When Julie Candy wanted to announce the largest organizational change in Accenture’s historical past to her workforce of greater than 770,000 workers, she broke with many years of company custom. As a substitute of crafting a company-wide memo, the CEO opted for one thing completely different: a direct video message that will attain workers throughout 120 nations and essentially reshape how huge companies talk throughout instances of upheaval.
“Reading it on a piece of paper would not have conveyed the why in the same way as hearing it—hearing the excitement in my voice, understanding the passion we have for why we’re changing,” Candy mentioned in a current interview with Alyson Shontell, Fortune‘s editor-in-chief, for the first-ever episode of the Fortune 500 Titans and Disrupters of Trade vodcast (subscribe right here).
Candy’s communication technique displays the size of problem she faces as head of Accenture, the world’s largest consulting agency by income. The Dublin-based firm generated $64.9 billion in fiscal 2024 and serves greater than 9,000 purchasers, offering providers spanning technique consulting, cloud migration, information analytics, synthetic intelligence, cybersecurity, and extra. With a whole lot of 1000’s workers unfold throughout greater than 120 nations, Accenture helps organizations reinvent themselves within the digital age, making it each a beneficiary of and participant within the AI-driven transformation sweeping international companies.
Candy herself represents an unconventional path to company management. Since changing into CEO in September 2019, she’s been the primary girl to steer Accenture and the primary CEO within the firm’s historical past who didn’t begin there straight out of faculty. Her background as a high-powered company lawyer—she spent 17 years on the prestigious agency Cravath, Swaine & Moore, making companion inside eight years—gave her an outsider’s perspective when she joined Accenture as basic counsel in 2010. Underneath her management, the corporate’s income has grown greater than 50%, and she or he’s been acknowledged as certainly one of Fortune‘s Most Powerful People in Business.
The restructuring Sweet announced represents what she describes as reversing “five decades of how we’re working.” The transfer brings collectively beforehand siloed enterprise models to raised serve purchasers searching for complete digital transformation, aligning Accenture’s organizational construction with its technique to be “the reinvention partner of choice” for companies navigating fast technological change.
On the coronary heart of Candy’s technique was recognition that this transformation needed to be each decisive and deeply human. The restructure wasn’t a cost-cutting train, although Candy acknowledges it inevitably uncovered efficiencies and duplications. As a substitute, the transfer was pushed by shopper wants and Accenture’s ambition to ship built-in options combining business data, technical experience, information, AI, and useful capabilities as a single providing.
“In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you really have to be willing to rewire your company,” Candy mentioned, reflecting broader recommendation she offers to Fortune 500 CEOs. “Many times, when clients are saying, we’re not getting a lot out of AI, it’s because they’re trying to apply it to how they operate today.”
Candy’s strategy to managing the change went past simply the medium of communication. She solicited suggestions and critiques from her management group, refining her message by a number of iterations to make sure it resonated at each stage. “I try to have no ego on communication, because it’s so important that we’re really clear,” she mentioned, noting all her direct stories work with speech coaches to hone their communication expertise.
The transformation additionally demanded what Candy calls a steadiness of “art and science”—utilizing metrics and benchmarks from Accenture’s transformation GPS database to supply the analytical basis, whereas making use of empathy and cultural understanding to make sure the human aspect wasn’t misplaced. In the end, Candy’s management by this restructuring has change into a case examine in navigating sweeping organizational change in an period when conventional company communication strategies could now not suffice.
You’ll be able to watch the primary episode of Titans, that includes Candy, beneath.
Introducing the 2025 Fortune World 500, the definitive rating of the largest corporations on this planet. Discover this 12 months’s listing.
