CJ - How well do you know Lane and his record? He pretty low key as a leader - not very charismatic, not the kind of guy to get the lower level people fired up. I can not see Lane playing rock and roll at a staff meeting to loosen people up, as Capellas did. But he is an excellent operational guy, not at all afraid to make tough decisions, great at "nuts and bolts", and a thoroughly professional manager - all things CPQ could use.
I would love to see Lane at CPQ but not as CEO - at least not at this point in CPQ's development, when getting to a sense of community and merging the very different cultures of CPQ and Digital is so important.
The combination of a visionary, charismatic CEO and a strong, nuts and bolts COO is usually great for business. We only need to look at the change in Oracle after Lane's arrival, but Roel Pieper and Enrico Pesatori at Tandem prior to the CPQ acquisition had similar dynamics. I had hoped that Pesatori would find a similar role under Capellas, but for whatever reason, they just did not mesh.
My sense is that Capellas is just right to restore CPQ "Culture" and values after the disasters of the Pfeiffer - Mason debacle and the Digital acquisition. He has made a huge difference in attitude within the company, but he needs a strong execution-focused guy to make his ideas happen.
If CPQ were in a different place - say comfortably leading as the provider of next generation infrastructure - and we were a couple of years down the road in terms of performance and predictability, we might see the kind of performance Oracle has seen. It took Lane a long time to make a difference at Oracle, due to mismanagement and loss of credibility similar to what CPQ experienced.
At that point, a logical succession might be for Capellas to replace Rosen as Chairman and Lane to take a CEO role. Rosen won't want to be chairman forever...
Just dreaming, but looking at ORCL stock performance over the last couple of years, I could stand for CPQ to follow a similar path. That would put us at about 250 - yea, I could stand that, I think. |
