Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry

Dr. Albert Bourla became Pfizer’s CEO months before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the US. Under his leadership, Pfizer manufactured 3 billion doses of the first FDA-approved vaccine in the first year, which led to record-breaking earnings. Yet over the past few years, post-pandemic sales slumps, patent cliffs and vaccine skepticism have driven down Pfizer’s earnings. In this episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell sits down with Bourla to talk about how he is answering this new set of challenges with science, innovation and optimistic leadership.

Pfizer CEO took on COVID. Now he wants to cure cancer | Titans and Disruptors

Leadership

It’s been one year since Vice President Kamala Harris and then-Democratic nominee was coming down to her final days of the 2024 presidential campaign against Donald Trump. She spent 107 days on the road in a bid to earn their vote, but it wasn’t enough. Almost one year later, she’s had time to reflect. In a wide-ranging conversation at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit, Harris joined Fortune’s Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell at the Washington National Cathedral to discuss the growing divides between Republicans and Democrats, how the government is not meeting Americans’ basic needs, and why not inviting Elon Musk to the White House was a “mistake”.

Kamala Harris says the ‘Glass Cliff’ Suggests Finality: “I’m Not Into That”

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has led the nation's largest financial institution through times of disruption for two decades. As Dimon navigates today's world of generative AI, President Trump's policies, and the effects on the global economy, Dimon sat down with Fortune's Editor-in-Chief, Alyson Shontell, to discuss these topics at the Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C. Dimon shares his thoughts on Washington, as the government is currently shut down, and Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist leading polls in the New York City mayoral race.

Jamie Dimon on What Kills Companies and the Key to Business Leadership

Ramp CEO Eric Glyman has helped build one of fintech’s fastest-growing startups — hitting $1 billion in annualized revenue, serving 45,000 businesses, and soaring to a $22.5 billion valuation in just 2,367 days. In this episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, he sits down with Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell to break down Ramp’s meteoric rise, the business model flipping corporate cards on their head, and why he believes speed and focus are the keys to scaling.

How Ramp's Eric Glyman Built a $22.5 Billion Startup in 2,367 Days

In this segment of Fortune 500:Titans and Disruptors of Industry Accenture CEO Julie Sweet opens up about how a breast cancer diagnosis reshaped her perspective and sharpened her resolve. She reflects on saying “yes” to a stretch role that would set her on the path to CEO, and on how decisive leadership has become her trademark in moments of uncertainty.

How a Cancer Diagnosis Reframed Julie Sweet’s Approach Work and Leadership

Fortune's Editor and Chief Alyson Shontell sits down with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet

How a life-changing diagnosis forged Accenture CEO Julie Sweet’s leadership style

For Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, surviving cancer twice brought both clarity and urgency. In this conversation, she shares how those lessons shaped her path to the top.

