This article originally appeared
in the 2012, No. 1, issue of
The journal of high-performance business
Strategy
IT and the strategic
growth agenda
By Paul F. Nunes and Gavin Michael
A
small but growing group of business leaders see IT as
a way to spur change that prevents a company from peaking,
then fading when its revenue growth stalls. They put IT
to work to support strategy—to anticipate and respond to
customers’ demands, renew their management teams and
strengthen the layers of talent they’ll need if they’re to
weather the bad times and grow fast when business is good.
a ccenture.com/outlook
Exercise equipment may make your
pulse race. But if you’re an exercise
equipment maker, how do you energize
the company’s growth?
Nautilus, maker of such fitness-center
mainstays as the Gravitron chin/dip
machine and the variable-stride
elliptical, has answered that question
by out-innovating the competition.
The company has a history of using
technology to improve its new products,
with the inclusion of eddy-current brake
resistance systems that run quietly
and smoothly, telemetric heart rate
monitoring on the screen and computerlinked training programs, to name
just a few.
But now Nautilus is taking a different
approach to harnessing technology:
using it to see what tomorrow’s markets
look like. For example, the company
has begun using real-time sentiment
data to pinpoint future fitness needs in
the United States. The software, which
in real time sifts through the mountain
of opinions about health and fitness
posted on the Web, helps predict
consumer intent based on insights
into users’ likes and dislikes, what
they think is missing in the exercise
machines they use today and what
they expect to see in the equipment of
tomorrow.
Nautilus is part of a small but growing
subset of companies that are using
technology to help them anticipate and
combat slowing growth and plan for
their next surge with confidence and
precision. These companies understand
that any business that is satisfied to
ride the growth curves of its current
offerings is destined to stall.
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Markets saturate. Competitors loom.
Customers defect. Regulations change.
Supply chains break down. Yet too many
leaders still manage by focusing only
on the financial “S-curve” of revenue
growth—in which their businesses start
out slowly, grow rapidly until they
reach market saturation and then see
their revenues start to level off.
Truly great companies know it’s not
enough to achieve greatness once,
no matter how strong their market
position, how steep their climb up
the S-curve or how good their profit
performance. Their leaders grasp a core
concept: To thrive over the long haul,
they must launch one successful business
after another, routinely outperforming
rivals during good times and bad. And
information technology has a vital
part to play in each of these cycles of
renewal (see chart, page 3).
IT and the hidden S-curves
Specifically, these high performers
actively manage against three hidden
S-curves that flatten off well before the
company’s financial curve reaches its
peak. Doing so requires them to track
trends and market changes to create
a business vision that is informed by a
clear sense of where demand will come
from next, and in what forms.
They must also monitor the development of their capabilities to ensure
that they have the right management
team at the right times to generate
new capabilities to support that vision. And they must spur the growth
and development of their talent pools
to maintain surplus talent—that is, to
make sure they have a deeper bench
of the skills and competencies than
they immediately need.
Research into the hallmarks of high
performance has established that technology is at the heart of innovation;
therefore, it plays a key role in driving
business change. Too often, however,
the change is expected to come from
technology’s impact on products or
services, or on operating capabilities.
Less often is it seen as a key enabler
of early change in a company—change
that prevents the company from
peaking and then fading when its
revenue growth stalls.
This is a subtlety that forward-thinking
chief information officers now grasp.
“The C-suite is now more aware of what
can be done with technology, so they’re
The hidden S-curves of high performance
Three key aspects of business mature and start to decline much faster than the financial
performance of a company.
Value
Financial
performance
S-curve
Hidden S-curves
Market relevance
Ebbs as the basis
of competition in
the industry shifts
away from the
dominant model
Distinctiveness
of capabilities
Lessens as
competition
intensifies and
imitation occurs
Talent development
Slows as companies
learn to do more with
less and competition
forces the lowering
of costs
Time
Source: Accenture analysis
becoming more demanding,” says one
former CIO. “This is forcing CIOs to
step up to an agenda that has much
bigger expectations of them and their
future roles.”
Let’s look at how IT is playing a leading
role in driving early change at high
performers by improving those companies’ success within each of the three
hidden curves.
Staying on the edge of tomorrow’s markets—
from the edge of the organization
In any given market, the basis of
competition evolves over time. The
personal computer business, for
example, began with competition
over increasing functionality—often
fancier features too—and eventually
became standardized, commoditized
and subject to unrelenting price wars.
