Tech Mahindra CEO Mohit Joshi

(phone ringing) - Hello? - Hi, Mom. - Hi, Andrew. How are you? - Good. - You know what I was thinking? I watched this podcast by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. At the end, I tell you this, she calls her mother. - Yeah. - Her mother's name is Judith, coincidentally. She's 90 years old. She's just lovely, very smart lady. And intermixed with talk about who Julia spoke with that day is family stuff, like what we might talk about on another call. And I'm wondering if maybe we should add a little personal discussion. - Okay, what's going on? - So this morning, I had my PT session and I hung my jacket with the purple hood on a rack. And then I leave and I put the purple jacket on with the hood and I go out. And oh, I better take my gloves out. I take my gloves out, but they're not my gloves. They're black gloves. So around the taking somebody else's jacket. - How do we connect that to my work with a $6.5 billion India-based tech services company? - Tell me the name of it again. - Tech Mahindra. - Tech Mahindra. So I was pleased that it was easy for me to understand the concept of the company and what they were doing. - Yeah, IT services or tech outsourcing. - It was surprising to me that they might put a thousand computer people on a project. - Yep, and sometimes more. Sometimes I think thousands. - Oh. - I don't know, I'm still not seeing a way to connect this to your story about taking someone else's jacket. - Maybe it's just an interesting side thing that people might say, oh, I did that once. (upbeat music) - This is the bigger narrative, I'm Andy Raskin. And I'm thrilled that my guest for this episode is the CEO of a public company with $6.5 billion in annual sales. His name is Mohit Joshi and his company is Tech Mahindra. Tech Mahindra or Tech M for short is a big player in the global market for IT services, but not the biggest firms like Infosys and Accenture are bigger. When Mohit became CEO in 2023, a few months before we worked together, Tech M had a reputation for excellence in telecom projects, but he wanted a way to crystallize a message about what made Tech Am a great choice, even for non telecom customers. As he puts it, - We were thinking about the simple question, what do you do and why you're different from your peers? Was a very difficult question for us to answer, right? I felt that the narrative was a little bit me too, that we can do what the others are doing and we can do it just as well. And that really wasn't a compelling narrative. - You mean the existing narrative, the way the company was talking about itself before? - Yes. Initially the narrative was about connected, world-connected experience, which really reflected the sort of the heritage the company had from our telecom's background. But that narrative was created when we expected telecoms to take over the world, which they notably didn't. Then after that, the narrative was about next start now, which was about help our enterprise clients realize the promise of the next now. But again, that sort of narrative was fairly common in the market. So I felt that there was a need to revisit our strategic narrative and to use it to differentiate ourselves. But also to use the narrative to maybe push the internal organization where needed. So we were really looking for a strategic narrative as the golden thread to hold this tapestry together. - One of the first things that I do when I run an engagement is I ask the team to start asking customers what is shifting in their world that led them to buy our services or our product. So what is the big shift? We saw that historically when you were talking about a large global technology transformation program, you were thinking about it and I used the analogy of assembling a large land army to attack your upright. You were thinking about for instance an SAP transformation program that would go on for multiple years, involve multiple geographies. And so you were thinking about how do I create this global template and do these multi-country road logs. And so you were more focused on scale. But equally there could be a few programs you were doing. For instance, a decade ago maybe a new mobile website. Where you were primarily looking for speed, right? And here you were looking for special forces type characters to help you do these very short duration high impact programs. - So in the past, these companies were either going into some very large scale project or some small scale skunk works beta kind of thing. - Exactly. So there was a choice between scale or speed. But once people saw that they were getting fresh apps and updates on their iPhones on a weekly basis, right? They were wondering why that wasn't happening to enterprise technology. There was a need for scale at speed rather than a binary choice between scale and speed. And so that was what was happening to our client context. But equally we realized that the service riders were either offering scale or speed. And I think what we felt was that we were able to give a unique combination of scale ads. - So you're hearing from your customers that they can no longer choose between scale and speed. They're being forced to deliver scale at speed. And that shift became the heart of your narrative. I remember one fear