While this Tiger Woods story has not been that featured in Europe, I came across several articles this week while being in the US.
Honestly I don’t care what Tiger did or did not do and whether he wants to share his motives or not.
What I find interesting to look at though is how Accenture reacted to events.
As you would expect from a good corporate citizen they didn’t want be associated with Woods and this kind of behavior, cheating, drinking and all that stuff, so they drop him immediately, withdrew from their relationship. So what’s the image you get? That Accenture is a good corporate citizen, whose employees don’t engage in these kinds of activities? (I happen to know a couple of people from university time that now work at Accenture. If their past behavior is an indication,…you get the point.) Another view might be that as soon as one does a mistake, Accenture ends the relationship. Is that the rule for its employees? Still another might be that as soon as it gets a bit complicated and the going gets tough Accenture quits. Yet another way of interpreting Accenture’s behavior might be that as soon as Accenture can no longer profit from you, you’re out. I’m sure you have your own take on it. I highly doubt that Accenture and all the people having decided to drop Tiger are flawless.
But what if Accenture had stuck with Tiger? How would they have been able to use this to their benefit? The Tiger Woods campaigns always featured Tiger in difficult, virtually impossible situations that he managed to solve by going the extra mile. That’s what the message was all about all these years, wasn’t it? So what about this challenge? Why quit now? I really hope that Tiger will show us in his press conference later today that he is also able to tackle this challenge!
And by the way: have you seen Accenture’s new campaign? Isn’t it extremely awful and completely silly? (1) It’s about animals! Cartoons! Is Accenture in the animal training business now? Going from human performance to animal achievements…well done! (2) It’s about animals doing really impossible things! Like the surfing elephant. No matter how good Accenture might be, they just won’t pull this one off! Sorry guys, but no way. Tiger might have face missions impossible, but was able to master them. (3) We had the idea with the dancing elephants already. While it might be a great achievement to go from dancing to surfing, the idea is not new and I would even say that it has been copied. Quite frankly. And they all together seem to have been inspired by Madagascar anyhow.
So next time you or your organization face a challenging, even rather unpleasant situation, you might want to think twice before doing the apparently obvious and try to use it to your advantage. It just might be a good opportunity to show off just how innovative you really are…
{ 1 comment }
Great article and great point.
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