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s I look back at the formative years of my career, I realise I never had an iota of doubt, ever, that I will one day lead the finance function. The initial mentoring I had from my leaders gave me enough confidence to believe in myself. They encouraged disagreement and during reviews, egged me on to recommend solutions instead of just stating problems.
Caricature by Shankar Pamarthy
My Biggest Challenge This, over the years, has helped me as a leader to overcome any challenge. The Patni acquisition, however, was a significant challenge, by far the biggest of my career, though it was overcome with élan. The complexities involved were immense. At the end, it proved to be an eventful challenge, well overcome, with some valuable lessons learnt. There is no doubt in my mind that this transaction was both my biggest challenge and in retrospect, a momentous achievement as well. Though I have been the CFO at iGATE Corporation for a while now, the Patni deal helped bring out the Chief Risk Officer in me. As I said earlier, it appeared to be a high-risk transaction with all the odds stacked against me in the game. At one point, I had almost 40 attorneys, auditors and accountants telling me all the risks involved and why this
was a difficult proposition. Here, I was careful to prioritise between ‘rewarded risks’ and ‘unrewarded risks’. I was then able to build an ecosystem in our planning methodology that optimised the rewarded risks for us and I am glad that the transaction finally was rewarding indeed. This was one of the important reasons for everything else to fall in place. The transaction changed me from being ‘finance-minded’ to a ‘business-minded’ person. For this, I am given to believe that it’s not about the time, it’s about the timing.
a mission to fulfill its dream of being a billion dollar entity. It was a business need to attain scale. On the other side, a reality check on the resources was needed. We had all the constraints. At $100 mn in cash, we needed to raise a debt of $1.1bn and construct the deal using several levers and instruments to make it work. In short, there was a gap between the dream and the reality that I had to bridge. That excited me. I have never had qualms about taking any decisions as long as they are in favour of the organisation. Thankfully, in Phaneesh, the CEO, I have had an A Cherished Success inspiring and aggressive individual to While it was an important milestone work with. for iGATE as an organisation, it was an We had to make the unthinkable hapall-important achievement for me, as pen. I am happy, we did! an individual. iGATE had set forth on Here, I would reiterate the importance of risk management that paid off well. Every time I would be introduced to a risk as a big one. However, I was While necessity is the able to judiciously categorise all mother of invention, constraint the risks, and put them in approis the mother of innovation. priate buckets, and able to protect the shareholder value. Dare to question every decision, if you My job here was to try and conare not convinced about it. vert as many dilutive elements as possible to being accretive to Look for solutions instead of stating all shareholders’ investments. I problems. also had all the room to think out of the box. There were several situDo not be scared to ations where I was taking decisions dream big. that were unorthodox in nature, but worked extremely well for us.
LESSONS