HARD DRIVE FOR SUCCESS

Even after an illustrious 36-year career, IT luminary Neelam Dhawan remains passionate about advising the industry. By Leila Lai in Singapore

To do any business, and to do it well, you have to be a logical thinker, more than anything else. You need an ability to look at ambiguity, and how you analyse it, how you think through the chaos that businesses go through every day

Being a woman was an advantage. They couldn’t say no to me as easily as they could to a man. If I said, ‘This is the business, this is the proposal and I think you should select us’, they would look at its merit and not give me a hard time

She has been recognised as one of the most powerful businesswomen — not just in India but worldwide — several times by magazines including Fortune and Forbes. Yet there’s no slowing down for Neelam Dhawan. She’s still highly driven and raring to go.

Even after recounting the milestones of a 36-year career studded with senior executive roles at technology giants including IBM, Microsoft and HP, the information technology veteran brims with excitement about her plans for the next stage of her career.

Ms Dhawan currently serves as a board adviser to ICICI Bank in India and the Singapore-based technology research and advisory firm Ecosystm, and also sits on the boards of the travel agency Yatra Online and Philips Electronics. She sees these appointments as an extension of her career and a way for her to give back to the industry she has learned so much from over the past decades.

“It’s a progression in our careers. We start by being a trainee, then we become a manager, then we become an executive, and then after being an executive, you’ve done everything,” she says during a visit to Singapore for meetings at Ecosystm.

“To me, it’s a natural evolution for all of us who go through this journey of being executives. Do I stop working? I spent 36 years doing all this; can I give this knowledge to some other company and help them gain and come up to speed? That’s where the role of an adviser comes in and that’s what I find exciting about it.” UP FOR A CHALLENGE

Ms Dhawan has never been one to shy away from a challenge. After completing her bachelor’s degree in economics and master’s in business administration in 1982, she entered the IT industry at a time when it was still in its infancy in India, and women were a minority in the field.

Despite having no engineering background, she accepted an offer from HCL Hewlett Packard over one from a bank because she decided the opportunity to work in an up-and-coming industry was worth the risk.

That early experience taught her that critical thinking ability, perhaps more than job-specific knowledge, is a key criterion for success.

“If you look at engineering or economics, these subjects teach you to be a logical thinker. To do any business, and to do it well, you have to be a logical thinker, more than anything else. You need an ability to look at ambiguity, and how you analyse it, how you think through the chaos that businesses go through every day. Any subject which teaches you that is good.”

She quickly rose to head the marketing department at HCL Hewlett Packard for 11 years, and went on to serve as vice-president of IBM’s PC business for about four years. Following another four-year stint as head of sales at Compaq, she moved to Microsoft in 2005.

There, she found herself on unfamiliar ground once again, with no experience in the software business after more than 20 years dealing with infrastructure and services. “I was like a fish out of water, because I wasn’t much of a software person,” she admits.

“Software is very different because you can fight your competition, but what you can’t fight is that your customer may not buy your software, but instead use it for free.”

Intellectual property (IP) rights were practically unheard of then, and Ms Dhawan fought an uphill battle to get authorities in India to recognise the need for regulation.

She recalls being told by a senior police officer in a discussion about software piracy: “Listen, in my priority of things, I first look at the VIPs and politicians I have to manage. Then the murders that have happened, and the crime that has happened. Maybe last, I look at how somebody has stolen your software and copied it.”

She realised at that point that she had no choice but to deliver results in other ways while IP regulations caught up to the times.

Aside from scrutinising financial results, she started evaluating herself on her ability to keep the team together, reduce attrition rates, and expand the business in the right direction to develop it for the future.

These were not necessarily the performance metrics spelled out for her, but she has always been competitive and goal-driven. “I am always thinking, how do I do better than what I’ve done? Am I competing with someone? I don’t think so. I’m competing with myself. I just push myself and I like it. I love doing that.”

This competitive streak showed up early in her life, manifesting itself in how she would aim to be among the top three students in class, and how she felt she had failed whenever she fell short.

It also explains her belief in the 90-day sprint at the start of every new job. “When you join a company, and everybody says ‘Take your time to settle in’, there’s no such thing,” she says.

In the first 90 days, new hires are watched by the managers who hired them, peers who wanted their jobs, and employees who will be working under them and are watching for leadership qualities. Ms Dhawan describes the experience as being like a fish in a glass bowl, observed from all directions.

“In the first quarter, you have to establish yourself as a person who can lead the teams, understand the business and put it in the right direction so that everybody then says ‘Ah, we have got the right person in the role’,” she says.

Absorbed in pursuing her self-assigned goals at Microsoft India, she was caught completely off-guard when her team won an award for the best Microsoft subsidiary in Asia-Pacific in 2006.

She recounts sitting at the back of the auditorium during the annual awards ceremony next to her chief of marketing, watching as one accolade after another went to other teams. Just as she said to her colleague, “Next year, we have to win something. This is not good for us!”, her name flashed on the screen and Microsoft India was announced as the winner of the next award.

“Did I expect it? The answer is no,” Ms Dhawan says, laughing as she describes running down the aisles and having to be lifted over the safety barricades by the security guards to accept the award on stage. “I was doing my job, and so was our team. The whole team was doing their job and we weren’t expecting any recognition out of it.”

