Interview with Sean Finnan

Sean Finnan was born in May 1961. His father was a metal worker from Limerick, Ireland who had moved to England in 1937. He joined the army when he could not find work, served in World War II, and then retrained as a welder.  His mother had been a linen dryer in the North of Ireland before moving to Lancashire where she worked in the weaving industry. She moved to London and became a Hollerith operator before marrying and having Sean and his older brother.

Sean attended the local middle school before joining his elder brother at Northfields. Despite poor health due to asthma, Sean says he enjoyed school. He says: “It was good.  I enjoyed new things, I always enjoyed new things.  I wasn’t a particularly good student; I didn’t really do homework and things like that back then.  I kind of didn’t understand what I was meant to be doing there, a bit of a slow learner really.”

He credits two teachers with helping him, Mr Norton, his maths teacher, who threatened to move him down a level if he didn’t “buck up his ideas” and Mr McLaughlin, his English teacher. He adds: “They both really took an interest. McLaughlin talked me into the school play which I really didn’t want to do, but which I really enjoyed actually.” Sean says that between them and his captaining the table tennis team, he managed to stay off the street corners and out of trouble.

Sean settled on IT as his future career, he says: “My perspective was that I was going to work in IT. I couldn’t really tell you why I had that idea.  … I thought it seemed like a place where not a lot of people knew a lot about it. It was new and exciting for a guy like me; it seemed as good a place to go as any.  I wasn’t one of those kids where someone was going, well, you’re going to be doing law, or you’ll go to this university and become an accountant.  No disrespect to that path, but it was sort of wide open to me and it was purely luck that I decided I’d go to work for the post office because I’d heard they’ve got a lot of different types of computers and that’ll be a good place to learn.”

Unfortunately, the Post Office rejected Sean’s application and while doing odd jobs, he applied for an IT apprenticeship at AC Delco, based in Dunstable, which made spark plugs. It was here that Sean saw his first computer around 1979/80. It was an IBM 145. He says: “It was in this big room with raised floorboard and you weren’t really even sure which bit was the computer.  It seemed very magical really.”

Sean started writing the Job Control Language (JCL). He learned on the job with a textbook and guidance from a colleague when needed.  He says: “People find it hard to believe nowadays, but there was this whole job which was to connect what the person who’d written the programme wanted to do with the actual resources, what disc drive, where was the output going to go, how was it going to be stored, how much space were you going to allow this job to run in—all those kind of things – and that is how I started.”

AC Delco was a subsidiary of General Motors and early in Sean’s career, it merged with Vauxhall Motors. The IT department that Sean was part of joined the much bigger IT team at Vauxhall and as a result, Sean moved into a helpdesk role.

In the early 1980s, Vauxhall’s manufacturing side began to source minicomputers outside of the central IT department. Sean says: “It’s a wave that got repeated and repeated, and repeated, and we’re seeing it again to some extent today with the drive to digital.  Basically, the departments couldn’t wait for central IT, saying ‘it takes too long, we’ll buy some of these little boxes that don’t go in the data centre, and we’ll have our own little data centre.’  I got hooked up with that. I was in charge of the data centre. … it worked pretty well, and I had a lot of fun, it was interesting.”

In 1984, when General Motors bought the Electronic Data Systems (EDS) Group, Sean became an EDS employee. He would progress to hold positions of European Regional Sales Director, Global Vice President CRM, and Chairman and Managing Director for the UK. Roles with 10s of thousands of employees and multi-billion-dollar revenue.

EDS was started in 1962 by Ross Perot, based in Dallas, Texas. The company initially sold timesharing; a process where unused computer time was leased to run other company’s programmes. Mort Meyerson joined EDS and introduced the concept of outsourcing. Sean says: “At its simplest, you go to a client and say, we’ll do all your IT for you for five years for this price. That was the backdrop for EDS and then, General Motors bought it because they wanted to transform their own IT. Rather than do an outsourcing contract GM thought we’re so big, we’ll just buy the firm, which is what they did.” Ross Perot joined the GM board as a result.

EDS was renowned for its culture which dictated the expected behaviours of its employees, from no beards, well-trimmed hair, blue suit and white shirt, to a clean desk policy. Sean says: “For some people it was a terrible thing but I thought it was brilliant because if you don’t grow up in the sort of social fabric where you get all the nuances of how things are meant to be, you mainly just blunder around. If I reflect on my very early career I did a lot of blundering around, and here was a company that said we’re going to tell you rules. …  EDS was absolutely a meritocracy, if you do good work you’ll get on, if you follow the rules, you’ll get on.  If neither of those are true, you’ll have a terrible time and I just thought, okay, I understand, thank you, it was like someone had given me the hidden code of how you get on.”

