OPERATIONS
I magination can take you a long way. And why shouldn’ t it be an essential leadership skill? After all, it’ s never done Duncan Angove any harm. The Blue Yonder CEO still talks passionately about the power of imagination and its influence on his approach to business and leadership – even if the limits of that imagination have stretched from early adventures in coding as an excited 12 year old to running one of the world’ s most successful supply chain software companies. Of course, you can only get so far on imagination alone. And Angove has indeed gone far. Recognised as a strategic architect of enterprise scale, growth and transformation, his career has seen successful stints at the likes of Infor and Oracle, where he drove global expansion and industry leadership. Prior, as Chief Strategy Officer, he helped steer pioneering software company Retek’ s growth from US $ 13m to US $ 175m, overseeing a successful IPO and an eventual acquisition by Oracle. Angove joined Blue Yonder in 2022, embarking on a major strategic transformation journey to position the company as a unified, AI-driven cognitive platform. Here, he tells us what that journey looks like, why people and culture are at the heart of the evolution, and why superpowers are the ultimate secret weapon.
You’ ve said your own superpower is imagination, shaped by your childhood moving around the world. How did your early experiences influence your approach to leadership? My dad served in the Royal Air Force, so I left England when I was six months old and we lived all over the world, including the Far East and the Middle East, before I went back to England for university when I was 18. This was in the‘ 60s and’ 70s, when there weren’ t TV shows or video games like there are today, so I’ ve always had a very strong and active imagination. From a very early age I was into computers and coding. I loved that there was a blank screen with a flashing green cursor, and I could basically create anything – I was writing video games from the age of 12. Combined with my imagination, I was very lucky to live through multiple computing transitions, and I’ ve always loved the idea you can leverage technology and code to solve problems. Now I’ m at Blue Yonder, and I get to wake up every day and use my imagination to solve problems on behalf of retailers, manufacturers and logistics providers, reimagining the world of supply chain through the lens of AI and robotics. We’ re writing the AI transition in a unique space between what’ s happening in AI and what’ s happening in supply chain.
132 May 2026