Sustainable Leadership by Clarke Murphy

Author:Clarke Murphy [Murphy, Clarke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119872160
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2022-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Art of the Possible

Accenture is one professional services company that has made the embedding of sustainability central not just to its own business strategy but also to the thousands of organizations around the globe that are among its clients.

I first met Julie Sweet, the company's chair and chief executive officer, on a bright and sunny day at Davos in 2020, when the Decade of Action on sustainability was launched. This was a significant moment in the world's sustainability journey because we were already 20 years into the SDGs, and nowhere near enough progress had been made. It was decided that the 10,000 corporate cosignatories to the UN Global Compact needed to be held accountable for promises long since made, with measurable results. Julie was a big part of that serious conversation. She was seated next to UN Secretary General António Gutierrez, and my place at the table was next to her (quite the turnaround from my first snowy visit 12 months earlier).

What struck me about this leader during that and many subsequent meetings was her thoughtfulness, clarity, and focus. Julie had a way of articulating the business case and existential urgency of sustainability that was at once overarching and laser-focused on detail. A year later, she made headlines when she announced that sustainability was the new digital, and that a “twin transformation” through digital and sustainability was critical for business success, and, as with digital, reskilling employees to achieve the SDGs was a key component of this transformation.

By September 2019, when she took her global CEO position, Accenture was already far along in its inclusion, diversity, and equity journey. Julie immediately asked herself if they were doing enough. After all, their core business was now offering consulting services and technological solutions to help most major corporations around the world reach their climate goals and offer metrics to keep them transparent and on track, so it made sense for the firm to infuse the behavior they were urging in other organizations across their own business functions.

“Your organization can't be a leader helping your clients unless you are leading yourself,” Julie told me.

Julie challenged her team to think boldly about how to get to net zero, and not use a path that was mainly buying credits, as they had seen many others do. She then asked her extended leadership team to think about where the possible intersected with the business value proposition. Accenture was already a global leader in digitization, accelerated by the pandemic lockdowns, and demand for sustainable solutions for functions such as cloud computing, for example, was growing exponentially. There was a clear business opportunity to “go big in sustainability services.” Not least, it was a way to attract and retain talent, “because we know what the people who are performing care about.” The result was a decision not only to commit to net zero for Accenture by 2025 and continue to grow sustainability services, but also to seek ways to embed sustainability across the work it does for clients, regardless of whether it would be a separate service.

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