How Accenture’s Julie Sweet hacked the CEO track

Before she took the helm of Accenture, the $176 billion consulting powerhouse, Sweet was a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the elite Manhattan law firm where partners rarely leave and even more rarely leap into a completely different industry. She had built a career there closing high-stakes M&A deals, not architecting cloud transformations or negotiating AI partnerships.

But in 2010, when Accenture approached her to become its general counsel, Sweet made the jump. Her father had recently died at age 68, a personal loss that left her reflecting on what she wanted her career and life to look like. “It reminded me to make sure I was living life to the fullest,” she told my colleague, Lila MacLellan, in a newly published Fortune magazine feature.

At the time, Accenture was shifting its growth strategy and looking to become more acquisitive. It saw in Sweet a business-savvy legal partner who could help execute on that ambition. Still, she joined with no formal background in technology and admits she didn’t know what the cloud was when she started.

Rather than seeing that gap as a liability, Sweet treated it as a learning opportunity. She enlisted Bhaskar Ghosh, now Accenture’s chief strategy and innovation officer, as a personal tutor. They met every two weeks for 18 months. It was a deliberate, sustained effort to build fluency in an area that would soon become central to Accenture’s future and her own.

Sweet has emphasized that understanding technology isn’t optional for executives; it’s foundational. Leaders today, she says, must understand how tech is changing products, industries, and customer expectations.

In 2019, following the untimely death of CEO Pierre Nanterme, Sweet was named chief executive. Her ability to connect the dots across legal, strategic, and operational domains has proven an asset, especially as the company scales up partnerships with firms like Nvidia and Palantir to embed AI across both commercial and government clients.

In interviews with Fortune, analysts credited her with positioning Accenture for the next wave of enterprise transformation. Clients described her as highly engaged, detail-oriented, and deeply prepared. Former colleagues also highlighted her ability to synthesize complex information and her tendency to keep pressing until she fully understands an issue.

Although Sweet’s path from law to CEO of a consulting and tech services company may be atypical, it reflects what modern leadership demands. Increasingly, the most effective CEOs aren’t those who simply follow a linear path up a single function, but rather those who can cross disciplines, absorb new knowledge quickly, and operate with intellectual range.

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Ruth [email protected]

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