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Communities of Leadership: Bill Green’s Accenture
No comments · Posted by Scott in Case Studies
I’m conscious that the list we’ve been making of Communities of Leadership seems overweighted to products, in a world where services are increasingly important.
To balance this, I wanted to put a leading consulting firm on the list, and Accenture (William D. Green, CEO) seems the natural choice. It’s involved in advising clients on strategy, operations, architecture, technology and outsourcing. With a market value of $28.6 billion in the annual Forbes 2000 list, it looks to me like the biggest company by market value that’s more or less a pure play in advisory services. Some other prominent, and arguably more prestigious, consulting firms, like McKinsey, Bain, BCG and Booz are not public companies, and so are very unlikely to produce publicly available information. IBM and HP are larger in total revenues, and have huge service businesses, but combine their service offerings with a rich mix of hardware and software.
At $21.6 billion in 2009 revenues, Accenture is a huge company. About $12.5 billion of that figure came from consulting and $9 billion from outsourcing, so the outsourcing piece is a massive business.
According to its 10-K filing, $9.4 billion of 2009 revenues came from the Americas, $9.9 billion from EMEA, and $2.2 billion from Asia Pacific. To me, that looks a bit underweight in Asia for the future. But those figures are computed according to the source of revenues by customer.
According to its Accenture in India brochure, Accenture has over 40,000 professionals in India, and claims India as its “largest geography”. As total headcount as of the 2009 10-k was 177,000, that puts about 22.5% of Accenture’s people in India.
Previously incorporated in Bermuda, Accenture was open to criticism in the U.S. for being incorporated in a tax haven. At the end of last fiscal year, it moved the domicile of its holding company to Ireland.
I feel a little ambivalent about putting Accenture on this list. In my own career, I’ve experienced the company as a hard-driving competitor, and I’ve met some people who have found the internal culture quite driven and pressured, and sometimes less than compassionate. But I do believe the company is a center of excellence for technology, process, and architectural skills, an important bellwether of the outsourcing market, a global player and a leading global corporate investor in India. For all these reasons, I look forward to following their progress.
Accenture identifies the following as its core values:
- Stewardship
- Best people
- Client value creation
- One global network
- Respect for the individual
- Integrity
The growing list of Interesting Communities of Leadership is athttp://lovingwork.org/interesting-communities-of-leadership
Scott is scott@lovingwork.org and @scottdowns3 on Twitter.
Accenture · customers · emerging markets · excellence · global · India · leadership · values
