Embracing business disruption

Pam Murphy, the Chief Operating Officer of software company Infor believes businesses have to embrace change in order to survive today’s period of disruption

“A lot of companies are trying to figure digital disruption out,” says the Chief Operating Office of Infor, Pam Murphy. “For many companies they are seeing all this stuff and thinking ‘oh my god, what on earth do I do?’. They know they need to evolve and they know they have to evolve.”

Murphy, who joined Infor in 2011 after over a decade at Oracle, has seen a lot of that change. Infor itself embraced the cloud and in the company’s has been on an acquisitions spree as it seeks to expand its product offerings.

Having dealt with so many acquisitions – eight since Murphy joined five years ago – the company has become adept at absorbing new businesses. “It does require a lot of thinking that you’re going to be respectful of that,” she says. “A lot of stuff is easy to standardise but culture is difficult.”

Another area that Murphy doesn’t see as being standardised is in developing talent. “You have to be open minded,” she says in answer to my question about encouraging women into senior roles and increasing the diversity of senior management.

Murphy’s main advice to business leaders is not to shy from the business world’s shifts, “embrace the change.” She says, “don’t think of it as being something that’s scary and threatening, get ahead of it. Embrace the fact we’re in a completely different era.”

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