Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.
- Oracle CEO Mark Hurd spoke about his leadership style and strategy at the tech company in an episode of Business Insider's podcast "This Is Success."
- Hurd said that his experience with Oracle proved that employees and their managers need to share the same goals for their company to be successful.
- C-Suite Insider is a collection of exclusive interviews with leaders of the world's largest companies.
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When Oracle CEO Mark Hurd joined the tech company in 2010 as its president, he quickly realized he had to transform Oracle if it was going to thrive in a changing market.
The IT industry was headed toward the cloud, meaning more software would be accessible online rather than through hardware. While that sounds like a simple concept, it requires significant changes at an established company like Oracle.
"Now you're saying to people, 'We're going to change what you sell, and we're going to change who you sell it to.' And so a lot of people said, 'I just don't want to do that,'" Hurd told Business Insider earlier this year for an episode of our podcast, "This Is Success."
Of Oracle's 35,000 to 40,000 employees, hundreds left over the first few years of the transformation plan, including some veteran employees who publicly said they were unhappy with the company's new direction. Hurd told us that he considered criticisms, but came to the conclusion that a plan to change what was sold and how it was sold (as well as how they trained employees for this new market) was necessary for Oracle's long-term success.
"I think that a leader's job is to describe, 'This is where we're headed, this is where we are, this is the journey to get from here to there, these are now the resources we're going to apply to get from here to there,'" he said. If a large-scale strategic decision is deliberated and some employees are still unhappy, Hurd said, then, "My view is that that's OK. We need to have people that are excited and passionate. I don't want to make it sound like I was for a lot of dynamism in the sales force, but I wasn't against it either."
Hurd said, "I hate to say it because it sounds like a non-empathetic answer," but his point is that, "if you don't have passion, and you're not excited about the task at hand," then you're not going to be successful. If an employee chooses to leave in this situation, then it is for both their and the company's benefit.
As for Hurd's plan, Oracle still has a ways to go to catch up to leading rivals in the cloud business like Amazon and Microsoft, but his general prediction for what was necessary to adapt has proven correct. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian even said in April that he was borrowing from Oracle's strategy for transitioning to the cloud.
"I think nobody likes criticism, resistance, no matter what anybody tells you," Hurd said. "That said, I think you have to rely on your experience and your instincts as to where you think the market's headed, and what changes are necessary. I've always believed it was the company first."
You can listen to the full "This Is Success" episode below, or on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.