Sayonara, Duncan: Fujitsu bids farewell to EMEIA and Americas president Tait Duncan Tait, the first non-Japanese exec to sit on Fujitsu's board and the man that rose to head up operations in Europe, Middle East, India, Africa (EMEIA) and the Americas, is leaving with immediate effect. The departure was confirmed by Takahito Tokita, representative director at president at Fujitsu, in a five-paragraph …
In 2012 Duncan brought the top 200 Staff to a hotel to tell us that the emphasis going forward was ‘all about’ infrastructure - and followed that up with a drastic restructuring of Apps capability the left a tiny fraction of us pushing to keep this critical skill set alive within the organisation.
Despite being informed of the importance of a Cloud capability spanning the full ‘stack’ his view (bolstered by those who saw ‘Cloud’ as a fad) was that our big customers would need big infrastructure for decades to come.
Zip to today and suddenly ‘infrastructure services’ as a big bet is exposed - badly - as a zero-sum future.
As Fujitsu scrambles to catch up, I’m not unhappy to see the author of a strategy that is now being (expensively) redressed.
Goodbye Mr. Plumber
Working on a large bid on a weekend in the London office with a team of about 20 Duncan took the effort to come into the office and buy cakes for the whole team. Now i think he might have been coming to London anyway but he didn't have to buy the cakes......not something that all senior leadership would do.
Mr Tait once told me he'd rather spend 10M on people than on offices, faced with bloated layers of historical management structure which cost money but deliver nothing tangible it was always going to be a challenge. The principles of Agenda 2020 was right, but execution by the same middle managers stripped out years of technical expertise whilst leaving the same onion layers of middle management. Yes Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
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