Hiroshige Sugihara, CEO and president of Oracle Japan, has an enlightened view of enterprise systems. And this view can be summed up in a word: 無分別智
“It’s a Buddhist word, and it’s hard to translate,” he explains from the executive boardroom of the company’s Tokyo headquarters. Nevertheless, the amiable Hiro, who joined Oracle in 2013, endeavors an explanation. He says that the human tendency to define the world by dividing it into (often binary) categories prevents us from seeing things as they really are.
Or, as thirteenth-century Japanese Zen scholar Dōgen Zenji wrote, “Don't think about good or bad, right or wrong. Don't give rise to the mind's common concepts, the judging of thoughts and observations.”
In the enterprise, this tendency—often translated as “dualistic thinking” from Japanese, Chinese, and the Buddha’s native Pali language—leads to what is more commonly known as “siloed thinking” in modern corporate vernacular. Hiro believes that this view of the world plagues the enterprise IT market—causing CIOs and business managers to unnecessarily segregate technologies from each other. The result: Essential IT decisions are made based on job title, organizational role, management bias, or legacy thinking.
“If you are too preoccupied with what software lives on what computer, you are going to miss the new opportunities the market is presenting,” Hiro suggests. “We are living in an era defined by a question: ‘What do you want to accomplish?’ ”
“Cloud. On premises. Public. Private. My servers. Your data. That’s all becoming irrelevant. The top concern should be with results.”
In a less-enlightened enterprise, progress may be stifled by a dualistic view of the organization. Efforts to improve system performance may lead the CIO to ask, “Is this job for the hardware or the software team?” But that overlooks the reality that increasingly, the software and hardware are coeval, with mutual interdependencies (as with Oracle engineered systems). Business managers looking for fast results may want to shift a key process to a cloud-based solution—overlooking the fact that the CIO is ready to quickly deploy an internal solution built on a strong, internal platform-as-a-service architecture.
Hiro believes that the current speed of business makes it critical for organizations to awaken from this way of thinking. “Things are changing very fast, and to be prepared for changes in the market, we need to adopt a new way of thinking about management,” he says. “Managers can’t use brute force to outrun the market—they will lose that race. Rather, they need to adopt a more adaptive mindset.”
Or as Zen master Dōgen wrote, “It is too late to be ready.”
Hiro hopes to bring holistic thinking to Oracle CloudWorld Tokyo, which takes place April 9-10. He believes that the Japanese companies featured at the event will have a lot to share with IT and business leaders from all over the world—particularly in business execution and customer service, areas in which he believes Japanese companies excel.
“We are very confident about the way we make things and work in a disciplined way. That is why I believe the Japanese are successful,” says Hiro. “This is a way the global market should eliminate false separations. Japan, the US, China, India, Europe, everyone—there should be no artificial boundaries.”
Hiroshige Sugihara, CEO and president of Oracle Japan.