Of course, all executives worth their
salt recognize that their markets
don’t stand still. But not all understand why that is so or when it will
happen—let alone how they should
respond.
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Leading companies deliberately search
for insights that, when properly
exploited, have the potential to change
the rules of the game—the existing
basis of competition. This requires
“edge-centric” strategies—focusing
on the leading edge of customers’
needs and wants. These strategies
are implemented at the edge of their
organizations (away from the corporate
headquarters and the core business),
where such needs and wants are often
first seen and responded to; they
operate at the edge of control in that
they are neither centrally planned
nor centrally run.
These companies typically have
CIOs who exploit IT to enable their
companies’ quests for such marketdriven insights. They apply the latest
in technology to watch and to listen
to their customers—as Nautilus is
now doing.
One company has
found a significant
untapped market
in the “near-miss”
customers it has already
successfully tempted.
Their efforts are by no means restricted
to analytics tools. They require a
range of technologies that deliver a
broad understanding of how markets
are evolving, how market disruptions
happen and what are the most appropriate ways to respond to these
disruptions. They achieve this by
applying IT to three forward-looking
customer activities: watching, listening and co-designing.
Watching what customers do
The “watchers” actively track what
their customers are doing. Some
companies do this by examining
historical data about purchases and
returns, which they capture at the
point of sale, hoping to learn from the
patterns they identify. Some analyze
data submitted by customers, such as
satisfaction and opinion surveys.
Other companies observe what’s
happening online, in real time, as
current and potential customers
interact with their website and the
websites of retailers that sell their
products, as well as with relevant
online forums where, for example,
consumers may discuss those types
of products. Still others, like Procter
& Gamble, deploy cutting-edge
“eye-tracking” systems that monitor
how shoppers act in a store.
What the watchers have discovered
is that by using technology to examine
the minutiae of their customers’
behavior, they can discover surprisingly
valuable information that leads to
insights that can identify hitherto
latent market opportunities.
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One cellular competitor, for example,
has been able to improve customer
retention in the mobile telecommunications industry, where customer churn
is endemic.
For example, the company indicates
that its ability to mine its database of
billions of customer records has helped
it to reduce churn in its operations in
the Netherlands—where there are at
least 54 different mobile phone brands
for consumers to choose from—by up
to 12 percent a year in some customer
segments. How? Data analysis was
used to inform the company’s customer
loyalty and retention campaigns; the
teams leading those campaigns were
then able to make the right offers to
customers at the right times—a smartphone with a prepay tariff for some
customers, perhaps—and through the
most appropriate channels.
Some companies track users’ online
behaviors in real time looking for
patterns based on such factors as how
much time shoppers spend on particular
product pages on retail sites; whether
they scroll through the whole page;
or whether they highlight any text,
click on any links or add any products
to their shopping carts. Their analytics
systems can then suggest products
likely to please users based on inferences
drawn from their behavior.
One e-commerce provider uses this
approach to respond to customers
abandoning their virtual shopping
carts when they can’t immediately
find everything they’re looking for.
By integrating real-time analytics
data with a recommendation engine,
the provider has been able to target
and win back “abandoners” with
relevant email offers. In effect, it
has found a significant untapped
growth opportunity not in new
customers or a new market but in the
“near-miss” customers it has already
successfully tempted.
Listening closely to customers
The companies that listen well are
actively soliciting opinions and
suggestions, going far beyond
conventional feedback formats.
Eavesdropping is accepted behavior
Leading companies
recognize that ideas
can come from regional
operations or remote
departments with the
organization.
here; it’s no longer unusual for
smart marketers to “listen in” on
customers’ conversations in social
networks. The payoffs may not seem
earth-shaking, but they can be very
rapid and very effective, as South
Korean carmaker Kia Motors Corp.
can attest.
Within months of the 2012 Kia
Optima marketplace launch, its seats
were redesigned in response to criticisms
“heard” in social media channels.
Two points are noteworthy: Companies
like Kia pay very close attention
to customer sentiment in a host of
online forums, and they act very,
very quickly on what they see and
hear there, without necessarily
waiting for the next product launch
cycle. The carmaker’s insight is that
it can improve and innovate continuously, independent of the traditional
automobile industry launch calendar,
by using technology to listen closely
to what customers have to say.
