Revisiting MindTree I

(September 1, 2003 – Businessworld)

Subroto Bagchi

How the software start-up got its tenth co-founder, its first office and its first order.

On 18 August 1999, nine of the most high-profile names in the Indian IT industry including Ashok Soota and Subroto Bagchi announced the formation of software start-up MindTree. Businessworld carried an exclusive first-person account by co-founder and vice-chairman Bagchi of how the company was conceptualised, formed and funded ('Setting Up MindTree', BW, 6 September 1999 and 'Setting Up MindTree-II', BW, 13 September 1999). Four years later, we revisit MindTree to see how they survived 9/11 and all the rest. This time Bagchi writes how the company has progressed. Like last time, this time, too, the story will be carried in two parts in two successive issues. (For the 1999 story on MindTree log on to www.businessworldindia.com)

The tenth co-founder

On the morning of 19 August 1999, we went to work still recovering from the heady feeling from the launch of MindTree the night before. The events of that evening had signalled a perfect start for the company.

First, we had a press meet in the morning that was so well attended by both print and electronic media that there was not even standing room. On the occasion, we showed a hastily put together film based on the first part of the 'Making of the MindTree'. The high point of the 22-minute film by TMG was the shot showing children of the Spastic Society of Karnataka at work, painting their renditions of our logo depicting imagination, action and joy.

As the camera focussed on 17-year-old Chetan explaining his work with the help of anothe child, everyone watching the film choked with emotion. Chetan is autistic, people did not understand what he was saying. Another boy who had a different form of cerebral palsy, but could speak, interpreted what Chetan was saying. He explained through his friend and interpreter that the blue upward stroke he painted represented imagination and the yellow dots around it joy.

The next day, the story of MindTree and how its logo was created made waves across India. There wasn't a newspaper that did not have us on the front page. For the first time, a corporate organisation had entrusted its visual identity in the hands of a group of differently able children who had no idea about brand and visual identity.

After the launch that morning, in the evening we had a get-together at the Taj Residency in Bangalore. It was attended by Azim Premji of Wipro and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys Technologies among other IT industry people. One man deliberately left out of the invitee list was S. Janakiraman (Jani), the then president of Wipro's Global R&D.

Jani and I had worked together in Global R&D. After I moved out from Global R&D as its first chief executive, Jani took over and, by 1999, grew it from 600 people to 1,400. We worked like the left and the right hand of the organisation. When I left Wipro to join Lucent, Jani was heartbroken. While contemplating the making of MindTree, the founders never thought of asking him to join in as he was considered to be doing too well for himself. KK (Krishna Kumar), Partha (N.S. Parthasarathy), Kalyan (Banerjee) and I had worked closely with him as had Ashok, whom Jani was reporting to until Ashok left Wipro.

Sometime in July, as the news of Ashok's leaving Wipro got around, Jani was devastated. There was no way he would stay on at Wipro. After a few rounds of discussion, it was settled that he would be our tenth co-founder, a fact that could not be made public on 18 August, when Part I of the 'Making of the MindTree' was released. Wipro was still working on the modalities of retaining Jani or letting him go. So he was not a part of the gathering the night before.

Jani was born to a village postmaster in Tamil Nadu in 1957. His father was a man of little means but with a burning desire to see his son get the best possible education. That ambition conflicted with his frequent transfers to places that did not offer good education. So, he kept his wife and children in a place where the schooling was good and chose to travel alone to wherever work took him. In order to afford the two establishments, he would not rent a house in his place of posting. Instead, when the village post office (usually a mud hut) closed, he just slept there. Every bit helped to save up and finally Jani earned a Master's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras and joined Wipro as an R&D engineer.
When Jani came on board, his moving out of Wipro caused serious and understandable concern in the minds of Wipro's top management. As we grew, contrary to the fear in some quarters, we did not turn out to be a "Wipro shop". Our desire was to build something ground up.