Likewise, the road to reclaiming the position of top PC maker in India for HP in 2012 started with internal efforts for a slightly different goal: to become the most respected IT company in the country.

Customer satisfaction was a key area that needed work, but Ms Dhawan’s team also worked on the company’s talent acquisition and retention, since high turnover rates would undermine their reputation.

“We defined a scorecard for ourselves. It gave us the direction to focus on the right things, and it took us three years, but we did reach [our goal].” CARVING OUT A CAREER

Although her early career in a male-dominated industry was no bed of roses, Ms Dhawan faced the challenges with a cheerful attitude, and counts herself lucky to have received support from both her employers and her family throughout her working life.

Her mother made clear her belief that women should be economically independent, and Ms Dhawan’s competitive streak ensured that she had no intention of losing out to her brothers in any aspects of life. “In my mind, I was never not going to have a career,” she says.

Early on, her work in marketing meant that she dealt primarily with internal staff. She believes that because the organisations that employed her trusted in her ability, she did not meet with too much resistance to her position or her ideas from her male colleagues.

She felt the gender difference more keenly when she moved into sales, as male customers would be visibly confused over how to respectfully greet and communicate with a woman. But she did not dwell too much on the fact that she was often the only woman in a room or a team, and took a light-hearted view of the situation.

“Being a woman was an advantage. They couldn’t say no to me as easily as they could to a man. If I said, ‘This is the business, this is the proposal and I think you should select us’, they would look at its merit and not give me a hard time,” she says.

Since then, she has observed a radical change in India’s IT industry, which, in her opinion, is now a great place for women to work.

“The percentage of working women has gone up,” Ms Dhawan says. “In those days, you could count the number of women in the workforce. Today, companies are more evolved. They think about diversity and women in the workforce, and many more women are coming into this career.”

With women being more career-oriented nowadays, that naturally adds to the difficulties for both men and women in balancing work and family responsibilities. When asked how she managed her work-life balance, she shares three tips that sound simplistic at first: Don’t stress out, get the support you need, and be serious about your career.

But she goes on to explain that she boiled them down to these three points when she realised that achieving this balance is no easy task, and one must prioritise and delegate to achieve one’s goals, rather than trying to do everything.

“You have to accept that you are a working person, and you are married with kids. You have responsibilities to both. If I have passion for something, I have to make time for it. It’s all about not being stressed about what we want to do with our time,” she says.

“I remember I used to get very worked up, thinking: ‘Is my house looking as it should? How are the kids in school, and my work?’ One bright day, I said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ If my home doesn’t look like it’s on the cover of

Architectural Digest, it’s fine. My kids and my work became my priority, and I just stopped stressing about one of the aspects which I was spending time on.”

A strong support system is crucial; while she had help from her mother-in-law to care for her two daughters Naina and Nupur, Ms Dhawan urges working parents to employ domestic help or make use of societal support in order to free up time and prioritise their careers.

In the same vein, she urges women to be more proactive in order to advance their careers.

“We sometimes don’t give our careers priority and we keep on thinking, ‘Why has he done well while she hasn’t done well?’ Have you prioritised and spent as much time as you want on being successful? Women should give priority to their career too, if they want to be successful about it. It’s serious work.

“It’s all about being bold and speaking what’s on your mind, what you think is right, and not being scared if somebody says ‘Oh, you’re wrong’. It’s okay if you’re wrong,” she adds.

“In a meeting, you will see that women talk less than men. They’re scared of rejection and failure, and one should not be. Just be bold in your goals, be bold for what you want in your life.”

But amid the hustle, Ms Dhawan also thinks it is important to take stock of one’s progress and appreciate how far one has come.

“Every 31st of December, I look back and ask myself, ‘Where was I on the first of January? What was I thinking, what was I doing? And what am I doing now on the 31st of December?’ When you do that every year, you look back and you realise that even in a year, you can achieve so much.

“What happens is we beat ourselves up and say ‘Oh, I didn’t do this, or that was wrong’. Just think about the good things you did, and what you achieved. You will feel really good about some of the things you did, and that will motivate you.” WORK NEVER STOPS

At this stage in her career, Ms Dhawan can afford to slow down a little, but it is clear her heart is still very much in her work. When asked what passions she would like to pursue, she starts off with a few that sound suitably relaxing: “I have a rooftop garden, and I want to learn piano. I haven’t started yet, but that’s one of my passions, to learn some music.”

Then, without skipping a beat, she continues: “But I’m equally very excited about developing younger talent. I see that as a really satisfying area for me to work on, when I meet young CEOs and executives, and people who have ideas, and the venture capitalists and private equity guys.”

Ms Dhawan will focus on sharing what she has done before, providing guidance when the companies struggle in certain areas, and asking the right questions to prompt her mentees to think about important issues they might overlook due to inexperience.

“When I started working 36 years ago, it was clearly a different world and some of my experiences may or may not be relevant. But what is relevant today is what we are doing and how we see the future.”

Most of all, she wants to help startups identify the next big thing in technology and turn their ideas into businesses.

“I see the technologies of today and the future, and I see technology touching each and every person. It’s the application of technology that is going to change how we work and live.

“The startups of today will be the large businesses of tomorrow, and the excitement is in creating that ecosystem of new companies who are the businesses of tomorrow.” Business Times