Looking long
Fujitsu Ireland CEO Regina Moran is upbeat about both the prospects for her organisation, and the long-term prospects for Ireland. She speaks to Grainne Rothery about leadership for success.
Her concern around the impact she has on the people she works with through their day-to-day interactions says a lot about Fujitsu Ireland CEO Regina Moran and her style of leadership. Moran, who was appointed to her current role in May 2009 following the merger of the three existing Fujitsu businesses in Ireland, claims that one of the most important things she has learnt around leadership over the years is the effect leaders have on people, both positive and negative.
“I’m very conscious when I come into work that how I interact with people, even just walking down the corridor, can have a positive or negative impact on how they feel,” she explains. “I think good leaders are more conscious or maybe more self-aware that they have that potential impact on people.”
She’s also very clear about the fact that people don’t gain respect and instil confidence as a result of their job titles. “Fundamentally leadership is earned, it’s not given to you,” she says. “And how you earn it is by having people that want to follow you. It sounds very simple but actually why would somebody follow you? A lot of it is about how you behave, what your value system is and how you treat people.
“Some of the most successful leaders in the world are people who others want to follow because they instil confidence in them. I hate the American word ‘empowerment’, but in some ways they do allow people to grow, whereas managers are much more about tasks and about assigning jobs and making sure that systems work.
“I think organisations will be more successful if the leadership potential that exists within them is unleashed.” Looking at the bigger picture, she adds, the same is true of Ireland as a country.
Trying to unleash that potential is something that Fujitsu Ireland is working on at the moment through a new leadership programme on which Moran herself is delivering some of the modules. She believes that leaders can be found in all areas of businesses and, reflecting this, the programme is open to every one of the company’s 320 permanent staff.
“I think management is hierarchical and leaders can come from anywhere in the organisation,” she says. “It’s been amazing actually because people from all parts of the organisation – people who are working on the service desk, some of the engineers who are out in the field, plus some of our established managers – have combined and there’s about 55 people on the courses that we’re running.”
The challenge, she stresses, is to grow the organisation fast enough to give these leaders the roles they now want. “But a lot of people need to have the skills anyway because we don’t have everybody coming to the same office with a very strict managerial line management structure. So I think we’re going to get huge benefit out of this.”
Route to here
Moran’s own route to the top job in Fujitsu Ireland was somewhat circuitous. Interestingly, her background is in engineering but, as she didn’t have the option to study physics or honours maths at her Presentation Convent school, she started out by doing a certificate course in what was then Waterford Regional College. She followed up with a diploma in engineering in Cork.
A few days after completing that course in 1983 she got a job in Little Island-based company Compucorp, where she began as a technician before being promoted to engineer. In 1986, she got a job as an engineer in Amdahl, which, as one of the top employers in the country, she describes as being “the equivalent of winning the lottery at the time”.
“That was a fantastic experience because they were big into education and training. We were sent out to California for months on end to learn about mainframe computers.” She was promoted to tech-support engineer and subsequently became the first female technical manager in Amdahl.
In the early Nineties, the mainframe market took a nosedive and Amdahl closed its manufacturing facility and laid off 700 staff. Moran and a group of colleagues responded by setting up a software and services business.
“Instead of taking the redundancy we got support from Amdahl to start the business in a different area,” she explains.
“We hired six software graduates from DCU and started with about 20 people from various parts of what was Amdahl. Then DMR Consulting, a French Canadian consulting company that had no presence in Ireland, approached us and asked would we rebrand as DMR Consulting, which we did.
“The DMR thing was very fortuitous because it had great methodologies. In a way we were somewhat naive starting this business. We were doing fine but DMR was a great opportunity because they had the know-how to do this really, really well.”
The business grew to around 150 people over a seven or eight year period, before being rebranded as Fujitsu Consulting and subsequently merging with Fujitsu Services, where Moran was appointed chief executive in 2006. Making the appointment to her current position, Roger Gilbert, CEO of Fujitsu UK and Ireland, said Moran’s selection was due to her drive and track record in increasing profitability, efficiency and productivity.
Personal development
Moran is a firm believer in the benefits of ongoing learning. In 2000, she completed an MBA at DCU, picking up first class honours in the process. “I guess that’s kind of essential if you’re from engineering, to round out the business side,” she says. “And it has been extremely useful in the CEO role to have had that experience.
“Ever since I did the MBA I get the Harvard Business Review every month and I keep in touch with what’s emerging in terms of management and leadership and employee motivation because I think it’s an ongoing learning you need in this game. You can’t stop learning really.”
Over the last year or so, much of the focus has been on integrating the three organisations.
“We’re very much an integrated organisation now and there’s one Fujitsu in Ireland, one brand. I’ve been with the company 25 years or so, in one guise or another, and it’s the first time we’ve had one single brand.”
