In this talk, Stephen Shapiro recounts two contrasting leadership experiences from his time at Accenture. The first, with co‑leader John, was a high‑budget ($30 M) innovation project that generated abundant creative ideas (the “diamond”) and a fun, people‑focused culture (the “heart”), but lacked execution discipline (the “club”) and ultimately wasted the entire budget. After the failure, Shapiro was assigned a new co‑leader, Ray, for a much smaller $6 M rollout. Ray embodied a strict, delivery‑focused “club” mentality, constantly demanding concrete results. Although Shapiro initially clashed with Ray, they openly acknowledged their mutual dislike and deliberately leveraged each other’s complementary strengths. Over three intensive hours they negotiated a working relationship that balanced creativity, morale, and disciplined execution. The result was a successful nine‑month rollout to 20,000 Accenture employees, remembered as a career highlight. Shapiro concludes with the core insight: the person you like the least is often the person you need the most, and effective teamwork requires embracing and integrating differing personalities and leadership styles.
Chapters
I created this 20,000-person innovation practice at Accenture, and I was a youngish guy back then, and I got a $30 million budget. And I thought, $30 million, holy moly, that's a huge budget. If this goes wrong, that's gonna end my career prematurely. So I decided I need a co-leader, a co-leader to take the fall in case things went terribly wrong. And I found John. I love John. John was this big, jolly, Happy guy. 100% heart, 100% diamonds, or maybe that's 200%, all hearts and diamonds. We got along great. And at the end of this project, there's 3 things that I can say, and this is without exaggeration. One, we developed more new novel creative ideas than any other project in the history of the company. That was the diamond in us. We wanted to make sure we were doing something that was Changing the rules of business. 2, we made sure everybody on the project had a blast. The heart in us wanted to make sure everybody was having fun. People enjoy— we spared no expense to make sure that people were having a good time. And 3, it was the biggest waste of $30 million you've ever seen in your entire life. Because we had diamond and heart mentality. We didn't have any club mentality. We forgot we actually had to get the work done. So my next project, I didn't get to choose my co-leader. First of all, they cut my budget from $30 million to $6 million. Oh. They also didn't let me choose my co-leader. They gave me Ray. Ray was a self-proclaimed anal-retentive club. He was in my face every single day. He's like, where's the deliverables? You're late. I need it now. And after about 3 weeks, Ray is driving me crazy. I can't take it anymore. And I said, We gotta, gotta deal with this. So I took Ray, we walked outta the office, and the first thing I said to Ray is I said, Ray, I have to tell you, I don't like you. And he looked back without missing a beat and he said, I don't like you either. And then I said the most important thing probably in my entire career, which was, I may not like you, but I need you. When I had a budget that was 5 times larger, I failed miserably because I didn't have someone like you. We may not like each other, but we need to figure out how to make this work. And we spent 3 hours talking about how we're going to drive each other crazy, how we can work together, how we can give each other a little more freedom and flexibility, how we can collaborate, how we can appreciate each other, and how we can really take advantage of our collective personalities. And I will tell you, what we created was probably one of the things that I'm most proud of in my entire career. We created something that we rolled out in 9 months to 20,000 people. People that, who were in Accenture at that time, many of them still remember. And it wasn't because of me, it was because of Ray. The person you like the least is the person you need the most. The person you like the least is the person you need the most.
