Welcome to Edition #100 of Gorick's newsletter, where Harvard career advisor and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Gorick Ng shares what they don't teach you in school about how to succeed in your career.
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→ Read time: 4 min
STORY
How Julie Sweet became Accenture’s CEO
You may have heard of Accenture, one of the world’s largest consulting firms.
But did you know that its current CEO, Julie Sweet, may not have gotten the top job had she not worked on the company’s most important deals—with its most important people?
It’s 2010 and Julie Sweet, a former partner at law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, had just joined Accenture as General Counsel (AKA the firm’s head lawyer).
One year later, leadership changed, and a man named Pierre Nanterme was named CEO.
His first order of business? To develop a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy “that could sustain growth for years to come.” (M&A is a fancy way of saying “when one company combines with or buys another company in order to grow or sometimes merely to stay alive.”)
Typically, the General Counsel’s job is to review contracts and keep the company out of legal trouble.
But with Nanterme’s eyes set on growing the company through M&A—and every M&A transaction requiring lots of legal strategy making—Sweet found herself having a front-row seat to the organization’s most important decisions. She also had key access to Accenture’s most important person: the CEO.
Before long, Sweet became the go-to legal and business advisor to Nanterme. In Accenture’s Executive Chairman’s own words, Sweet developed a "strong command" of the business and a "proven ability to drive results.”
In 2015, 5 years after Sweet joined as Accenture’s General Counsel, Sweet was promoted to CEO of Accenture North America. 4 years after that, in 2019, Sweet became Chair and CEO of Accenture. By the time she stepped into the CEO role, Sweet and Nanterme had completed $6 billion worth of M&A deals.
What does this mean for you? The next time you see a company making a big announcement, remember Julie Sweet—because behind every big initiative is likely someone next in line for the top job.
UNSPOKEN RULE
Work on what’s important with people who are important.
A few things happened for Sweet:
- She was at the right place (or what I call “the center of gravity,” which is also what happened to Taylor Swift)
- She was there at the right time (and had the right assets for the job)
- She developed key relationships with those who had influence (and found new sponsors when old ones left, like Ken Frazier)
Above all, she worked on what was most important with the people who were the most important—and impressed them.
How can you work on the most important things with the most important people?
Try filling in these blanks:
1. _______ seems like a top priority because the higher-ups can’t stop talking about it.
2. _______ is a major decision maker or gatekeeper.
3. _______ seems like a rising star (+ likely a future major decision maker or gatekeeper).
You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room—you need to be in the right room, solving the right problems, with the right people.
So, go and work on what’s important, with people who are important.
See you on Thursday for our “Ask Gorick Anything” of the week!
Gorick
What’s an “unspoken rule”? They’re the things that separate those who get ahead from those who stumble—and don’t know why. You can learn more about these rules in the workplace in my Wall Street Journal bestselling book called—you guessed it—The Unspoken Rules.
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