Co-designing products
and services
Other companies are taking customer
input a big step further—essentially
asking customers to co-design
products with them. The objective
of this spin on crowdsourcing is not
always to cut R&D costs; it is often to
create lively communities of customers
and, as much as possible, to lock in
their loyalties.
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That’s the case with Threadless, an
apparel company whose product
designs typically result from its
customers’ imaginations. Most of the
designs it uses come from the company’s
ongoing open call for submissions
from a worldwide community of
artists and designers—many of them
customers. Once ideas are submitted,
Threadless’ community, which has
more than a million members, casts
votes that help the company decide
which designs to put on the apparel
they will then sell.
Likewise, Fiat’s Mio concept car was
designed through a crowdsourcing
project that involved more than 17,000
people. One food company relied on
this technique to come up with a new
pasta. And South Korean electronics
conglomerate LG Electronics is developing new mobile phones based on
ideas generated this way.
To return to the business importance of
residing on the edge: Leading companies
recognize that important ideas come
from regional operations or remote
departments within the organization—
and they use technology to foster
cultures that enable and support those
idea flows.
At Pfizer, Christopher Bouton, a former
team leader in computational biology at
the pharmaceutical company’s Research
Technology Center, downloaded free
open-source wiki software with the
goal of creating a scientific encyclopedia
for Pfizer’s internal research and
development community. He believed
that the wiki could help generate
articles that could then be developed
collaboratively by community members.
(In 2007, Bouton won the prestigious
2007 William E. Upjohn Award in
Innovation for conceiving of and
implementing the organizationwide
wiki, Pfizerpedia.)
But the Pfizer R&D community—
independent of oversight or governance
from senior management—took the wiki
in a different direction. Researchers
started using it to publicize their
projects and to use the wiki’s search
function to learn about other work at
Pfizer. With thousands of users contributing content, the site grew at an
astonishing rate to become a central
index of everything to do with R&D
at Pfizer.
Now the wiki has become an
innovation accelerant. Bouton, who
is currently CEO of biotech company
Entagen, says that Pfizer researchers
(Continued on page 7)
Technologies for jumping the S-curve
There are a number of relevant supporting information technologies that can help
companies manage issues raised by hidden S-curves (see chart, page 3).
Hidden S-curve goal
Actions required
to achieve goal
Examples of associated information technologies
Change the basis of
competition by finding
“big enough” market
insights (BEMIs)
Watching consumers
Data-mining software to reveal hidden consumer behaviors
and desires
Shopper-behavior-monitoring software to influence consumer
decisions in real time
Eye-tracking technology to identify and respond to what attracts
customer attention
3D simulation to create low-cost virtual environments in which
to study user-experience
Listening to employees
and consumers
Electronic suggestion boxes to broaden and accelerate
boundary-less ideation
Prediction market software to connect strategic decisions
with insights from employee confidence levels
Sentiment analysis software to align consumer attitudes
expressed online with innovation efforts
Wiki technology to use participant ownership to stimulate
broader collaboration and information dissemination
Co-creating with
consumers
Crowdsourcing software to use the “wisdom of crowds” to
create solutions for and with consumers
Online consumer communities to monitor and elicit customer
feedback and insights to improve the business
Ensure distinctive
capabilities by
continuously evolving
leadership
Forecasting talent
demographics
Predictive workforce-analytics software to use data-driven
insight to prepare for or prevent employee attrition
Proactively managing
career progression
Automated performance-management systems to identify
when, where and how to best deploy talent
Automated succession-planning tools to streamline and
improve the leadership-replacement process
Talent pool databases to capture knowledge of employee skills
and experiences to more accurately assess readiness for promotion
Facilitating top-team
collaboration
(Continued on page 7)
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Collaborative software (groupware) to boost efficiency and
creativity levels in virtual meetings
(Continued from page 6)
Technologies for jumping the S-curve
Hidden S-curve goal
Actions required
to achieve goal
Examples of associated information technologies
Provide sufficient
talent for both growth
and change by creating
a surplus of talent
Fostering ubiquitous
and constant learning
E-learning platforms to help remove geographic constraints to employee
skills and career development
Video/computer games to craft more engaging training scenarios
Education management systems to integrate employee training with
personalized career development plans
Staffing and
HR Management
Managed staffing systems to maintain knowledge of desirable and
available candidates to expedite temporary and full-time hiring
Talent acquisition systems to ensure a broad geographic search
and distribution of up-and-coming talent
Recruiting and hiring
Social media tools and applications to preview candidates’ performance
and fit, at times even before they apply
Third-party recruiting databases to gain access to vast stores of
potentially desirable talent
Recruiting widgets embedded in social media outlets to engage passive
candidates and encourage them to apply
Virtual applicant screening technology to reduce talent search costs,
allowing more candidates to be better evaluated
(Continued from page 5)
regularly told him that they used the
wiki to find someone at the company
doing related work, and that they
have since launched new research
projects with their new colleagues.