your team had. And I think it was valid was, well, we can say this because we're currently have an ideal size for scale at speed. We're big, but we're not too big like an emphasis or an accenture. Would this narrative work if we got bigger? - If your speed only comes from your size, then effectively what you're saying is that as you become larger, you will lose the elemental speed as well. And so it really forced us to look at the elements that really promised speed beyond this size. And we've saw that those elements of speed were the very entrepreneurial DNA of the company, the way the company had been created by a bunch of entrepreneurs and they had left their imprint in terms of the decision making being with the front end teams. The speed element also came from the huge investments that had happened in training and learning, which allowed us to put together teams at fairly short notice. And the speed element also came from the way we had structured the company, right? So the structure of the company was conducive to faster decision making and the mix that we had of service lines and market-facing strategic business units allowed us to pivot much more quickly. So we also figured out that the scale at speed promise wouldn't go away as the company became larger, but speed was something that was hardwired into the DNA of the organization. - I remember one of the deadlines we worked towards was the public presentation you were making to investors, Kitek Em is a public company about your new strategic direction after taking over his CEO. Can you share what happened in that call? - It was very successful as we had a really nice bump on the stock price of the day. We announced the new strategic narrative. Tell me it was like 1.2 billion. Is that right? - We had, actually it closed at about 1.2, but at its peak in during the day, we had a 1.8 billion dollar jump in the overall valuation of the company. So it was a very good outcome from that perspective. More importantly, because the stock price is just a daily reflection of what the market thinks of you, but on a more sort of sustained basis, I think the narrative has really gone down very well with our teams. I think any sort of narrative has to be meaningful to our clients, meaningful to our teams, and it has to be credible, right? And I think this new narrative of scale at speed meets the twin criteria of meaningful and relevant for clients and equally credible as well. I was just actually just before this, I was with a very large banking cloud of ours here in London, and we were talking about the scale at speed narrative about why it makes sense and they completely got it. They said, look, this is how our business is changing. We're being asked to deliver scale, and we're being asked to deliver it almost immediately. - That's great. And I love what you said about the banking client you talked about. It's not just, hey, we're saying we, tech Amor scale at speed, we're saying, hey, this scale at speed is a shift that's happening in your world, and it sounds like they're saying, yes, that's happening in our world. One thing I hear people sometimes say is, what if other people just start saying the same thing? And what I think is really interesting about your narrative is in a way they can't say the same thing, right? Nobody else has this really interesting balance of speed and scale that you can deliver. - Yeah, we already see the word scale and speed propping up on a lot of our competitors' websites. But as you said, it does feel very intrinsic to what also very distinctive from our tech Amor perspective. We are seen as an organization that moves fast, that is responsive, that is also the internal promise of the organization. And so it'll be harder for some of us peers to make that claim because just the internal teams would laugh at us, saying speed, you've got to be kidding me. - Right. What did you mentioned earlier that there was something about how tech Amor was structured that lends itself to speed? Could you tell me a little bit about that? - So the way we've structured the organization is a mix of market facing strategic business units organized vertically within geography. So in the Americas, for instance, we've got a financial services practice. So because we're not running global verticals, it allows the teams to be very closely connected to clients on the ground and to be responsive to their needs. But equally, we've got a centralized delivery organization that allows us to then harness the global capabilities of the organization. So a combination of geography-focused teams that are close and intimate to the clients, but equally a scale delivery organization based in India and elsewhere. - You and your leadership team kept talking about, we want this message to also be relevant inside the company. How does this scale at speed narrative play a role in your leadership in the company? - Like I'm saying, We have a full-fledged program of work to transform the company. And I think the strategic narrative, right, scale at speed, again, is a common and consistent threat that is running through the entire transformation. And it is the promise of the company to the external world and the promise of the company to our employees as well. One of the things that we're doing, for