The business has benefited from becoming a one-stop shop for all types of IT services, she believes.
“We’ve retained the strengths of all of the organisations and we have a very strong, committed workforce, which is very important these days. Particularly when you’re in the services business, when you’re providing support services to customers, your main natural resource is your people, so that’s crucial to us.”
The long-term view
In keeping with Fujitsu’s and the wider Japanese approach, Moran is a fan of taking a long-term view in the business.
“Fujitsu has been around since 1934 and it takes a long-term view. The company’s view is the relationship with customers is a long-term relationship. They want to build it over time, they want to add value over time and that’s our view as well.
“They call it the 1,000 flowers, this idea of improvement. It’s like if you plant a flower, you can’t keep pulling it up to see if the roots are okay. You have to let it grow and develop and that can take many years depending on the type of plant.
“I think it’s the same in business. Sometimes we can be very impatient about results and sometimes you have to let something take time. I think that is very much instilled in the Japanese culture. It’s not that we have a very strong Japanese influence here because in many ways we don’t. They give us a lot of autonomy to run the business in Ireland to suit the Irish market conditions and their slogan is ‘Think global but act local’. They want us to think about doing things I suppose in the Fujitsu way which is longer term: don’t make snap decisions, think about the implications and have steady, continuous, incremental things instead of big bangs. It’s a nice environment to be in because you feel things will be given time.”
One of Moran’s main aims at the moment is to grow the Irish business. “That might sound like a mad thing to say in the current climate but I think there are opportunities to grow,” she says.
“There’s a lot happening in the whole area of green IT and the area of life sciences converging with ICT, which I think is a very exciting area and one that Fujitsu in Japan is investing very heavily in: the whole idea of health remote monitoring, sensoring and having all of those things converge together.”
Another one of her objectives is to help build stronger country-to-country links between Ireland and Japan. “I’d like to, under the auspices of Fujitsu, try to strengthen our links to Japan and link innovation and research more strongly with Japan. We’re working very hard to do that.
“Some of the challenges that are facing the Japanese in terms of the ageing and a very disparate population have to be tackled with innovation and ICT. I think we can be part of that and there are some very exciting programmes happening in Ireland in the universities in these areas. We’re trying to facilitate linking that up.
“From our own business perspective we have had some customers for many, many years, we want to retain those customers, add value to those customers, help them to grow and innovate as we need to in the new environment. One of the great things about the new world we find ourselves in is that it’s forcing people to innovate, to think differently and to change and there are a lot of positives in that.”
Regaining confidence
Speaking about Ireland’s current situation, Moran believes the country needs to regain confidence. To illustrate her point, she talks about Munster Rugby of which she is a big fan.
“Munster have achieved amazing things over the last 10 years. If you look at the resources that they have, 18 of their Heineken Cup squad came from the six counties of Munster and most of the people who live in those counties don’t even play rugby, and yet they’ve achieved greatness on a world stage, as have Leinster in recent years. Why have they achieved greatness?
“It’s about confidence, it’s about belief, it’s about backing yourself and I believe as a nation we need to get back to that. One of the reasons we performed as well as we did wasn’t just that there was a bubble and all of that kind of stuff. I don’t buy into that. If you look around the country, the road infrastructure has improved enormously, things are clean and tidy and not run down. When I came to Dublin 25 years ago the Quays were derelict. We need to remember in less than two decades how far we’ve come and the legacy of that is longer term.
“People talk about short-termism, but I don’t see it,” she continues. “I think an awful lot of the investments that were made and are being made are for the longer term so that the view of the country, the perspective people would have visiting the country, would be a hell of a lot more positive than it would have been 25 years ago. I think that we need to get back to backing ourselves as a nation. There are only four million of us and we need to start pulling together.
“Are things very difficult? Of course they’re very, very difficult and I’m not trying to minimise that. If you have a job it’s worth gold at the moment. To be employed is probably the most important currency. So I’m not trying to minimise the difficulties, but as a nation if we don’t back ourselves, who’s going to back us?
“I have confidence. I look around at the pockets of leadership that are being shown around the country, people are just getting up and getting on with it and really fighting hard to survive and thrive. There are great things happening and we really do need to start promoting some of those good things. Not sticking our heads in the sand and saying it’s all going to be alright on the night, but looking at the huge amount of positives.
“We’re a very young nation. Yes, people did lose the run of themselves, of course they did. We need to take that as a learning, take it on the chin and grow from that experience and emerge stronger, fitter and more ready and able to change. It’s not the strongest or the fittest that survive but the most adaptable to change. And that’s what we all need to be.”
This article first appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Irish Director magazine.