Sign of the Times--Bernard Departs

I wanted to add my own personal observation to others who have written this past week (I liked Darren's post over at the Lucid Era blog as well) about Bernard Liautaud's official departure from Business Objects, as the SAP transaction becomes official. Obviously it's a fact of today's M&A world that as companies get acquired, the executives move on, take new roles, and in many cases, fade into the sunset.

My sense is that Bernard will have a lot more to say about business intelligence in the coming months and years, although I do wonder about the weight of his message, now that it will be given through the prism of SAP's point of view. After seeing him deliver so many presentations about how important "independent BI" was to the Business Objects customer base, it's still jarring to think that just one year ago at the BOBJ sales kick-off, he was up on stage with a safari hunter's hat on and toy gun shooting at the "big game" of SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, making fun of their offerings, and vowing to take them on whole--he really had the crowd eating out of his hand. And now he's going to be on the SAP board of supervisors. But such is life in the corporate world. You wear many hats, including safari hats; you change teams and allegiances; and even your points of view depending on where your career takes you.

However, I'll relate one personal anecdote from Bernard (I realize this sounds like an obituary, and while he's in fine form, in a professional sense, there's a lot of BOBJ obituary writing going on right now). Before I joined the company, I was listening to a recorded BOBJ earnings call to get a sense for him as a leader, and as someone that I'd potentially like to follow.

What came through in that call was as proud a recitation of goals and ideals of where he wanted the company to go as I've ever heard from an executive. At the time, the Jim Collins book "Good to Great" was all the rage, and I think they even brought Collins into the sales kick-off that year. But however Bernard's vision was executed (and I can go on and on about how it did and to the extent that it actually "was" throughout the following years), there was no doubt that day that the leader of that company was fully vested in making something great out of the organization he had built. He realized then that were he was wasn't good enough, and he was using a great quarter's results to make the case both to the employees, as well as to the investors, that merely being an industry leader wasn't satisfactory--great companies survived through their continuous innovation, commitment to excellence, and ability to change and adapt.

I suppose it's a bit ironic that in the end, the company was sold and was not able to survive. I'm not sure what it says about Bernard's ability to execute on that vision, but it's good to know that there were leaders in the company that actually believed and subscribed to this vision and those ideals. In life I'm finding that often times it's the battle vs. the result that defines you (man I'm getting old...), and no one can deny that although SAP may have "won" in the end, it was one hell of a fight to get to that result, and Bernard was a great leader for so many of us to follow into battle every day.