When Rick Belluzzo came into his position as head of Quantum Corp. in 2002, the company was at a point where it had to transform itself into something new.
“The hard drive business had been sold, and we had a number of businesses under a tremendous amount of pressure from the dynamics of technology,” he says. “That was the challenge — where were we going to take the company to make us be successful?”
He decided fairly quickly that the company had to transition from a device-focused OEM company to a storage systems company focused on backup recovery and archive segments of the storage industry.
“Part of your job as a leader, which is especially true in technology, is getting on the right side of gravity,” the chairman and CEO says. “There are certain things you do that just seem to work. Forces around you are helping you succeed, and the opposite is also true — when you’re pursuing something that’s just an uphill battle. Part of driving your strategy is making sure you get into a position where you’re not working against gravity — the gravity is working for you.”
That’s the biggest challenge he had to tackle as a result of Quantum’s position in product segments that were going against gravity.
“We can fight all day long to try and stop it, and no matter how good we were, that working against gravity was really a problem,” Belluzzo says. “We spent a lot of time getting ourselves in an opposite position where we’re in markets that are growing, we’re in technologies we know how to do, there are a number of things that are working for us, and we talk about that a lot. I often ask when we’re facing a business problem, ‘How much of this is gravity working for us or against us, versus we’re just not performing well?’
“No matter how good you are and how experienced you are, if you’re working in a situation that is against the laws of physics, as a leader, you’re responsible to not just fight that, but you’re also responsible to get your business and your team working so the gravity is working for you instead of against you.”
He led the company through a number of changes, and by 2006, Quantum was still under tremendous pressure. But that didn’t stop Belluzzo from borrowing $500 million to complete an acquisition.
“That really was the watershed moment in terms of getting us to where we are today,” he says. “We were struggling up to that point, and we had to do something big. This was it.”
Here’s how he used the acquisition to move Quantum forward.
