In my corporate career, I have been fortunate to be part of different kinds of IT businesses including start-ups. In the process, I have been involved in situations which required us to come up with solutions to business problems, most of them involving business policy decisions which changed the direction of the business most of the time. I would like to discuss some of the interesting ones for the benefit of everyone.
In one of my first jobs with a leading Indian IT services major, I was thrown into a situation where one of the US customer accounts in the Insurance sector (in the late 90s) was in trouble. When I landed there and had some initial informal conversations with the customer & our folks working there, I realized that the problem was on the customer side. As soon as the first set of folks from our company started working on their premises on-site, some of their employees had got laid off and the word had spread that these two are linked and more heads will roll. I had to work with the senior management on the customer side to ensure a clear message was sent across to all employees that the new IT contract has nothing to do with jobs being lost in other divisions. In fact, I convinced them to hold back some of the other layoffs till things stabilize. This ensured co-operation from the customer side for us to take over some of their IT functions while their employees focused on new application development. This account later went on to become one of the marquee customer accounts for the IT major in the BFSI segment. This is the best example how right messaging can change the whole game.
In one of my stints with a IT services startup started sometime before the dot-com burst, we were focused on one specific technology segment where we had a lot of expertise. When the dot-com bust happened and some of the customers pulled the plug on some projects, the founder-investor really panicked. He wanted to do 2 things. One, layoff some consultants and dilute the focus of the company to include all kinds of services. I had no problem with the first step, but argued that the second step would take away our USP and when things turn-around, we will be classified as yet-another-it-services-company and that can be disastrous. But the founder went ahead with his plan. The end-result was that most of the experts left the company and now, even after 10 years, it has not managed to grow even 10 times in revenue terms & is still a struggling IT services company. Had it stuck with the niche segment where the margins were higher & we had the best people on-board, the company could have done really well instead of being forced to compete with thousand other IT services companies as it is doing now.
In one of my later assignments with a venture capital firm, I had a mandate to come up with business ideas suitable for the India market. One such idea was to build a technology platform for preventive healthcare in India. For this to take off, having at-least one hospital chain as anchor was important as this requires feeding patient data into the platform. None of the leading hospital chains I talked to showed any interest in this idea. But, I later found out that Apollo Hospitals (whom I had approached) had started a similar venture. Another new startup called LifeMojo has also started operating in the same segment. This goes on to show that if you don't pursue your idea someone else surely will. Another idea that I had come up with was to have a SMS based GIS service on the mobile phone. This was in 2006 when there was no market for smart-phones in India. Some companies have started offering this service now. I could not pursue either of these ideas myself as my venture firm could not put the heavy upfront investment required for these content-intensive ventures.
In one of the subsequent jobs where I had a chance to head APAC for a valley-based telecom solutions startup, I realized how biased thinking can prevent someone from seeing the obvious. We had a development center in India and we had finalized channel-based selling strategy for the APAC region since we were too small for going solo. I had also generated some leads in the region. Suddenly we had the 2008 bust hitting us and the US market where we had all our business coming from, orders just vanished. At that time, I advised the top management that the APAC region is the one which is going to recover first and if we aggressively pursue the leads in this region. But, they went ahead and wind down the APAC operations which included the India development center. The company decided to focus on the US market only. The US market has still not recovered fully and Europe is not doing great either while APAC has surged ahead.
In summary, most of the so-called strategic decisions of companies are just simple changes in the way business is done and most of the time, companies end up making the wrong moves without seeing the obvious. The experiences I have shared is just a small sample of what really happens in the corporate world on a daily basis.
No comments:
Post a Comment