The Pioneer interview with... Terry Corby

From making Accenture into a B2B customer pioneer...to pioneering to keep small businesses afloat

Accenture was stuck - growth was slowing and Partners were under pressure to generate sales. But a small team, including Terry Corby, saw a new and better way to meet clients’ needs.  

Partners were specialists, leading practice areas on subjects that were the focus of their work. The problem?

They knew what they knew, not what everyone else in the firm knew. Yet their customers, clients, have broad problems that Accenture could be doing plenty to solve. 

The new approach saw the creation of client-facing Partners working alongside the specialists. This group was motivated to understand each client’s big picture, taking on board their priorities, and bringing in the right specialists to solve their most critical problems.  

Then they found a pioneering way to go to market. They looked for a big, broad issue that was interesting to business leaders across sectors and that no one else was talking about. They came upon ‘high performance’ in organisations and teams, an emerging field of learning. 

They studied it, understood what lay behind the headlines and how organisations all round the world compared. Gold dust. Now the client-facing Partners had insight into each client or potential client’s current position plus knowledge on how to do better – to stretch a lead, to go from middling to the leading pack, or to get away from the laggards. ‘High Performance, Delivered’ became the firm’s global tagline. And a new division, Accenture Learning, was born. 

Terry’s not stopped… His current work involves pioneering on behalf of small businesses who in this case need a behaviour change in a group of their customers – large corporations. He’s working to get them to be paid promptly by making the cost of not doing so clear – to those customers and to a wider audience. It’s in their interests – it harms them in the end, and it affects the nation as a whole too. 

Q: What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you and where does your desire to pioneer for customers come from? 

I've always been driven by trying to make positive change – people-driven change rather than organisation-driven change. Even before consulting, I was involved in significant initiatives like staging BT's first annual general meeting at the National Exhibition Centre, relaunching Midland Bank, publicising the Channel Tunnel breakthrough, and lobbying for the Sunday Trading Act. 

At American Express, I got involved in bringing marketing teams and IT teams together to find new products for customers. That led to things like the Blue Card. The organisation helping us was Andersen Consulting, and I could see that transformation was their business. I thought, "This is my home to do big change things in an organisation that specialises in transformation." So I joined Andersen Consulting, by accident, as with everything else in my career. 

Part of this ‘pioneering spirit’ comes from how I was brought up. My mother has a phrase, "right's right," which meant always try to do the right thing. Is it fair? Is it right? 

I also took an unconventional path. I went to a good school but wasn't a good student. I left at 16 after O-levels, didn't go to university, and went straight to London to become a runner at a production company. When I got to Andersen Consulting, my new boss asked what university I went to. When I said I didn't attend, he replied, "Oh my God, how did they let you in here?" From that point, I just wanted to prove people wrong – that you don't need a degree to be successful. 

That idea of being given an equal chance to succeed extends to how I think about customers. We are all customers in our daily lives. We experience frustrations with holiday bookings, travel companies, and other services. But somehow, we leave those frustrations at the door when we walk into our jobs. We forget that we're frustrated customers and then go invent things for other people without remembering our own experiences. 

Q: When you joined Accenture, you mentioned it was already a transformative business. Can you take us through the cultural transformation that occurred during your time there? 

I joined a business that had transformation in its roots. Andersen Consulting grew out of Arthur Andersen, an audit firm that wanted to develop a separate consulting arm. When I joined, the firm was ready for change but still had a culture from an era with partners from an audit firm background. It was facing a critical business challenge – it had spent years helping companies integrate their technologies so that auditors could make sense of the data. Once all the technology is plugged in and systems are working, what do you do next? 

My colleagues and I were evangelists for the human element of change. The people component was typically treated as least important, despite our belief that it should be first in line. After all, when transformations fail, it usually comes down to people.  

We asked ourselves – what if we could prove how important humans were to the whole process of change? So we proposed surveying 100 financially successful companies about their people management practices and comparing them to 100 companies that weren't doing well. 

The results showed that companies performing well financially were doing different things in managing and leading their people. We called this the ‘High Performance Workforce Study’. We tested this hypothesis with 1,000 more companies and got the same results. That's how our journey began – solving a people problem that blossomed into something much bigger.  

Looking at what successful companies were doing differently across functions like HR, finance and supply chain, we discovered an opportunity to create a powerful new narrative. So we flipped our perspective from horizontal to vertical. Instead of focusing as specialists on individual business functions, we started looking more broadly at entire industries. We asked: What makes one airline outperform another across all departments? What distinguishes high-performing banks from average ones? 

