Disruption is pushing companies to rethink their business. Yet capabilities and talent are not pivoting fast enough. The workforce is performing tasks in ways that have been passed from previous generations. So people are doing work that no longer contributes to valuable outcomes. This organizational inertia is deadly. ZBx is a new way to drive profitability that emphasizes the future over the past. A critical component of ZBx, ZBO (zero-based organization) designs the “right” organization from a clean sheet, shifting talent from work that does not contribute to outcomes to the distinctive capabilities and operating model needed to fuel growth. Learn more about how to reap the rewards of a ZBO approach, visit: http://www.accenture.com/ZBO

1. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

2. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
Yet many companies are not pivoting capabilities and
talent — often among the largest P&L investments — fast
enough to drive profitable growth.
DISRUPTION IS PUSHING
COMPANIES TO RETHINK
THEIR BUSINESS AS A
MATTER OF SURVIVAL
75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced in the
next 10 years.

3. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
FORWARD THINKING COMPANIES
ARE TURNING TO ZERO-BASED
ORGANIZATION — ZBO
A fresh approach to organization
design that frees companies from
backward-looking peer benchmarking.

4. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
ZBO DESIGNS THE “RIGHT”
ORGANIZATION FROM A
CLEAN SHEET
It shifts talent from work that no longer contributes to desired
outcomes to the distinctive capabilities and operating model
required to fuel profitable growth.

5. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
THE FIVE RIGHTS OF ZBO
RIGHT WORK
Consider what work drives the
greatest business value,
identifying key routines and the
most important projects.
RIGHT SIZE
Aggregate workforce effort and
identify the time, effort and
frequency of work that must get
done.
RIGHT STRUCTURE
Balance spans of control, focus on
core competencies, and clarify
roles and responsibilities.
RIGHT PEOPLE
Build a true bottom-up, clean
sheet organization, looking at
skills, levels, tenure, salaries and
location.
RIGHT MEASURES
Set organizational objectives and
align them to business functions.
Develop individual employee
objectives to drive personal
accountability and create true
transparency to enable people to
make decisions from the
“frontlines” for a more agile
organization.

6. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
SERIOUS SOUL-SEARCHING
IS A PREREQUISITE FOR ZBO
Leaders must consistently question their
company’s strategic ambitions, choices
and capabilities to feed clean sheet design.
Only 1/4
of executives believe
their company’s
operating model has
evolved quickly enough
to align to their strategy.

7. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
CONTROL YOUR
OWN DESTINY
With ZBO, companies design as digital natives do for
“should be” costs by clean sheeting every line item to
create transformational savings rather than
incremental reductions.

8. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
THE RIGHT PEOPLE
DOING THE RIGHT WORK
ZBO designs for a fluid ecosystem of fixed and variable human
labor, bots, virtual and cognitive agents, crowdsourced talent,
and customers and suppliers.
75% of executives think the workforce will shift to
multi-skilled employees
79% believe work will be project based

9. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
REAPING THE BENEFITS OF
ZBO STARTS WITH CREATING
A CLEAN SHEET THAT IS
TRULY CLEAN.
These are the three no-regrets fundamentals:
1.
Be who you aspire to be
ZBO is deeply rooted in the future work routine.
Do the pre-work of revisiting your strategy and be
open minded to changing course.

10. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
REAPING THE BENEFITS OF
ZBO STARTS WITH CREATING
A CLEAN SHEET THAT IS
TRULY CLEAN.
These are the three no-regrets fundamentals:
2.
Design from the outside in
Determine what work is not creating value. With
design thinking, companies can bring a
customer-first spirit to recreate the value chain,
simplify customer experiences and shift talent to
work that drives valued outcomes.

11. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
REAPING THE BENEFITS OF
ZBO STARTS WITH CREATING
A CLEAN SHEET THAT IS
TRULY CLEAN.
These are the three no-regrets fundamentals:
3.
Build it so they come
Companies using ZBO have an arsenal of
approaches at their fingertips to orchestrate the
ecosystem required to deliver outcomes,
including industry specific analytics automation,
consolidation, standardization, renegotiation
and reskilling.

12. Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.
Learn more about designing the right organization from a clean
sheet with ZBO. Download the full report here:
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ZEROING OUT
THE PAST
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