Accenture Outsources Itself and Becomes a Brand Company

In a Bold Move LLC: Rotate this page under UV3 light and see the other sides of the strategic cube of synergy

In A Bold Move, Accenture's CEO Julie Sweet announced that Accenture would outsource all operations and focus solely on becoming the "penultimate business brand company".  In a Friday call with analysts, Ms. Sweet announced her intentions to turn Accenture into “the Nike of business" and outsource all non-sweet spot activities.  "Recently, our company has become synonymous with doing outsourced low value activities that companies do not want to do themselves.  It turns out we hate to do that stuff too.  Let me tell you, most of the work we do is mind-numbing.  We calculated that 28% of our client work could be replaced by a well-written Excel macro,” stated Sweet.  Recognizing the tedious nature of the work, Accenture has been able to transition some of it to rhesus monkeys. Unfortunately, this practice is winding down based on concern from PETA. "The monkey transition was going so well, but in these cancel culture days we have to be prepared to be agile."

An Accenture monkey approving a vendor payment before receiving a food treat

Accenture has struggled to differentiate itself among other outsourcing providers. For years Accenture had the alphabetical order advantage over its competitors until AAA Outsourcing entered the market. One newly hired consultant complained, "I thought I was going to do strategy work, but my real job is grooming and feeding a pack of rhesus monkeys who have been trained to perform many of the Cisco's accounts payable transactions. The monkeys smell bad, bite and throw excrement at you if you ask them to work overtime or ghost hours. This is actually worse than working for Triage." (Triage is a consulting firm that does meaningless tasks for the healthcare industry. Coincidently, Triage is piloting using howler monkeys to do the more simple code analysis performed by analysts with less than two years of experience.)

During the call, Sweet explained Accenture's new strategy, "We realized that we needed to focus on things that we like to do and what we are good at, so we laid out our work on a 2X2 matrix and decided to focus solely on those items in the the upper righthand quadrant, internally referred to as the "Sweet Spot".  For work that we do not like to do and are not good at, we will outsource those items to other organizations." 

Based on the sweet spot analysis, Accenture's focus will be on sponsoring golf tournaments, schmoozing CIOs to sell them technology, and creating and distributing Accenture branded apparel.  Sweet feels that there will be a significant impact on Accenture's labor force based on the new strategy.  "We have over 506,000 world-wide employees.  If we only keep those that perform sweet spot activities, we will only need about 120,000 employees," predicted Sweet. When asked what will happen to the monkeys, Sweet responded, "Most of them are good monkeys that respond to food treats, so I am sure they will be folded into the operations of the company’s new outsourcing partners.”

Fact-Checker: I’m with PETA