University of Chittagong

A Report on a Successful Business Leader

Course Title: Strategic Management (409)
Submitted By:
Suvo Das
ID: 15303125
Department of Finance
University of Chittagong

Submitted To:
Dr. Tanvir Mohammad Hayder Arif
Professor, Department of Finance
University of Chittagong

Date of Submission: 13-10-2019

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 Larry Ellison
American businessman

Lawrence Joseph Ellison is an American businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who is a

co-founder and the executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation.

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 Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................
....................4

Objectives ...................................................................................................................
......................4

Methodology................................................................................................................
....................4

Acknowledgement.........................................................................................................
................4

Biography .......................................................................................................................
.................5

Success
story.................................................................................................................................
..6

Learnings from the life of Larry

Ellison..............................................................................8

Conclusion...................................................................................................................
...................11

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References ..................................................................................................................
...................11

Introduction: A leader inspires, motivates and encourages people to achieve visionary goals. A
manager, on the other hand, deals with the actual operation of a business. Typical managerial tasks
include: ensuring products and services reach clients in the way they expect - a manager needs a good
understanding of customer service.

Ellison was a self-motivated, determined leader, who transformed a start-up into a multi-billion Dollar
company in a fiercely competitive industry. Ellison possessed many of the attributes of a true leader -
leadership, drive, imagination and the attitude to win. Describing Ellison, BusinessWeek said, "He has
spent years transforming himself from a causeless rebel to a driven, disciplined warrior - a self-styled
New Age Samurai.”

Praising Ellison's visionary thinking and flawless business judgment, The Wall Street Journal commented,
"At Oracle Corp., not many people get to tell CEO Lawrence Ellison where to get off..... Ellison is a
mercurial, headline-grabbing visionary."

Describing Ellison's leadership qualities, Florence Stone said, "Depending on who you're talking to,
Ellison is an arrogant promoter who borrows heavily from the ideas of others or a visionary leader who
knows how to turn a neglected idea into a stunning market success...

Objectives:
The main objectives of the study are to know the success story of a successful business leader
‘Larry Ellison’ Biography who is also known as “Billionaire samurai warrior of Silicon Valley”. He
is a visionary leader who has turned a neglected idea into a stunning market success, world’s
second largest software company Oracle.

The other objective of this study is to learn about his leadership quality which has influenced
me a lot.

Methodology:

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The study has been prepared by using secondary data. That is journals, website, YouTube videos have
been used in preparing this report.

Acknowledgement:
I express my gratitude to my honorable sir Professor Dr. Tanvir Mohammad Hayder Arif for assigning me
to do this report on business leader. I am also grateful to my Idols ‘Steve Jobs and Larry Page’ who have
always inspired me.

Biography:
Larry Ellison is the founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, which earned him a spot as fifth
wealthiest person in the world in 2014.

Background and Early Career

Larry Ellison was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 17, 1944, to single mother Florence
Spellman. When he was nine months old, Ellison came down with pneumonia, and his mother
sent him to Chicago to be raised by her aunt and uncle, Lillian and Louis Ellison, who adopted
the baby.

After high school, Ellison enrolled at the University of Illinois, Champaign (1962), where he was
named science student of the year. During his second year, his adopted mother died, and Ellison
dropped out of college. The following fall, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, but he
dropped out after only one semester.

Ellison then packed his bags for Berkeley, California, with little money, and for the next decade
he moved from job to job at such places as Wells Fargo and Amdahl Corporation. Between
college and his various jobs, Ellison had picked up basic computer skills, and he was finally able
to put them to use as a programmer at Amdahl, where he worked on the first IBM-compatible
mainframe system.

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In 1977, Ellison and two of his Amdahl colleagues founded Software Development Labs and
soon had a contract to build a database-management system—which they called Oracle—for the
CIA. The company had fewer than 10 employees and revenue of less than $1 million per year,
but in 1981, IBM signed on to use Oracle, and the company’s sales doubled every year for the
next seven years. Ellison soon renamed the company after its best-selling product.

Oracle Corporation
In 1986, Oracle Corporation held its IPO (initial public offering), but some accounting issues
helped wipe out the majority of the company’s market capitalization and Oracle teetered on the

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brink of bankruptcy. After a management shakeup and a product-cycle refresh, however,
Oracle’s new products took the industry by storm, and by 1992 the company was the leader in
the database-management realm.

Success continued, and as Ellison was Oracle’s largest shareholder, he became one of the
wealthiest people in the world. Ellison set his sights on growth through acquisitions, and over the
next several years he gobbled up several companies, including PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and
Sun Microsystems, all of which helped Oracle reach a market cap of roughly $185 billion with
some 130,000 employees by 2014.

In 2014, Larry Ellison hit No. 5 on the list of the world's wealthiest people! And As
of March 2019, he was listed by Forbes magazine as the fourth-wealthiest person
in the United States and as the seventh-wealthiest in the world, with a fortune of
$66.1 billion, increased from $54.5 billion in 2018.

Success story:
From a college dropout to a $54 billion fortune — the incredible rags-to-
riches story of Oracle founder Larry Ellison!!!
As a child, Larry Ellison's adoptive father repeatedly told him he was good for nothing, according to
Fortune.

Today, Forbes estimates Ellison's net worth at $54 billion, making him the third-richest person in
the US.