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Of course, being savvy about IT
doesn’t guarantee that a company
will get the edge idea. Many have
long held to the virtues of centralized
computing systems. However, such
old-school perspectives will not
help companies to manage their
market-relevance S-curves. “It’s an
absolute necessity for today’s CIOs to
create awareness of what it takes to
bring ideas from the edge,” affirms
one ex-CIO.
Constantly matching the top management
team to the market’s changing needs
By the time a company’s financial
performance starts to taper off, it’s often
too late to begin building new marketrelevant capabilities—which can take
five years, 10 years or even more to
create—that can propel the enterprise
toward the next big opportunity. The
default is to maintain the status quo
while the business is humming along—
which is what many lesser performers do.
By contrast, high-performance businesses establish a pattern of early
renewal of their top teams, coincident
with the changes they know will be
needed to drive renewal of the organization overall. They maintain a balance
within their top teams, blending cognitive styles, tenures, viewpoints and
other characteristics, with the intention
of keeping one foot in today and the
other in tomorrow. And they organize
and manage the management team so
that they maximize the effectiveness
and productivity of the time the group
spends working together.
Intel Corp. stands out in this regard.
During its 43-year history, the semiconductor giant has had five chief
executives—all of them homegrown.
“We discuss executive changes 10 years
out to identify gaps,” said one board
member. Just months after current CEO
Paul Otellini took over in 2005, the
search had begun for his successor.
So how can IT help to ensure that the
leadership team is all it can be as
markets morph? We have pinpointed
three areas: managing top talent
attrition, actively managing career
progression and enabling top management to collaborate better.
Managing top talent attrition
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Enabling dynamism in the top team
first requires ensuring that some
portion of top talent stays with the
company and grows to take on leadership roles. Some companies already
practice predictive workforce analysis
as a matter of course.
That’s the case at Alliant Techsystems.
The aerospace and defense products
company puts significant effort into
accurately anticipating its labor supply
and demand. Senior managers analyze
the departures of key employees to
create a “flight-risk model” that calculates the probability of any one employee
quitting. The model paid off in 2010 by
helping to project—correctly—unusually
high turnover in a crucial plant maintenance group.
By getting smarter at predicting attrition among key performers, employers
can make preemptive moves—by
developing targeted recognition and
retention programs, for example, or by
preparing for departures with better
succession planning, training and
recruiting campaigns.
Actively managing
career progression
For a number of years, Procter &
Gamble has seen enormous value in
advanced, IT-enabled HR management
systems that track employee skills
levels and support succession planning.
The company uses a talent management
system to track 13,000 middle- and
upper-management employees.
The software captures information
about succession planning across three
main levels: country, business category
and region. It includes career histories
and capabilities along with education
and community ties. It pinpoints top
talent and the development needs of
those “high potentials.” It also keeps
tabs on diversity within the ranks of
middle and senior management. P&G’s
business leaders can use the talent
Does your IT support strategy?
While myriad applications of IT exist, our research shows that high performers deliberately
and incisively employ IT to meet their strategic goals. The following scorecard will help
you assess whether your company is effectively supporting strategy through IT.
. . . Changing the basis of competition by finding “big enough” market insights (BEMIs)?
Small extent Large extent
Watching consumers
• Studying shopping patterns that reveal hidden consumer needs
• Analyzing behavioral data to influence consumer spending in real time
• Tracking eye movements to determine the most effective marketing strategies
• Using virtual environments to conduct focus groups
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
• Aggregating know-how from internal and external contributors to solve difficult problems
• Soliciting feedback to make consumer-relevant business improvements
1
2
3
4
5
. . . Ensuring distinctive capabilities by continuously evolving leadership?
