Transitioning Accenture | Douglas Scrivner

 

About Douglas Scrivner

Doug Scrivner, former General Counsel of Accenture, retired in 2011 after 31 years with the company and 14 years as General Counsel. During his tenure, he built a legal group of over 400 lawyers in 35 countries and also over saw the company’s government relations function and served as Corporate Secretary, Compliance Officer and as a member of Accenture’s Executive Leadership Team.

Mr. Scrivner has participated and held leadership positions in several educational and professional organizations. At the University of Denver this has included serving as a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Denver, where he will be Chair–‐Elect in June 2013, and has chaired the Advancement Committee and serves on the Trustee Affairs, Audit and Technology Futures Committees; Chairman of the Visiting Committee, University of Denver Sturm College of Law; National Co–‐Chairman of the Second Century Campaign, University of Denver Sturm College of Law; and member of the Advisory Board of Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers at IAALS. He is also an adjunct professor at the Sturm College of Law.

 

Interview Transcript of: Transitioning Accenture | Douglas Scrivner

Alan
Welcome back. I’m here today with Doug Scrivner. Doug was the former General Counsel at Accenture. Welcome to the show.

Doug
Thanks very much.

Alan
Give us a background how you got to where you became the General Counsel at Accenture.

Doug
That’s sort of a fun story. It’s probably the last successful advertising story that you’ll hear. But I was in a law firm in the Twin Cities and decided that I wanted to go in house that was the beginning movement to to have in house counsel, play a leading role in companies and managing the legal spend of, of companies. And so I was looking around, answered a blind ad in the Wall Street Journal, which turned out to be the world headquarters of Arthur Andersen. And so in January of 1980, I was the third lawyer in in Arthur Andersen. The other two lawyers were very focused on litigation matters and on governance and related matters. There was this new element of the firm called the management information consulting division. And they said, Doug, why don’t you spend a lot of your time helping the consulting division through all of its legal activities? And I said, Sure, I’ll I’ll do that. I also spent a lot of time on the Arthur Andersen side in the early days and learned a ton about about business, and about about the law, and about litigation, how to read a financial statement and things that made me a much, much better lawyer. But I was the first lawyer for what is today Accenture in 1980. The management information consulting division had 2000 people around the world and did 220 million in revenue. And they announced their results a couple of weeks ago, and they have 275,000 people around the world today and almost 29 billion in revenue. So I wrote I rode that train for 31 years. And was really the principal lawyer from almost day one, but it was designated formally as general counsel in 1996. And which is also when my wife and I moved to the Bay Area from Chicago.

Alan
Now you said backing up 275,000 employees?

Doug
Yes, and or 70,000 of those are in India. 30,000 of them are in the Philippines, probably 30 5000s in the United States. But they have formal operations in 50 countries, but Accenture serves clients in probably 120 countries around the world.

Alan
What was a like? Building and by the way, when we talk about Accenture, we’re not talking about a new company. I mean, this this thing was born out of the explosion in the demise of Arthur Andersen is that right?

Doug
The name Accenture came about January 1 of 2001. So the unfortunate demise of of Arthur Andersen was in 2002 as a product of Enron, largely although there are other factors there as well. But we had separated as business units in 1989. Accenture was a billion dollar business, then the 90s were an extraordinary time in by the year 2000. We were a $10 billion business. But we had an arbitration against Arthur Andersen starting in 1997. To separate ourselves, then that was concluded in 2000s successfully fortunately for us, the only thing we quote unquote lost was the arbitrator said we had to change our name. We couldn’t use any variant of the Anderson name. So we went through a four and a half month process to come up with the name Accenture. And and then we had the the ability to go public. So we went public in 2001 in July, and had been a public company ever since.

Alan
The amazing thing though, you were there from day one and building this thing out.

Doug
It was an extraordinary, right, you get a lot of frequent flyer miles. So the plane I have somewhere north of 5 million miles, it’s still using some of them.

