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Former Accenture Interactive Founder and CEO Tim Breene is a lifelong professional in the world of technology, digital media and consulting. After retiring from his last position as CEO of World Relief, Breene joined PCB Partners as a Senior Advisor to support the executive team. In an exclusive from Consultancy.uk, he examines how business leaders can effectively navigate the rapidly changing market.

We live in a time in which we are inundated by new management theories that try to explain the keys to success and securing the future of your company in a rapidly changing market. Whether Reid Hoffmann’s theory of “lightning scaling” or Brian Robertson’s thinking about “Holacracy” to institutionalize agile work, there always seems to be a new theory that helps us to scale our companies in the rapidly changing economy. Unfortunately, if we can be sure of one thing, it is that predicting the future is an imprecise science at best. We live in a world that is VUCA – volatile, insecure, complex and ambiguous. The connections between past, present and future are not clean – we are always in the middle of a new revolution.

As business leaders, we are touched by the big developments that are happening around us now – the trend towards hyper-specialization; the M&A race for a dominant size; the acceleration of digital transformation and growth, fueled by the Covid experience of virtual work; Networking as the new norm; the power of data – to name a few. At the same time, we look ahead and ask tough questions in order to be positioned for the future and our success today.

When I first came up with the idea for Accenture Interactive, it was because traditional advertising agencies didn’t have the culture or technological know-how to respond to a content-rich, data-driven, multichannel universe. Customer IT shops that are steeped in “waterfall” development processes have not been able to respond with the agility that CMOs would need in an increasingly digital world. It was what Paul Nunes and I referred to in our book, Jumping the S-Curve, as BEMI – a market insight big enough – to drive a journey to leadership in digital marketing and advertising today.

This insight served as the basis for several early acquisitions by Accenture Interactive that expanded its capabilities into new areas and initiated a process of discovery and invention as we deliberately sought talent beyond the traditional Accenture culture through non-traditional partnerships. The right balance between separation and integration into Accenture’s central delivery model is considered. The details of the vision and model have been adjusted in light of successes, failures and the evolving external environment. When we finally formalized the launch of Accenture Interactive in 2009, it was after 4 years of experimentation and storming to discover the “pattern that works”.

The current race for size, which led to dramatic increases in acquisition activity last year – with more than 1,000 digital commerce transactions in the first half of 2021, an increase of more than 40% compared to 3 years ago – has ended stay because maximizing network effects will continue to matter and aggressive growth in the current marketplace takes precedence over efficiency. But sooner or later, large, fast-growing companies will have to deal with changing workforce expectations and some of the cultural and organizational pressures that arise from this onslaught to scale. The winners will be those who think beyond the immediate asset and people-raising challenges required today to stay competitive. These winners are careful to create the culture and organization that will enable them to keep changing ahead of time.

Because the only thing we know for sure is that we can never really predict the future. When the next seismic shock comes, the organizations with the best, most dedicated, and dedicated talent will be the winners.

PCB Partners is an entrepreneurial global M&A advisory firm serving digital and advisory firms. It works with clients who want to develop acquisition strategies, prepare companies for a sale or develop a business strategy.