Pramod Bhasin, Genpact CEO, looks ahead
Pramod Bhasin – President & CEO, Genpact
Like love and, to an extent, cooking, economics are definitely an inexact science. Those who expect the solid and dependable predictions will often be disappointed. Indeed, no killer app has yet been invented to help CEOs and entrepreneurs map out strategies with the reliability and regularity of a suburban picket fence.
What we do have, however, is the mix of knowledge, experience and what passes for gut feeling but is in reality a kind of spontaneous interpretation of a basket of indicators.
When Pramod Bhasin begins to speak of markets and the state of the world of business today, he is informed by his daily work as president and CEO of Genpact, a major BPO player with over 37,000 employees spread out in various countries, including home country India, China, Hungary, Romania, the Netherlands, Japan, South Africa and the USA.
Genpact – which grew from a fairly pioneering and experimental effort to deliver finance and accounting and transactional services remotely in 1997 – serves industries across the entire spectrum, from banks and pharmaceutical companies, to automotive and transportation.
This allows Bhasin to put more than one finger into the wind and perhaps be a little more differentiated in his views and forecasts. For instance, he is not sure the pundits currently talking up the markets and burying the Great Recession are entirely correct, not with the high unemployment in the US and capital goods down by up to 50%. On a recent trip through Europe, however, he noticed “pockets of recovery, amazingly,” as he told Swiss Style recently.
Go east!
Where fires are really burning is Asia and Latin America. “China and India are in their own bubble,” says Pramod Bhasin. “With all this talk about coupled and decoupled worlds, these countries seem to be quite decoupled in their own world and driven enormously by fiscal stimuli. This is not make-believe: there is more demand for automobiles, there is more steel and cement and equipment being produced, more construction in progress and more shipping and transportation en route. So the world has become far less homogenous, less consistent and far more regional or geographical.”
A rather remarkable statement, which casts some doubt on the vision of a globalized system settling comfortably in its flatness. The recession has reshuffled the cards and “forced all of us to think differently about different regions, about different geographies in a way that has been accelerated.” Talent, Bhasin points out, is readily available nowadays, and companies that fail to invest in it will be missing the boat.
“In the past we were thwarted perhaps by people’s reluctance to unseat themselves and move to different places,” he comments somewhat wryly. “Now, the willingness to be flexible, to change, to move to other geographies, to work all over the world has never been better, so the rebalancing is really life-changing.”
Economic pressures and other cataclysms have always triggered movement, be that within countries, or internationally. The idea, therefore, is hardly new. Nor is the other very real consequence of the current financial drought, namely a cleansing of the markets as weaker firms struggle to remain competitive. The harsh laws of capitalism apply and the stronger shall gobble up the weaker. Hence, it is also a perfect time for companies to lock suppliers into long-term contracts, says Bhasin, “because you will not get them cheaper.”
Surf and turf
By the same token, snug and smug is not an option in dynamic times. Never a shrinking violet in his business undertakings, Bhasin feels that in order to remain a player, one must be creative, take some risks, even diversify. If some of his markets are suffering, then he must turn up the heat in the successful ones. The best way to achieve this is by building up partnerships, alliances, relationships and networks with communities, a technology partner, a product partner, or an analytics partner.
“Doing it with your competitors is also important,” he adds, and goes on to describe the peculiarities of doing business post-2008: “One day you are competing, the next day you are partners, the next you have an alliance, a joint venture. To go into China you need a joint venture, to go into India you might need a partner. If you want to do it all on your own, it will slow you down, it is time-consuming and capital-consuming. It’s not just mergers and acquisitions, it’s mergers and acquisitions plus joint ventures, plus alliances.”
These are the real opportunities that Pramod Bhasin foresees as the “joy for the next five to ten years.” By and large, an exciting picture, with a few dark spots. As the economy revives, for instance, all that cheaply acquired talent may well become the target of poachers, which was one of the main questions Bhasin himself had when launching Genpact. A constant pressure on prices and pay can also result in erosion by churn and a lack of loyalty, which can be disastrous in some industries.
But Bhasin is a proponent of the feisty fight, of flexibility and finesse in business. The word “opportunity” looms large in his vocabulary, but not the concomitant buzzword “challenge.” Only at the end of the interview does he mention it, revealing a great deal of his philosophy: “If you think it’s a challenge, you shouldn’t be in business.”
Article by Marton Radkai
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