Stewart van Graan looks remarkably relaxed for a man whose company is going through the transition of delisting and becoming a private entity. A company that analysts fear is struggling to retain its ground because it's been too slow to innovate in this unrelenting industry.
Van Graan is the GM of Dell for Southern & Central Africa, giving him a vast area to oversee as Dell delists from the Nasdaq and returns to the hands of its founder Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.
Yet Van Graan is calm and relaxed, suntanned and well rested after a holiday where he clearly didn't let work interfere with pleasure. That's true, he says, because he refuses to stress about the things he can't control.
He believes his role as a leader is to hire people around him who are better than he is; a team that knows what needs doing and gets on with it, so the need for control is minimised, leaving him free from the stress that a control freak would encounter. Besides, he says, when you reach 58 in the IT industry, you've seen it all before, and the wisdom and experience of age leaves you in a strong position to cope with the latest changes.
A strange industry
"We're not getting old, we're getting more experienced. That's the way I look at it. Life at work has become easier because we've seen a lot of these things before," he says.
"We're working in a strange industry where leaders don't need to know as much as the people they employ. In a knowledge environment, the type of leader I believe is necessary is one who nurtures and gets people to do their best for themselves and for their customers. So there's no management required; that's the subtle thing about leadership," he says.
"A core tenant of my leadership style is serving, and that means you have to understand people and equip them to operate to their best potential."
Van Graan says Dell's delisting was a smart move because it allows the company to become more agile than it could be when it had profit-hungry shareholders to satisfy. "Without denigrating the shareholders, doing things at our pace and the pace of our customers is now the key thing. We've just started as a private company and some of the things we've seen are exciting in terms of agile processes and making quick decisions and being the old Dell again in front of customers and being 100 percent focused on them."
A string of acquisitions has allowed it to build a strong portfolio of enterprise-class solutions in the cloud and a great software and services portfolio, he adds. The move to mobility has seen Dell enter the tablet market, and focus on servers and storage and on the operational methods in which data interacts with these access devices.
At the 2013 Gartner Symposium, Gartner vice president Andrew Butler said the buy-out and other recent moves had been a major risk, but it would have been a greater risk to do nothing, allowing Asian rivals to erode its PC business. But some aspects of Dell's business had to be jettisoned or radically changed, he warned.
The PC side was vulnerable as the move to tablets eroded demand, yet Dell's recent acquisitions were savvy and it was making the right investments for converged infrastructure. Gartner's major concern is what the buy-out will mean to research and development (R&), which Dell has never been renowned for.Life at work has become easier because we've seen a lot of these things before.
Stewart van Graan, Dell Southern & Central Africa
Van Graan is confident that Dell is doing the right things, of course, and says his role is to drive the changes regionally. "South Africa as the gateway to Africa is a bit of a clich'e, but we have a huge investment in South Africa and the intent is to leverage it up through Africa."
On the personal front, his career is in the phase of giving back. That will build on his move to create the Dell Development Foundation in 2003, which channels a percentage of Dell's revenue to initiatives such as bursaries, equipment for schools or helping small businesses to grow.
Now he's assessing a new venture to create jobs for young people interested in a career in IT. The details are yet to be finalised, but he has presented a plan to the Department of Trade and Industry for an incubation centre to train people and provide a space for them to operate under Dell's umbrella.
Van Graan also sits on the board of Christel House, a non-profit school in Cape Town for pupils living below the breadline. The children are bused to school, fed and clothed and given an education, including life skills. The school regularly achieves a 100 percent matric pass rate. Then the principal helps the pupils get into university or find a job through a work-study programme.
Intervention
The school has proved that special care and follow-up attention are important, Van Graan says.
"I've learnt that just getting an education and not having some help to get you into work or study through conscious intervention leaves too much to chance. That's why our Dell bursaries take people through the work experience."
His passion for education also sees him serve on the board of Stellenbosch Business School and undertake a lot of mentoring. He wants his involvement in that to grow substantially in the coming years.
"A lot of people need to accelerate their careers and I want to be part of that," he says. "I haven't given it deep thought and pictured anything around 'Stewart.Inc' that will monetise things, but I know my future is going to be in that."
First published in the March 2014 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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