First impressions are the last impressions. Extending that idiom further, Sudhir Narang believes that in any endeavour, it is the beginning that is the most crucial.
And so, when he joined British Telecom (BT) in 2007, after a long stint at Cisco, he treated the initial period as a sort of challenge. Taking a cue from the book, The First 90 Days, he says, “The team watches you closely in the first 90 days, so that is definitely a time of pressure for any leader, as one needs to understand the organisation’s strengths and what one can do to improve and enhance its position in the market.”
As managing director, BT India, Narang has his hands full. He is responsible for the entire Indian operations of the British telecommunications major. Delivering services as per contractual obligations and gauging customer satisfaction with BT products and services ?? all come under his purview.
It took Narang a while to forge relationships at his new workplace. A strong believer in the philosophy that interpersonal relationships determine success or failure in a venture, he decided to leave his doors open to his team, in spite of being the boss. Once strategies were outlined, he tried to motivate his team to meet targets. “Being in a customer-centric business, one needs to have highly motivated people in front of the customer,” he says.
Having dealt with people for many years, Narang has come to a key conclusion ?? that people possess a “stretch mentality”. Basically, that people deliver their best when truly stretched to the limits of their ability. “That’s when we really know how much capability we possess,” he observes.
It is a mindset he literally grew up with. Coming from a middle-class family, he observed his parents work really hard to give him a good education. That made Narang resolve to make something of himself; to be someone his family could be proud of. “Study, study and study more” was the advice he received from his parents.
Narang obtained an engineering degree from BITS Pilani and then decided to take a course in international trade. Secretly, he nurtured a desire to run a company. Now that his dreams have transformed into reality, he is full of gratitude for those early days of guidance from his parents.
While Narang’s wife, a prosecutor, has constantly supported him in his endeavours despite her own busy professional life, Narang believes that the phrase “work-life balance” is actually a much-abused term. “In this juggling, you gain something, you lose something. If you take too much out of your life, you are automatically losing out on something in the same life.”
His counter-view is this: “More than balance, spending quality time is what matters. Let’s say, you have a conference call at 8 a.m., will you not attend it? Or, if you need to file a story late at night, can you shirk your responsibility? Therefore, one should enjoy and make the most of the spare time one gets rather than keeping time aside for various activities.”
Narang is a strong advocate of doing one’s job with enthusiasm and sincerity. Given the current work scenario, he feels that it is very difficult to say that one should work for only eight hours a day. Nonetheless, he takes every opportunity to spend time with his family, pursue his hobbies, and at times, hit the dance floor.
Commenting on the boom in the telecom sector, Narang says that the trend started with the IT revolution when global and domestic outsourcing took place and the telecom sector was liberalised. The wireless segment, in particular, witnessed exponential growth.
He now sees convergence becoming the order of the day. “From an emphasis on voice-only earlier, today data too has become important. With all platforms gradually shifting to IP, there is a lot of convergence taking place. The question is, can one build many applications on the same platform irrespective of whether the user is at work or mobile?”
Going forward, application-intensive high productivity tools, growth in IP and convergence of wireless and wireline solutions are the trends he anticipates. “In India, one can see huge growth in rural commerce as PC penetration is now increasing, and everyone may soon have access to a communications network.”
Narang began his career with HCL at a time when half of India’s computing world worked with either HCL or Wipro. “I spent a long time with HCL, and then moved to Cisco. BT has come my way only recently. My decision to switch jobs has been guided by a desire to really translate a technology to a solution, to a service, and finally to a deliverable that the customer can actually touch and feel. Consumers are not interested to know what is GSM or CDMA, or if the product is on an IP-based platform or TDMA. They want to have more services and applications atop a common platform.”
Narang believes in constantly pushing the envelope, raising the bar as it were. “Once you have achieved a task, it seems small, because you have another challenge before you,” he says.
BT, he believes, is probably a pioneer in the strategy for IP ?? the twenty-firstcentury network. In the future, he sees BT offering several services and applications on this platform.
Compared to the complexities and pressures of life today, Narang’s growingup years were fairly simple. For one, he was not surrounded by the fancy gadgets that most young people flash nowadays. His advice to young people is that it is good to have big dreams but one needs to have a vision and a focused career path to pursue. He also stresses that it is important give back to society. “I am not talking in terms of money, but in terms of enabling others to achieve something in their lives. Sooner or later, I might get into that.”
Narang is fond of reading. But he does not like to indulge in fiction; instead he prefers to read motivational non-fiction. Indian mythology is something that he likes to read up on. “It is important to know the past because it is the past that shapes our society and the individuals we are today. One book that I have just finished reading is Conversations With God. Such books encourage you to look into the inner self and improve on problem areas. They also bring in the human touch in one’s day-to-day life,” he muses.
Narang reiterates his belief that relationships play a key role in making one a better human being. For example, he talks about his teenage daughter, whom he gets very few opportunities to interact with, given his hectic work schedule. “She is a teenager ?? that’s a time when you need more space for yourself. So, she is not disturbed by my absence. But when it comes to my son, he makes his best effort to catch my attention, considering that I do not spend enough time with him. So, I try to dedicate my weekends to my family. I try to give my best towards maintaining all my relationships, be it at the workplace, with customers or in the family ?? at least that’s my target,” he says.
Narang says that he has moulded himself to become a people’s person. While he is of the opinion that the human touch is good, he realises that overdoing it may become a weakness. “I feel that sometimes, I tend to overdo things, and then people see it as my weakness. So, it depends on which side of the coin you are looking at. My vision and ability to grasp business models are good, but when I do things very quickly, towards which I have a tendency, it becomes a disadvantage rather than an advantage,” he says.
Narang has been based in Delhi for most of his life. However, while he was a student and during his initial days at work, he was in Mumbai. Interestingly, he gets to be in both cities nowadays, with at least one trip a week to Mumbai. All of which makes for a very hectic existence. The answer, Narang sometimes wonders, would be to devise a converged platform in his life too ?? whereby he can mesh his work with his family commitments, each complementing the other. 