A huge break that you got and deserved, frankly was the North America CEO job. How did you first know that that was something that you wanted? And how did that come about? That seems like a really big career moment and a really big opportunity that you had. So I'm just curious if there's a backstory there and how you prepared. I went from GC straight to the head of North America. Wow, and I remember the moment this even became a possibility. So I, I worked for an amazing CEO, Pierenter, and I was in Paris. He was French and we were having just a usual meeting. I was his general counsel. It's a very close relationship. We were kind of, you know, just doing the usual meeting. At the end of the meeting, he closes his notebook and he pushes it aside, and he says to me, completely out of the blue, he says, I think you could run this place someday, but you'd have to run something else first. You can't go from general counsel to CEO. Well, so he thought you could be the CEO of the whole thing, like, right, he could see me. He said, you know, do you want that? Now at the time, what ran into my head immediately was something that we had this incredible director Dina Dulon, who had once talked to a group of women, and she'd given us advice. She said, When someone gives you a stretch role, and let's face it, moving from GC to, you know, being the global CEO is a stretch role, it's like, chances are that the person offering you a stretch role is as nervous or more nervous than you are. So don't say anything like, are you sure? You know, right? And it would have been really easy to, because I was very close to Pierre, um, and, you know, it would have been easy to be kind of like, oh, are you sure? da da da. And you know, what's most remarkable about me being global CEO is not that I'm the first woman or that I was a lawyer, but I'm actually the first CEO that didn't start out of college, right? So like, it had never occurred to me that Accenture. would take someone who hadn't grown up here to be CEO and then you add on top of it, I was the general counsel like it wasn't just part of like something I thought I could reasonably aspire to. So I looked at him and I said, with Dena in my head, why yes, I'd be interested. What did you have in mind? Is that like interim step, you know, and it was really funny because he said, Well, you know, products is going to come available. That's one of our business scene, he's like, but that's really big. He's like, Ooh la la, you know, maybe not. And he said, Well, you know, maybe the North America job. So that was just like an incredible moment. And a month later I found out I had breast cancer. Oh my gosh. So I wasn't thinking too much about, you know, running North America at the time, and he was so incredible to me. And then when I came back full time, I had a lot of complications. And when I came back full time, the North America job actually opened up and You know, what an amazing company I work for, because, you know, I battled with all the different things around breast cancer for about 9 months, and I remember I came back in January of 2015 and there wasn't something like, oh, you know, Julie's been out or anything. It was just like, oh, she's back. The job, you know, became available and Um, you know, long story short, on June 1st, 2015, I became the North America CEO, which, you know, was the stepping stone to be able to become the global CEO four years later. Wow. There must be something so clarifying and distilling about getting a diagnosis like that. And I'm curious how, and you've battled it now twice, including recently, and I'm so glad that your treatment has passed, and I hope, I hope you're doing well. I'm doing great, so thank you, and I've had so much support. It's been amazing. So I'm curious how it's changed you as a person. I'm sure you know it brings empathy with it, but also clarity of how do I want to be spending my time? Am I doing the thing that I really want to be doing? Do I want to spend all this time at work? So I'm curious how you've worked through that. When I go back to 2014, I had young kids, they were 6 and 7, and uh which is always scary, um. And you know at the time, I felt good about how I'd been living my life because I said, you know, like, do I have any regrets? And I, and I actually felt like I'd struck the right balance with the given that obviously I'd chosen a career that I was going to work a lot, like so it's not that I was, you know, like that was just a that was a choice, but within that choice I felt good about the choices that I had made in terms of time. And in the intervening years I've used that as kind of a litmus test because I mean, you know, like I know your job is crazy, so I know you, you relate to this, right? You can get sucked into different times being really busy and so I would, I would stop and ask myself like if, you know, if something happened to me tomorrow, would I still feel like I didn't have any regrets? And sometimes I'd be like, no, I would be regretful and I'd have to adjust. And so I think it helped me. Bring more balance over the 10 years and balance, not like somehow some nirvana, but being able to stay focused on what's important, which is my family and, and, you know, being with them. And then this, you know, this latest time is just of course always a reminder. So for me, you know, probably the thing that as a working mom kind of went to the wayside the most was a focus on my health. Then now fortunately the one area I always did was self exams because I actually found Recent cancer through a breast self exam and I always talk about that