Small extent Listening to employees and consumers
• Inviting fresh perspectives to encourage ideation
• Gauging employee confidence to inform strategic decision making
• Collecting and assessing consumer attitudes to spur consumer-centric innovation
• User-managed information sharing to stimulate collaboration and dissemination
Co-creating with consumers
Forecasting talent demographics
• Analyzing data patterns to prevent or prepare for employee attrition
Large extent
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
Proactively managing career progression
• Identifying metrics and data on job performance to determine when, where and how to deploy talent
• Storing data on management performance and demographics to expedite the process of finding replacements
• Tracking employee capabilities and development needs to accurately asses readiness for promotion
Facilitating top-team collaboration
• Using improved document sharing, group-editing features, shared calendaring, etc. to increase efficiency and
creativity levels in virtual meetings
(Continued on page 11)
management tracker to get a snapshot
of who may be best placed to take on
which leadership roles.
Enabling management teams
to collaborate better—and be
more productive
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Technology can also play a crucial
role in making senior executives more
productive—individually and collectively.
Increasingly, executives are using
smartphones and tablet devices—often
that they have purchased themselves—
to maintain access to their companies’
information systems. Many IT managers fight such moves, often out of
concern that the devices don’t fully
meet their security standards. But
astute IT leaders foster rather than
fight those moves, recognizing how
valuable improved leadership productivity is to companies.
Collaboration technologies can also
significantly shorten decision cycles,
reduce unproductive time spent traveling,
and cut travel costs. Case in point: One
(Continued from page 10)
Does your IT support strategy? (cont.)
. . . Providing sufficient talent for both growth and change by creating a surplus of talent?
Small extent Large extent
Fostering ubiquitous and constant learning
• Removing geographic constraints to employee career development
• Creating more engaging and realistic training simulations
• Integrating employee training with personalized career development plans
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
Staffing and managing human capital
• Maintaining a pre-approved applicant database to streamline hiring
• Pooling applicants to redistribute hires regionally and globally rather than simply hiring locally
Recruiting and hiring
• Testing candidate performance via social media games even before they apply
• Tapping into vast talent pools to accrue a store of desirable talent
• Embedding widgets into social media outlets to engage passive candidates
• Pre-screening applications automatically to help managers hire the best possible talent
Based on our client experience, you should interpret your score as follows:
35-45 IT is making strategy happen
IT in your organization is not only aligned with strategy, but
also serves as a source of strategic advantage. The challenge for
high-performing IT lies in maintaining that advantage by keeping
up with the rapidly evolving technological landscape.
15-24 IT supports strategy
Some of the applications that can support better strategy
formulation and execution have been delivered, but the IT
organization now needs to focus on quickly delivering a more
complete range of supporting applications.
25-34 IT is a partner with strategy
IT is certainly aligned with strategy, though not uniformly
across the organization and the full range of possible support
opportunities. The IT organization needs to identify the weaker
spots and close the gaps.
9–14 IT has a significant opportunity to better support strategy
IT support for strategy is not strategic. A world of opportunity is
being missed to support strategy development and execution in the
organization, requiring a coordinated approach to delivering
capabilities across the range of strategy needs.
Is your company supporting its strategy through IT? Take our survey
http://www.accenture.com/OutlookITStrategySurvey
large North American bank uses Cisco’s
TelePresence Web-based video-conferencing systems to make decisions much
more quickly, to boost productivity
and to establish trust more rapidly,
particularly among senior managers
who may not work with one another
frequently. An additional benefit of
TelePresence and other collaboration
tools is that they are very easy to use.
The key, then, is for senior IT managers
to walk in the shoes of their peers
in the C-suite, sensing what technology
systems will make the leadership teams
more adaptable and more productive.
Generating and sustaining surplus talent
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To maintain strong performance over
any extended period, companies need
more than just enough talent. Accenture
research indicates that they need a
surplus of available talent. One reason
is to more easily adapt to attrition
For further reading
“Jumping the S-curve: How to
sustain long-term performance,”
Outlook 2011, No. 1
“Strategy at the edge,” Outlook
2011, No. 2
For these and other articles,
please visit www.accenture.com.
and demographic shifts—all those
Baby Boomers retiring. But the more
important reason is to be ready to ride
the next S-curve upward.
