It's good to be here with everyone.I speak at a lot of these kind of events, and I have a very short bio history of what I've done, that I'll talk about a little bit. But, really, what I wanna use this time for after that is to share the things, the 4 or 5 things that I wish somebody had told me when I was starting this epic career journey. These are things I discovered later in my career that I think if I had embarked on earlier, I would have found them even more valuable, and I want you to benefit from that set of experiences that I've had. So as Margo said, my name is Penelope Pratt. I'm with Accenture. I've been with them for more than 30 years. Every time I think it might be time for me to go do something else, they come up with something more fun and exciting for me to do.

Last, I was the CIO, which is a rotational job at Accenture. It rotates every 4 to 5 years, and now I lead the Workday business group. But as part of my journey with Accenture, I have literally done just about everything there is in our company to do. And with the 3 quarters of a 1000000 people employed by Accenture, that's saying a lot. Right? I've visited more than 40 countries in the course of executing work for Accenture. I've worked with just about every technology known to man. I've worked across more than 20 industries. It's been a tapestry, a mosaic of different kinds of roles over that time because the the one thing that is constant about what I do with my life I'm a cancer survivor, and I promised myself it was a long, long time ago, but my sole promise to myself was coming out of it.

I knew how fortunate I was to actually survive and that everything going forward would have to have an element of joy in it. In other words, if you don't like your life, change it. Right? And so my journey with Accenture has been a series of things that I have done to make sure that joy is all the always the central tenet of what I do and how I think about the world. That's important to me as a personal value, and it's an important value for my company, especially in the professional services injury industry, which we are, where personnel, motivation, and retention is a key part of success metrics for the business. Right? So talking about some experiences, let me talk about 3 or 4 key things, and and specific stories about why. I want you to think about these as superpowers that you already possess that you may not have activated yet and you need to because they'll serve you well your entire career.

Please feel free to put comments in the chat channel, and I'll answer as many of them as I can. But the first superpower that you need to activate as early in your career as you can is the power of peer groups. A very specific example for me, and I've had many throughout my career, But one of the most impactful ones was when COVID hit. You guys remember how we were all sitting around and looking at each other going, now what? We had no idea how to go forward. We were all confident that we would find a way through, but it was difficult to communicate in the ways that we had been accustomed to communicating, getting together, brainstorming, traveling hither to the ring on. And so I put together a peer group of 12 women who are my level in the firm, peers who would not be afraid to kinda share openly with each other.

And we frankly just got online and talked about now what? How do we advance here? What do we do? And it became a forum for sharing questions and fears, thoughts about the future, how things might or might not work as we were navigating that incredibly volatile time of change for all companies and industries. Right? And that peer group endured past the pandemic and is now an integral part of what I do every day. I usually hit them at least twice a week with just questions about, hey, I'm thinking about looking at this. Does anybody have an intel on this or know who I can talk to? Or has anybody seen anything about it and market? And they do the same for me. It's a constant channel of information for me and from me that helps make all of us richer in how we attack, our daily living. Right?

How we try to find the joy in everything. And one of the questions I get is, well, how do you establish something like this? Guys, LinkedIn. There's already, I guarantee, 5 people on your LinkedIn list who would be willing to get on a WhatsApp chat with you and serve as a peer base. For a lot of women on this phone, you may already be in groups like the t two hundred, right, or the CIO council, the up and coming CIO council, various forums for women in business where you meet and have dinner. It doesn't really matter, but I guarantee you've already got the doorways to find that group. The problem is nobody's gonna do it but you. So if you want a group like that, you have to create it. So reach out and make it. I have several of these. Some of them are reactive. Some of them are not active, but they all provide information and support that I need and crave to get through my days and feel like I'm doing a good job.

Right? Right? The second power is somewhat tied to that, and it's the power of social media. I never really understood because I come from a generation that still drank from the yard hose when we played. Right? But it came from a generation that wasn't born in social media. And so for me, it was that thing I've got to do because it's part of the job and I need to be decent at it, but it's not something that I was really looking forward to until I came to understand that as a connection tool, there is nothing better than social media. And I'll give you a very specific example. I write articles on behalf of my company about where I think technology trends are coming and what's going on in the world.

I've just, published a couple of different ones in the HR domain. I've got one coming up on LLMs. Every time I publish one of those, I get 40 or 50 reach outs of people with questions. Why do you think this is true when I see all this in the the media? Right? And it starts dialogues with people who have similar interest because they read your article because they were interested, and they actually have questions that make you think more about what you're doing. So don't miss the power of social media as a connection tool, right, to reach out and find like minded people from other walks of life that you might not normally connect with, whether that's, you know, community, whether it's spiritual with your religion, whether it's professional with LinkedIn.

These channels are made to be used and used properly. They are a wonderful way to connect with people in the world that you might walk past on the sidewalk in every other aspect of your life and never recognize as a sort of a kindred spirit with whom you can have two way dialogue, learn a lot from them, and teach them as well. The third thing that I would put on the list as a superpower that has served me well as I've gone through different phases of my Accenture career, When you change roles as much as I do, I change roles every 3 to 4 years, sometimes a lot sooner than that, There is no way the next role you're gonna go into is a role that you are 100% prepared to take, meaning you have full knowledge and expertise on every domain of that new role.