We started with T.G.C. Prasad, Amit Agrawal, Erik Mann and Joseph King. Prasad was implementing SAP for PricewaterhouseCoopers' clients. A mechanical engineer with a diploma in human resource management from the Tata Institute of Social Studies, Prasad had topped his batch and taken up a career in HR. Then he had moved to sales and had gone on to Singapore before switching to software development. My eye had been on him for a long time and after a quick round of discussions, we settled the case for him to set up our People Function. We needed an unusual individual who could bring in both the consulting view and hands-on experience to the job and Prasad fit the bill perfectly.

Amit Agrawal was raised in New York City by his immigrant parents and he went to school at Rutgers. Though his original ambition was to study music, he ended up majoring in computer science. Anjan discovered Amit at Cambridge as a "hot shot" technical architect who was what we called "MindTree material". I met him over lunch in New Jersey and expected that I would have to do a sell job to get Amit to take the plunge. In yet another happy move, life presented Amit to us on a silver platter. No questions, no issues. Amit was subsequently chosen as MindTree Mind of the Year in 2001, our highest internal recognition.

Then came Erik Mann. Schooled at Princeton, flying cross-country gliders at US National Championships, Erik gained great experience at Health Management Systems and then at Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP). Erik designed eExpress, our methodology for e-business implementation, led our delivery team in Avis and then set up our healthcare vertical in 2003.

Scott Staples brought in Joseph King as vice-president of marketing. Joe and Scott had worked together in Cap Gemini and at Cambridge, and Joe got the marketing act off the ground pretty fast, setting up our direct marketing efforts, putting in place relationships and, finally, taking on additional responsibility for our People Function in the US.

One position that remained open for a long time was head of finance. Ashok saw dozens of candidates and it was difficult to convince him on anyone. He was very clear about wanting to take a young person whom he could personally groom. Additionally, the incumbent had to be able to take the white heat of Ashok's proximity day in and day out. After a long search, we finally found Venkat (N. Venkatraman) from Andersen (long before the Enron scandal, thank you...).

Shortly afterwards, we recruited Vishweshwar Hegde from Motorola as our head of quality. Vishu, as he is better known, was part of the team that set up the world's first Six Sigma facility for Motorola and had both a manufacturing and a service view of quality. When not working, he plays many instruments, acts and can even walk on his hands!

The vision of MindTree was to build two specialisation areas. On the enterprise side, we wanted to provide e-business consulting and implementation. On the tech side, we wanted to provide product realisation services in the networking domain. The former was to be headed by KK and the latter by Jani. Jani put together his team with outstanding people like Vinod Deshmukh, Sharmila Saha, S.N. Padmanabhan, C. Balu, Vilas Bhade Ram Chandran and Raja Shanmugam. While Balu came from Novell and Vilas from Philips, Vinod, Sharmila, Ramachandran, Padmanabhan and Raja had been with Jani in Global R&D. On the enterprise side, we were lucky to get outstanding people like Siva Vajjhala, Babuji Abraham and R.K. Veeraraghavan from CTP, Verifone and Wipro, respectively. We were all set.

In Somerset, New Jersey, Scott, Anjan and Kamran opened the bank account, won the first customer engagement, and settled on a small office space at the same time as we did in Bangalore. We did not have a customer engagement in India yet. That was to come later.

In Bangalore, knowing that it would take us a while to create space and fix it up, we readily took up an offer from V.G. Siddhartha of Sivan Securities, later renamed Global Technology Ventures (GTV), to use an office space he had bought with the idea of eventually furnishing it and using it himself. The office had all of 14 tables, but it was a Godsend. The place came with a phone line and we finally had a mailing address! Though the place was as just about as big as Ashok's presidential corner office at Wipro, it felt good. What brought special warmth was the joining of Latha as our receptionist.

Latha was one of the 10 children at the Spastic Society of Karnataka who had painted for us along with Chetan. She was born with a form of palsy that took away the use of her legs. Her truck-driver father had given her away to a convent, where the nuns raised her. Latha had a great smile and we said to ourselves, 'Why not take her as our receptionist'. She joined us on Day One. Today, she runs our front office.

