Leadership Strategies for Business Growth

What this session covered

The session was the institute's 109th webinar and the first of 2021, held on the broad theme of leadership strategies for business growth. It took the form of two invited speakers, each giving a personal account of building and scaling a business, followed by a moderated question-and-answer exchange. The first speaker traced his career as an entrepreneur in professional services, security and investigation work and compliance software, from starting a company without outside investment in the mid-1990s through roughly a decade of effort before reaching profitability, with operations he described as extending across 80 countries. He recounted the loss of major contracts some years in as the spur to a shift from one-off, project-driven revenue toward recurring revenue, realised through a compliance software product later taken up by a number of multinational clients.

Among the practices the first speaker advocated were hiring people more capable than oneself, making salespeople the highest-paid staff, presenting marketing material credibly, defining precisely what growth should mean for a given business, empowering employees to take decisions, staying in direct personal contact with customers, and treating honesty with clients as central to a firm's reputation. The second speaker described conceiving the idea of deploying skilled professionals in India as the back office of a large multinational, securing two million dollars to test it, and building the venture from a single premises; an early recruitment drive in 1995, he said, drew some 8,000 applications for 21 advertised posts. He recounted its growth to around 100,000 employees across 26 countries and a New York listing, attributing the outcome to a combination of luck, timing, skills and resolve, and emphasising flat, non-hierarchical working, the empowerment of staff and a readiness to give responsibility to young people.

Both speakers independently returned to the value of surrounding oneself with people more capable than oneself, the second explicitly endorsing the first's remarks on the point. The moderated exchange drew on a major multinational's in-house leadership-training campus and its firm-wide adoption of a quality methodology as models for building a leadership culture, and touched on decision-making by analysis as against intuition — particularly in judging people — the value of humility, and reflections on why a once-pre-eminent company had subsequently declined. The discussion was framed throughout against the backdrop of the pandemic, including one speaker's expectation of a strong rebound in demand once conditions eased.

Key points raised

• The session was a webinar with two invited speakers, each recounting how they built and scaled a business, followed by a moderated question-and-answer exchange rather than a debate.
• One speaker described moving from project-driven revenue to recurring revenue after losing major contracts, and building a compliance software product taken up by multinational clients.
• The other speaker recounted establishing an India-based business-process outsourcing venture, from a two-million-dollar experiment to around 100,000 employees across 26 countries and a New York listing.
• Both speakers independently stressed hiring people more capable than oneself, and one explicitly endorsed the other on the point.
• Recurring themes included flat, non-hierarchical structures, empowering and looking after staff, staying close to customers, and defining what growth means for a business.
• The moderated exchange covered a multinational's leadership-training campus and firm-wide quality programme, decision-making by analysis versus intuition, humility, and reflections on a once-pre-eminent company's decline.