It was while working for EDS that Sean was involved in his first applications project for Vauxhall. He explains: “I had to write the system to track the cars and move the cars around the factory. It was asynchronous COBOL, so, it was written in COBOL, but you could basically have an event come in at any point in the programme and flip you out to a different place. I used to say back then, it was like being paid for writing crossword puzzles, I loved it, I absolutely loved it.”

His next project was for General Motors, an account he serviced for several years, was called DCS. It involved implanting a new dealership system all over Europe; the first PC based project that EDS had done. Sean followed this up by working across Europe as “a sort of a freelance consultant helping the people who ran the likes of GM Italia, GM Finland etc be successful.” Because that went well it was drawn together and he was promoted to run all of those IT departments.

Sean says the first 12 years of his career were moving sideways. He adds: “If anything, it was a very long slow spiral for 12 years, but then I got to a place where I really knew my trade and, if I say so myself, I wasn’t half bad at it. Then, I could start my career in the way that careers get started. I don’t feel like that’s a loss of 12 years. I know today, people move quickly after a eighteen months to get promoted, but I think you end up on a very narrow pile of tiles if that’s how your career goes.  Whereas because I had this sort of odd spiralling, I could talk to operators, I could talk to folks who ran data centres, I could talk to programmers, I could talk to analysts.  I’d been in their world, salespeople, managers, clients, and I felt that was a real benefit to me.  It wasn’t planned, it was just people would say to me, here is an interesting, rather ugly problem, do you fancy it? I was a sucker for that.”

He adds: “It was a 12-year apprenticeship of working in that kind of environment. I do suspect that I was just lucky I landed in EDS because it was such a full-on meritocracy.”

It was while working for EDS, who believed in investing in developing its people, that Sean was able to study for his MBA paid for by EDS.

The company had a somewhat paternal culture with a range of people joining from a lot of different organisations and an open atmosphere where you could ask for help. Sean adds: “The whole principle of never leaving a client in trouble, EDS had its problem contracts like everyone, but there was a belief that you should do your very best for the customer, at least that was true wherever I worked in EDS. You took care of your team and a lot of that was because Perot was very inspired by the military. His point was that someone will put their life on their line for 15,000 dollars, in the US army, so, it’s not about how much you’re paying people, it’s about all the rest of it.  The design of EDS was very much trying to empower people and give them an opportunity to grow, helping them if they fell by the wayside, but really holding them accountable.”

On his management style, Sean says: “Firstly, I always try and lay out where I expected we were going to take the business and have a vision that people could get excited about. … The second thing was I believed a lot in giving people independence to do their own thing.  I’d been an account manager early on and I thought every company ran account managers like EDS did and it was only about 10 years later I discovered that in most firms, account manager really meant salesman.  It wasn’t like that in EDS. At EDS, the account manager ran virtually all the resources for the customer that they served. … I thought that worked, it gave an autonomy to people.  So I told people to bring your own creativity to this, focus on the bigger picture that we’re trying to achieve, but find your path to it. I’ll help you in whatever way you want but I’ll leave you alone unless you get into trouble and then I’ll come and get involved.  I always try to be very, very clear, and transparent, and now, I’m talking about it, Richard, I think that goes back to the fact that I spent 10 years kind of being bewildered as to what was really going on in the early part of my career.  I tried to be really clear with people what it was I wanted and what I expected and hold them accountable for that. I tried to do it through motivation.”

Having progressed to Division President, Sean became Financial Services Director for the UK EDS operation, a move he describes as a “step backward”. He explains: “I had reached Division President, but I had sort of got to the point where I thought, I’m either going to spend my entire career serving GM, or I’ve got to get out.  At that time, half the company was the GM world, which was huge and then the other half of the company was the commercial world and to some extent Government. The UK was doing very well, it had signed a lot of government business and I just thought, I can stay here and kind of run this gig as far as it goes, but I’m probably due to go into the rest of the commercial world.”

Asked if he ever thought about setting up his own IT consultancy business, Sean says he did consider it during moments of boredom, but they were few and far between interesting and challenging projects. He adds: “Before I knew it, I’d been with EDS for 25 years.  I worked in all sorts of industries, all sorts of technologies, I did all sorts of jobs, so, I felt like I’d changed career a lot but it just so happened I had the same paymaster.” During this period Sean took on a number larger P&L executive roles and also led the signing of both the largest Infrastructure and largest Applications deals ever sold in Europe at that point.

In 2008, Hewlett Packard acquired EDS Group and COMPAQ. Mark Hurd was running the organisation at the time and Sean says: “Mark had a very different model, it was hugely matrix, the account managers from all the different divisions had tremendous autonomy. It took me a while to figure out who I needed to call before going to see a client, or what was the relationship, all that kind of thing. There was this general sense that we’re so big we set the standard of service, which was a very different philosophy from the EDS point of view, which was the standard of service is essentially defined by the client.  I suppose it’s more consistent with a product perspective and the overall model, at least the way I could see that the idea was to just run the existing businesses as efficiently as possible in order to generate cash to buy new businesses. It was a very different model, it was all about cash generation and the efficient running of existing businesses, rather than, for example, at EDS where it was about the rapid expansion of the existing business.”

