Richard Spitzer spends a lot of time on planes to help his clients build and sell better cars and automotive equipment. Spitzer joined Accenture a year ago and quickly helped the automotive practice take flight as that area's global managing partner. During the past 12 months, he has logged 400,000 air miles while visiting clients, suppliers, and others in China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. He has visited India a dozen times in the past two-and-a-half years alone.
He believes that global exposure to new ideas, processes, and approaches is a crucial quality for consultants advising clients in an industry that has sped headlong into a climate of major change.
"I take comfort in knowing what it takes to make large-scale change happen," says Spitzer, who worked for A.T. Kearney before joining Accenture. "And that excites me a lot."
A mechanical engineer, Spitzer worked for Texas Instruments early in his career before earning his MBA from Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business. His consulting experience also includes the oil and gas industry; Spitzer contributed to the book Creating the High-Performance International Petroleum Company (Pennwell Books, 1994).
He brings all of that experience to bear on the steep challenges currently facing client companies in the automotive industry. "Many of the executives we work with find that they have been dealt a very difficult deck of cards," Spitzer notes. "The magnitude of some of their challenges requires their advisers to be grounded and humbled in what we do and how we do it." Reaching that realization, Spitzer says, has taken time — and a heck of a lot of consulting miles.
"Early on in your consulting career, you're scared to death because you walk into companies that are extremely large," he explains. "You work through self-doubt and get acclimated, but then you think that you know more than you actually know. The final stage is when you start to hit on all cylinders. That's when you truly know how to make change happen — you understand the best way to execute the change, and you have the relationships necessary to make it happen."
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