Right? It's a new role, and by definition, there's stuff to learn. And so as you're walking through your career timeline and thinking about what comes next, one of the super powers that I'd urge you to activate earlier versus later is to map out what you think you might be interested as your career progresses. One of my interest was being a CIO. Okay. Well, between here and there, what are the things I don't know? Right? And I'll give you a very specific example. At Accenture, our CIO is responsibility for sustainability is responsible for sustainability technology that powers our sustainability footprint for the entire company. That is a brand new and very complicated technology space I knew nothing about. I decided to teach myself. And in the process of learning about that text, self study, watching videos, listening to earnings calls from up and coming sustainability proposition companies, right, and VC companies.

I learned about a whole dimension of technology that I truly just hadn't been exposed to before. It was a joy to learn it, and it stood me in good stead. So map that career journey out. Don't worry. Whatever you map out will be wrong, and you'll change it every 2 years. That's the way life is, and that's the way it's supposed to be. But as part of that, look at the major gaps in knowledge that stand between you and where you wanna go, and start a journey of self discovery now to learn about those things even if you don't end up going to the same place. The joy of learning, of expanding your mind, and of getting new perspectives about different things to bring in what you already know can only make you a better practitioner at whatever it is you choose to do. The 4th superpower that I would put out there, which is one that I've watched women my entire career struggle with, and as Margo was saying, DEI is very important to me, because I believe if you don't have diversity points at a table, you have a poor product.

The best products come from diverse views of the world, period. Full stop. The science proves it. It's empiric. It's not personal or emotional. It's just a fact. And so to support that, as we look at the DEI picture, one of the trends that I saw emerging with both women and minority groups is that they don't ask. They don't ask. They believe that if they just work hard and do well and deliver, they'll automatically be recognized and things will move forward. You have to ask. And to ask, you have to have a crispy enough understanding of what you want and need to ask. I have never gone to my company and said, you know, I'm a little bit bored. I I need to learn something. I wanna do something. Would you mind if I focused on this and tried to help out this team stuff some some and build some knowledge in this area because it's an area I haven't gotten into?

They've never told me no. I mean, that's a freebie for your company. Right? But they would not have thought to pull me in and involve me and give me legitimacy and a presence at the table if I hadn't asked. So think about what you want out of your career, what you wanna learn, where you wanna grow, and figure out how to ask for it in a very crispy, defined way to someone who can help you. And I want you just to plan over the next year to make 10 or 12 very simple asks. And I bet everybody $5, and you can come back and collect your $5 from me if I'm wrong, but I bet everybody who does this, $5, no one will ever say no to you. They're flattered to be asked.

They love to talk about you and how they can help you because helping other people suits a deep seated need in all of us, but they just never get asked. So when they are asked, they're more than happy to do it. So activate that power of making the ask small, crispy, clean. It'll help you. It'll help them. Don't wait until the late stages of your career to start asking because then it's not a core part of your behavior, and it doesn't come across in quite the same way. And then the final superpower that I would urge you to activate is the power of not saying no. And, again, this one is very specific when I look at women and other groups, in the DEI space. And what I mean by not saying no is do you know how many times I've had a conversation with a woman or someone has had tried to have a conversation with me and said, I want you to take this role over here.

And the first words out of your mouth is, I'm not qualified for that. I mean, I could probably learn, but I don't know that. Don't say no. The fact is companies are not stupid, and other people are not stupid, and they would not ask you about things if they didn't think you could do it. Nobody's gonna set you up for failure. So make sure that when you get asked to do something to participate in something, the first sentence you say back cannot have the word no in it. It cannot, for any reason, assume that it's yes, and then ask for what you need. Let me give you a very specific example of this space because it's kind of funny. Right?

I had spent 25 years of my career with Accenture working with CIOs from every walk of life, restructuring their departments, helping them get their talent in order, helping them reset their tech stacks, delivering massive global 5 year programs for ERP backbones, blah blah blah.

I knew a ton of CIOs. I loved the work. Then my company calls me and says, we think you'd make a good CIO. Would you like to interview? And my eyes crossed, and the first thing out of my mouth was me. Really? Of course, me. Who else was more qualified in terms of the work experience that I have? Forget temperament. Forget whether I was willing to do it or had some of the skills that I need to get into. But just from a work experiences perspective, if you look at my resume, Cole, I was probably one of the most qualified people in the firm to interview for that job, and it never occurred to me. So the first thing in my mouth was, pooh, me? Once I settled it and thought about it, I was like, well, yeah. I did it. I loved it.

I loved it. But my first instinct was to think about why maybe I wasn't the perfect choice for that role. Once I got over that, I competed hard for it. I got it. And I gotta tell you, I've never had a more fun role in my entire life. It is just it is combination of joy and terror in every day. It is unmatched in my field of experience for for how much I enjoyed it. So those are the five things that I would think about with some examples from my career. Think about the power of peer groups, think about the power of social media, activate those powers, think about self learning, how to activate that power, Think about how to make the right ask of the right people at the right time to drive your career, and think about the power of not instinctively saying no, but trusting other people are making to ask of you for a smart reason.

So let me pause there. Are there any questions that I can answer or anything I can talk about within those spheres that maybe I didn't get into? I'm happy to do it. I'm looking at the comments. If not, we'll give the agenda a few minutes back because I'm sure we will run over at some point today.