Being at the helm of a huge, global company that recruits around 200 South African graduates every year to work on a vast array of local and global client projects is no easy task, yet recruiting the cream of business talent is just one of the jobs of William Mzimba, chief executive of Accenture Southern Africa.

“My role is to ensure the company recruits, nurtures and retains the best. Overall, though, my job is to implement Accenture’s growth strategy in southern Africa, and ensure we deliver revenue and profit growth according to our objectives. And I’m happy to say that we have been able to deliver double-digit year-on-year growth during my tenure,” he says. It’s an impressive laurel, but Mzimba is, as always, quiet and unassuming.
He listens  carefully and responds to questions with consideration and a palpable inner confidence. Mzimba has worked just over half of his more than 20-year career at Accenture, climbing steadily up the ladder from 2000, when he joined as a senior manager and associate director. He become a senior executive and partner, leveraging his previous experience running his own companies and, in 2006, took his current seat as the CE.

In the process, he garnered a huge bank of experience in a broad spectrum of industries – government utilities, manufacturing, transport, housing, insurance, information technology and telecommunications – his role being to help clients with “complex, mission-critical issues from tactical performance improvement to true business transformation”. Leadership, Mzimba says, is “about envisioning the future and building the blocks today to make that vision a reality” and, in getting there, that vision needs to be “communicated throughout the organisation and supported by all the key stakeholders”.

“Over the years, I’ve learnt the value of networking, trust and personal integrity. After all, people tend to do business with those they can trust. “Mentoring future leaders is another crucial pillar of leadership. It is fundamental to an organisation’s sustainability. As a leader of a people based business, having the right team is imperative, and I believe my strength lies in the ability to identify talent, groom it and provide the correct level of inspiration to get them to perform at their best,” he says.

It’s perhaps predictable, then, that Mzimba started out his career as a lecturer, at Lompec College in Mamelodi, near Pretoria. “I spent four years from 1986 to 1989 lecturing, then took on various IT roles before co-founding my own companies – Integrated Quality Systems, Integrated Research Systems,” he says. He is also well-educated. He has BA Honours in business studies from De Montfort University in Leicester in the UK, a diploma in datametrics (computer science and statistics) from Unisa, and a national certificate in personnel management – as well as being a Certified NetWare Engineer (CNE). In 1995, while working at Sage Life as head of IT support, he enrolled for the MAP programme at Wits Business School. It was a challenge to balance work and the demands of assignments, research and attending lectures, he concedes, but it was “not insurmountable”. “I realised that continuous education, and especially advanced management training, is critical to becoming a well-rounded leader in the highly competitive business environment we operate in. After completing the MAP programme, I went on to do an MBA programme at Bond University in Australia, to gain an understanding of the international business environment and hone my entrepreneurial skills,” he says.

In 1998, Mzimba became a founding director of New Africa Technology Holdings (now IOCore), a subsidiary of New Africa Investment Limited (NAIL) – but, by 2000, he was already working in partnership with Accenture (then Anderson Consulting), spearheading its business expansion into the municipalities of Cape Town, Tshwane and Johannesburg; as well as Eskom. When Accenture changed its business model locally to become a limited- liability company instead of a partnership, Mzimba was appointed as a director and eventually a member of the board.

Accenture has notched up a number of award-winning client successes, across both the public and private sectors, under his leadership. It has among its clients SABMiller, Edcon, Xstrata, Sars, Eskom, the Independent Electoral Commission, the National Treasury, and metropolitan cities such as Johannesburg, Tshwane and Cape Town. Unassuming and down to earth, Mzimba says South Africa has a “general lack of technology skills”, but he sees it as an opportunity rather than a challenge. “We see a lot of opportunities in helping support our clients as they expand their businesses to the rest of the African continent. We also see a lot of opportunities to support government and state-owned enterprises as they roll out large capital infrastructure build programmes. And because we are part of the global Accenture organisation, we’re able to tap into global best practice, industrialised tools, methodologies and the global delivery network to provide industry-specific solutions and thorough leadership,” he says.

In other words, a ‘can do’ attitude is very much part of his business toolkit. “I also believe in working hard and smart, and in collaboration rather than a hierarchical approach. Leading from within, and sometimes from behind, allows one’s team to perform at their peak. What works for me are humility, interdependence and confidence,” he says. Among his business collaborators are members of his old MAP programme syndicate, of course – some of whom are business counterparts and clients. “The network stays forever, but you need to consciously build it,” he says.

Accenture SA’s impressive performance in the past few years – which has seen it being admitted into Accenture’s top 10 priority emerging markets, together with Brazil and Asean (South Eastern Asian group of countries) – has Mzimba buoyant about its future. “It implies that our global organisation is taking on a more strategic role in supporting our clients as they expand into the rest of the African continent. We are planning expansion into more countries, over and above the 14 that we have a physical or legal presence in today,” he says. To keep abreast of technological trends globally, Mzimba reads business magazines and newspapers like Fortune, Times, Engineering and Mining News, and e-books. “I also attend courses and business conferences.” He’s not an early bird, and prefers to work nto the evenings “when there is quiet to get my thinking and job done – no ringing phones and interruptions”.

Working for a multinational means global travel is part of the job, “mainly to attend regional board meetings and the global CEO advisory council that I serve on”, and in the past year he has been to Miami, Paris, Lisbon and Lausanne in Switzerland, to mention a few. To achieve balance, Mzimba goes to the gym and enjoys a round of golf. Of a weekend, though, he’ll be spending quality time with his daughter and wife, “my most wonderful and best friend”.