Video Quick Take: Accenture’s Emma McGuigan on Curiosity and Cloud Computing

Video Quick Take: Accenture’s Emma McGuigan on Curiosity and Cloud Computing

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. I’m Todd Pruzan, senior editor for research and special projects at Harvard Business Review. And today I’m joined by Emma McGuigan, global lead for intelligent platform services at Accenture and chair of the board of Avanade, the company’s joint venture with Microsoft.

Emma’s group helps clients achieve enterprise-wide transformation by bringing Accenture’s deep technology, functional, and industry expertise across SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, Adobe, and other leading platforms. Emma, thanks so much for joining me today.

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

Thank you for having me, Todd.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

First, what fuels your curiosity?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

I constantly want to know how things work, why people think the way they do, why they do the things they do. And I think that just helps me always [keep] asking questions and learning. And I think that continual learning is really important to me.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Great. So as a leader, how are you encouraging curiosity within Accenture?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

I try really hard to lead by example, to make sure I listen. I think sometimes we’re too quick to speak. And actually, if you really want to learn, you first of all have to listen. But you have to be seen as being curious as to asking those questions, reading, learning, and really thinking differently about how to ideate and evolve and how we do that with new people.

We’ve just been launching our growth summit for our IPS, our intelligent platform services. So we’ve broadened out from just our core leadership to bring some of our up-and-coming leaders into that discussion. You need that diversity of thinking to drive the best thinking and that learning mentality.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Great. So when you were a new and emerging leader, what were you most curious about? I mean, are there things you wish you’d been curious about?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

Well, I think it’s really important not to live with regrets. So our first thing is to say there’s nothing I wish I hadn’t done, because then I’d be living with regret. But I think the thing that I think sometimes we think, as engineers, as consultants—and I started my life as an engineer and a consultant—we think we have to know all the answers.

And sometimes, I think it’s really important to say I don’t know. And when you say you don’t know, you do two things. You open up whoever you’re talking to into feeling that they have value and that they can help you explore that. And you bring other people into thinking about how to solve problems, how to create something new.

And if I think of an example, I was working with one of the senior leaders at Microsoft and we were trying to put together a client deal. And we were really trying to align some different commercial principles to give the client what the client wanted. After all, it’s the customer where we’re trying to unlock that value.

And by actually saying I don’t know, we were able to explore what we thought could work for the client and then think about how to bring that to life for ourselves. So I think there’s power in saying you don’t know. And I think the thing I wish I’d learnt earlier is just say you don’t know when you don’t know, because actually, there’s strength in doing that.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

That’s a great lesson for everybody. Switching gears, what areas of technological innovation have the most potential to change the world?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

Well, this is a fantastic question, Todd, because as a technologist, I get so excited about so many technology innovations. I think about [how] it’s not very long ago that if you wanted to do quantum processing, there [were] kind of one or two locations, literally, globally where you could do it.

But if you think about the power that quantum unlocks to do health, diagnosis, and prognosis instantly for an individual, what a difference that can make to the way we think about health care. Also, though, thinking about how edge processing can suddenly bring access to all sorts of health and education and drive societal change. But I think the thing that excites me most at the moment is when you think about the cultural innovation that we’ve been forced into through the pandemic.

We’ve got organizations [that] used to be really slow to adopt change, become the leaders. We went to a virtual health care system overnight. When we shifted—when you think about that shift that all of us as humans have adapted, we’re only limited now by our human ingenuity. And suddenly, we have many, many people thinking about how to apply those technology innovations.

And so I think we’re going to see this huge acceleration in the next two, three, five, 10 years, where more people feel free to think differently about how to apply that technology advancement. And the technologists are going to keep innovating. I have no doubt about that.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

The technological innovation of cloud computing specifically has changed significantly. How do you see this technology having an impact in the future?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

I think we’re only at the start of this journey, Todd. And I think we’ve been stuck a little bit in the last five years on this notion of journey to the cloud. And actually where it gets exciting is when you’re in the cloud.

We’ve seen numerous organizations accelerate business transformation over the last 18 months in a way that we didn’t think was possible before. Organizations [that] are product manufacturing [that]’ve always been in a B2B model suddenly rotating to drive direct to consumer. All that is enabled in a very accelerated way through already being in the cloud, driving towards a data-driven outcome and being able to accelerate the pace at which we can do things.

