The holding-company shift: functional group management (2016)

Building the vessel first

What sets this decision apart is that it was not a reorganization forced by crisis: at a time when the core business was highly profitable, Future deliberately moved its main business into a subsidiary and remade the parent into a holding company. By giving up the business it had built itself and letting the parent become a pure vessel for bundling functions, it could later take in each acquired company on its own standalone books. The order of things — arranging the vessel first rather than swelling the contents first — is what let the parent serve as a receptacle for diversification.

Yet even with a vessel in which to line up functions, the two-layer structure — profits pooling in the IT-consulting core — remained. How far the peripheral businesses can be grown into pillars of earnings, and how much the design of cross-combining functions against each management problem actually turns into results, are things still to be judged, inside the next choices: the concentrated investment in generative AI, and the 2026 succession from the founder. Recasting a single business into group management can be seen as a choice that placed that question at the centre of management early.