Pivoting towards a new direction while supporting an old one
Why staying still is not an option
We continue this week with some reflections in navigating business directions, and how you as a leader can influence executive decision making. We also look at how company culture innately influences decision making.
It is not unusual to have to balance an existing set of systems while the business tries to pivot to a new path. There was a lot of that at Amazon where new ideas were tossed around and explored regularly for a good fit.
And it's no different at Oracle. In fact, its almost a way of life in my current team as we coalesce on the right strategy and architecture in the Studio in the Cloud initiative.
Generally, these moves are more common in today's environment where businesses are trying to optimize cost and bring more value-add such as AI integration.
As a leader this can present interesting opportunities, challenges, and some apprehensions too. You have an ambitious roadmap to deliver. How do you balance between making room for new ideas, while maintaining existing investments and ensuring all while you don't stray from the north star goal?
One strategy is to flip the script and look at it from the other side. Periods of change are signals that executive leadership are feeling-out new possibilities. And they are looking for new perspectives on the value of potential directions they're considering. You are a leader, and a substantial one at that. Use your voice to share your thoughts and influence upwards.
Express curiosity in 1:1s with your leaders (especially skip-level) to better understand the macro directions of the business. Reflect on them. Just because the business is going after a new direction, it doesn't reduce the validity of an existing one. There is no one better than you to understand that for your space and balance the view upwards.
Put your viewpoint to good use by highlighting tradeoffs the business may have to reckon with by taking a new direction. Call out essential investments that should continue to be funded, and contrast them from the two-way doors to experiment with. Offer resourcing options to balance the two.
With this approach you naturally become a part of the new direction, while ensuring the existing investments are looked after. Leaders would view you as someone with a vested interest in the business, which may create new opportunities to scale your influence.
Even if some of the outcomes don't pan out, the exercise of formalizing your perspectives would give you ideas on forward-looking actions or plans you may have to make in your current space.
Whatever you do, don't be passive, waiting for changes to happen to you. Take control of the situation and give your voice a chance. You will be surprised the doors that would open for you.
How org culture manifests in business directions
And what you can do about it
Last week I listened to CIO and VP of Oracle Cloud Jae Evans for the first time, and it was inspiring to hear her thoughts. I found it fascinating to get a glimpse of how Oracle viewed Cloud regions, how different it was to Amazon's perspective, and how culturally backed both these viewpoints were.
During my time at Amazon, cloud regions were perceived fundamentally as an availability feature. A mechanism for customers to create redundancy in their architecture. A way for customers to fail-over to a functioning region if one becomes non-functional. A means to deliver functionality as close to end-customers as possible.
This approach worked harmoniously for AWS's humble beginnings supporting mom-&-pop customers that wanted a space on the web for their local business, and fueling organic growth in supporting mid-sized businesses. But by the time large-enterprise and mission critical domains came about, AWS had to 'wedge-in' more nuanced customer requirements into the cloud architecture it had built over time. And it was painful.
While Oracle shares similar tenets around availability, it's region strategy goes way beyond operations. Remember that Oracle was an established entity in the enterprise market way before the cloud era. When Oracle entered the cloud business, their customers expected the cloud to work for their needs from day-one.
So Oracle innovated its way to offer four types of cloud offerings. It started out with the 'Public cloud' which is the most common style of cloud similar to AWS. But quickly pivoted to 'Hybrid cloud' when it learned its customers preferred to retain select workloads on their premises. It then pioneered 'Dedicated cloud' for customers that wanted a walled environment in the data center of their choice.
And finally 'Multicloud' - a reflection of Oracle simultaneously viewing competitors as collaborators. Oracle Database@Azure for instance runs Oracle Cloud databases in Microsoft data centers. Oracle MySQL HeatWave on AWS is a fully managed Oracle Cloud database running on AWS and compatible Amazon Ads, Amazon Aurora and several more Amazon features.
The debate on cloud leaders will continue on, but one thing is clear. Customers are the winners. And successful service providers not only align culture with their products, but also redefine it as the market evolves.
