How Giant Accenture Learned To Run At Digital's Fast Pace

Chairman and CEO Pierre Nanterme tells Forbes how his global consulting firm discovered that being a "fast follower" suddenly became fatally slow in the age of A.I. and cloud. Q: Describe your 35 years at Accenture, because I think talking about that will be an interesting way of describing what's happened to the global economy and the Information Technology backbone of the global economy during that time. Nanterme: Accenture has changed a lot during that time, probably undergoing a new wave that drove significant changes to the business every ten years. We evolved from management consulting to systems integration and technology. Ten years after that came a new wave--outsourcing. Indeed, each reinvention of Accenture was based on the new technology waves that occurred.