Forward-looking’ is a good way to assess Nick Kugenthiran. Where his predecessor Phil Chambers might’ve been called ‘ground-breaking’ and Andy Lambert was ‘consolidating’, the most recent Fuji Xerox Australia managing director brings a progressive view. With his first 12 months as MD now behind him, his focus is firmly on the future.
Kugenthiran leads the company into the second decade of the 21st century with a people-oriented approach to management. “I want people to look forward to what the new Fuji Xerox Australia will look like in the next decade,” he says.
His progressive style is driven by the changes in market climate. It’s not the same world that predecessors oversaw. The Australia marketplace is dramatically different and requires an altogether different approach to management – especially when it comes to managing people. Kugenthiran recalls that in his earlier years, methodologies were extremely rigid. He now admits to being a strong believer in letting people take their own path to achieving their goals.
“Nowadays, people want to be given freedom to decide how they go about doing their jobs with independence to innovate,” says Kugenthiran.
“We don’t tell them how to do their tasks; we tell them: ‘This is what we want to achieve. Go and define how you want to do it’,” he adds.
At the core of his leadership approach is Kugenthiran’s conviction of the need to release the capabilities within the 2,000-strong organisation. His challenge is to foster those capabilities. As he puts it, the strategy is “to create 2,000 leaders in the business who are absolutely engaged and passionate about the business”.
Economic hurdles
When Kugenthiran took over Andy Lambert’s chair in mid-2008, Australia was still reeling from the GFC. His early priorities in climbing the mountainous economic hurdles were to create specific cost centres within the organisation.
Kugenthiran knitted his team together by clearly defining their roles and making their future clear to them.
Another of Kugenthiran’s early priorities was to kick off a review and call for changes to the ranks of senior management. Of the nine general managers he inherited at the time, three remained, while most were replaced by new appointments. “These changes in structure were needed to match the direction we need to take in the next five years,” he explains.
He has a clear, self-determined vision of where FXA needs to be post-2010. He says in very unambiguous terms that the organisation should be at the forefront of a movement to transform tomorrow’s documents into knowledge.
How does he want to do this? Kugenthiran says the plan is “to create a strategy called Integrated Documentation Services, which we see as an industry standard in the future”. He envisages the management of a document through the entire lifecycle.
To this end, Kugenthiran is heavily dedicated to funding sophisticated research to facilitate the stepping stones into a new era of communication.
Achieving his vision will require FXA to harness the sector-specific skills of graphic arts professionals. But Kugenthiran is not just looking internally at the printing industry. He looks outward for inspiration from people whose work he admires. Heading his list of role models is Boston Philharmonic Orchestra’s current conductor, Benjamin Zander, a co-author of the bestselling The Art of Possibility.
The book promotes a deep sense of the powerful role that the notion of possibilities can play in every aspect of life. Kugenthiran says one lesson he has gained from Zander’s work concerns the role of the conductor to empower the people under his baton. It’s not about keeping the power to himself. He recalls bringing his FXA team together for a session on Zander, wryly noting it differed somewhat radically from the conventional rugby ra-ra type of motivational meeting.
Others from whom he takes inspiration are such industry leaders as Procter & Gamble chief executive Robert McDonald and former Xerox chairman Anne Mulcahy. As a result, he now concentrates on impressing on his teams the possibilities that lie ahead by overcoming the road blocks to achieving targets and finding solutions to achieve those targets.
Inevitably, Kugenthiran turns the conversation to trends in the digital world. Print runs are continually getting shorter, while time to market is also constantly being reduced. But long-run applications requiring offset presses will always be with us. Kugenthiran doesn’t believe digital print will replace offset in our lifetime. While he has seen Fuji Xerox machines replacing offset presses in some instances, he maintains that the real print-related issues lie elsewhere.
“The lead indicator for me is how information will be consumed in the future. That will define the direction of the graphic arts industry. In other words, how will the corporate world use information with much of it migrating to online?” asks Kugenthiran.
The internet presents challenges, but he believes this trend will create huge opportunities. He envisages that the industry will need to undertake “crusades” to make the corporate world recognise the add-on commercial benefits of printed documents such as invoices and statements.
“Corporates tend to look at costs and not at opportunities,” he says. He points to the long-term benefits of transpromo and makes a case for its continual development. Transpromo uses personalisation tools to create more attractive, customer-focused statements that can also accommodate dynamic marketing messages and co-branding. It is just one example of how powerful print can be as a marketing tool.
He wants to galvanise the entire print industry “to reverse the trend to electronic-only messaging”. He is convinced that FXA will play its part, through manufacturing, marketing, customer support and training leadership. The forward-looking leader believes his Integrated Documentation Services strategy will ride to battle under the banner of the printed word.
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