To go after big projects, you need to move people from their comfort zones, says Shanker Annaswamy
Name: Shanker Annaswamy
Profile: Managing Director, IBM India
Age: 56
Why He Won For transforming IBM’s India business and making it the nerve centre in servicing 174 local markets through its global delivery network. The telecom service model it pioneered for Bharti has become the de facto industry standard worldwide.
Barely two months after I joined, in July 2004, the first non-IBMer and non-IT person to lead IBM India, I had my first interaction with the chairman [Sam Palmisano]. He said he didn’t like what he saw in the systems and technology business with respect to market leadership position. He wanted us to get our due. Later that year, IBM made the announcement that it was selling its PC business to Lenovo. What happened then? A substantial portion of my business was gone. In that environment, the real challenge was to work on the mandate of market leadership. I think my general management skills and being a non-IBMer helped since I didn’t come with any historical knowledge or baggage; people saw a new style.
We realigned our business and targeted some sectors like telecom, banking, etc. We focussed on the referral side, new technologies, even leveraging the new platforms that IBM had released worldwide. The chairman came again in 2005. He was pleased with what we had done of course, but set fresh targets: “Why don’t you get overall market leadership in the country?” Remember, 70 percent of the market in India at that time was in services. He said, “If you do this, I’ll hold a big celebration in a cricket stadium.”
That was also the time when the delivery of the Bharti deal was on our hands. You know how the first year of any strategic relationship is critical. So, I decided to integrate all the core capabilities of IBM. We had Research Labs, working for the global market. We asked what they could do for India. Then we had Software Labs, working for the global platform. We decided to bring them to serve local clients like Bharti. By 2006, we had achieved market leadership.
[Palmisano kept his word and held the annual analyst meeting, the first ever outside the US, in June 2006 in Bangalore; not in a cricket stadium though, but in the sprawling Palace Grounds.]
For me, market leadership in India is important because we are partnering with clients who are transforming their business. It wasn’t a traditional outsourcing deal, a vendor-supplier relationship, but real partnership and it held true for Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Cadbury, Eureka Forbes and others. For MNCs, market is important no doubt, but often the India market turns out to be very small. The excitement at the headquarters comes not just with size and growth, but also the pace of growth; your innovative technologies and business models that can be replicated elsewhere.
For that, I had to overcome another challenge — of business leadership. So, I created a forum called India Leadership Forum. I used to take top 100 leaders from different business groups who in their normal routine jobs wouldn’t be talking to each other. For instance, a software lab guy wouldn’t know the challenges in the domestic market and vice-versa. For three days, I’d keep these folks together tied to various activities including a full day session with renowned business academicians from all over the world and an outdoor event. This bonded them well. I also gave them cross-functional projects, those that would impact India or global business. They had to then present it before a panel of leaders and explain how they’d move the needle.
All this integrated the team. They stopped viewing IBM India from their verticals’ point of view. This helped us go after big projects like the Indian Railways for which we developed and deployed the crew management solution. Subsequently, big global capabilities became available for local use.
Such people-development programmes were necessary; you can’t run business leadership without people leadership. This was particularly significant during my early days of joining IBM. The Lenovo transition was difficult for many of my colleagues, who had to report to other locations. That had to be handled in a certain way. Moreover, when I took over, the speed with which we moved was nothing short of a blitzkrieg. That meant moving many people from their comfort zones and getting used to my style. (I am an in-your-face type of a guy, always pushing and challenging.) Because of IBM’s values and ethics, we stayed away from a lot of business, but we still had to grow. Additionally, there was this fear that India was so hardware-centric, what were we going to do in services?
But we proved many fears wrong. Nothing succeeds like success, they say. We closed many big deals with tremendous support from the global team. I remember in 2005, the media used to ask me: “When is your next Bharti [type deal]?” By 2006-07, we had replicated the Bharti deal with Idea Cellular and Vodafone and now we have expanded all of them beyond their initial mandate.
After consolidating business and people leadership, came the act of aligning the two to the national agenda. This is uppermost on my mind as well as on IBM’s strategy. It’s not philanthropy; society sits right at the intersection of technology and business and opportunities are ripe today. This also allows employees to connect with the company so that they don’t think they are working just for a multinational. Our entry into several infrastructure projects such as in banking, NSDL [National Securities Depository], CBDT [Central Board of Direct Taxes], Delhi-Bangalore-Mumbai international airports, etc. provided the evidence.
(This story appears in the 04 November, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)