Outsourcing: Tata Communications Interview (Part 6)

By guest author Tony Scott

Operating Across Cultures

Tony: You are working around the globe, dealing with enterprises and carriers around the globe. What are the issues that you have faced within your internal culture in terms of being able to deliver products and services on a global basis? Has that been a challenge for you?

Shridhar: I will give you the answer from two perspectives. One is in the acquisition of Teleglobe and what happened a few years ago in terms of the cultural integration of Teleglobe. The second is related to what we do now.

When Teleglobe was acquired, it was almost like a marriage of equals in terms of size. Both were billion-dollar companies, and in terms of revenues, people, and people profiles they are pretty high on the list.  So almost overnight the profile of the company changed to include a significant portion of our workforce who were based in North America.  What happened at the same time was that we were growing our business through targeting overseas companies.

Although we are an India-headquartered company and our brand is as an Indian company, even the most senior executives don’t have to be India passport holders. So our varied profile at the very senior executive level has helped us with the cross-cultural initiatives or cross-cultural operations that we undertake.  We have good representation of senior management from America, and we have good representation from Europe.  What that has helped us to do is to connect with our teams that are local that manage local relationships at the senior executive level from a customer point of view. The physical of delivery of services is largely India based, and those teams are split between Pune and Chennai. We have our own customer relationship people and salespeople in different regions who operate with local teams under the Tata umbrella.

Now, from the India delivery center perspective, we have had challenges in training these people to get them to stay aligned to our customers. What we have done is extended the customers’ environments into the delivery center here in India so that the customers’ operations are delivered pretty seamlessly. There is constant human resources intervention from the customer’s point of view, not only of explaining policies but also helping us to understand the local cultural dynamics with their customers. This is an ongoing exercise that happens on a quarterly basis on a smaller scale, and on a yearly basis on a larger scale. So there is a constant flow of what’s happening with customers’ environments or their working environments. In this way we know what’s happening in the cultural environment, too. We make a conscious effort to tell our own people that they should see themselves as customer employees, an extension of the customer’s organization. Of course we are governed by Tata Communication Transformation Services policies and our own career provisions and all that, but the way they should think and react to the customer’s situation is how to make that customer’s operation successful, so our alignment has to happen at the cultural level.

Tony: If you think about the next few years, what kinds of cultural skills do you think your organization will need for you to be really successful, from the senior management level all the way down? For people you have brought in from the outside, I would be curious to hear how you feel the transition is going, and why you felt comfortable making these kind of hires.

David: It was an interesting move for me to join because I had several other opportunities in U.S.-based firms, and this one was initially third on my list. What really got me over here was the people. Tata Group overall has a reputation in the market of higher end professional managers, and I think my peer group is not different from that of other companies. My boss was originally from India, he went to the United States, he has worked in France, he traveled around for multiple companies and lived in many countries. After living in the United States he lived in Japan for quite a while; he learned to speak Japanese. Then he was in Hong Kong and finally settled in Singapore. He is a very worldly person, and his profile is a lot like that of most of the senior executives in my peer group, which included multiple Americans and other nationalities in addition to Indians. So from a leadership team perspective, I think we follow through on our aspiration to be a global organization. Having an international process in the way we operate is a result of that. We are heavily influenced by being known as the Tata Group in India, so of course there are different expectations in the market in India. Sridhar has worked extremely well with his team through the approach he described about overcoming differences.

I would say that across the organization it comes down to focusing and paying attention to that aspect of it. Nothing about my opinion has changed in the few months that I have been with the company, and I would say it’s still the same assessment. The people here are great to work with; they are not myopic in their view of how to do things.  I think one of the things that really attracts people to this organization is that philosophy and being driven that way, from our CEO down.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Outsourcing: Tata Communications Interview
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