Building An Indian Outsourcing Leader: MindTree CEO KK Natarajan (Part 3)

SM: For how long were you chief marketing officer?

KK: I held that position from 1992 to 1993. By 1995 I had moved into an operating role. For those two years, I felt that when the local brand had dropped that there was no big meat in that role. That is when I received an interesting opportunity. HR is typically an internal function and is badgered by all of the business guys. However, we clearly thought it would be an important role in the software business, and it was true.

That was probably the most interesting part of my career in Wipro. We had 800 people in software and the plan was to expand to 4,000. The issues of attracting top talent, engaging them, and showing your ability to retain and attract top talent were great challenges.

SM: What did you do to meet those challenges?

KK: We recognized that we needed to increase the diversity of our workforce. We did a lot of things to increase the number of women in our workforce. We started by targeting women on campuses. We created special policies accordingly.

Although we had need for a technical workforce, there was also a lot of business need. For the first time we started recruiting analysts from campus. These are people who had the capability to be customer-oriented and be put in customer-facing positions. We taught them all of the basics of domestic sales and had them serve in those types of roles as well. Ten years later it is likely that 70% of them are in key sales leadership positions.

SM: This takes us up to the mid to late 90s?

KK: I was in that role until 1997, when I moved on to start a business. I was recognizing that e-commerce was becoming a big thing, so I took on the role to start the e-commerce practice. It grew well for two years and then it crashed. Wipro started a financial practice in 1998 and later started other practices like data warehousing. At that time I was starting to realize the potential of labor arbitrage.

I was sensing that over a period of time it would get commoditized as well. I thought there was something new we could accomplish in e-commerce by allowing companies to take aspects of their business online. What I was sensing is that people recognized our technical ability but not our ability to understand their business.

I realized there was an opportunity to do something different from what the services companies were doing. I wanted to be focused on a specific area. I want to have people who understand the local business and the local market. I figured if we could marry a solution along with that, we would have a viable business.

SM: Is that what ultimately emerged as MindTree?

KK: Yes, that is the genesis of MindTree.

SM: Could you describe the landscape in India?

KK: It was in June of 1998 when we started thinking about it. We did strategy for about seven to eight months, then we decided we had to go talk to people. I had built some good contacts by that time, and I ended up talking to some people at Goldman Sachs, and a few others. Everyone said it was a great idea but that success was going to lie in the execution.

One of the key things is about startups is that people try to be a superhero and do everything themselves. What limits entrepreneurs is when they do not know what they don’t know. The key is to know what you do not know and bring in the right talent to supplement your ability and treat that person as an equal partner.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building An Indian Outsourcing Leader: MindTree CEO KK Natarajan
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