After formulating and communicating the right strategy and optimizing operations to execute that strategy, CEOs and other top leaders then must be able to build management teams that truly understand the big picture.
— Mark V. Hurd
Oracle will continue to componentize all of its solutions so we can work in a heterogeneous environment.
When I was at Teradata, I got called a growth guy. And then when I became C.E.O. of the whole company, I got called a cost-cutter. Then, I came to H.P. and became an operations guy.
It's important to know when your work is done.
Without execution, 'vision' is just another word for hallucination.
Everyone wants to lead when things are going well.
I like being pushed.
It's counterproductive to lower my price, because I have to sell more units to make up for that lost revenue. Generating brand-new products can take a long time. Improving service is typically the quickest way that I can take market share. So aligning technology strategy to better service customers becomes an essential path to revenue growth.
Executives need ample flexibility to respond to the market. That means both reducing costs and increasing innovation.
At its core, HP has the best technologists on the planet Earth.
I grew up in New York City, and I moved to Florida in high school.
Most tech companies do one trick and die. If you can do two or three or four, that's where wealth gets created.
There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.
I like to have a team environment where I can go anywhere and not threaten management.
I've been lucky to be at companies that have been at interesting intersections at the time I've been able to run them and lead them.
CIOs have to be able to lay out a clear path in concert with the business leader - I used to make the business guy responsible for the apps and force them to answer the question of why they feel they need non-standard apps when they know that's how the costs skyrocket.
I have to put people in the right spot so that if they execute, we win.
There's a powerful tendency to overcomplicate the whole notion of leadership.
When I left HP, I thought about sitting it out for a while.
I go all over the place. I do like the ability to go around the company at different levels to find the people that have the actual answers to the question.
In the pros, tennis is all about individuals. In college, it's getting individuals to make points for the team.
Processes break in two ways. They break because they don't have the right checks and balances and because they don't have the right execution.
When you're a leader at any level of any scale, leaders are defined at times of crisis.
Not everyone is comfortable with being pushed.
I know only a few ways to take market share and drive new revenue. I can engineer better products and services, I can build better relationships with my customers and deliver a higher level of service, or I can give my customers a lower price.
Like it or not, at HP we are technologists, not executive compensation consultants.
It's tough to reenter the work force.
My day starts at 4:30 A.M., and I sort of have two speeds: fast and stop.
References drive the industry.
The fact that everything ever works perfectly together, anybody who tells you that is pulling your leg.
My daughter's got a smartphone in her hand with roughly the same power as a mainframe circa 1982, and she's running around Beijing and wants an answer as fast as she can.
From a productivity standpoint, you're supposed to reduce headcount on par with declining revenue. If you believe the environment isn't going to improve, you should take a bigger cut to get in front of the problems.
We have, of course, all of our Oracle technologies in our cloud. But I don't think you're going to see customers wanting to deal with 50 clouds or 40 clouds or anything like that.
My objective with strategy is to be very repetitive, to be somewhat boring, to allow people to coalesce behind a common direction.
You have got to get the strategy right; you have to get the operations right - lined up from R&D out to the field.
To be very blunt, I am not really that concerned with what labels get associated with somebody.
CEOs can stay too long.
The day you feel like you've won, you need to drive out of the parking lot and not come back.
In times of crisis, you just have to bear down and lean on your own instincts and your own beliefs and make decisions.
I like being part of teams that go into things that people don't think are doing very well and getting into them to do better.
Cloud represents the maturation of the IT industry.
For the most part, earnings and market value growth are a result of reduced expenses.
I have been competing against IBM my whole career. It's a good company, with good management and a good team.
I have a wife who's a great mom.
There's money in the old stuff, but there's more wealth created in the new growth areas.
Customers want to talk to other customers.
We make a significant effort at Oracle to focus the organization on making customers successful in how they deploy Oracle technology and transform their business through IT.
I'm old, I'm used to crummy service, I'm trained to get crummy service. To me, the fact I can get through to a call centre and then hold for 15 minutes, I don't get that upset. My kids won't. They want to know the answer to their question now. As a company you have to provide an answer to that consumer.
CIOs have earned a strategic seat at the table, but now they've got to hold that seat - and the only way they can do that is to converse in the language of business value and business benefits and business outcomes that all align perfectly with the strategic agenda of the company.
I really don't want the best people at the highest cost.