Sean continued to thrive at HP, producing good results and being offered the role of European Presidency for Services, the kind of the job he’d been hankering after for a while, but Sean was also approached by IBM and decided the time was right to move on.

In 2009, Sean joined IBM as General Manager and Vice President, Northern Europe and then Strategic Outsourcing Europe, Global Technology Services. He would stay with the company for three years. He says: “They just caught me at the right moment really, a year earlier I wouldn’t have been interested. It was an exciting journey … I’d realised this was my one chance to take that next step up (p&l wise there are not many jobs of more the 6bn$ revenue) and decided to give it a go and see how it is, so, I went to IBM.”

Once again, Sean found himself in a different work culture. He explains: “It was really different. One of the differences was time.  There was no long-term time perspective, all the plans were about this quarter, all the focus was about this quarter.  That was difficult for me to adjust to actually because I was always on a long game, here’s my vision, here’s what I’m going to do, year 1 year 2, year 3, and we’ll end up there and it really wasn’t like that.”

He continues: “The structure was so complicated, there were industries, product lines, the direct management line and then you had the geography line. Everyone wanted to have a meeting with you.”

The number of meetings would contribute to Sean’s decision to leave IBM after three years, he says: “There were various reasons I decided to leave in the end, but I do remember staring at my diary and realising I had five times as many meetings with IBMers as I had with customers. They were very nice to me, they gave me good appraisals, paid me well, I was ill for three months and they were very supportive. I haven’t got a bad word to say about the time there, but it was a very different culture, and the jacket never quite fit, I think would be the honest way of saying it.”

After leaving IBM, Sean set out “to do something completely different and work with much smaller firms.” In 2013, he founded Sean Finnan & Associates which provides effective counsel, coaching and connections to C-Suite executives. He also took on Non-executive director roles with a charity and various tech SaaS firms such as Avvio and Activeops. He became Chairman and Activeops floated on AIM in 2021.

Asked why the UK has issues scaling-up tech start-ups, Sean says that when he was at Intellect a report (early 2008) suggested the ambition for many start-ups was to reach £5m payout for the founder, he explains: “For a lot of people, they get to a certain point and then the offer comes and it’s just too tempting for them to take the money and go. Whereas in the US, there’s this assumption that, ‘I’m going to make 50 million or I’m going to make 100 million or I’m going to make 200 million’. There is a very different sense of what success is there than here.  I think that’s changed a lot now. At least the people I’m seeing now, seem to be bedding in for a longer journey and all credit to them, but the fact of the matter is there is a wash of money in the industry that you can use to help you grow, but also it does, unfortunately, mean a lot of companies get subsumed into bigger companies.

“There is a thing called a rollup and you get a lot of companies that do rollups of four or five companies. Investors take four, five, six companies with similar tech and roll them into one bigger one, trying to shortcut the entrepreneurial growth part because quite often it takes 10, 15 20 years, to be an overnight success.”

Asked if the rollup system works, he adds: “It depends on the metric. If the metric is to make the investor more wealthy, then yes, I think it can work quite well. If the metric is to grow regional geographic champions in certain technologies, then no, I’m not sure it’s so helpful.”

On the mistakes he’s made during this long career, Sean says: “I would say whenever things have gone badly, it’s because I didn’t spend enough time talking to customers.  Generally, when things have gone well, it’s because I spent lots of time talking to customers. For me, that’s somewhere at the root of it, being close to the expectations of your customers and trying to exceed them.”

He adds: “Normally, I arrived when the building was on fire as opposed to setting fire to the building.  I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes, I probably made hundreds of mistakes, because at that level of business, once you get up to running 4, 5, 6 billion dollars of business a year, the amount of decisions you’re making and the quality of the information that you’re having to make the decisions on, the sheer pace of it, it is inevitable you’re going to make mistakes.” As long as net net you get the targets in the end it can be ok.

For anyone interested in working in IT, Sean says: “I just think it’s the best industry to be in.  It doesn’t really matter, get in, get trained, try and avoid all the stuff that you read on the internet that says there’s three steps to success or if you haven’t been promoted in a year and a half, or even, follow your passion, sort of thing. I never knew that I’d end up doing things I was so passionate about and I wouldn’t have been able to even conceive of them before I arrived at that spot.

“I would say, even if you don’t think you’re going to work in IT, learn about data, and how to work with data, because I don’t think there will be jobs in the future that don’t involve working with data and the information that comes from systems.  So, even if you think I’m going into insurance or banking or anything like that, then you’ve got to familiarise yourself with the systems world because all jobs will be IT jobs, in one form or another.”

Interviewed by: Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by: T P Transcriptions Ltd.

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley