“You really need to be wiling to disrupt yourself,” Accenture’s chief leadership and human resources officer Ellyn Shook said. “You really need to look at yourself hard in the mirror and say, ‘The things that we are doing simply aren’t working, so how do we access new talent pools,’ or, ‘How do we make our company more friendly to people who are different than us.’”
Shook cites her own firm’s diversity in making it “smarter and more innovative” and quotes a favorite saying of her CEO Pierre Nanterme: ‘If you’re relying on what you know today, you’re already irrelevant,’ in making her point. “Ensuring that you have the full diversity really ensures that you’re going to get the innovation to be relevant in the future,” she said.