This approach transformed our client conversations. Rather than simply selling the latest HR or finance system, we could discuss what a truly successful airline or bank might look like if it optimized across multiple functional areas. 

The term ‘high performance’ resonated powerfully with clients, though we hadn't initially planned for it to become our positioning. Clients adopted our language and data to build investment cases within their organisations. There was also a personal appeal – executives discussing high-performance organisations were themselves perceived as high-performance leaders.  We had created terminology that was aspirational for both companies and individuals. Seeing this impact, we incorporated 'high performance' into our marketing and advertising campaigns. 

Our research showed clients valued our reliable delivery, so we combined this with our new focus on high performance. The phrase ‘high performance, delivered’ captured both our promise and our clients' aspirations, differentiating us in the marketplace at a time when we weren't yet universally seen as a high-performance company ourselves. 

Q: And how did you apply that learning inside Andersen to change how the company worked? 

We had four service areas – technology, strategy, process, and people change management, but were struggling to deliver them as a cohesive solution to clients. 

Clients would tell me, ‘I had no idea you did all these other things. I only get sold what the person across the table knows how to sell me’. 

This pointed to our internal problem. Our partners didn't really have capability in the other areas, so it's quite difficult to get them to cross-sell. The way the P&L was set up also worked against it – set up to reward partners selling the single solution they were responsible for – so there was a worry if a Partner was selling an HR solution, and the finance person came along that that Partner might ‘steal’ the revenue for a finance solution from the client.  

The shift in perspective, from internal to more outside-in, from organising horizontally by business function (HR, finance, supply chain) to look vertically by industry, wasn't easy. Our Partners needed training and confidence-building to transition from function-specific conversations to positioning themselves as industry experts. But the impact on sales figures and cross-selling was remarkable. 

To fully embed this approach, we made structural changes too. We shifted P&L responsibility from functional units to industry verticals, created a reward system that encouraged cross-selling, and aligned client feedback metrics with high performance solutions rather than individual functional areas. 

The result was a complete transformation in how we approached client challenges, and ultimately, in how we defined ourselves as a business. 

Q: How have you applied those experiences to your current work with small organisations through Good Business Pays? 

I founded this community interest campaign somewhat by accident. When COVID hit, much of the creative industry shut down – filming stopped, music festivals cancelled, theatres went dark. Since 97% of people in the creative industries are freelancers, many didn't get paid. It was a painful time with heartbreaking stories of people unable to pay bills or feed their children. 

I realised we needed to address the issue of late payments. I figured that despite all the laws and technology developed to help businesses pay faster, ultimately, it's always a human who decides whether to use those tools. What we needed was a hearts and minds campaign, not another technical solution. 

I started by building a coalition with organisations like the CBI, FSB, IoD, Chambers of Commerce, and 22 other industry and trade bodies to create a single voice on late payments.

We got support from big businesses to fund our work so we could provide everything free for small businesses. We built relationships with government departments across both Conservative and Labour administrations. 

In four years, we've got over 1,600 big companies to slash their payment terms from 100 days down to 10-12 days. Each of these companies has thousands of suppliers who themselves have thousands more suppliers. We've changed laws, enhanced the Small Business Commissioner's authority, and established a Fair Payment Code. 

Four years ago, no one in big business wanted to talk about late payments. Now, heads are nodding in big business and government, and they're making changes. Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the US want to implement similar initiatives. 

Q: Why do you think organisations find it so hard to be customer-led and think about their customers? 

I think it's a cultural thing. Trailfinders, the holiday company, is a great example of doing things well. They pay their suppliers in about 3-4 days, which is exceptionally fast for their industry. 

When I asked their CEO why they pay suppliers so quickly instead of holding onto cash, he explained that it creates a virtuous cycle. When Trailfinders customers arrive at hotels, they often receive perks like a complimentary bottle of wine or room upgrades. This happens because Trailfinders pays the hotels quickly, so the hotels take extra care of Trailfinders customers. When customers return home, they're loyal to Trailfinders because of these experiences, creating a halo effect for everyone involved. 

Another interesting aspect of Trailfinders' culture is that since their founding in 1979, they've maintained two separate bank accounts – a ‘customer bank account’ and a 'working capital bank account.’ When a customer books a holiday, their money goes into the customer account and isn't touched to pay wages or bills until the customer has returned home safely. This ensures every element of the customer's holiday is always protected – they won't face a situation like Thomas Cook where money is spent on operations and then the holiday isn't delivered. 

Being customer-led can also mean being a good corporate citizen by treating your suppliers fairly – because they're also your customers and people in your community.