Management and chutzpah

Turnaround manager Veer Sagar's book chronicling his journey as an entrepreneur and executive serves a purpose beyond recall and nostalgia, offering valuable insights and lessons to the reader

Failure is not an Option: When the Chips are Down Get Up and Get Going

Author: Veer Sagar

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 226

Price: Rs 599

Veer Sagar is a well-known name in the Indian IT industry. He started his career as a computer engineer in Dunlop, in the 1960s; pioneered the application of operation research, a mathematical approach to obtain optimum solutions to various commonly occurring conundrums in management decision-making in production planning, sales, finance and so on. That was his first job in an iconic British multinational with a “pucca sahib” culture that had invented rubber tyres and hence obviously thought they knew everything to know about tyre business. So trying out anything new and that too based on inputs from a rookie way down the food chain was blasphemous. However, Mr Sagar, all of 20, had already learnt the lessons in how to win friends and influence people and got his way and started a rapid rise in the company.

After two decades in Dunlop, practising IT as a management decision support system for all core corporate functions in a tyre company, Mr Sagar moved successfully into sales and marketing. But when he saw that the mother company in the UK was preparing to divest its holdings in India to a Dubai-based Indian investor, Manu Chhabria, he moved to another hardcore British computer company, ICL (ICIM) to head its marketing in 1984. ICL was also once iconic but was already in decline with relentless competition and rapid changes in technology from a plethora of American companies led by IBM. Soon in 1987, ICL, too, divested from ICIM in favour of another Indian business group, RPG, which had its own plans for the company.

Mr Sagar now moved to another pioneering company in north India, DCM Data Products, as CEO. This, too, was in decline by then. After a decade in DCM and its repositioning as DCM Data Systems, a solution provider and not a mere hardware manufacturer, Mr Sagar earned the enviable title of “turnaround manager” in the business media for the improvement in the company’s fortunes. There were, however, winds of change in the hardware industry and PCs had entered the Indian market both in the government and in private companies. Most PC companies were importing knocked down kits from East Asia, and DCM could not compete with them.

With telecom infrastructure rapidly changing in the nineties, Mr Sagar saw a new opportunity opening up in back office operations and brought in new business too. But DCM’s owners disagreed, so Mr Sagar quit and plunged into a new phase as an entrepreneur at 55. He was one of the pioneers in starting up in 1997 what we call today the IT-enabled services (ITeS) or BPO industry. His successful venture, Selectronics was mentioned by Time magazine in 2000 and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree—Understanding Globalisation.

His stint as an entrepreneur was not all rosy, however. He had to learn many costly and hard lessons from some unethical practices of some of his business partners.

What the book brings out is that Mr Sagar in all his professional life employed plenty of what the Americans call “chutzpah”. Thereby hangs a tale and also a very well written book that never bores you with lectures on management theory. He draws a host of simple-to-state yet extremely important practical lessons from over five decades of experience, first as an executive and then as an entrepreneur.

He has a crisp and engaging storytelling style. At the same time, each story has a purpose beyond recall and nostalgia and actually yields some lessons for an executive that Mr Sagar sums up neatly at the end of each story or episode. He constructs almost his entire life story from childhood; student days till university; his professional career of over 50 years; his experience at entrepreneurship in the nineties when start-ups were still new and BPO was yet unknown and so on. In fact, he claims that he coined the word IT-enabled services in those days. He also weaves in his family life, friends, associates, role as a policy advisor to the government in a cornucopia of industry bodies and committees.

I would recommend it to any budding corporate executive in any industry. The only blemish I found in the book is the lack of an index at the end.

The reviewer is adjunct faculty at NIAS, Bengaluru. He has had a varied career as a theoretical physicist, business journalist, author and former VP of IT giant TCS. He can be reached at skanavi@gmail.com