295 Laura Bonamici - Round Two - Former Global Head of Marketing, Fujitsu

Laura Bonamici - Former Global Head of Marketing, Fujitsu "Leadership is increasingly an act of translation." "The role of leadership was not to force speed, it was to create the conditions where speed could emerge." "Perfection was never the problem, but waiting for it was." "You become geographically global, but you're remaining intellectually domestic." "Ultimately, what you leave behind is that beating heart, and you leave that through people."   Laura Bonamici is the former Global Head of Marketing for Fujitsu and spent four years in Japan helping lead major transformation within one of the country's best-known technology companies. Born and raised in Sardinia, Italy, she built her career almost entirely outside her home country. After completing university, she moved to the United Kingdom, then Germany and eventually Japan. She describes her career as one of "leading away from home", repeatedly operating as an outsider who must understand a new environment while still delivering organisational results. Her original assignment in Japan was expected to last around 18 months, but the scale and complexity of the transformation extended her stay to four years. During that period, Fujitsu was pursuing an ambitious mid-term plan and expanding its Uvance digital services portfolio, with marketing playing an important role in the company's transformation. Japan ultimately forced Bonamici to question leadership approaches that had previously worked successfully elsewhere. The experience strengthened her belief that effective global leadership depends upon understanding context, translating between different perspectives and bringing people with you through change.   Laura Bonamici's lessons about leadership in Japan begin somewhere unexpected: mushroom hunting in Sardinia. As a teenager, she would accompany her father into the woods at six o'clock in the morning. It did not matter how late she had stayed out the previous night. If she had promised to go, she was expected to be standing at the door on time. The first lesson was trust: if people cannot rely on your word, nothing else works. Her father also taught her not to rush into the woods searching for mushrooms. First, they stopped, crouched down and allowed their eyes to adjust to the colours, light and patterns around them. The lesson she later carried into leadership was equally simple: without understanding context, people often cannot see what is actually there. Her four years leading transformation in Japan brought those childhood lessons back into focus. Bonamici describes modern leadership as an "act of translation". She is not referring simply to translating Japanese into English or vice versa. Leaders must translate contexts, perspectives and competing realities so that people can understand what change means and move forward together. One of the biggest tensions she encountered was stability versus speed. Japanese organisations possess formidable strengths in structure, process, alignment, consistency and execution. Yet technology cycles are shortening, AI has become a standard copilot and markets can change in months rather than years. Simply demanding greater speed from a system designed around careful execution can generate resistance. Bonamici instead created protected spaces where small cross-functional teams could experiment, learn and make mistakes. Speed was not imposed on the wider organisation. New approaches were tested, demonstrated and then scaled. Communication also required recalibration. Important ideas were often shaped through relationships, trust and smaller conversations rather than created inside large meetings. Small groups could explore ideas before larger forums validated decisions and accelerated implementation. The second tension was precision versus progress. Japan's commitment to quality encourages organisations to get things right before moving. Transformation, however, often requires learning while moving. In Fujitsu's marketing application of AI, Bonamici did not dismiss legitimate concerns about governance, accuracy and risk. Her team started with focused, lower-risk use cases and made the learning visible. The question gradually moved from "Is this perfect?" towards "What are we learning and how can we improve it?" A third tension involved global ambition versus local reality. Bonamici describes what she calls "Japan-to-Japan gl