CP Gurnani aka CP, as he is known in the tech industry, never loses cool. Even in the midst of a crisis, the 57-year-old Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Tech Mahindra maintains the same composure as he does in a routine conversation. He played a crucial role, along with Vineet Nayar, in steering Satyam Computer Services out of the woods and absorbing it into the Tech Mahindra fold.
After resuscitating life into the dying Satyam Computer Services, he set a target of achieving $5-billion turnover for his one-lakh odd employees and introduced a system called Young CEOs. The task was tough to allay fears, to stay relevant and to make it to the Top-4 IT league.
In Hyderabad for Tech Mahindra’s annual MI16 (Mission Innovation 2016) conference that focused on robotics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and automation, Gurnani spoke on the challenges in transformation of the company, changing the culture to drive innovation and bring in “the agility of a start-up”.
“As we move on from the crisis, we have started two major initiatives – transforming the company from IT-led one to Digital-led one and Growth Factory to encourage innovative ideas within the company and outside,” Gurnani told
“The transformation process is not something easy to achieve. You need a leadership that needs to believe in the goal in order to make them encourage thousands of others to make that transformation. We have taken about 50 top leaders to California a few months ago. We have shown them how companies like Facebook and Google worked,” he said.
Gurnani, who wanted to bring in the “agility of a start-up” to the company, said it was important to “create that sense of aspiration”. “You need to bring that culture of innovation at the grassroots level,” he pointed out.
Real challenge“The real challenge is how you manage culture and how willing you are to disrupt at least part of your firm to encourage innovation. Culture comes from encouragement,” he said.
The Young CEO programme identified some young leaders that hold promise to lead future business growth areas. Through Growth Factory initiative, the firm has begun to invest and incubate start-up ideas. One of the initiatives Saral Rozgar has emerged the biggest database for blue-collar workers with over 60 lakh people registering their profiles.
“We have introduced stretch goals and encourage our employees to work towards those goals. For one, we have set the turnover stretch goal of $5 billion at a time we were trying to handle the Satyam crisis. We were almost there,” Gurnani said.
“You need to allow people to experiment. You need to allow people to fail in order to make them innovative. Somebody is willing to disrupt out there. How willing you are to allow that to happen hold the key,” he said.
“Leaders must set the example. You must let dreams of employees bloom by creating conducive environment,” he said.