TECH
MUSIC TO ORACLE’S EARS
ADVICE FOR FUTURE LEADERS FROM ALEXIS LANGAGNE Communicate Succinctly: Use “straightforward, short, summarized communications, either verbal or written. I think that’s really important.”
Alexis Langagne, vice president of operations for North America, believes communications, analytical and changeagent skills are critical Neil Cotiaux
Be Both Analytical and Operational: “You’re going to be exposed to tons of information but you need to have analytical capabilities to have insights. … Then you need to not only make decisions, but execute actions based on that.”
Jesse Nogales
March 6th, 2018 in Plano, TX
Be Able to Promote Change: “I think being able to not only introduce but embrace change … that can make you very successful, because basically you just stay focused and you push for the right things that you know will be prevalent in the future.”
G
rowing up in Mexico City, Alexis Langagne had his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds. The son of an architect father and psychologist mother, Langagne seemed smart from the start. At the same time, he felt compelled to listen to his musical muse. So Langagne took up the drums at age 6 while attending a Montessori-style school. “I used to practice with, you know, wastebaskets and whatever tool was available at home,” he remembers. And practice made perfect. As he breezed through academics, graduating from high school at 16, his parents acquiesced to their son’s creative urge and arranged to have him study with internationally renowned drummer Al Lopez. “But I had to practice between six and eight hours a day,” Langagne says. “And then I had a rock band.” But a “left brain, right brain” dichotomy eventually saw him drifting away from music to pursue a physics-engineering degree at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. “I was completely passionate,” he says, just as he was with music. “I was very curious to learn about the corporate world, and that’s how I started my career in the information technology industry,” he explains. Over the past quarter-century, Langagne, now 49, has moved among companies 28 LATINO LEADERS MARCH / APRIL 2018
Embrace Other Cultures: “During my childhood years and teenage years, we’d have people in at my home from all over the world. … I never would have thought that was going to be so important in my career.”
(IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle); regions (Latin America, Asia-Pacific and North America); and disciplines (sales, marketing, operations and strategic planning) and earned an MBA along the way. He’s convinced that his years as a musician instilled in him a greater power of concentration while his immersion in the sciences allowed him to deal with technological change more readily – two qualities that helped him succeed in a series of assignments culminating in his current role as Vice President of Operations for North America at Oracle.
About 18 months ago, Langagne says, he realized that he wanted to work for a company committed to innovation “where the cloud and all the digital transformation trends are going, and I thought Oracle was a fantastic company,” he says. His transition to Oracle was helped along by a former boss at Hewlett-Packard who was already on board. “The cloud basically eliminates, pretty much, barriers for any type of technology to be offered in the market,” Langagne says, and Oracle’s global business units enable the company to provide industry-