January 2007
In a conversation a few years ago, I referred to the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business as the company's "think tank." I was quickly corrected by a colleague: "It's our 'think-and-act tank,' " she reminded me.
Clearly, new ideas that ultimately cannot be put to work are of limited use in business. When I asked Executive Director Bob Thomas to describe the Institute's mission, he neatly paired the "think" and "act" elements: "We conduct rigorous original research, based on our own analytical skills, and temper our ideas with extensive business experience. That way, we are able to create valuable, actionable insight that can be applied by our clients."
Members of the Institute's research staff work directly with Accenture's global service lines and operating groups in their areas of expertise. Collaboration includes joint research and publication, support for client engagements, and identification of new topics and issues that merit further research.
Founded in 1996 as the Institute for Strategic Change, the organization has grown during the past decade with the recruitment of former faculty members from Harvard, MIT, New York University and UCLA to complement the Accenture personnel. Current staff numbers 14, including four executive research fellows. The Institute also maintains important external alliance relationships with organizations like Babson College, the University of Virginia, the Marketing Science Institute, the International Consortium for Executive Development Research and Asset Economics.
The work of Institute members has appeared widely in publications including Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Wall Street Journal, CIO, California Management Review and Strategy & Leadership. Fellows have also written or coauthored several books on subjects ranging from leadership to marketing to outsourcing. Two Institute-authored books will be coming out this year from the Harvard Business School Press: Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, by Accenture Fellow Thomas H. Davenport and Institute Executive Research Fellow Jeanne G. Harris; and Bob Thomas's Crucibles of Leadership: A Guide to Growing More Leaders Faster.
In 2003, with the launch of Accenture's High Performance Business initiative, the organization was renamed to reflect the focus of this new program. Since then, it has played a key role as a center of excellence in research and writing on what constitutes a high-performance business.
Outlook's partnership with the Institute is a longstanding one, but it has become particularly important during the past three years as the journal has assumed the role of conveying the results of Accenture's high-performance research to the marketplace. Nearly two-thirds of the more than 30 articles we have published on the subject since 2003 have come from the Institute, notably Thomas's series of performance anatomy case studies and Executive Research Fellow Paul Nunes's work, in collaboration with Accenture Chief Strategist Tim Breene, on the building blocks of high performance.
Looking ahead, Outlook's writers and editors will continue to work closely with Institute fellows and other Accenture professionals to shape exciting new ideas into practical insight about what it takes to be a high performer.
David Cudaback
Editor-in-Chief, Outlook
Back to Contents
Return to Outlook Online main page
To Top