because I really want to encourage women to make sure that they're getting their mammograms and they're doing their regular self exams and because, you know, ultimately because I caught it early, you know, I'm here and I was able to get through it pretty quickly. But you know, this time around for me it was a little bit more of a wake up call that, you know, just focusing on my health and, you know, not so much but because of the cancer, but recognizing that I'm probably, I wasn't spending as much time. It wouldn't have affected whether I had cancer or not, but it was kind of like a reflection on I want to live a really long life. Like you get really clear, I want to live a really long life, and I want that to be a quality life and I was reading this book by Peter Atia, I don't know if you know it outlived and And he talks about, you know, having a health quality, not just life, you know, tenure, and what he talks about is like you want to have that last 10 years of your life be very high quality, and that means you've got to do things now. And so I'm super focused on making sure that I'm doing the things that I need to do now that are good for my health now but also put me in a position that You know, I have, you know, an opportunity in the last decade of my life to live it to the fullest. Even as she faced her own health struggles, Sweet was steering Accenture through seismic shifts in geopolitics, the economy, and rapid tech change. In 2022, after navigating the firm through COVID, she made the swift decision to pull Accenture's operations out of Russia just one week after the country's invasion of Ukraine. Russia overnight launched its long anticipated attack on Ukraine, striking military posts across the country. That kind of rapid response reflects a broader leadership style, spotting opportunities and moving fast to act on them. Sweet has also helped drive an aggressive mergers and acquisitions push. In 2024 alone, Accenture completed 46 acquisitions worth $6.6 billion. The company targeted firms in data, analytics, marketing, and AI to strengthen its position in fast growing sectors. Beyond AI, the company is pushing into bold new areas too, from humanoid robots to space tech and even building digital twins. I think one of the defining things that I just heard from your peers, we have a great profile of you out in Fortune. Every everybody should go read it. Jane Frazier, who runs City, said, you know, Julie is a great leader, but she makes decisive quick decisions, and that seems to be just something that's trademark about your to lead is that you are able to take a lot of noise and just be like this is the path going with conviction. How do you make those decisions because from everybody else it seems like it's fast and quick, but I'm sure to you there must be something going on internally. Is it data? Is it gut? Is it talking to peers? How are you coming to these conclusions? Well, first of all, Jane is an amazing leader, so it's so nice of her to say this. Um, it starts with a great team, and what do I mean by that? I have a team that is constantly, like, also, you know, acting with humility, excellence and confidence, right? We are constantly challenging each other and our assumptions. And when you have a team that thinks that way, right, not that they all think the same, in fact, the exact opposite because we put together teams with like diverse experiences and ideas, but when you build a team that thinks that status quo is challenging assumptions embracing change, it means you're constantly questioning, right? You don't need to stop and have a big strategy, sort of like, let's take the next, you know, 12 months to look at it because you're always working on the strategy. And when you have that base, that means that you have like leaders to go to to like to be starting to question and test things and then I have a larger team, a global management committee. That is deeply steeped in our strategy. They own every dollar of revenue and cost who are like also constantly providing input and they're there to bounce ideas off very, very quickly. And this was an innovation when I became the CEO. A back in 2019 because the prior CEO only had his direct reports as the Global Management Committee, and I expanded that to me the direct reports and the people who lead our services, so think of that as our products and our markets and what that Means is I have about 45 people who are deeply steeped in our strategy, not, you know, sort of meeting once a year, you know, like lots of companies have these like kind of groups of leaders that are almost an adjunct. These are the leaders who are running the company and they provide that constant input. And so I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have a body of leaders who know more than just their role. who believe that their role is is also to lead the company and that you can have like this constant resource of input so that as you're testing ideas you know you've got the right input and that makes me able to make decisions with a lot of confidence and to do so with my team.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet leads one of the world’s largest workforces—and is navigating an era defined by AI disruption, geopolitical volatility, and shifting global markets. In this segment of the Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry vodcast, she shares how she advises fellow CEOs to reinvent their companies, reflects on her unconventional leap from law to CEO, and opens up about the lessons that shaped her rise to one of the most powerful roles in business. 

