Dear Authenticity, I get a text from my friend Ellyn. She’s at Pierre’s funeral. It sends me back to the day I met Pierre Nanterme, the global CEO of Accenture until 2019. Ellyn, who was CHRO of Accenture, had a big goal to reach 50 / 50 gender equality at the firm. She asked if I would help tell the stories of women across the company. She also said, “I think I can get Pierre too.” He is the CEO of a company with more than 500,000 employees and will be a driving force for the campaign. She tells me he’s interested but not to push him too hard. I fly to Paris, set up a video booth and wait. He arrives. I show him photos of my work. There is one of a little girl in a refugee camp. That’s the one he stops on. Not for long. Just enough and I see an opening. I ask him what he might want to say about the gender equality initiative. “I think I’ll talk about my daughter,” he says. He beams about Marie, who is 15. She is probably the woman of my life. My relationship with my daughter is absolutely irrational. She is me, and she is not me. And there is something extraordinarily special between us. Gender equality is just the right thing to do. And the truth is, it is not as universal as you might think. To be even more specific, I feel extraordinarily compelled to make the world better for my daughter. After we published the video, Pierre gets a question in an event about his Dear World video, how it happened and why he shared so personally: Ellyn told me, “You will have to trust me.’” At that point, I became slightly more concerned about what ‘trust me’ really meant. She explained that it would be an unusual experience. To make a long story short, someone would ask me to take off my shirt and write on my body, which was certainly not a typical Accenture experience, or really a typical experience anywhere. But I had two hundred percent trust in Ellyn, so I said, ‘Why not?’ We moved into another room, into the space where it would happen, and honestly, this guy (me!) is just great at what he does. We talked first. He put me in the right mood. There was a feeling of confidence and trust. Slowly, he encouraged me to become more personal. Then we moved into the video and the photograph, and I simply let my heart speak. This is who we are. This is who we should be. There is nothing wrong with being extraordinarily authentic.” *** “You’re forever a part of his legacy,” Ellyn writes along with a photo of the funeral program. And I realize something. That’s what his family chose. His Dear World photo. I wonder aloud now, what if someone had to pick one image of me? How about you? Would your message already exist? What would it say? Write your future, Robert PS: Pierre Nanterme served as Chairman and CEO of Accenture, leading the company through a period of significant global growth while pushing to make inclusion and gender equality a real, measurable priority. He stepped down in January 2019 due to health issues and passed away shortly after at 59 from colorectal cancer. The work you just read about began with Ellyn Shook, who shaped the company’s global people strategy and set a clear goal of reaching 50/50 gender balanced workforce. PPS: Click here to watch Pierre’s video on Youtube.
