As president of North American Services for Keane, Inc., Richard Garnick has a tough task. He not only drives sales strategy and delivery execution for Keane's operations in North America but is also responsible for a major company-wide transformation that it has undertaken.

Garnick joined Keane from Wipro [Get Quote], where he served on the management board of the firm's executive team, as chief executive-Americas & enterprise application service for four years. He spoke to George Skaria & S Lakshmi Chopra about the tough change in management process. Excerpts:

What was your assessment of how Keane was doing when you joined the company to help bring in a transformation?

When I was with Wipro, Keane in India was a relatively small enterprise. At the same time, the company had a 40-year-heritage, a good customer base and a positive reputation.

However, for the past four years or so, the company was stagnating. There was a slowdown. Business models had changed and the global business delivery models were driving the change.

By the end of Y2K, 20 per cent of the revenues for most companies came from the Y2K solutions. Companies had started to grow at that rate. Keane made a few acquisitions in 2002, and made investments in the BPO space. Because of all this activity, when I joined the company, it had a strong foundation. Primarily due to the given business model, the company's profit and loss statements started to show a slight healthy growth.

Talking about business models and strategy, typically the graph is like this - first comes strategy, business model, execution and then your approach to the marketplace.

When I joined Keane, my aim was to build common ethics across branches' operations. While I was based in North America, my job began with standardising operations.

The hypothesis was to take the strong customer base in the region and build the essence across all locations. In that sense, when I took over North America, I had one circle that built a seamless integrated model that was servicing customers.

That became a prototype for other branches of the company. Fundamentally, the transformation within Keane was a difficult one. I got leadership talent across the world on the Keane's board of employees.

As a leader, chairman Brian Keane supported my decision and understood there were compelling reasons to get people on the job before the company went for a total transformation. Therefore, even before I joined the company, leaders of different groups and departments were already in place, understanding their jobs at their respective levels.

This was the driver for growth of our business. It took seven months for us to get in place such leadership. Keane was formed as one identity - one group. Today we work together in a seamless fashion in a simple global business line. Integrating different locations was a challenge.

To begin with, we never integrated all our capabilities. We brought together innovation, technology and processes in a faster and cost-efficient manner. We thought it was better to integrate these operations and build along the stack of IT operations that Keane already had.

IT services such as infrastructure support, application packages, programme testing and management, programme architectural services to these functions had to be integrated. Then, I brought in this integration seamlessly in our India offices as well.

All integration processes start with global resource management. With disparate locations, it becomes inevitable that each individual is thinking differently. It is important that information from the top management level flows down the path in the correct manner.

For Indian employees, we have ensured that they have access to information. This also provides us the confidence to move people swiftly into other locations. Providing access to your internal resources to every employee in your organisation across locations is vital in any integration process.

What have been the key challenges while bringing about this change?

A positive thing in a professional services company is that you have a workforce that is well-educated. You give the people the right logical reason and they understand. And if the reason is not logical enough, they have a reason to question.

Here, you are dealing with some 9,999 people who are smarter than you are, and understand this business, perhaps, even better than you do. You need to provide them a clear path. Basically, the challenge is to have those facts aligned so that you can put that forth. Change had to be sold intellectually.

As in other change processes, there were a few problems or loopholes. If once you are unable to sell change, then it becomes a painful area. As I keep telling people that, "Change before you have to or are forced to."

In that sense, try to control your own destiny. To bring in change, in Keane, the resistance came from the top level. It was difficult at the top before it cascaded down. Nevertheless, we managed. Every business situation has different dynamics. If you lose the market momentum, you lose the dynamics. Timing is the key.

At a time when many multinationals world over are decentralising their operations, why is Keane looking at a more centralised approach?

Yes, it is important to have localised approaches in your management and leadership styles. Basically, the trick here is to localise and centralise various aspects accordingly. It is rather complex these days.

One has to be careful in bringing in global aspects in certain local locations that are sensitive. Unlike old models of businesses, models today have to be flexible and more nimble than ever. You need to build a regional selling structure along with the global business lines.

With a combination of vertical and customer understanding, one needs to work on an integrated approach. Finally, it is the execution. In the whole transformation process, the focus was on day-to-day operations. Ten thousand jobs were reversed. All roles were changed.

Now, moving forward, we would like to tweak our strategy to optimisation and building processes. The other task would be to link our strong IT backbone with the management governance processes.

This could range from picking up the right measures to training people. The thing to remember is: don't get bogged down by resistance to change. You learn everyday. For me, personally, it has been an intellectual challenge. You have to be more and more self-aware, to be a better leader.

What are your India plans?

We have demonstrated seriousness in the country. We hope to bring in more services that are relevant to the talent in India. India has a vast pool of talent.

The challenge here is different - retention of talent. We will provide them a unique platform. We hope to be 10,000 employees in India in the next two to three years from about 3000 people at present.

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