How Accenture’s CEO Took the Leap From Law to Consulting

Alyson Shontell sits down with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet

Julie Sweet shares how she her unconventional path from lawyer to CEO—and what it takes to rewire companies in the age of AI disruption.

From law to the corner office: Accenture CEO Julie Sweet reflects on her rise and why today’s leaders must rewire their companies to withstand AI and shifting markets.

You are able to take a lot of noise and just be like this is the path going with conviction. How do you make those decisions? It starts with a great team. We are constantly challenging each other and our assumptions, and that makes me able to make decisions with a lot of confidence. AI is transforming every industry, and it puts even the biggest companies at risk. Top venture capitalists. The Node COSLA predicts that the 2030s will see the demise of more Fortune 500 companies than at any point in history. This transformation is the number one thing on every Fortune 500 CEO's mind, especially for Julie Sweet, who runs one of the largest workforces in the world with more than 770,000 employees. In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you have to be willing to rewire your company. I recently sat down with Julie about how she's advising other CEOs to transform their companies and how she's trying to keep AI from eating Accenture's own lunch. Our conversation was packed full of advice and it was personal. Her journey from a small California town to becoming one of the most powerful people in global business is inspiring, especially as she has battled and beaten cancer now twice. I'm your host, Importance's editor in chief, Allison Chantel. Please enjoy the first episode of my podcast, Fortune 500, Titans and Disruptors of Industry with Accenter CEO Julie Sweet. Julie, it is so nice to be here with you today. Thank you for joining me. It's the inaugural Fortune 500 podcast podcast episode of Titans and Destructors of Industry, and who better to have in you. Well, thank you, Allison, and I'm really honored to be your first, so that's that's really exciting for me. So thank you for having me. Since becoming CEO, Sweet has nearly doubled Accenture's value and grown its workforce to over 770,000 employees across 52 countries. That's more than 20 times the size of a key rival, McKinsey, ranked number 211 on our Fortune Global 500 list. It's also among the mere 5% of Fortune Global 500 companies that's run by a woman. First off, you're on Accenture. You've run it since 2019. It is in the top five largest workforces in the world. On top of that, you generate some of the largest revenue in the world. You're number 211 on our Fortune 50 Global 500 list, right, that ranks companies by revenue. I think it's like $65 billion. In a year or something that a center does and then also just you are incredibly powerful. You rank number 11 on our most powerful people in business lists. So I'd just love to start with an economic snapshot from your vantage point. What are the major things on your radar that are affecting your business, but also the businesses of all the CEOs that seek your counsel and work with the center? Well, there's a lot of trends that are literally affecting the world, right? So one, the obvious one, has been tariffs and trade. And that affects countries differently, but there isn't a country that's not being touched by that, so that's one. Second, there has been an ongoing shift in geopolitics, and you know, sometimes people say to me like, oh, right now it's so volatile and uncertain, and you know, I've been CEO for 6 years and I'm kind of like, that's been the story of the last 6 years and And we'll talk about that later, I'm sure, but you've been seeing a shift in geopolitics for some time, like the role of the Middle East. We look at Southeast Asia as things have changed with China, and so making sure that you understand the opportunities and the challenges. So oftentimes people think about the supply chain, but it's also a huge opportunity and are you positioned to take advantage of where growth may come. In the future, so those are two of the big ones. And of course then you can't go, you know, you can't walk past AI, so you'll notice I didn't start there, the obvious one. When I think about AI, the thing that for me is so exciting is that, you know, the last several years have been a series of what were once black swan events. And now the CEOs around the world have a powerful set of tools that they didn't have for some of those events before. Now those tools are hard and they're complex and they have a lot of different, you know, aspects to consider. But as I look forward, it's, you know, very rare as a CEO that you're handed something that is brand new, wasn't part of the toolkit, and allows you to look at the world and really shape your future, and we talk a lot about You know, how do you set the next performance frontier, and AI is definitely something that allows you to think very differently about your future trajectory. So those are the three of the big ones. There's more demographic changes we can go on and on, but those are 3 that I'm talking to a ton of CEOs about, and of course underlying all of that are the talent implications. Unlike traditional strategy focused consulting firms, Accenture doesn't just advise. It also takes on operations and services on behalf of its clients, and its clients span a wide range of industries from banks like Citi and Barclays to Nestle, Saudi Aramco, and pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer. Since we took the helm in 2019, she's helped boost the company's revenue more than 50% to $65 billion. But Sweet's path to CEO was far from typical. In her years before joining Accenture, Sweet had a high profile legal career, earning a scholarship to Claremont McKenna College, graduating from Columbia Law, and making partner at an elite firm within 8 years. In 2007, she landed on the cover of American Lawyer as dealmaker of the Year. So when you decide to come to the center, by the way, you've already had a tremendous career as a lawyer, a career that I think most people wouldn't have said, Oh, I'm just going to forget this path. You rose to partner at one of the top law firms within 8 years, and I'm curious, why did you make that career change? Why say I'm going to go into this crazy tech consulting firm that I don't really don't know that much about, and I'm going to leave this really cushy setup I've created for myself