A surfeit of talent allows them to fully
explore new business opportunities
and grow and exploit all of their
current business opportunities at
the same time. Yet all too often, poor
performers starve themselves of the
talent they need—by regularly cutting
their workforces to the bone in tough
times, and by being slow to rehire
and recruit when things improve. They
make the same mistake in periods of
rapid growth and strong competition,
when margin pressures can lead to
efforts to reduce labor costs.
IT executives can help by collaborating
with HR chiefs and business-unit
leaders to ensure that their companies
have the most appropriate and costeffective tools to benefit all aspects of
employment: recruiting, retention,
talent management, training, promotion,
compensation and more. Specifically,
they can help to create “constant
learning” environments, sharpen talent
acquisition systems and leverage social
media to improve recruiting.
Fostering constant learning
To improve the effectiveness of
training and development, IT is in
an ideal position to identify and
evaluate everything from distance
learning to e-learning systems. IT
can also seek and support education
management software that properly
integrates training and development
functions and ties employees’ development needs and goals directly to
the training available to them.
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Whole Foods Market’s online “university”
is designed to connect team members
and team leaders to the retailer’s core
values and to deepen their knowledge
of the company and the industry. The
education website is accessible to all
employees; the tools on the site make
it relatively quick and easy for Whole
Foods’ workers to acquire new skills or
update existing ones. Self-paced courses
include “Introduction to Organics,”
“Dietary Supplements and the Law”
and “Introduction to Quality Standards.”
Sharpening talent acquisition
systems
These tools transcend HR’s conventional
information systems for career development and skills tracking. For instance,
household, health and personal care
products maker Reckitt Benckiser Group
uses virtual screening techniques to
sharpen its talent acquisition systems.
The company’s website features an
application, called Virtual Career, that
allows potential candidates to figure out
whether they might fit with its culture.
The software shows various situations
at work and asks prospective hires
how they would respond; it then scores
the candidate on how well his or her
response matches the company’s core
values. On that basis, candidates can
decide if they want to go ahead with an
application for a job at Reckitt Benckiser.
Using social media to attract and
screen candidates
Other companies harness social media
to effectively go where potential
candidates are. Nokia has made social
media a linchpin of its recruiting
strategy; Facebook, LinkedIn and
Twitter all appear prominently on the
telecommunications giant’s careers site.
Marriott International, the hospitality
chain, is putting a new face on recruiting with a social media game called My
Marriott Hotel that enables candidates
to envision what real-life jobs are like
inside the hotel chain. For gamers who
are intrigued enough to apply, a tab
labeled “Try it for real” moves them
into the actual recruiting process.
Starbucks Corp. is an especially
assertive user of social media. To lure
passive candidates, the global coffee
purveyor uses Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter and YouTube to build a vigorous
employer brand in the virtual places
where candidates already spend a lot
of time. Starbucks’ own Facebook page
has a widget, a small application that
identifies job openings and even allows
potential recruits to apply. Overall,
Starbucks says its use of social media
has significantly improved the effectiveness of its recruiting efforts.
Clearly, no one software program and no single initiative from the IT group
can, by itself, catapult a company onto the next S-curve. But there is much
that IT can and must do, cumulatively and over time, to help the organization
jump the three hidden S-curves while the core business is healthy. That’s what
is needed to allow the company to achieve lasting greatness. And that’s what
IT can do for strategy.
About the authors
Paul F. Nunes is the Boston-based executive director of research at the Accenture
Institute for High Performance. His work has appeared regularly in Harvard Business
Review and in numerous other publications, including the Wall Street Journal. He
is also the coauthor of Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top,
And Stay There (Harvard Business School Press, 2011). In addition, Mr. Nunes
is the senior contributing editor for Outlook.
[email protected]
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High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
Gavin Michael, Accenture’s chief technology innovation officer, leads the company’s work in
innovation and technology alliances, as well as Accenture Technology Labs. He has more
than 20 years’ experience in technology leadership in the financial services industry,
especially in driving major business change. Mr. Michael is based in San Francisco.
[email protected]
The authors want to thank Scott Kurth, senior researcher at Accenture Technology Labs,
and Ivy Lee, research analyst at the Accenture Institute for High Performance, for their
valuable contributions.
13
Outlook 2012
Number 1