The People-centric Leader: Bill Copacino
by John Kerr -- Supply Chain Management Review, 10/1/2005
The story that sums up William C. (Bill) Copacino is the one about the cup of coffee. A recent college graduate was about to be interviewed for a position at Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), but a scheduling glitch had left him waiting for quite a while. A man emerged from another office and asked: “Anything I can do for you—a cup of coffee?” The interviewee said: “I’d love a cup of coffee.” The older man got him the coffee and said: “Let me know if you need anything else.” Some time later, the new hire found out that he had met managing partner Bill Copacino that day.
That story, told in a Harvard Business School case study charting the consultancy’s challenges in developing enough top talent, amply describes Copacino’s people-centered approach. His “we” kind of leadership trickles down through middle management and reshapes corporate cultures. It did so at Accenture, and it is doing so now at C&S Wholesale Grocers, a $16 billion privately held food distributor, which Copacino joined recently as chief administrative officer.
During his 26 years as a top management consultant, Copacino has led and mentored hundreds of supply chain managers in practical and permanent ways. Jonathan Colehower is one of them. “Bill and his team were the first to expose me to true supply chain management,” says Colehower, now president and CEO of Optiant, Inc., a provider of supply chain design software. “Bill invests his time in young managers by teaching through participation. He takes the time to show exactly how to deliver the best service to clients. Bill’s contribution to my development is recognized best in my desire to shape managers as he helped to shape me.”
Copacino does not play down his impact on a new generation of managers, but he does not trumpet it either. As the leader of Accenture’s Business Consulting practice from 1989 until late last year, he led 7,000 talented, ambitious, and driven individuals through a tumultuous economic cycle. Quietly but firmly, Copacino states his preference for celebrating collective accomplishments: “I look for how many ‘we’s’ we use versus how many ‘I’s’.”
Three Leadership Themes
There are three big themes in Copacino’s leadership playbook. First, he says, it is crucial to recognize employees’ needs, to balance their needs with those of the organization and to consistently signal to employees that they’ll be cared for. That does not mean they don’t get what he calls “hard feedback.” But it does help them stay loyal, energetic, and focused. Second, leaders must act in ways that make staff more productive and more successful. One example: Copacino says he is always punctual for meetings led by his subordinates. “I try to be efficient with their time,” he says. “It’s also about respect for others.”
The third leadership theme he mentions concerns vision. “You have to show where the North Star is, and how we’re going to go in that direction,” he says. Copacino draws a distinction between reaching for the stars and being starry-eyed: vision must be realistic to be credible, especially in tough economic times.
Copacino has been heading in the right directions since he was knee-high to his grandmother. To both grandmothers, in fact. He grew up in a close-knit Italian household1two-family houses side by side that shared a front yard1where his grandmothers had a major influence. “From that base I always had a good sense of self-esteem,” he says. He credits that “centeredness” with shaping his external focus: an ability to be concerned less with how he was doing and more with what others wanted and needed. “That external focus makes you much more powerful1you sense how others are reacting, what they’re thinking,” he says.
His outward focus came into play early on. An avid basketball and baseball player in school, Copacino recalls a time when, as the captain of the high school basketball team during a state championship game, he suggested a new play to his coach. The coach thanked him for the suggestion, said he’d think about it, and soon after, put the suggestion into action, leading to a decisive win for the team.
With a degree in industrial engineering from Cornell University and an internship at General Electric, the young Copacino was still unsure of what he wanted to do as a career. Joining a friend in Guatemala in 1973, he ended up working there for two years, founding and running a non-profit that helped bring potable water to rural communities. Back in the U.S., he earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, and then, in 1978, signed on for a summer consulting position with the Logistics Management practice at Arthur D. Little, Inc. His recently acquired knowledge of Spanish helped cement a connection with his Cuban-born boss; before long, Copacino was leading successful client projects in South America.
It was that boss who taught him the value of “over-delivering”1particularly on new projects. Copacino recalls: “He used to say ‘the harder you work, the luckier you get.’ People who call that workaholism kind of miss the point.” That is not to say that he does not seek work/life balance; his own recent move to C&S sees him closer to his wife and children more of the time. It simply means that he believes that when a team is working toward common goals, and when the work itself is enjoyable, it is absolutely appropriate to work long hours to reach those goals.
A Career of Contribution
To simply say that Copacino is an inclusive and intuitive leader is to leave out part of his story1the part about his contributions to supply chain management thinking. “He has set the foundation for a consulting practice that, to this day, is one of the strongest in the industry,” says one former protégé of what is now Accenture’s Global Business Consulting practice. Copacino has written three books and more than 150 articles on supply chain management. In 1998, he received the Council of Logistics Management’s prestigious Distinguished Service Award, and he also was awarded the 2002 Salzberg Medallion from the School of Management at Syracuse University for career contributions to the fields of logistics and transportation.
Copacino is credited with some of the early work in marrying the concepts of IT and business process reengineering. He helped coin the term “4PL” to describe an organization that combines the capabilities of a consulting firm with those of a third-party logistics provider. And he and his colleagues advanced the thinking around supply chain strategy1in particular, around cross-enterprise logistics systems. His thought leadership also extends to a 1993 article on the concept of the Perfect Order1the idea of an order that is complete, accurate, on time, and in perfect condition.
As group chief executive for Global Business Consulting at Accenture1his last role there before moving to C&S1 Copacino was in a position to disseminate his ideas far and wide. Former colleagues recall that he had an exceptionally strong following in the firm. “Bill is a people-centric leader,” says Dave Anderson, now a venture capitalist. “He hires the best people, gives them the resources to be successful, spends lots of quality time with them...and is very loyal to them.”
Copacino’s mentoring efforts emphasize not only setting high standards of quality and the importance of building top-quality teams that have low attrition rates but also the need to manage your own self-development. He explains: “I always tell my people to look back every six months or a year and ask ‘Am I learning new things? Am I building my personal equity?’ If so, that’s something you can trade on.”
Copacino sees abundant career opportunities in logistics and supply chain management. “Management of the supply chain is going to become much more important, particularly in the U.S. The operational challenge is going to become a logistics challenge,” he says. Copacino points to Wal-Mart chief executive
H. Lee Scott1for a long time the retailer’s transportation and supply chain chief1as a prime example of what he believes will be an increasingly common career path for supply chain managers. That’s good news indeed for the next generation of Copacino’s protégés.
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