Lunch with BS: Meet Marjet Andriesse, the head that wears the hat

The number of women in leadership roles in tech companies has gone up since she started out 30 years ago but it is still small, Andriesse tells Samreen Ahmad

It’s a Thursday afternoon. I am expecting Marjet Andriesse, vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat, to appear for our virtual lunch meeting with a light meal by her side. Instead, she turns up with a delectable surprise: samosas and her favourite mutton biryani, brought to her Singapore home by online food delivery platform, Deliveroo. It’s a rather odd combination, but on second thoughts, why not?

“Since it’s late afternoon here, I will have the samosas and some biryani now, and save the rest for dinner,” she chuckles, dipping a crispy samosa in green chutney, an accompaniment she digs.

As she enjoys her Indian delicacies sitting in her beautifully lit living room, Andriesse, who is wearing a soothing blue top with a matching statement necklace, tells me about her love for India.

While it’s only now that she’s spearheading Red Hat’s growth in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, her connection with the country, she says, was established even before she was born. Her father, a businessman, had travelled to India a year before her birth and had instantly fallen in love with its many cultures and cuisines. And so she grew up on Indian food, which was quite uncommon for a Dutch family.

From doing touristy things like visiting the Taj Mahal to shaking a leg at a Bollywood New Year’s Eve concert in Mumbai, she has done it all during her dozens of visits to India. She is mesmerised by Indian weddings and confesses to watching clippings of big fat Indian celebrity weddings on Google. “But living in India is still on my wish list,” says this global citizen, who has lived in the Netherlands, Canada and Japan, before her current assignment at Singapore.

Taking over the reins of the APAC business from Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen in April, she is now at an inflection point from where she wants to ride the next wave of the open hybrid digital transformation journey and accelerate the growth of Red Hat further in the region. “We’re going to work very closely with our partner ecosystem for that, including companies such as Infosys and Wipro in India,” she says. 

And how has Covid affected the software company, I ask her, helping myself to my tehri lunch at my home in Bengaluru. (Tehri is a one-pot rice-based dish with lots of vegetables.)

Post-Covid, the company, which was acquired by IBM two years ago for $34 billion, is seeing more growth in Asean countries as compared to mature markets such as Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as digital transformation accelerated because of remote working.

Red Hat is empowering teams with the operations-from-anywhere model through its open source technology. Currently, over 90 per cent of its clients are Fortune 500 companies. India continues to be a key market for the software company with its second-largest workforce operating out of here after the US. It has two Engineering Centres of Excellence, one each in Bengaluru and Pune. “We will continue to invest and grow our headcount in both the IT and sales and marketing sides in India,” says Andriesse, who is one of the few women leaders in the IT sector globally.

Various reports estimate that women make for about 35 per cent of the tech workforce in India, but this number shrinks to 10 per cent as you go up the ladder to founder and leadership positions. “Something is stopping us ladies from getting into that higher executive level,” says Andriesse. She remembers that when she started out 30 years ago, women were given only supportive roles. Over the years, they also came to be seen in executive positions. She’s hopeful of more diversity at the top level in the future, with data from countries like India indicating that about 44 per cent of the new hires are now women. “One needs to be open to diversity of thought, of culture and of gender as a leader,” she says.

For women to grow in their careers, she says, they need to learn to speak up. “By this I also mean you speak up in decibel,” she says. “From a young age I made it a point to make at least one remark at every meeting, even if not a smart one.”

There’s a “three C” framework that she goes by. First is “curiosity”. It has taken her to different industries such as software, HR and telecom, different continents, and different companies such as Telstra and Randstad. “Curiosity also helps you if you’re genuinely interested in your customers’ problems; it is then easier to find a solution for them instead of doing a product push.” The next is “complexity”. This is one of the reasons that she transferred into tech companies as these are complex in nature, but are also fascinating. “It’s complexity that makes you use the strategic side of your brain,” she says. And the third one is “cohesion”. It’s all about people for her. No one person, she says, has all the answers; it is a collection of people that has the solution.

She advises the women she mentors to focus on their strengths over their weaknesses and not to cut corners at work. “But I will emphasise, hard work does not mean spending 30 hours on it. Just make sure that you are proud of the work that you’ve delivered.”

So, how many hours in a day does she work?

“I work long hours when it’s needed,” she confesses, adding that she is eagerly awaiting her “recharge off” the following day. Since Covid struck, Red Hat instituted a “recharge off” — a day once a quarter when the whole company doesn’t work globally. “Since everyone is off, you get no work emails. So, it’s even better than a public holiday,” she chuckles.

On this particular recharge day, she is planning a long walk in the park followed by lunch at a Malaysian colleague’s home. “I am going to have home-cooked Malay food at her house, and we are not going to talk about business,” she says, visibly excited about the day ahead. She’s even chosen to wear a traditional Malaysian Sarong Kebaya for the visit.

As for what she wants to do next in life, well, she just wants to be happy. “Stop, and smell the roses,” she says, and we end our conversation on this fragrant note.