First customers are patron saints

While all this was happening, KK moved to the US to help get the operations set up on the e-business side. Jani took on the task of putting together the technology team. It was settled that Ashok and I would divide common functions between us. It was also settled that we would start offering our services for the India geography as well and I took up that task, in addition to my responsibilities of people function, marketing and infrastructure-building. Ashok was directly overseeing quality, information systems and finance.

But job No. 1 was landing new business. Though we were born in the boom time of the Internet, the streets had to be pounded and we needed some luck there. When you leave behind your corporate success and start something anew, you leave behind everything you stood for. However large the halo of the past may have been, it is removed faster than you think. That is a transition that takes many people off-guard. Fortunately, we had no qualms about it. We were ready to pound the pavements.

More than our brave attitude, what made the difference was the willingness of the first few customers who gave us their business. Every new company that succeeds does so on the strength of a few such sponsors and no amount of business planning ever replaces their contribution. They appear from nowhere, give you business for no explainable reason and seldom claim a return on their disproportionate contribution.

The first major breakthrough in the US came from Lucent. A man named Rod Trombly knew Scott, Anjan, Kamran and Amit and had the fullest confidence in them. No one else could articulate the architectural problem he was battling with as well as this team could and we got the job. What started as a $300,000 project grew to a million plus account. To Rod, it did not matter that we were less than 50 people who had a two-room office in which the furniture was yet to be assembled.

Equally unbelievable was how we won Avis. Joe made a direct call to newly-appointed CIO Larry Kinder. In what must be one of the rarest of rare occasions, he took the call, liked the story, gave us an appointment and we were there - driving a requirement definition workshop for a dozen Avis executives who had differing views on what Avis.com should be. That eventually led to greater than $7 million in business over three years and, in the process, we completely rearchitected Avis.com. In 2002, the new Avis.com accounted for 11% of their total car reservations. In 2003, that number keeps moving in the right direction. Intrigued by how a Fortune 500 customer chose a no-name consulting firm, a TV show, Business-Now, ran a four-minute report on us on ABC's Channel 7.

While Avis was beginning to take shape in the US, one day we received an unexpected visit from a Chuck Johnson, co-president of Franklin Templeton Investments, and its CIO Allen Gula. Both were on a visit to India and were doing the big company routine when GTV's Siddhartha suggested that they meet MindTree. They agreed and, when they did stop by, Chuck and Al were intrigued by our culture and went back to suggest to Richard Preece and Sandeep Bhatia in their IT Department that they give us a try. Richard and Sandeep were in the process of collapsing 36 huge but disparate applications into one and their vision was to make it fully available on the Internet so that Franklin Templeton could connect its 10,000 customer service representatives and end users all over the world. Sandeep, himself an ex-PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant, keeps high standards for himself and for those who work for him. What followed from that point on was a long relationship and we built Franklin Templeton's global website. At its peak, the project had close to a hundred MindTree Minds working 24/7 across two continents.

When Franklin Templeton gave us the job, they did not ask us if we knew the mutual fund industry. They were not worried about whether we would be around a year later. They had faith in the people of MindTree, something that Sandeep talked to me about long after we completed the assignment.

In India, our first customer was Fabmart. V.S. Sudhakar was already up and running with Fabmart by the time we opened shop. His current service provider was not scaling up and he handed over his site to us.

Then came Hindustan Lever. As we were getting started, Ashok walked in one day and declared: "We must do business with Levers." When Ashok says something, he means what he says. The same day, he wrote to Keki Dadiseth, the then chairman of Hindustan Lever, who sent the mail to HLL finance director D. Sundaram. He was at that time putting together a team with the charter to e-enable HLL as part of its millennial initiatives. Sundaram asked us to meet K. Ramesh, who had just moved from their culinary business to steer this team. In Ramesh's Brookfield Office, when colleague Puneet Jetli and I stood to present MindTree, we were aware of how small and naked we were. What if Ramesh asked for case studies and customer references? What if he asked us to show ISO certification and process maturity?

