Although some teams within Accenture are producing great content, the overall average has
fallen steadily over the past two years. This decline means that the firm is now to be found just
below the half way mark in our quality rankings table.
So where is the firm falling behind the leaders? In this report’s sample, two areas stand
out: resilience and prompting action. A whopping 70% of the publications we reviewed
incorporate no primary research of any type and (a slightly different) 70% include no or very

Our analysis of Accenture’s output for our last report – and for our recent report on thought
leadership about emerging markets – may have seemed a bit equivocal: the firm had risen
impressively in our rankings from 7th to 4th (and was 2nd in the emerging markets report) but
we remained a bit guarded. Accenture was, at the time, managing to be consistent, but it wasn’t
managing to be a whole lot else. Its success was serving to demonstrate just how far not doing
much badly can get you, but the question of whether it was capable of doing anything that was

Accenture is clearly capable of creating good material – for an example, see Playing to win, which is built upon extensive
research, is appealingly presented, and leaves the reader with a clear understanding of the decisions they face. Yet we
can’t help but picture the firm as the bright child in the class who occasionally hands in a really good assignment but often