Teaching English to MNC Workforces: GlobalEnglish CEO Deepak Desai (Part 1)

Deepak Desai is the president and chief executive officer of GlobalEnglish Corporation. Deepak has over 20 years of financial and operating experience, most notably with Time Warner. From 1995 to 1999, he served as general manager and CFO for Time Life Asia, managing the children’s education, ESL, and direct marketing businesses. He holds a B.S. in commerce from the University of Bombay and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

SM: Deepak, tell me about yourself. Who are you and where do you come from? Tell us about your journey.

DD: My journey has taken me where I need to be. I am doing what I was meant to do. I was born in India and grew up in Bombay. I came to the United States in the early 1980s and did my MBA. I was always fascinated by the media business, so I went to work for Time Warner. That was the old Time Warner, which was Time magazine. The company changed over time.

SM: What did you do there?

DD: I worked on the financial side. At that time we had a good business, but today it is a difficult business. At that time there was plenty of advertising for print. It was an old, traditional company. After the merger with Warner it became a different company. The Turner and AOL mergers completely changed it.

I spent eight years in New York in various financial positions. The opportunity came for me to go to Asia. The four years I spent in Singapore, I was in the education business. In the United States we had Time Life books as well as some radio business. In Asia it was primarily an education business. It was primarily children’s education based on encyclopedias, science, and math books, as well as English books. There was a Time Life series of books about history and geography. They were not textbooks, but they were engaging and educational to children.

We also had English language materials, which consisted of books and CD ROMs. Disney has a similar business in Asia. In Asia, parents love to spend on their children. Math and English are the two skills that are really big. Our model was in some ways an encyclopedia sales model. They were door-to-door sales. That died down in the United States.

From that experience, I understood that English learning was an aspiration business. When people learned English, it would change their lives. It was not just the money that people paid, but the passion and fervor that they had. That was from 1995 through 1999. I left around the time the AOL merger happened.

SM: Why did you leave Time Warner?

DD: I left to go work for a dot-com. I knew that the Internet was going to change everything. Even at Time Warner we were trying to figure out how to take things to the next level. It is much harder for established companies to make that switch.

SM: When you were doing the education business in Asia, were you still doing finance?

DD: I had an operational role and was the general manager. It was fascinating because we had businesses all over Asia and the headquarters did not even know what we were doing. It was about a $40 million business, and in many ways was like a startup. It was also one of the most profitable businesses Time Warner had.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Teaching English to MNC Workforces: GlobalEnglish CEO Deepak Desai
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