It’s what you do once you’re in the cloud which I think is so exciting. It brings in that whole ability to drive data-driven decision making at scale, the ability to have all those decisions at your fingertips because you’re no longer waiting. You’re no longer trying to merge data from different sources.

When you think about that, that’s where this opportunity of cloud comput[ing] can really come to life in driving that scale of transformation and unlock[ing] that agility and resilience that so many organizations have looked for in the last few years.

I also just want to finish, though. Because you know, just think about it. Historically, organizations had to focus on things like security, making sure their data center was secure, making sure that they were maintaining the core applications, taking in updates from software providers as they came in. In a true cloud world, all that can go away in a true public cloud space so organizations can focus on accelerating and being agile and staying ahead of their competition.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Thanks. Emma, you’ve touched on curiosity and innovation separately. But how would you describe the relationship between curiosity and innovation?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

I think they’re inextricably linked, and I don’t think you can have one without the other. And I think we have to be always thinking about the what if. What if we could do this? What if we could do that? Because that’s what drives the innovation.

But as we innovate, as we see the art of the possible and we understand what’s possible, then we start to ask more questions about what if. And so I think these two really importantly live together. And I think it’s really important that we recognize there is no finish line. And it’s about this attitude of it being continually evolving.

And I think the pandemic has really forced us into leaning into that, and I think the pace of innovation we see with companies across all sectors today, it brings to life the way these two things are so inextricably linked when we think about them in that context.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Yes, I think we all feel that. That’s true. Do you see broad and open technology sources like cloud computing as opportunities for individuals to be curious and continually innovate? And if so, how?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

Yeah, I mean, I talked earlier about it’s the journey in the cloud that matters. I think if you’re really, really engaged in that public cloud solution so you can take some of those layers of security and complexity away, it allows core businesses to focus on what they know. They understand their customers, their consumers.

They understand their business, and they understand how to operate. When they then realize everything else that comes with that cloud solution, they can start to innovate much more readily and much more rapidly and have that agility and resilience, which we know is so important and has been demonstrated to be even more important than perhaps we even believed through the last 18 months.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Right. As we wrap up, Emma, how has the global pandemic influenced your own curiosity? And how do you expect it to influence innovation in our society overall?

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

You know, Todd, we’ve done things in the last 18 months we didn’t think were possible. And I think about that for myself. I think about the fact that every day I come back down to my home office, and I run a global business from a home office, which I never leave, and I interact with partners, with clients, with teammates, with colleagues. And we drive all sorts of change for our customers, and we ideate with our partners, and we create new opportunity.

We would never have thought it possible that I could do all that with never leaving a home office in London. Like we just wouldn’t have believed it possible. If we think about that, and we think about how that’s reinventing how we as citizens consume health care—health care went virtual overnight for so many of the treatments and so many of the interactions that we need—we would never have believed that possible because we would have thought there would be too much behavioral resistance to that level of change.

And I think when you think about that, we’re in a world now where we’re constantly thinking about the next new. Millions of people stopped commuting. I don’t think for a minute millions of people are going to start commuting again, and neither does anybody else, but what’s the new workplace going to look like?

And so we’re in this space right now where we’ve been forced into driving massive innovation, but we’ve also started to recognize what we really need in terms of that human interaction. And I think what we’re looking at as we think ahead, it’s about reasserting what we mean by an employee experience, repositioning what we think about when we’re serving clients, whether you’re in a B2B or a B2C situation, and thinking about how we address challenges in a really different way.

I think businesses have really mentally changed; I think industries have been mentally changed as fundamentals shift. And I think it creates huge opportunity for all of us as we look ahead—to each of us [to] drive innovation and each of us to remain curious, because if we don’t, we’re going to get left behind.

So I think for the innovative, for the curious, and for those willing to learn, I think there’s a fantastic future ahead. And I think the pace of change is going to continue to run fast over the next few years. But I think what’s shifted really fundamentally is people’s behavior and ability to adopt and really lean into that agility that’s required to do that.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Well, that’s great. Emma, thank you so much for joining me today.

Emma McGuigan, Accenture

Thank you very much for having me, Todd.

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SAS and Accenture partnered to help their clients use data to connect the dots, from surgically targeted analytics projects to enterprise-level initiatives. To learn more about their partnership and how other innovators are putting curiosity to work, visit sas.com/curiosity.