12.07.2024 Today’s Inspiration from Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture, via Microsoft Worklab Podcast
Dear Students,
It doesn’t hurt to marry into a family name like “Sweet,” which is quick to pronounce, easy to spell and creates positive associations.
And yet, it takes a lot more than a surname to become CEO and Chair of Accenture, a multinational professional services firm with $64B+ in 2023 revenue. Even more impressively, Sweet, who grew up in Southern California, has served in her role since September of 2019, managing throughout the pandemic and the ensuing rocky times in business, circumstances for which she laughingly says “there is no playbook.”
As one of the most powerful women in corporate America, Sweet realized that she wanted to be a lawyer in 8th Grade. Coming from humble beginnings, though (her father painted cars and her mother was a beautician), the high school debate champion ultimately graduated from well-regarded Claremont McKenna College (ranked #11 in US liberal arts colleges) and eventually received a JD from Columbia.
Sweet, the first woman CEO at Accenture, provides a great example for ambitious international students like you, who may set a professional goal while young, work diligently to achieve it and then leverage the power skills you will gain along the way to advance into an even broader role – in this case, applying Sweet’s legal background within a business leadership context – and establishing a vision for clients representing 91 of the Fortune Global 100.
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How the enterprise giant, which employs more than 730,000 people, is reinventing its processes with AI and helping clients do the same.
www.microsoft.com
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In this spirit, our coaches encourage candidates like you to listen to and/or read some or all of the attached podcast, where Sweet muses on not only technology, AI and upgrading processes, but also talent, adaptability and the value of learning, among other topics, while demonstrating the importance of these areas among a team of 730K employees worldwide.
Best,
Amy-Louise
P.S. For more on Sweet and her journey, please see articles from her early CEO days: