The leader I intend to be in FY27

That means understanding how the year feels to an ACE, not only how it appears through customer activity, pipeline, consumption, forecasts and outcomes.

My one-to-ones, team meetings, written communications and informal conversations should help me understand workload, confidence, motivation, personal context and professional ambition—not simply progress against a list of actions.

I want to listen with the intention of understanding. I want to create enough trust for uncertainty, disagreement, difficult truths and bad news to surface early. I would rather hear that an engagement is struggling, a forecast assumption has weakened or a colleague needs support while there is still time to respond than discover it retrospectively when the available choices have narrowed.

I want every member of the team to understand what good looks like, what Oracle expects from us, what our customers need from us and how their contribution connects to the wider mission. I want to maintain high standards without making pressure our primary method of achieving them. I want accountability to lead to ownership and action rather than blame or defensiveness.

I want personal growth to remain individually owned but collectively supported.

My role is not only to encourage development. It is to coach, challenge, advocate and create opportunities for people to demonstrate their judgement and expertise. I want the six ACEs in this team to become more capable, more confident, more visible and more influential. I want our intern to experience serious investment, meaningful work and a genuine introduction to the standards and possibilities of the profession.

I want to provide clarity and purpose as sources of motivation.

People should understand not only what we are being asked to do, but why it matters, what has priority and what trade-offs we are making. Where I have made a decision, I should explain enough of the reasoning for others to understand it and exercise sound judgement without waiting for my involvement in every detail.

I want to be closely connected without becoming the centre of everything.

As OCI ACE Director, I should understand the current activity, customer objective, intended outcome, material blockers and next significant action across our priority engagements. I should know where leadership intervention is needed and where ownership properly remains with the ACE and account team.

That awareness must not make me a bottleneck. My aim is to build clear ownership, dependable communication and strong operating rhythms so that the team can act with confidence without requiring my presence in every customer meeting or internal discussion.

That does not mean believing that every urgent situation can be prevented. It means reducing surprises through better qualification, earlier communication, stronger ownership and more disciplined follow-through. Where genuine pressure cannot be avoided, I want to remain calm and useful rather than transmitting panic into the team.

I want us to be the team that is rarely surprised because we understand what is happening.

That requires an honest view of our consumption position, gap to budget, forecast movements, pipeline quality, customer readiness, workload status and execution risk. The team deserves to understand where it stands commercially. Commercial context should not be held at leadership level and revealed only when pressure increases.

I also need to be cited when forecast conditions change, not briefed only after the event. That requires contribution from every ACE and strong alignment with our Sales FLMs. Forecast integrity is a shared discipline: ACE judgement, Sales ownership and leadership context working together around the best available evidence.

I want our alignment with Sales to be practical and valuable.

The relationship with Sales FLMs should give us shared clarity around account priorities, opportunity qualification, customer objectives, ownership, blockers and intervention. Our role is neither to operate as a detached technical function nor to become an uncritical extension of a sales forecast. We should contribute credible technical and customer judgement that improves the quality of commercial decisions.

I want customers to experience One Oracle through our behaviour.

OCI is our specialist responsibility, but it is not the limit of the customer’s problem. Public-sector outcomes frequently cross infrastructure, data, applications, AI, security, operations, partners and services. My responsibility is to work productively with peers across Oracle, bring the right expertise together and prevent our internal structures from becoming the customer’s burden.

One Oracle should be evident through clearer ownership, better preparation, cleaner collaboration and a more coherent customer experience—not through the frequency with which we repeat the phrase.

I want to use AI intentionally and responsibly.

AI should not be adopted because automation is fashionable, because producing more content feels productive or because saving time is automatically valuable. I want AI to enrich our capability: helping us prepare more deeply, organise evidence, test assumptions, expose weak reasoning, ask better questions, understand customers more fully and communicate with greater relevance.

The work must remain human-led, judgement-protected and owned by the person who uses it.

AI should raise the quality of our thinking rather than obscure who is accountable for it.

I want FY27 to be better because we are willing to learn from FY26 honestly.

FY26 was not perfect. Not every engagement progressed as intended. Not every forecast movement was visible early enough. Not every handover was clean. Not every pressure could be absorbed without effect. Yet the year strengthened our habits, judgement, resilience, sector understanding and sense of what this team can become.

I want to ask for feedback, act on what I hear and acknowledge when an approach has not worked. Changing course in response to evidence should be treated as responsible leadership, not as weakness.

I depend on each ACE to maintain ownership of their customers, communicate material changes, surface risk early, contribute to the development of colleagues and help create the environment they want to work within. I depend on our intern to bring curiosity, challenge and a fresh perspective. I depend on Sales FLMs and account teams to create shared commercial clarity. I depend on peers across Oracle to help make One Oracle real.

My responsibility is to create the trust, clarity, standards, support and operating environment in which those contributions can combine.

The leadership position I want to demonstrate is that humanity and performance are not competing choices.