The salesman’s punt

“If you don’t golf for business, you just won’t get it,” colleagues remember Phaneesh Murthy saying.

“More sales pitches could be made on golf courses by chatting with top industry executives than by making cold calls,” an executive at Infosys Technologies — where Murthy was then the head of sales and marketing — remembers him advising his team. “He made certain that most of his team members learnt to play course.”

The concept of networking on golf courses, which Murthy had picked up during his formative years in the US, did help him climb the ranks at Infosys.

He was instrumental in helping the Bangalore-based IT company grow from $10 million revenues in 1992 to $700 million in revenues by 2002.

“The fascinating challenge in the 1990s was trying to create a company, industry and putting India on the global IT map,” recalls Murthy. “It was a point of time when no one knew where India was. Those days, my first slide used to always be on India. Specific slides about the company would follow later in the presentation. Infosys was a young company when I joined them to kick off the US operations. It was an entrepreneurial opportunity for me. There was no defined strategy. My job was to go and get customers in
the US.”

Get them he sure did, swinging it all the way, like a pro.
“He loves numbers. In fact, I remember he won’t do a meeting with a client without actually going through the company’s (client’s) annual report,” recalls Jessie Paul, who worked with Murthy for five years at Infosys and another 2 years at iGate.

More proof of his networking skills and knowledge of investment banking was to follow — when he got five big investment banks, including Standard Chartered and Bank of New York, to work for his startup Quintant Services Ltd’s American depositary receipts (ADR) issue.

“He (Murthy) had left Infosys and started this company and we issued $10,000 ADRs. And he got five banks to arrange the issue,” says Tiger Ramesh, friend and one of the co-founders of Quintant, which iGate bought in 2003 by picking up infrastructure major GMR’s 51% stake for Rs87 crore.

Not for nothing do friends and detractors alike agree that the IT executive would have made an excellent investment banker.
“He is well-read, articulate and always speaks the language of the client. This helps open doors,” says Srinjay Sengupta who worked with Murthy for eight years — six years at Infosys, where he was the head of Europe and then two years at iGate, where he was in the executive committee.

Murthy, though, begs to differ. Had it not been for IT, he says, he would have opted for medicine. “I am still tempted to try medicine. May be after I retire I will do medicine.”

Infosys boss N R Narayana Murthy too was enthralled by the young whizkid’s acumen and many in the senior ranks even believed Murthy could head the company after Murthy retired.

“He is a very bright and ambitious person. I still remember, once Phaneesh was going through a bad phase and he hadn’t made any major sales in about a year. I told him “don’t worry, we will go do the pitch together.” I still remember, he did such an excellent presentation that we clinched the deal. This was the account of Nordstorm. Somewhere in 1992-93,” recalls N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor and chairman of the board at Infosys Technologies.
But one deal soured for this “relationship guy.” In the summer of 2002, a sexual harassment suit filed by a former Infosys employee in the US, Reka Maximovitch, alleging that she had been harassed by Murthy, forced him to leave the company.

But despite the scandal, recounts another executive who has worked with Murthy for over a decade, this teetotaller and vegetarian had offers from a couple of companies in the US. “This was testimony that when it came to sales, you couldn’t better him.”
“At Infosys, we created the operating model discontinuity — it was lower, faster, cheaper. At iGate, we are creating the business model discontinuity through my outcome-based, transaction pricing model. I continue to be focused on growth and revenues,” says Murthy.

Murthy says he does not have any idols in the industry, an attitude his detractors believe reflects the “aggressive, self-centred and ruthless team manager” that he is.

“He loves winning and could not tolerate one dissenting voice in a meeting,” says a senior Infosys executive, who had worked with him since the mid-90s.

This is why, his salesmanship notwithstanding, Murthy could never command people loyalty, recalls the Infosys executive. “He was not a good manager as he came across as a know-it-all guy.”
Many also believe Murthy to be “more a deal maker than a builder of companies.”

“(Testimony to that is) iGate has never really done that well,” says another executive who was a board member at the company until 2008.

Murthy disagrees, saying he is more into “organisation building” than “deal making.” “I do believe iGate has been successful,” he says, adding that he has been able turn around a “messy, loss-making” company into $1billion market capitalisation.

“On a scale of 5, I would rate him at 4 or may be 5 when it comes to his performance in sales. But I would rate him at just 2 if I have to judge him on his stint as a CEO,” says an executive who has worked with him both at Infosys and iGate and now heads a company that competes with iGate.

What Murthy and his team do at Patni Computers therefore remains to be seen. It will be a challenge ahead of Murthy to be a “likeable salesman” as he leads a company that has an attrition rate of close to 24% — the highest among the big four IT giants.
As it unravels, Murthy might say. After all, he has a voracious appetite for reading serial murder mysteries, too. And he never shelves a book after reading it; he leaves it behind in hotels and airplanes for other travellers to pick up and read, says an associate who has often travelled together.