Michael Fagan steps down as chief transformation officer at Village Roadshow

Michael Fagan, chief transformation officer at Village Roadshow has stepped down from his role since being at the helm for a little over three years.

Speaking to Digital Nation exclusively, he said one of the factors for leaving Village Roadshow was completing all of the major transformation work on the board agenda. 

“A key value of the chief transformation officer (CTO) role is to help the existing executive team leap from running the legacy organisation to leading the new future-focused one. It will always be a temporary or fixed-term role,” Fagan explained.

“While improvement must always be made you can’t be running significant transformation across the whole organisation forever.”

Fagan said he rebuilt the IT, analytics, and digital functions with new leadership and teams.

“[I] completely transformed the IT network to full SASE SDWAN, migrated SAP to AWS cloud, moved head office, opened some new concepts. Major pieces of work that are once-in-a-decade thing,” he said.

“In my time at Village, we employed a new group CFO, new general counsel, new CHRO, new CIO and completely rebuilt several functions. The leaders of those units are in place and have been running their new functions for some time with ever-decreasing support from me.”

Fagan said at Village Roadshow there will not be a new chief transformation officer.

“The new leaders of the Finance, Legal, IT, and HR functions will run their own change and improvement programs as required, but not to the level of change that we saw in the past three years,” he said.

Fagan said when done right, the chief transformation officer is a “hands-on role” that gets things done in the short term while bringing a depth of experience and future orientation to the executive table.

“If this is what you need, then do it, and make sure you hire someone who isn’t afraid to roll up their sleeves – I had no problem cleaning the floor in the cinema, unloading a truck, or doing an overnight shift to see how and why we did stocktake,” he said.

“However, there was a wealth of expectations on my shoulders – this is a role that needs to deliver, fast and big changes. Employing a CTO and then not changing anything is worse for morale than just doing nothing.”

During his tenure at Village Roadshow, Fagan said he learned that people are the hardest part of change but the one factor that will make or break transformation.

“My role evolved from enforcing governance and dramatically cutting costs initially to laying the foundations for new revenue streams, and building a culture of discipline and execution that would outlast me and live beyond my tenure,” he said.

“I was trying to transform the company to be competitive in the new landscape post-Covid, and I leave after having delivered a record financial result. Village is in good shape for the future if the remaining executives continue to execute as well as last year.”

Fagan said he is looking forward to a break in the short term and volunteering in his local community centred around education and sports-related activities.  

For his next business move, Fagan said he wants to end up in a role that encompasses a “significant business component and customer focus”

“I would be just at home in a COO or CEO role as I would be in CIO,” he said.  

“In particular I like what I read about Ross McEwan at NAB. There is a massive opportunity in financial services to accelerate delivery, lift digital innovation, and unlock the data and business processes that are buried in the major banks like NAB and ANZ to lift customer outcomes and deliver billions of dollars in shareholder value.”