Before joining Accenture in May 2004, Walt Shill spent 12 years at McKinsey & Company, where he led the Global Post-Merger Management practice. Today, Shill is global managing partner of Accenture’s strategy services line of business.


CM: Where would we find you spending your time these days? What types of industries and what types of work are you involved with?

Shill: I do a lot of work in mergers and acquisitions, and another exciting part for me is in organization strategy or design, and operating models. I spend some of my time working in the communications high tech industry and also work inside the entertainment industry. I have recently worked with companies that are doing global implementations, whether it involves an acquisition in China or going into Eastern Europe.

And then the second piece is leading our strategy practice, and there are kind of two parts to that. There’s one part that reports directly to me that is cross-industry. We’re organized into a couple of different groups. One is focused on corporate strategy; another, on organization strategy; another piece, on innovation, or growth and innovation; and then another, on strategic IT. We address other areas such as pricing.

A large portion of our strategy practice is within the operating groups or our industry groups. I help guide, provide leadership, and troubleshoot for those groups as well. I guess I would characterize that part as kind of a connector between those other parts.


CM: You mentioned pricing. Is this perhaps a new practice area for Accenture?

Shill: It’s not new. We actually have several hundred people around Accenture who are working on pricing. But typically it’s been by industry, and we’ve recently decided to take a portion of those people and skills and grow a cross-industry piece, and do more research and deeper pieces. So, essentially, we’re taking part of that and centralizing it, and there’s going to be more investment, more growth in that area.


CM: Are you sourcing talent in places different from those where other parts of Accenture source talent?

Shill: Yes. There are two things. We do the traditional campus hiring, both at undergraduate and MBA schools. But a large portion of our strategists come from the technology side. And if you realize that there are 130,000 people in Accenture, that’s a sizable base to draw from for our recruiting. So we actually have a lot of our own homegrown strategists. It’s a big advantage to have over the traditional strategy firms that have to rely 100 percent on MBAs. And, in fact, we are now working on a mini-MBA where we can take some of those folks and accelerate their development from the technology side into the business and strategy side.