Jetlag

Jetlag usually hits me on the second or third day after arrival - the first day I'm usually so exhausted that I manage to sleep through the night. Today, however, I woke up at around 1am and I'm not able to get back to sleep. So I might as well be productive!

On the flight over, I was reading the current issue of the Economist and Accenture had inserted in there an excerpt from Outlook (a journal of high-performance business and thought leadership) with the title "Changing ahead of the curve". It gave examples from several companies such as Toyota that were already doing very well but still decided to transform the company to ensure that they would remain ahead of the curve. Reading this, it seemed to me that this must have been the inspiration for Accenture's own transformational program called Horizon 2012. I think the key takeaway from this is that changing before you are forced to change is the only way that you can control your own destiny. Accenture has done this several times already, for example going public at a time when the firm was in a position of strength, changing the workforce model, and aggressively building up delivery centres all over the globe are just 3 key examples of changes that were made before they had to be and as a result putting Accenture in a very strong position, not just in traditional high-value consulting but also in outsourcing and in systems integration.

So with this experience one would expect Horizon 2012 to be a success as well. At the moment there is still a lot of chaos and uncertainty though, which begs the question - why are we so strong at delivering transformational programs for our clients but we can't do the same in our own organisation? Perhaps we should follow our own advice from the Outlook article referenced, which is that up to 30% of the management team to drive the change must come from outside the company...