Having spent a decade working with people in the ASEAN region, Mohan Menon believes the term “ASEAN” is a bit of a misnomer in that it implies certain similarities when, in fact, every country is hugely different from the others. The amount of common ground in terms of culture, social customs, attitudes and styles of doing business is small. Apart from intrinsic cultural differences, each member country is at a different stage of economic development.
Singapore is a first world country in every respect. The Philippines is what India was 10 years ago. Malaysia is somewhere between the two. Thailand is closer to Malaysia than Singapore. The variety is immense. Malaysians think very differently from Indonesians. “I feel as though I have experience of having worked in 10 different countries,” says Mohan Menon, CEO and director, Airtel Enterprise Services (Corporates).
Unable to make it to a meeting earlier in the week, owing to a Bharti board meeting that stretched beyond the allotted time, Menon has come into the office in Gurgaon on Good Friday for the tele.net interview.
He worked in the Asia-Pacific region when he was based in Singapore with Motorola. He loved absorbing the different cultures and learning to be sensitive to the nuances of each in order to build relationships and do business. For some time after arriving in Singapore, he says that he watched and “listened and listened and listened” to Motorola staff and Motorola customers to see how people behaved.
He discovered, among many other things, that people in Singapore were akin to westerners in the sense of being matterof-fact, and getting to the point. In Malaysia, however, you could spend two days with a new business partner discussing everything under the sun ?? the beaches in Bali, family, food, weather ?? before you could even broach the subject that had brought you together.
“As for the Thais, they are quite nationalistic. If you send them an SMS, it has to be in Thai, not English. Honestly, I could write a book about what I learnt,” says Menon.
If he wished to entertain an ethnic Chinese person in Malaysia, he would take him to a karaoke lounge. If he tried the same thing with a Malay, it would be a blunder because Malays do not frequent such places.
Some aspects of life in the region were endearingly similar to home. Punctuality was observed in the breach. “Meetings could easily start a couple of hours after the appointed time without anyone batting an eyelid. I’ve had meetings fixed for 6 p.m. finally getting started at 9 over dinner in a local restaurant.”
And the cellphone market in each country, of course, was different. A mobile costing $1,000 in Singapore, for example, was something that many people could afford. The same product would not have worked in the Philippines.
One of the first rules he learnt about doing business in this region (which again bore similarities with India) was the need to build relationships first. “If you have a relationship with someone, you have a business. No relationship, no business, no deal. You may be offering the best and cheapest product in the world but if you have no prior relationship with the person, he won’t buy it from you,” says Menon.
His Indian background helped him negotiate this kind of delicate territory in a way that someone from America or Europe might have found harder to understand. “I had an absolutely awesome experience. And that is something I bring to my current job because in India too, the way you deal with people in south India is different from those in the north or east.So this kind of exposure has been of tremendous value.”
Singapore itself was a city the Menons enjoyed. Their son and daughter were happy at their schools. Menon’s wife Rekha, having decided to do a three-year programme in early childhood education at the Singapore Institute of Management, ended up working in a school.
Menon was born in Kerala and still adores the state. Although his parents moved to Mumbai when he was four and his school years were spent in the city, his emotional connection with Kerala has remained strong. Throughout his schooldays, he would return there for the summer vacation. A battalion of aunties, uncles and cousins would be there in the family home.
His schooldays at St Francis Catholic Missionary School in Mumbai were, he says, “the best time of my life”. He still visits the school almost every time he goes to Mumbai, even if it’s just a quick visit to the chapel where he still makes the sign of the cross, out of sheer habit. And he will be attending its 100th anniversary next year.
“The grounding the school gave me made me what I am. I realised how privileged I was. Of the 900 children there, 700 were orphans. I learnt not to differentiate between rich and poor. You took a person for what he was.”
Menon used to have lunch in the orphanage lunch room. “I’d usually take the lunch my mother had packed for me but invariably I preferred the look of the orphanage food and they preferred my home lunch, so we usually swapped.”
He still has around 10 close friends who date back to Class I. Whenever he goes to Mumbai, he tries to make sure it’s a Friday.”All I have to do is send an e-mail to one friend and by the time I get there, they are all there. Although we’re all doing well and could go to the Taj or wherever, we never do. We end up going to the bars and cafes we used to visit as youngsters,” he says.
After school, Menon read commerce at Bombay University and then law. After qualifying as a lawyer, he decided he’d rather be a salesman. It’s a decision he has never regretted and his law background has been extremely useful to him too.Whenever a contract is being signed, money is being transferred, letters of credit being opened or questions of arbitrage pop up, his legal expertise has come in handy. After his law degree, Menon worked in the Middle East, doing project coordination roles in a few companies.Not finding any meaningful direction, he returned to India in 1982 and joined Nelco (Computer Division).
In 1984, he joined Digital Equipment India in computer sales and spent the next 10 years with Digital in Kolkata. By this time, he and Rekha were married and their son was just over two. They loved their time in Kolkata, finding Bengalis warm and affectionate. “My friends told me I was mad to go to Kolkata. It was where companies banished people who weren’t going anywhere. But my wife said, `what do we have to lose?’ So we decided to try it.”
During the next 10 years, Menon got to grips with understanding market segments, products, new technologies and working in a wide variety of solution selling, deal-making-type of enterprise businesses. As general manager of the eastern region, he set up Digital’s business from scratch by focusing on process manufacturing and the metals industry.
The company went from zero revenues to $30 million under his leadership.He was a consistently high performer, winning the “Dec 100” award five years in a row and the coveted “Decathlon” award for the best performing operating manager in India in 1991.
In 1994, he joined Motorola in India and set up its paging and messaging business. It was another consistently high performance that culminated in his moving to the regional headquarters in Singapore in 1999 to lead the cellular distribution business for Southeast Asia and India.
In April 2001, Menon joined a team of ex-Microsoft professionals to start up Versada Networks in the US (though he continued to stay in Singapore). Versada Networks was a pioneer in the “presence technology” solution which enables select 3G application capabilities on a 2G mobile phone. While the company had a good start, pre-testing this new technology and signing some major deals, when 9/11 happened, it ran into inadequate funding issues and could not sustain its plans.Eventually, it was integrated with another technology company in the US.
In 2003, he joined Advanced Wireless Group as vice-president, South Asia and India, is an OEM manufacturer of GSM and CDMA mobile phones. A year later, he joined Net-Itech AsiaPacific as CEO for its Asia-Pacific operations. Net-Itech is the operating arm of Net Integration Technologies, a Canadian technology company.
Around last year, Menon was thinking about returning to India, mainly because his son was going to study in the US and his daughter would soon be finishing school in Singapore and also going to the US. “They were going off to lead their own lives and it seemed a good time to come back.” So when Bharti contacted him, he seized the opportunity. “I realised that this job gave me a chance to learn, to add value and to have a good time.”
He is inspired by Bharti’s vision of being the best telecom company in the world in three years’ time. “We benchmark ourselves against global standards and so, increasingly, do our customers.When you have customers like Oracle or Cisco, they are reporting to the US and its standards, and we have to meet those. The focus is on quality and uptime.”
Menon says he’s having a great time. “I enjoy interacting with the board and with Sunil (Mittal). I’ve not yet met a person with greater clarity of vision and execution skills in my entire 25 years of working.”
Menon plays golf occasionally, travels a lot with his job (“I get a bit edgy if I don’t”) and is enjoying living in Gurgaon, trying out the restaurants and spending time with old friends. They miss their children but make up for it by having a two-hour MSN conference calls with webcams every Sunday. “It’s the mother who has a lot to say to the children,” he laughs. “I just sit on the sofa, more like a spectator.”