Alan
Well, yeah, I’ll tell you it’s so why when you went through this process, why was corporate client compliance so important or when you’re driving this in house counsel, there’s

Doug
So many reasons for it. You know, just the cost of compliance mistakes can be enormous financially, but more importantly, reputation is so critical, particularly in a business like ours and a personal services business. And we were probably even a little bit more sensitive to that by having come out of Arthur Andersen. So we I thought there were a lot of people who would have loved to have taken us down the way they took Arthur Andersen down and we weren’t going to take that risk.

Alan
Yeah, that we need to take a quick break. And I actually want to get into the the demise of Arthur Andersen in history of you know what happened with Enron that rolling out but we need to take a quick break right now. Okay, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visiting here today with Doug Scribner. He is the former General Counsel at Accenture. And before the break, we’re talking about the demise of Arthur Andersen Kennedy, Enron happened again.

Doug
I’m not sure that the precise parameters of Enron could happen again. But I think it’s important to take a step back and think of the kinds of corporate scandals go through waves. I mean, this is not Enron was not the first time there was a core set of corporate scandals. You go back to the 60s and the bankruptcies of Penn Central and, and some of those companies, you think about the bribery scandals in the 70s with Lockheed and others that led to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, you think about the savings and loan episode, you think about the insider trading episodes of the 80s. You think about the tech bubble and the and the bursting there, which was sort of the era of Enron and you think about 2007 2008, and the financial crisis and all that went on there. And the that’s continuing today. So you see the stories and every day in the newspaper of JP Morgan, HSBC financial institutions seem to be the the scandal, bed of du jour. But I think a lot of the Sarbanes Oxley reforms, not all, but many of them, I think did have a salutary effect. I think boards are much more effective. I think the independence requirements that came with Sarbanes Oxley were beneficial, no guarantee but beneficial. I think the independence requirements for audit committees and for compensation committees were beneficial. Some of 404, Sarbanes Oxley 404, the internal control provisions were good, I think, taken too far and get way too, into the weeds. And in many respects, I think the accounting firms drove it there. But I think there’s a lot of wisdom in the in the essence of 404. That provides it briefly for us as a brand new public company at Accenture. It gave us it’s forced us to have a degree of discipline that was not otherwise a natural act for coming out of a partnership. As you would know, partnerships are different animals. And so I think human nature is such that we will have new waves of scandals, they will probably look a little bit different. I think the accounting firms are much more attuned. So the the massive house of cards kind of financial scandal that was Enron, hard to see how that could happen again, but you know, lots of stuffs gonna happen. And we need to be prepared for it.

Alan
Because Accenture work for so many types of companies, what direction do you see the technology taking us today?

Doug
You know, technology is just so pervasive and drives so much. I think what what Accenture is now saying and their technology vision which they wish you reissue every year. So the technology vision 2013 talks about technology being such an integral part of how you do business that you actually don’t talk about the technology anymore. You talk about the business outcomes, and how do you achieve those so big data, the the speed of the velocity of data, the need to design your business around customers, and how you do the analytics that allow you to have an intimacy with your customer in a way that we could never have in the past. The notion of moving from transactions to relationships, which requires a level of knowledge about your customer that we can now have The notion that just the ubiquity of technology the the data driven networks, as opposed to hardware driven networks, if you start if you’re talking about the cloud now, you’re sort of missed the point that’s everything is, is in the cloud. And it’s just everywhere

Alan
So that we, we need to take a quick break. Speaking with Doug Scribner, he is a former general counsel and Accenture. He was there when the company was built into an empire of 275,000 employees in pretty much 120 countries throughout the world. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visiting here today with Doug Scrivner. Doug is the former General Counsel at Accenture and joined when the he was the third attorney in the in house counsel at Arthur Andersen and later over the years, saw the organization move to Accenture and then build into a 275,000 employee organization with 120 countries. And was it 39,000,000,020 9,000,000,020 9 billion? What’s a billion here? There? Right? Well, let’s talk about so Accenture. They focus in helping little companies to become big advising consulting, you know, coaching along the way? And what advice would you give for a startup company in our current environment?

