For many, leadership is the top of the career ladder. Taking on responsibility for a team can feel like a natural progression after years of building the experience required to lead. However, reaching the strategic level isn’t the end of a career journey—it’s a whole new start full of exciting challenges.
In Taking the lead, we catch up with executive leaders celebrating Oracle anniversaries and ask them to share their experiences and the lessons learned along the way.
Simon is interviewed by Executive Leadership Recruiter, Ben Vodila. Ben is responsible for senior level executive searches specializing in go to market leaders and general managers across Oracle.
Simon de Montfort Walker has spent five years managing Oracle’s Food and Beverage Global Industry Unit (GIU)—first as SVP and GM, then as EVP and GM.
His story of leadership and advancement is interesting for just how much he’s been able to accomplish with us. Our culture of innovation has been fertile ground for Simon’s ambitions and every day is a fresh chance for him to build something better with complete trust and autonomy.
So, how does he share his time between two roles as crucial as EVP and GM?
Global leadership, local leadership
“I would say it’s maybe 50/50. I have a commercial role where we are running a business and selling to clients globally, and the point-of-sale business is in 100+ countries. We have customers that range from tiny, independent businesses in the food and beverage world, and we serve larger, global customers. We’ve also got a little bit of a start-up. We started a consumer payments business about three years ago from zero. The goal is for it to be a really large revenue business, so that’s kind of half of my life!”
This demands a blend of leadership styles that mixes the depth of global business with the agility of start-up culture. It’s been a winning combination and has allowed him to flex his creativity, people skills, and strategic experience. This side of our culture had always been a strong draw for him, even as far back as his days as an Oracle customer on the outside looking in.
Performance-driven
“I was a large Oracle customer before I joined. I had this impression of Oracle from the outside, being a highly professional, performance-driven organization that was very goal-focused,” he explains. The opportunity to make a real impact on this as a leader was too much to resist. When it came along, he had no hesitation in seizing it. “I think all of that is very true on joining. What was really interesting was that the GIU opportunity is super unique in the marketplace.” Our focus on innovation was also a huge draw and came with the added challenge to position Food and Beverage as a world leader. He had a blank slate to write his ambitions on—and took full advantage. However, nothing could have prepared him for the personal growth he discovered.
Empowered to grow
“If you think about where the marketplace is going and what’s happening, even before this recent big AI push and what we’re doing there. There’s a tremendous amount of power in the combination of things that we have as a company,” Simon explains. With so many tools at his disposal and full freedom to explore possibilities, Simon understood just how much he’d been empowered to drive change. “We’re really the only people on the planet that can help a business understand the consumer and receipt level data about the interactions they have with their customers. There’s really no one else that can do this.”
Building positive workplaces
Simon’s impressions of the company before he joined were quite different and he imagined he’d have an uphill battle to drive change in such a large organization. What he found was surprising.
“On the buyer side there has been this impression that Oracle was a very intense sales culture. Incredibly good at it, but also that there were lots of teams competing for the same patch.”
“It was more lore than reality!” he concludes. “When I got here, I was very pleasantly surprised to see what is genuinely a really collegial environment.”
Collaboration renaissance
What he’s experienced instead is a powerful commitment to results-led collaboration. It’s something he’s fully embraced into his managerial style—with strong results. “It is obviously very, very focused on high performance and winning, but not at the expense of a culture that tends to be pretty helpful. And it’s part of the larger renaissance that’s happening.” Our collaboration renaissance continues to grow and everywhere Simon looks, he sees customers, colleagues, leaders, and the wider business thriving. This support structure was also a big part of accelerating his development to EVP and GM level.
Customer success
“Working on client solutions, that crossed lots of different boundaries, geographies, product boundaries, territory boundaries, tended to be difficult. There weren’t a lot of mechanisms to structure those conversations,” he explains. It was a golden opportunity to drive something new under his leadership and put the customer back at the center of our story. “We are coming to customers. Customer success being the driving mantra, we are bringing together everything that we do to configure a solution that’s really going to drive a customer’s business forward.” And as Simon has discovered, this applies as much to our tech stack, messaging, and app integration as it does to relationships.