Ramesh asked us none of these questions. He said he had read about the Making of MindTree in Businessworld and admired us for who we were. He did say that since we were industry veterans, he had some doubts on whether we would be able to roll up our sleeves and become hands-on. But he also said that the names behind MindTree were associated with unimpeachable integrity. So, he would go with us. From what started as a one-day engagement with their mid-level managers to educate them on e-business basics, we grew to build a big business in e-integration, data warehousing and supply chain management in India, China, Japan, South-east Asia and Australia.

MindTree House is built...

While customer acquisition was happening at a fast pace, we needed to build physical infrastructure - the office lent to us by Siddhartha was, after all, only good for 14 people. So, we all looked around and settled for a lease of a new structure that the Brigade Group of Bangalore was constructing. It was a bare concrete structure.

We decided to name it "MindTree House 1" and approached old friend and architect Prem Chandavarkar of Chandavarkar and Thakkar to design the interiors. We gave him the theme of 'imagination, action and joy' - our DNA - to be depicted in the design and execution of the interiors. In the final stages, we decided that while imagination and action were adequately reflected in the décor, the place lacked joy. So Prem roped in Sujata Keshavan, the Yale-educated founder and designer of Ray+Keshavan - a design house from Bangalore. We requested her to use the art of children with cerebral palsy and blend it with digital design to create an unusual workplace. The result was magical.

The friendship with Prem and Sujata endured through the years and we worked together in creating two more facilities in Bangalore. When The New York Times wrote a cover story on MindTree, their photograph showed the brilliant interior created with the work of differently able children in all its glory and the headline read "A Different Kind of Company". Business India magazine adjudged MindTree facilities as one of the best in the industry. We built them with great affection, but at prices that were significantly lower than market costs.

These facilities ran like clockwork, thanks to a man called Abraham Moses.

Moses was born to a lower middle-class Christian family from Tamil Nadu. After high school, he enlisted in the Indian Air Force. After his first day in boot camp, he realised that it was not his place and literally ran away. After many twists and turns of fate, he came to Wipro as an "office boy" - a term he severely disliked. For him, running errands was not the problem; earning respect was the issue. When I took over as chief executive of Wipro's Global R&D, Moses and I struck up a great relationship. To me, running a Six Sigma infrastructure was the precursor of writing Six Sigma code. I respected him for how he kept the facility spick and span.

Moses and I had a pact. If ever I started something on my own, he would have to take care of the administration and facilities. In a subsequent interview to a magazine, Moses recalled that when I actually gave the call to arms, he had no clue what MindTree's business was going to be and what his role was going to be. He just joined.

People who demonstrate high emotional security build organisations. They have stuff in them from which faith derives its strength. It is what gives people courage to take on impossible tasks and accomplish extraordinary things in life.

Is it about culture, or is it about values?

One of the important rites of passage for a young company has nothing to do with business. It has to do with culture. In MindTree, we were trying a create a next generation company that would work business backwards - blending high-calibre "local-feel" consulting with the discipline of offshore software development. The two are inherently different animals. No doubt, the world was comfortably perched on the dichotomy between on-site and offshore software development and here was MindTree saying it was possible to forge a concept we coined internally as "OneShore". The teams that came together on the platform of that promise also brought excess baggage from their pasts. The more successful teams are in their past lives, the larger the baggage becomes. The challenge very often is not in dealing with people's inabilities, but in dealing with overly capable people. That was beginning to happen to us.

The consulting world works in a 'business-backward' manner - many among us who came from the software development world were more comfortable working in a 'technology-forward' manner. The style of the consulting folks was one of authority and confidence, with the ability to articulate and be upfront. Consultants demonstrated high physical and mental energy. In their interactions, form precedes substance and they invariably look for intensity as a prerequisite to commitment when looking at others in the team.