Doug
I think the thing that I would focus on is looking for important problems to solve in the next simple app. Great, wonderful, but looking at areas of extraordinary need, whether it’s education, health care, and like and finding solutions, through technology, typically, for some of those fundamental problems of affordability and accessibility and effectiveness and efficiency in in those areas. I think that there’s a huge opportunity for companies that come up with ways to to help solve some of those pressing problems of our country and frankly, in the world. Another piece of advice, I think with the sort of the change in exit strategies, and liquidity events compared to the 90s, when IPO was the most likely way to have an exit strategy, much more oriented towards selling to another company. The longer you can keep venture capital money at bay and retain your control and flexibility, I would say the better off you’re going to be because you want it to be your company, not their company. So there’s lots of ways to do that through angel investing and through partnering with big companies. And doing that in a fashion that allows you to maintain your freedom and your flexibility to do what you want to do but use their channels and use some of the things they have to offer. Accenture’s only one of many, many potential channels for those kinds of things. But those we frankly weren’t very good at we tweet, we tried multiple times to set up sort of skunk work kinds of environments where we could start something very small. And you know, we usually had our our bureaucracy get in the way. We were sort of a one size fits all kind of company we learned and we gotten much better at it. And I know that they’re very good at it today. But it was a very tough learning environment to figure out what you need to do to allow something small to take root and then begin to grow without being suffocated by the mothership. Change the metaphor a little bit.

Alan
It is interesting that as as a company goes from small to big, it obviously changes and the complexities and your processes and everything else. What was it like expanding into 120 countries though?

Doug
Yeah, we when I joined Accenture as it is today, man at the management information console I think vision was probably already in 20 countries. But what we did was hire nationals, bring them to the states, put them on our own training, have them work in established practices in other countries and then had them go back. So they were acculturated they were they had Accenture in their, in their blood before they went back to their home country to build a practice, but we gave them then significant autonomy and flexibility to grow a practice. But we were also very methodology driven. So we had we’re very process oriented kind of a company. So we gave them the the training in our processes, but then then set them loose on their own national market so they could translate into into their local market, what they’d learned about Accenture in other parts of the world,

Alan
DEC, I want to move over to the post Accenture life because you’re doing something else today that you have a greater passion for. And what exactly is that the world.

Doug
I’m involved with a number of not for profit things. But the primary one and the one that takes the most time is the University of Denver, where I am chairman elect of the Board of Trustees. I’ve been on that board for about five years now. And my colleagues asked me if I would take on the challenge. So I’ve got a one year transition with our current chair. And then I have a four year term as Chairman of the Board starting next July. I’m also very involved with the law school at Denver. I’ve taught there the last couple of years a class in corporate governance risk and compliance. I’m involved with a another initiative at the University of Denver called educating tomorrow’s lawyers, which is focused on trying to figure out how we change what we teach and how we teach to make lawyers more effective more quickly. I’m also involved at Duke University with their public policy school, I’m on their board of visitors. And I’m on the board of a foundation for Medical Research Institute in San Francisco, called the Gladstone Institutes, which do extraordinary research in the brain, the heart and Immunology. It’s all they do. One of their senior investigators last fall won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Shinya Yamanaka, who is an extraordinary man who figured out how to take a human skin cell and convince it that it was a stem cell, which you could then turn into a heart cell or a brain cell or any other human cell, and avoid all of the issues, the real issues around embryonic stem cells. So it’s, those three things are the also having a little fun traveling a little bit with my wife. But, you know, it’s important to me to be able to spend time helping institution and education is probably the most important element for me, because I think that’s where opportunity comes from for for everybody. But then also, we do some things with our local hospital, which is an extraordinary institution. So it’s trying to find ways to whether you call it give back or paying for it or whatever it is. It’s important to us and get great satisfaction from being involved with those kinds of activities.

