'I went terribly wrong about B2B exchanges'

DINNER WITH BS/MOHANBIR SAWHNEY

On paper, Professor Mohanbir Sawhney, one of the earliest dotcom evangelists, has a resume that is forbiddingly accomplished. Here's a sampler: consulting and speaking engagements with Accenture, Bank of America, Dell Computer Corporation, Eli Lilly, Goldman Sachs, Boeing and Microsoft; McCormick Tribune professor of technology; the chairperson of the Technology Management group; and director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University....

In person, however, despite reaching the heights of management academia, Sawhney clearly hasn't strayed too far from his Punjabi roots. As teacher, consultant and writer, he describes himself first in sophisticated terms to explain how there is complete synergy in life.

"I am an intellectual arbitrageur," he says. To buttress the point, he adds helpfully, "Idhar ka maal udhar and udhar ka maal idhar." He may be a guru of the New Economy, but as our meal progresses, I realise he's also the master of the one-liner.

Sawhney is in Chennai and Bangalore for two days for a lecture series that, I understand from the organisers, is sold out. A request for a tea appointment gets okayed and then changed to a dinner appointment at the Taj Coromandel's Chinese restaurant, Golden Dragon.

As we walk in and settle into a corner table at the crowded restaurant, he tell me that he has not touched Indian shores for close to two years. It helps that close family is in the US.

"I have travelled 150,000 miles this year "" it is unfortunate that I have not visited India in the last two years, though I have criss-crossed Asia," he says. The reason? "Indian companies find my advisory services costly, I suppose "" 'our cost is in dollars and the advantage in rupees,' they say. So it does not match up, I guess," he tells me.

So are they saying he is too expensive a proposition to afford? "They are saying it and yet not saying it," he demurs. The waiter comes to enquire whether we'd like to order drinks. We do "" Sawhney settles for a glass of white wine, I for a whisky and water.

He is obviously irritated with the way Indian companies look at what he brings to the table as a strategic advisor. "Do you get value for the money you pay "" that is the question. It is the old Hindi saying of ghar ki murgi, dal baraabar that afflicts these corporations. A gora may be incompetent but perceived to be better," he points out.

By this time our drinks have been served and the discussion shifts to competition. "What do you compete on "" you compete on insights and executing them ahead of competition. Insights need to be competitively advantaged, they are intangible and insights come from unusual places and very often from the intersection of various disciplines," he says.

That's already clear from his own ability to spot common threads from disparate themes. "I accept facts and I have a gift to make ready connections. Ready connections are important when you have to start giving definitions and it helps to give real life examples from folklore and fables, in which my Indian background helps tremendously," says this Tata Administrative Services alumnus.

"At a recent consulting assignment I was asked to describe and define competition. I gave them the example of the goat with one eye that was afraid of being attacked when it was grazing. So it decided to graze on a cliff overlooking the sea, thinking that nothing could come and attack it from the sea "" which is a wrong notion. This is the same problem that afflicts companies in the sense they do not think about where competition can crop up and challenge their dominance," he points out.

For Sawhney, though, it's time that's a valued asset. "Time is money and the field is my laboratory." Time spent in the field with companies is extremely productive, he says.

He attributes the term he coined "" "Innomediary" "" to field time spent at Eli Lilly. "Eli Lilly had a division called Innocentive, wherein they posted their R&D problems on the Net and about 20,000 scientists from across the world would get to work on it. Anybody who cracked it would be rewarded. Without realising it themselves they were actually running a B2B market place and I told them that they could actually enable and mediate innovation. Then I came up with the word 'innomediary'."

So what has he learnt from all this? "I am an Indian at heart and I know only one thing "" life leads and you've got to follow."

By this time we have decided on our soups "" Sawhney prefers a chicken clear soup while I go in for a spicy seafood soup. Alarmingly, he declines dinner, but kindly suggests that that shouldn't stop me and even helps me choose Mongolian beef and steamed rice.

So does the fact that he consults to the Who's Who of industry and is a renowned world figure get his ego all trumped up?

"Humility is the natural state "" and being a teacher I cannot afford to have an ego," he says.

Teaching, according to Sawhney, helps keep his feet firmly rooted to the ground. "There has been a fundamental shift in the role of the teacher. A teacher no longer doles out nuggets of information. The Internet has put paid to that and has also ensured that the student is smarter. I am only a facilitator of information and try to help the student on a self-guided exploration trip."

How did it feel to be called the guru of e-commerce? "It felt great that just five years into my academic life I had been invited to the World Economic Forum at Davos to speak on e-commerce and the potential it holds."

So can he truly look into the future and predict correctly or has he gone wrong? He's humble enough to say yes. "It is just not done in the guru world to accept that you went wrong, but I did go wrong. I went terribly wrong about B2B exchanges. In fact, an article on the potential of B2B exchanges got me a journalism award in September 1999. Sixty to 70 per cent of what I predicted in that article never happened. I simply underestimated the inertia of large companies to embrace new technology," he frankly admits.

What about the brain drain from India? "The IITs [Indian Institutes of Technology] were ahead of their times in India. The kind of things we learnt at the IITs could not be absorbed by Indian companies then. In fact, both my brother (Amar) and I were recruited by Hindustan Lever Limited [HLL] in the same week."

As it turned out, both brothers turned down the HLL offers. At the time, in 1984, Sawhney was at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and Amar was at IIT, Delhi. "Ab to Sawhney khandaan ko blacklist kar diya hain HLL ne," he jokes.

In retrospect, it wasn't such a bad decision, considering his own success. As for Amar Sawhney, he became a polymer scientist who founded his own company Confluent Surgical which develops products based on its platform of in-situ polymerised biomaterials and associated delivery systems.

So what does he think of dotcoms and the future? "Dotcoms are thriving. There are 80 successful dotcoms in the US and those with a sound business model have survived and are doing very well."

What was his biggest failing as an academic? "I tend to pitch better with smart students and am impatient and angry with less intelligent students," he says frankly, "This is something which I have to overcome as an academic."

By this time it is a good two hours since we met and is well past 10 in the night. Sawhney has another early morning lecture the next day and as he stifles a yawn I realise it is time for us to say good night.