Calm, collected and credible. Kiran Karnik is the extinguisher of crisis the tech industry turns to
This happened in late January, 2009. It was one of those hundreds of conference calls that the besieged top team of Satyam Computers was having with customers extremely nervous about the breakout of a mega scandal. In most of the calls, the customers would either be very concerned or irate; sometimes both. It was surprising, then, to see one customer become rather chummy. “Kiran, how are you doing? You remember we met during the Nasscom meet at Mumbai? I am going to be travelling to India soon and so let us catch up. And yes, we’ll stay with Satyam, but we hope the quality of delivery doesn’t come down,” he said.
Fortunately, the Deepak Parekh factor worked and Satyam was able to get a loan of Rs. 600 crore to tide over the cash crunch. Once salaries were paid out, the employees became a little more comfortable. But many customers did not want the uncertainty. Coke pulled out. Cigna went away. Telstra said bye. One of the potential bidders for Satyam and a rival later admitted: “We thought “what’s the point of buying this company!” All the customers will desert it en masse.” And they would have. Except that Karnik and the senior management decided to do two things. One, they spoke repeatedly to every single customer and two, they had a daily call for about 100 managers of Satyam to monitor progress and also to solve any dicey problems they were up against.
(This story appears in the 08 January, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)