Now, have you ever watched your dog make a bee-line for a patch of sunlight and lie there contented? It’s a straightforward act, though not an apparently evident one, bringing swift gratification. Animals simplify things, which is sometimes what we all need to do.

Two of the animals selected for the new campaign are elephants and frogs. One image is of an elephant perched on a surf board, tail curling up and trunk down, with the tagline reading, “Who says you can’t be big and nimble?” Another shows an airborne frog soaring over three others and says, “Play quantum leapfrog.”

The ads, which rolled out in January, are playful, clever, compelling — and without Woods’ infidelities we’d still be staring at him in a bunker. Makes you think. I asked Alex Pachetti, senior director for communications at Accenture, about lessons learned. He e-mailed me: “Have a plan in place for potential scenarios. Gather facts to make the decision. Take swift action.” Sounds simple.

But it’s not. Letting go is hard, as newspaper companies can testify. The U.S. auto industry got itself into a great big hole by clinging to the outmoded and failing to notice that a lot of the world was getting fired up about creating a low-carbon economy. “All great truths begin as blasphemies,” George Bernard Shaw observed. And a lot of great products, like most of what Steve Jobs has created, begin by being “impossible.”

So I’m grateful to Woods for tossing his little grenade and getting Accenture to turn on a dime. Creative churn is the American way. Woods is not the first guy to let power and money go to his head and he won’t be the last. He’s had to think again and so have we. That’s not so bad. This is the land of second — and seventh — chances.

As it happens, I’d read an interview in 2009 with Accenture’s chief executive, William Green, a plumber’s son, conducted by my colleague Adam Bryant. It stuck in my mind because Green seemed so sane. He said three things matter for managers. “The first is competence — just being good at what you do, whatever it is, and focusing on the job you have, not on the job you think you want to have. The second one is confidence. People want to know what you think. So you have to have enough desirable self-confidence to articulate a point of view. The third is caring.”

And before you know it, you’ve got quantum leapfrog.

Funny, I’ve found myself wondering in airports what grenade might induce HSBC to change its ad campaign. I know it’s a great bank and the world’s local bank and all that, but if I have to look at another of those “leader-follower-follower-leader” ads (guy in suit/guy in jeans/guy in suit/guy in jeans) — or their numberless equivalents imparting the earth-shattering info that we all think differently — I might just follow my dog to a patch of sunlight and stay there.