Great work
“We are using core Oracle technology and our branding to take advantage of that philosophy and language. We’re building things with natural touchpoints to horizontal apps. It’s increasingly part of the thinking. And that goes all the way down into how we use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services.” Leaders don’t work alone here and cross-department collaboration is integral to executive development. With access to senior talent across so many disciplines, it’s only natural that ideas—and careers—should flourish. Culturally, Simon admires Oracle’s drive for performance—in products and people—and the teams that make it possible. Empowered leaders are crucial to this and raising others up is vital. “We are really thinking about it in an organized way. Asking what is the next generation of leadership? How are we bringing people along? I think that’s hugely rewarding and it filters into all our programs.” While most companies attempt this, few truly get there. The difference is all tied up with our global approach—the responsibility and support to grow and excel isn’t confined to one part of the business: it’s everywhere and anyone’s for the taking.
Candidates and culture
When it comes to attracting talent and growing future leaders, Simon looks for passion that translates. Hospitality in particular benefits from grassroots knowledge that can be hard to find.
“We want people who have knowledge or passion or desire for the hospitality space because we’re dealing with customers that have a specific frame of reference. You’ve got to be able to understand that culture and be engaged in it,” he explains. “We also need people who are technically thinking in really advanced ways and are really sharp on the product side.”
Creating leaders
It’s all part of the cycle of creating new leaders and demands a dedication to finding people with the aptitude and developing them. “Over the last five years that I’ve been here, I think we’ve gotten a lot better at it and there is a lot more discussion,” Simon says. “We talk about high performing people in each organization that we believe are ready for a role. Maybe in another industry, or how they need to get stretched in certain ways as part of their career journey.” Reflecting on his own progress, he sees moving from SVP to EVP as a more fluid process. Oracle understands that every leader’s growth journey is unique and this motivates Simon to drive his own career forward every day.
New challenges, new opportunities
A major part of the leap to executive level he feels, is shaping your path to fit company need while maximizing opportunities. “(You need to) take advantage of Oracle, take advantage of all the good that is here on both sides of that divide across the modern Oracle tech stack…There are always new challenges, new opportunities, and so the move up in Oracle is more a reflection of that,” he explains.
Leading by example
The latest stage of Simon’s leadership journey has him working closely with Executive Vice President of Oracle Global Industries, Mike Sicilia and to a lesser extent CEO, Safra Catz, and Chairman, CTO and founder, Larry Ellison. Each has been a major source of inspiration with unique leadership lessons to share. “Mike understands the sales world, the product, and the technical world deeply, and has a perspective that not a lot of people have. Safra is a voice of very pure, rational thinking in terms of sticking to our knitting, making sure that we’re managing the numbers in a very focused, tight way, and you can see that impact everywhere.”
Secret weapon
“Larry’s involvement is hugely valuable,” Simon shares. “He is very demanding in terms of are we fulfilling our obligations? Adopting and driving Oracle tech? Are we building applications that put us at the forefront of the marketplace? Are we being as competitive as possible by using all the tools available to us in the Oracle world?”
“It’s been a great rallying cry for the team. Obviously, you’ve a legendary tech leader who is engaged in the business on a day-to-day level. It’s a point of pride and one of our secret weapons!”
When asked to share some of the most important lessons he’s learned in his time at Oracle, he makes it about the customer—as well as efficiency and simplicity.
Lessons learned
He has a newfound appreciation for customer success as his ‘North Star’. His advice on developing as a leader in this regard is simple: focus on customer need, ask the right questions, and build your strategy from there. “I think when we got started in the food and beverage world, one of the most important pieces of work we did was really thinking about what the culture was. Then we set some clear expectations for our behavior. One lesson is spending time asking, ‘what’s the embodiment of these goals and how do we want to behave around them?’ For us, that was urgency, focus on being exceptionally competitive and winning, and creating a culture that really enabled very open and honest conversations.”
“Above all, make sure you’re building a culture and team that are an embodiment of how you want to get the results you want.”
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