October 2009
Few people are better placed to observe the economic landscape firsthand than Accenture professionals. Much of our consultants’ time is spent with business leaders around the world, discussing their challenges, country by country, industry by industry, company by company.
The insight gained from this privileged perspective, up close and personal, has been particularly useful in helping us understand the current downturn at both the company and the broader global level. Subsequent conversations among colleagues across the firm have had a cross-pollinating effect, deepening this shared knowledge.
Caroline Firstbrook, Accenture’s managing director for Strategy in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, likens the experience to poring over business cases while studying for her MBA at Harvard Business School—except this case isn’t an academic exercise, and it is unfolding in real time. “This recession is so different from any that have preceded it,” she says, “that I think there is only limited insight that can be gained from looking backwards.”
Instead, Firstbrook has looked for common themes, emerging patterns and causality in her discussions and in the events and business developments making headlines in the business press. “I tested my ideas out as I continued my conversations with clients and colleagues,” she explains, “collected new thoughts from them to fill out the picture, and looked for examples that confirmed or disproved my ideas.”
Outlook’s readers have been among the beneficiaries of Firstbrook’s work. She coauthored “Managing in extraordinary times: New choices for new challenges,” which appeared in the January issue and explored three possible strategic responses to the downturn. She also wrote this month’s cover story, “Aftershock” , which identifies the five key dimensions of change that define the emerging economic and commercial reality, and argues that executives must carefully reexamine all aspects of conventional business wisdom and, in some cases, abandon them altogether.
Where do we go from here? “Looking at the future, I have tried to present a range of hypotheses about where these trends are taking us,” says Firstbrook. “Some I am quite confident about; others may well turn out to be wrong. Time will tell.”
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