On the other hand, the folks who came from a software development background were understated and deferential. They had invisible but sustained energy. In their paradigm, substance was everything. And finally, if they were Indians, intensity was culturally unacceptable.

The folks who came from the consulting world were happier working with dynamic specifications and resources, while their development counterparts were more content if specifications were cryogenically cooled and there was constancy of resources.

The former had a decisional style based on the here, now and today. The latter disliked all forms transitional.
The consulting folks were process-led, but collectively did not care about process formalism as we see in standards like ISO or assessments like SEI CMM. For instance, they were sticklers for time, their meetings were structured, they followed methodologies and closed each session with clear action points and these were followed up. But most had no idea of what software quality was all about. The folks who came from the other world knew all about software quality processes, but in a personal sense, it did not jump out of them when they stood in front of an audience. The fusion of the two was key to our differentiation. The fusion was the essence of our brand. We realised that this was going to be the tough part, would take its own time and that there was work ahead of us. Our problem was made more difficult by the fact that we were people from nine different national origins. How on earth were we going to manage the fusion? How were we going to create the alignment?

In order to create alignment, we said to ourselves that we must learn to "manage" our multi-cultural situation. In a fortuitous meeting with Professor Jukka Laitamakki of Fordham University, New York, and Professor Vipin Chandra of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we learned that our approach to the situation was totally wrong.

Finnish-born Laitamakki taught at the Fordham MBA School where Joe King had studied. Joe, in turn, had introduced Jukka to MindTree and he and Vipin came together to visit our Bangalore office one day. We asked the duo how we could "manage culture" in a rapidly growing organisation such as ours.

To our surprise, Jukka said: "You do not manage culture, nobody likes his or her culture to be managed. You have to focus on building values and insist that people who work in MindTree share those values. You leave culture alone as long as you have shared values." How true that was! Out here, we were mud wrestling with a pig while the answer lay elsewhere.

In a room full of MindTree's senior folks, Jukka asked us: "So, what are your values?" The room was silent. I walked up to the white board and wrote down the six values that we had articulated while conceptualising MindTree. They were (i) lower total cost of ownership for your customer, (ii) teamwork, (iii) learning, (iv) shared wealth creation, (v) social sensitivity, and (vi) integrity.

The inability of the people in the room to spontaneously recall these individual values deeply concerned Ashok. He saw the need to go back to MindTree Minds to seek their inputs on what the value system of the organisation should be. He was of the opinion that as a less than 500 people company, we were all founders in some sense and every one must be made a part of the value creation process. In the following few months, we had several rounds of discussions at all levels, involving all our locations and finally had a new set of values articulated.

These values, after much discussion, were settled as (i) caring, (ii) learning, (iii) achieving, (iv) sharing and (v) social sensitivity. Each value was expanded to convey an intended meaning and, in turn, asked for certain behaviour from each MindTree Mind.
Caring to us meant caring for customers, employees and shareholders and what we called organisational caring. Learning was about development and innovation. Achieving to us was accountability, action orientation and teamwork. Sharing involved giving away knowledge and encouraging, appreciating others. Social sensitivity was thought of as commitment and integrity.

The new MindTree values were easy to remember as they lent themselves to the acronym CLASS. Far more arduous would be the task of creating a common dictionary, driving alignment and getting these institutionalised. In parts we knew that. In some parts, we did not know what we did not know. Internalisation of values is not about top management articulation and wallpaper. It happens one day at a time, one person at a time and does not come without moments of truth. One such moment of truth came when a very senior person in the company had left an audit trail of minor fiscal irregularities. As soon as it surfaced, we met as a management team and decided that irrespective of the person's seniority and the consequences to the business, we would ask the person to resign. The result was traumatic for many employees who had no idea why the person was asked to go. Some who knew the background felt that we were being unduly harsh. Only over time did people realise that we meant what we said and values were things that we did not take lightly.