Alan
You know, it’s it’s giving back, it’s what it’s all about, and you’ve had a remarkable career and what you’re doing now matters and, you know, helping the rest of the world. And as we move through life and advanced technology and different causes, so that we need to take a quick break, I’d like to hold you over for the last segment. And I want to get back into your vision for the future of the education of attorneys where that’s going. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back, I’m here today with Doug Scrivner. He’s a former General Counsel at Accenture and saw grow to a company of over 275,000 employees and 120 countries. The later went on recently and stepped out of the role of General Counsel and has been doing a lot of not for profit work with a greater passion or time commitment with the University of Denver in the saucepan working on improving the law schools education system whether you know how attorneys aren’t I want to ask you in this area what needs to be done to improve In law schools and the legal system?

Doug
Well, there’s no question that we are at a tipping point. In many respects, the cost of legal education is is just out of control the debt that young lawyers have to carry is, is staggering. And yet, we’re not equipping lawyers effectively to hit the ground running and be a phrase, we often use his practice ready. But law firms are telling us that the product that the law schools are producing isn’t isn’t as good as it needs to be. Now, that’s also a product of major changes going on in the legal profession in the law business, that law firms aren’t providing the training they used to corporate departments, like, like I used to lead are imposing huge pressures on law firms to cut their cut their costs. And one of the costs that they tend to cut his training, but we’re focused on the learnings from the Carnegie Foundation for teaching did a report in 2007, on legal education, they said that what we do in the first year of law schools is terrific. We teach doctrine, we teach substance, the law, and how to think like a lawyer, the last two years are not nearly as effective. And we don’t teach skills that are necessary to both legal skills and sort of soft side skills, whether that’s negotiation or just resilience, or, or the like. And we also don’t do as an effective job in what they call the third apprenticeship. So you’ve got doctrine, you’ve got skills and what the Carnegie Foundation called professional identity, which is an amalgam of things like ethics, leadership, professional responsibility, what’s the role of lawyers in society? How do you how do you effectively serve the ends of the legal system, not just a job, not just a career serving clients, but as lawyers, we have responsibilities to the system, as well. So we’ve educating tomorrow’s lawyers is a consortium of 33 law schools that are looking at how best to change what we teach and how we teach. And the principal thing around how we teach is to be much more experiential. So clinics externships, internships, simulations, there’s no question that people learn best by doing. And the old apprenticeship model of how lawyers learned their their trade in their craft, by second chairing watching a master perform, and then perform under the supervision of a more experienced person, we’ve lost a lot of that. And so law schools can’t do everything. But they can do a better job of equipping students to come out more fully formed with with a set of skills set of competencies to to serve their clients more effectively than historically we have been doing

Alan
It, what do you consider your greatest accomplishment in life?

Doug
Remaining married for 36 years to a wonderful woman is not a bad place to start. But professionally, I would say the helping guide the transition in Accenture, from our private partnership days to being a public company, and to doing that in a fashion that, that built on the strengths of our partnership and the values that we had as a partnership and continuing those and using those as a platform on which to build the culture and the culture of compliance in in Accenture and avoiding some of the problems that other public companies have to deal with. It has been an enormous amount of satisfaction, and frankly, progressing the careers of some people who were very important to me. We had 420 lawyers when I left but there’s some folks that I’ve worked with for 25 years, who are very special to me and making helping them have satisfying careers is very satisfying to me.

Alan
A remarkable career in it’s still in process. Doug, thank you for joining today’s show. Thanks very much. I’ll be joining with. I’ve been speaking with Doug Scribner, he’s the former general counsel of Accenture now involved heavily and not for profit work with an emphasis with the University of Denver. Thanks for joining San America dreams. Join us again next week. Right here on kto W am 1220

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

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