Before he founded Oracle, the database software firm that made his fortune, Ellison grew up in a
working-class Chicago family.

"I was raised on the South Side of Chicago," he said in an oral history for the Smithsonian
Institution. "I remember Look Magazine called it the oldest and worst black ghetto in the United
States."

When Ellison was born in 1944, his mother was unmarried, according to a profile in Fortune.
She gave him to relatives to raise, and Ellison never met his biological father.

He dropped out of college twice — first from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
then the University of Chicago — before moving to California and working odd jobs.

In his oral history, he recalled, "I never took a computer science class in my life. I got a job
working as a programmer; I was largely self-taught. I just picked up a book and started
programming."

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When Ellison landed a programming job at Ampex Corporation, one of his responsibilities at the
company was building a database for the CIA, Business Insider's Madeline Stone notes. In 1977,
he and two coworkers left Ampex to start a database management company of their own.

Larry Ellison grew up in a working-class family in Chicago after his mother gave him to relatives to raise.
YouTube screenshot

Knowing that no one would want to take a risk on a brand new product, Ellison and his
cofounders chose not to label their first release "Version 1.0." 

"The very first version was Oracle Version 2," he admitted at a customer conference last year.

Their ploy worked. Oracle's first customer was a big one: the CIA. Their product later became
the most popular database ever sold. That success paid off for Ellison — according to the Wall
Street Journal, he was the highest-paid executive in the US before he stepped down as CEO in
2014.

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Ellison says his wealth is "surreal." Reuters But becoming a billionaire was never his goal, he told the
Smithsonian Institution, "When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where
I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never
expected to become rich, certainly not this rich."

Now 70, Ellison has a lifestyle that he could only have dreamed of during his working-class
Chicago childhood.

"This is all kind of surreal," he told Mike Wilson, the author of "The Difference Between God
and Larry Ellison." "I don't even believe it now. Not only did I not believe it when I was 14, but
when I look around, I say, this must be something out of a dream."

He has also given hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, particularly medical research and
education. He also says that he plans to give billions more.

Learnings from the life of Larry Ellison:

College degree not required

Ellison dropped out of college not just once, but twice, before moving to Northern California at age 22,
in 1966. Today that database is run by all of the world's biggest companies. Just about every time you
use a credit card, book an airline ticket, or get a prescription drug, Oracle has helped you do it.

A competitive spirit is the greatest motivator

Ask Ellison why he still comes to work every day — what drives him after all he's achieved —
and he'll tell you the same answer: he loves to compete.

"I'm addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win," he says.

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Be greedy
He was the highest-paid executive of the 2000s, with total compensation of $1.84 billion, CNBC reports.

Be generous
Larry Ellison has been called a closet philanthropist. When he signed the ‘Giving Pledge’ organized by
Gates and Warren Buffet, Ellison revealed that he planned to give billions of dollars to charity. This is
what he wrote:

Know how to break the rules

Ellison doesn't play by anyone's rules but his own.

The latest biggest example was the 2013 America's Cup.

After winning it in 2010, he was allowed to dictate the kind of boats to be raced in the next
championship. He chose an extremely fast, expensive but dangerous design. And a sailor died
during a training run when the boat capsized: British sailor and gold medal Olympian Andrew
"Bart" Simpson.

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Enjoy some smack talk

Before Larry Ellison, corporate CEOs were a mostly stodgy bunch who didn't publicly slam their
competitors.

Ellison raised corporate smack talk to a new level, never hesitating to discuss (and diss)
competitors during Oracle conferences, on quarterly calls with Wall Street analysts, even in ads.

Never stop growing

Ellison drove Oracle to be the world's biggest provider of database software, then he moved on
to dominate the business software industry, conducting one of the nastiest hostile take-overs in
tech history to do it, with his purchase of PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion.

A few years ago, he pushed Oracle again into new areas, the hardware business, by buying Sun
Microsystems (a company that didn't figure out how to reinvent itself).

Ellison taught the Valley that no matter how big you are, you only survive through reinventing
yourself.

Be a visionary
Larry Ellison is known as one of the tech industry's leading visionaries.

He was even instrumental in inventing the area of cloud computing known as software-as-a-
service, providing seed funding for Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

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Conclusion:
Leadership brings people and their efforts together to achieve organizational excellence. It is the
leader who extracts the best out of his employees and presents a victorious picture that crowns
all. The study has taken dive into the career and leadership style one of the most successful
leader named Larry Ellison. He is a prominent entrepreneur who has a multidimensional and
versatile capacity which helps him to gain a leading position in the software business sector. His
company ‘Oracle Corporation’ enjoys a dominant position in all the fields which it operates. He
believes in ‘Do what you love and change lives while you do it’. Oracle believes innovation
starts with inclusion and celebrate diversity. Oracle leverage their people and technology to help
change lives around the world. As Chairman of the Board and CTO Larry Ellison Said “Oracle
thrives because of the exceptional talent we have attracted.”

References:
https://www.business.qld.gov.au › employing › staff-development › leader
http://www.icmrindia.org/casestudies
https://www.biography.com/business-figure/larry-ellison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
https://www.businessinsider.com
https://payspacemagazine.com/tech/oracle-founder-larry-ellison-and-his-
secrets-for-success/
https://www.oracle.com

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