Julie Sweet leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant that employs more than 400,000 people and produced more than $32 billion in sales last year. Julie's territory made up almost exactly half of that total.

I'm not really sure how most people become consultants. Ideally they get good at something, then show other people how to do it better.

Julie's path was different. She was a lawyer – a partner at one of those swanky firms: Cravath, Swaine & Moore – and left that to be the top lawyer at Accenture, which you might also know by its old name, Arthur Andersen Consulting.

She parlayed that job … into a bigger job. And that's the key detail here. Julie has a history of doing that sort of thing, and I wanted to find out how.

I sat down with Julie Sweet just this week at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her path to the C-suite of one of the world's top consulting firms, and how her father, who painted cars for a living, set the no-excuses example that helped her get there.