Shali Thilakan is one of those young achievers, the sort that India seems to be putting out in a tearing hurry, these days. The 35 year old managing director of Cable & Wireless in India is a man to watch out for in the corporate world, from the looks of things. ?See I have lost so much of my hair, staying up all night and working hard,? says Shali, pointing to his balding head.
Shali has been with the telecom industry for the last 12 years. ?I was always gravitating towards engineering, and my specific interest lay in telecom. Our family is full of highly educated people and so I was naturally drawn towards studies. Also I had a high performing peer group, and I had to keep up with them.?
He did try for a seat in IIT, but missed it despite giving his best. Most of his friends got through and that was a rude wake up call for him. ?But that worked for me in the long run. After having missed out on IIT, every decision I took in life was taken with the motive of succeeding and moving ahead of my peers. That was the motivation, and I worked extra hard on every project. I did not want to miss out in life, just because I could not get into IIT.?
Shali completed his Bachelors in Engineering, Electronics & Communications from Mumbai and then joined BPL Mobile where he managed the sales function. He then moved to Telecom Italia, which was one of the earliest companies to enter the enterprise telecom space in India. ?Some may think that Italians may be good only with wine and women. But they were very good in technology and marketing, and I picked up a lot from that stint.?
He then joined Worldcom, where he rose to operations manager, before he left. Rising fast and making an impression, Shali became the ?go-to-guy? wherever he worked. His big break came soon after with Cable & Wireless. He relocated to Hong Kong as part of his first big globally challenging project worth $50 million.
?I was called upon to be part of a resource pool, which was hired to manage few of the large, complex global projects. This was my first project within 60 days of joining C&W Worldwide. It required me to be based out of HK. Not only did I have to swiftly learn all about the customer and his needs, I had to also understand our own internal organisation and the way of working in a different geography.?
?The customer was a large American financial institution. The project involved setting up the state of the art network/telecom infrastructure on behalf of the bank in all their key locations spread across Asia-Pacific, Europe and Americas. This was one of the most prestigious wins for C&W Worldwide at that time and involved managing customer directors across several different cultures and time zones. It also required setting up a state of the art network operations centre (NOC) dedicated to the customer.?
The successful delivery of the project made Shali an overnight star in his company. He was asked to come back to India. ?That was a big decision. My salary would have been far higher if I had stayed on in HK, but I decided to move bag and baggage to India. And that was the right decision.?
After handling operations and managing global clients across the world for over three years, he was appointed as the director of enterprise sales at the company. Even in this role, Shali did what he always did?out do peers. In less than two years, he was appointed as the managing director for India and South Asia in April 2010. ?It?s going to be a year soon. And needless to say it has been a great journey.? Shali today heads a team of over 500 people and manages six key teams.
Shali says the professional culture at C&W has played a huge role in his success. ?Our values determine everything we do at Cable&Wireless Worldwide. How we work, how we recruit and how we reward and create the ?right? culture for our organisation. One of our values is to ?Be the customer?. Colleagues in our business are encouraged to look at everything through the eyes of the customer. We do this because we have an obsession for customer service. It also helps to drive innovation and insight on what more we can do to help our customers succeed. Our culture is defined by our passion to deliver the best in class solutions to our customers. This is reflected in the hiring process and on the kind of colleagues, we tend to invest in. We are a relatively youthful organisation.?
?We have understood that customers want a telecoms partner who is reliable?someone they can trust to deliver results, every time and all the time. We don?t make excuses and we don?t break our promises?whatever it takes. Our colleagues are driven by this, which is why we measure and reward them on what and how they deliver.?
Now C&W is focused on expanding its global presence. About 25% of revenue already originates from customers based outside the UK. ?In this financial year in India, we have closed seven large enterprise deals, secured a new contract with one of the top three Indian banks, signed up with two of the top BPOs in the country?including Mphasis, and achieved a strong performance with some our existing global accounts. We also opened a new NOC in Chennai and set up a product innovation centre in Bangalore that helps in faster product roll-outs and offers customised proposition for our customers in the region. In terms of investments, we have already committed $80 million in India in network development and cable systems.?
?Going forward, we will focus our energies on building even deeper relationships with our key customers and providing managed services proposition to them. We think that customers in India can greatly benefit from our MS offerings like Managed Video Conferencing, Cloud Contact Centers etc,? says Shali.