Ashok Soota began his career in 1965 with the Shriram Group of Industries in India. In 1978, he became CEO of Shriram Refrigeration, a company which was unprofitable for four consecutive years. He went on to become the President of Wipro Infotech from 1984 to 1999. Under his leadership, Wipro's IT business grew from US$2 million in 1984 to US$500 million run-rate in 1999.
In 1999 Ashok co-founded MindTree which in a span of 11 years became a global entity with revenue run rate of US$350 million, with over 9000 people and offices in multiple cities in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Happiest Minds (a next gen IT solutions & Services Company) was launched in August, 2011 by Ashok Soota and a team of industry experts, with the mission to create Happiest People and Happiest Customers.
Ashok is an industry leader. He was President of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), India's largest Industry association and also President of Manufacturers' Association of Information Technology. He has served on the Prime Minister's Task Force for IT and on the Advisory Council for the World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva. He was recognised as 'IT Man of the Year' twice and as 'Electronics Man of the Year'.
Why did you start Happiest Minds?
We believe that new technologies and transformational technologies really represent an opportunity for a new entrant to come in. It provides your entry strategy, it provides a basis for transformation and it gives you an opportunity to come in and say “look, none of the incumbents have really got any solid experience which puts them at an advantage; we’re all experimenting with some case studies here and there”. On top of that, we have no legacy to protect. Therefore we are straight away going to provide you with the richest, most logical solution which favours and helps you build the newest technologies. So I think it is a basic entry strategy that we saw, we see that the message has resonated well enough – 12 customers across the world in the space of just 6 months after starting is quite something given the lead times in this business. Interestingly enough, none of those customers are customers from our previous business, they were all new recruits. They met us as well as meeting with larger players, and then decided “hey look these guys know what they’re talking about, they’re a seasoned and experienced team, and they’re working at the leading end of where they’ve got expertise.” The second reason is linked back to the name, where we are saying we do want to create a company, where I would say it is truly a unique culture which enables, and focusses on happiness.
So, you said that your mission is encapsulated in the word smile. How does that work?
Research shows that the happiest moments in anybody’s life are the ones that they were giving, not the ones that they were taking. It resonates when you say straight away “how do we inculcate that?” We do this in little ways, for example, we will celebrate every milestone with an act of giving. So when we launched the company we gave away a finite number of meals for the government’s food for schools programme, so we were helping those kids access their one big meal a day. We will do some act of giving at each and every stage, every milestone. If I were to talk about some of the other aspects, I think the word ‘mindful’ is a very unusual word. You won’t find it anywhere else. It is a very rich word, it carries a lot of meaning in it, apart from being thoughtful, attentive, caring, seeing what’s likely to come ahead, literally you are thinking of the other person. I think that in itself is very closely linked to our approach. I should mention that it is not just the values alone which encapsulate our theme of happiness, its actually reflected in everything right from the name obviously, the mission statement is ‘happiest people, happiest customers’, the values as I’ve just described lend themselves to the acronym ‘SMILES’. We have developed a happiness framework for people as well as for customers, in our 5 year vision statement it says that we want to be the happiness evangelists for our people, and our customers. We want to be part of a global happiness movement, so we work in the IT environment but we also work in a global environment with people saying “what can we do to maximise happiness?”
You touched on your Corporate Social Responsibility programme, something that we’ve noticed has taken a back seat for some organisations in recent years, but you’re clearly making a big feature of it. Can you tell us about your activities in that area?
As part of our 5 year vision statement we actually articulated it and defined a set of measurements with criteria behind it so that it doesn’t remain pie in the sky. If you see our 5 year vision statement it says to be a leader in CSR initiatives with our core business operations, is an interesting approach to social responsibility. We are saying we are bringing a certain core confidence, if we can integrate some of that capability with our core business operations then we can deliver more value. So how do we take our own expertise to help make a difference in the lives of other people? For each of the divisions we have defined measurement criteria. The first we have decided is that we want to establish volunteering and community involvement as a core part of our Global People practice, and we encourage our people to get involved in that. I’ve already mentioned our celebration of milestones with an act of giving; we want to be able to establish processes to leverage our own capabilities for socially relevant causes. We want also to be able to say ‘how do we engage with our own clients and partners?’ to make a difference to society and to the environment. Finally, as we become profitable we will launch the Happiness Minds Foundation with its own focus mission. But that doesn’t mean we are going to wait until that time, we are going to do all of the activities I mentioned to you earlier.
(Puneet Jetli, Co-CEO of Happiest Minds Technologies) The holiday season was 3 months into our existence and there is normally the practice of a Secret friend or a Secret Santa, and the motivation was not only to find a secret friend but to establish contact, communicate and collaborate, and it would accrue a certain act of giving. The more people who go out and find a secret friend, the more people are sponsoring meals for underprivileged children. The idea is that every little act can become a force for giving.