instance, to make it very real, is when we talk about speed, we're putting together a list of 10 fairly common processes within the organization. And this could be as simple as an expense claim. And this could be as complex as a hiring in debt, which is raised and how quickly it is fulfilled, right? And what we're doing is we're measuring the time it takes now. And then we're making a promise about the time it will take in the future, as we become even more efficient, right? So we're also trying to make sure that the internal organization sees that this scale at speed, that's not just a tagline. It is something very real, and it is something very transformational about the way we're thinking about the future of teching. Anything that was particularly difficult for you in reaching this narrative, in terms of the process working with the team or stumbling blocks that we came to, that you could share maybe with other CEOs if they're going down this path. - So I think first of all, it was always hard to close certain avenues, right? So when we thought about the strategic narrative, obviously we looked at the ones that we had in the past, like connected world connected experience, and we looked at some of the ones that our competitors had, and every time you were shutting out some doors, there was always a degree of repetition saying, "Are we making the right direction?" As we narrowed our choices. Once we got to scale at speed, there was obviously the concern about what is this going to be relevant to our clients, and this really going to be differentiated enough, is this going to be something which is both meaningful and credible? And equally, even if we had the elements of the narrative, it was important to articulate it in a simple and concise and a beautiful way. And I felt that the entire exercise was focused on first, getting to a narrative that again, met the twin test of relevance and credibility, and then being able to articulate it in a catchy and a beautiful manner. And then finding the proof points, right? Finding the case studies that allowed us to validate it. And you had rightly warned us that there'd be values of despair in between, and we certainly went through the values of despair, but because we knew what we were going to be going through, for the despair, and like everything else, right? Over time, we've become even more confident that we made the right decision. And every sort of element of customer feedback or investor feedback has cemented our belief that we made the right choice. - That's great. And yeah, I think along the way, we talked to a lot of customers, and we just heard this scale at speed, sometimes literally, we heard those words. And I think that gave us some confidence we might be in the right direction. - No, absolutely. I think look, customer feedback. We also spoke to a couple of industry analysts and industry advisors. We obviously had multiple senior leaders within the company who were part of the core team that went through the exercise with Anit Pasta, Chairman, with Anit Pasta, the board. And so it went through a degree of validation. And again, we were looking for, is this something which is really important to customers? So we could have said, we're the only company that has a logo in red and black, but that's not really important to my customers. We could have had a sort of bringing the deepest research oriented thinking to our clients, but we would not have met the test of credibility via execution experts. And so I feel that this narrative again, it keeps harping on the fact, it met those twin tests of relevance and credibility. - Anything else that you wanna share that I didn't get to? - So look, we have the narrative now which unifies our go-to-market, it is differentiated. I feel that it highlights our unique strengths. And now because the company historically has had different narratives, it'll only have value if the whole organization is talking in the same language. What often happens as a senior team is you get tired of the narrative, because you're talking about it all the time. And I think it just takes a while to realize that it takes a couple of quarters, indeed it rotates a couple of years of constantly repeating it before it sticks in people's heads. And so now what we really need to do is to have the stamina and that patience to keep with it, because we feel that we've found something very valuable. (upbeat music) - Some great takeaways from Mohit. I especially loved how throughout our work together. As he says, he saw the narrative not only as a sales marketing thing, but also as a leadership thing. A tool for him to guide the culture. And hey, I'm not gonna say that a great narrative always gives you a $1.2 billion market cap bump, but now I'm not gonna say it doesn't. The bigger narrative is produced and edited by me, Andy Raskin, with music by Stephen Emerson and podcast cover art by Angela Maychen. Carla Barrelli inspired the show by telling me I should do it over coffee. Thanks to Mohit Joshi, Piyush Duby, Abishek Shankar, Sehill Dauhan, Sundaram, Krishna Murphy, and everyone at TechM, special thanks also to Judy Raskin, Richard Raskin, Emily Raskin, Eli Raskin, and Randolph, and Carol Wasserman. And remember, the company story is the company strategy. (upbeat music)