and go try something totally different. How do you weigh a big career change like that? Well, and Allison, one of the things I look back to and now that's like not many people realized was I made the change when I had a 2 year old and a 3 year old as well. I respect that. I took this job when I had a newborn, exactly, which I'm like it all up at the same time. Exactly. You're like, I'm like, oh my gosh, what was I thinking? Well, you know, it is interesting because I was in my office and I love my law firm, so I love the job and I got a call and my assistant had had stepped away and I, this was like a very You know, like a law firm where you had somebody answer always answers your phone, you know, and we had like iced tea delivered 3 times a day to my office, you know, I had a beautiful office. And so I pick up the phone because she'd stepped away and it was a head hunter talking about like this great opportunity and You know, I look back, I was 42, and my father had actually just passed away recently, and I think that definitely affected me because he died quite young at 68. So I'm like listening to this and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to take a meeting. And when I did that, I said to myself like, I know I'm 42, I'm super successful, and I absolutely know what my future is going to be like at Cravath, right? Like because it's like the deals would change, but I made partner and I was like, OK, I could see my future and Then I went and I interviewed with Accenture, who I knew about because I'd done actually a securities deal for a competitor where, you know, we had to like learn about Accenture as a competitor and so I respected the company. Their CEO Bill Green was incredibly charismatic. He had the best line ever for me. Like I, I just fell for a hook line and sinker in my interview. He said, I'm not looking for a lawyer, which is kind of funny because he was hiring a general counsel. He said, I'm looking for a business leader with legal experience. And I'm like, that's what I want to be. And so I ended up taking, you know, taking the leap, and it was the it was the right time. And you know, when I, you know, think back to it, I'm sure my dad's passing had something to do with it, but also just the possibilities of making an impact and uh you know, I've just, I was so fortunate because I absolutely love Accenture. It's an amazing company. I was very privileged to join and I feel really privileged every day to leave this place. So it sounds like a big new opportunity and challenge, a chance to try something new, but to really expand who you were. So you've said that when you were 42 and you came in as general counsel to Accenture, you didn't have the skill set then to be the. CEO, but you're the CEO. So what happened? What was missing and how did you work on those things and know to work on those things? Well, just to start with, I didn't understand technology when I joined, and Accenture is all about technology, and I figured out pretty quickly that If I wanted to be the business leader with legal experience, I had to deeply understand the business. And so after I'd been here nearly 12 months, probably, I made friends with someone named Bhaskar Ghosh, who was running our India technology practice at the time. He would eventually become our global head of technology and now my chief strategy officer, and I asked him, I said, Will you teach me technology? And it really was because I thought of myself as a business leader and I didn't deeply understand the business that we were in. And so we used to meet every 2 weeks for about 18 months, and he would send me off to meet people to learn things. I still remember the guy that taught me, you know, what cloud was, and and that really set me on a very different path because I think my boss at the time, Pierre Naner, saw me differently too. He saw me showing up differently and so did my colleagues. And so anywhere in do it because sometimes it can feel like, oh, I just want to act like I know this thing, but I really don't know this thing, but You seem pretty fearless about just going in and saying like nope, don't know it, tell me everything. I think one of my superpowers is asking for help, you know, I, and maybe that goes back to humility and the idea of building great teams, and so I've always been that way. I've always, you know, if you focus on how you deliver value, then it becomes very natural that you have to have a team and you have to ask for help because at the level that we operate, no one delivers value alone. And one of the things I I coach a lot of people because the people come to me and say, Well, how do I network, etc. and I'm like, look, don't think about networking. Think about connecting with people that can help you deliver more value or who you can help deliver more value and focus on that as opposed to someone who can get you your next job, because the more value you can contribute to your company, the more likely you're going to get that best next job and I've always thought about that with my clients, right? It's like, what do my clients need? They need me to better understand this. And when I was the general counsel, my, my client was actually the company, and what did they need from me? They needed me to understand the business better, to be a better general counsel. And so that focus on value has really been, I think, a big part of my career trajectory.

AI is rewriting the rules of business — and Accenture CEO Julie Sweet says reinvention is the only way Fortune 500s will survive. In the debut episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, Sweet sits down with Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell to reveal how she’s nearly doubled Accenture’s value, grown its workforce to 770,000, and kept the company thriving through disruption.

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Pfizer CEO took on COVID. Now he wants to cure cancer | Titans and Disruptors

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Episodes (7 episodes)

Pfizer CEO took on COVID. Now he wants to cure cancer | Titans and Disruptors

Kamala Harris says the ‘Glass Cliff’ Suggests Finality: “I’m Not Into That”

Jamie Dimon on What Kills Companies and the Key to Business Leadership

How Ramp's Eric Glyman Built a $22.5 Billion Startup in 2,367 Days

How a Cancer Diagnosis Reframed Julie Sweet’s Approach Work and Leadership

How Accenture’s CEO Took the Leap From Law to Consulting

Julie Sweet’s Path From Lawyer to Leading 770,000 People