Building An Indian Outsourcing Leader: MindTree CEO KK Natarajan (Part 2)

SM: Was your next professional step a move to Wipro?

KK: Yes. It was just starting, so I initially went off to Bangalore for a while before I returned to Chennai to open the office there. I was still not sure how Wipro was going to make an impact in the IT business. Since I was one of the first eight people to join that unit, it was very similar to doing a startup. I learned a lot. In the evenings I would write demo programs for customers and the next morning I would go and show them, which is when I turned into the sales guy. When a machine was delivered sometimes there would be problems, and in that case I would take the tools and go fix it.

SM: At the time Wipro was doing domestic business?

KK: Yes. It was only doing domestic business for the first ten years. There were two of us business school graduates who joined the IT business at the same time. It was a great experience.

SM: Doing all of these different functions is how you get the cross-functional experience. When you grow up in a very large company in a very small job, you simply do not develop.

KK: That is a good perspective. I think that at every stage of the organization leaders need to be bringing in customers. Starting off on that early gave me great experience. Even people who you have relationships with may not buy the product.

SM: It is essential to learn to sell. You have to sell yourself, credibility of your product, and credibility of your company.

KK: I did various things. After Chennai I went back to Bangalore to run operations there and then moved to Delhi. That was the region in trouble. It was a good experience because the organization was going nowhere. That is where I realized more of the angles of business. Pricing was the issue that needed to be sorted out.

SM: How did you deal with that?

KK: We picked up the National Institute of Informatics. The guy running it became a key influencer of government policies. I realized that over a period of time we needed to work with him. We brought him to Bangalore and asked him to evaluate us. He was a technical guy, so when he saw real work being done in our R&D and the capabilities we had he started supporting us. He started giving us requirements from the government.

There was a commercial enterprise business at the same time. There was enough business in the Delhi region to support non-government work and justify the office and its existence. I spent four years there and then returned to Bangalore. That was the time when Wipro was starting to look at IT hardware and software as a larger piece of the business. They created the IT Group, which looked at both aspects, and I came back to be the chief marketing officer for the IT Group. There was very little marketing in the software business. Instead we just had customers walking in every day telling us what they wanted us to do.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building An Indian Outsourcing Leader: MindTree CEO KK Natarajan
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