Lessons from the road - fighting out of our class in India

As a latecomer in 2009 to a crowded landscape, we faced an existential challenge early on in our business. We lost the rights to our spectrum in 2012 as part of a Supreme Court decision that required operators to re-bid for their rights to do business. Against all odds, we survived. This stands as a great example of how a performance-driven, passionate company culture can take you through any challenge. 

And there are new challenges on the horizon: We are still a smaller player in a competitive, rapidly digitising Indian market. Despite only running our network on second generation, we have made a commitment – to bring “Internet for All”. To do this, we have to fight way above our weight class. In India, we aim to have 50 per cent of our customers connected to the Internet by the end of 2017.

To get there, we need to continue to stimulate a performance-driven business culture. In my book, there are two types of people in business. The first looks for excuses to opt out of challenges and looks for scapegoats for crises like the one we faced back in 2012. 

But the second type sees past struggles and the current situation as positive challenges, as a tension that keeps our people motivated and on their toes. This is what our Indian operations have become. They turn challenges into strategies and have rallied around a simple strategy that remains unchanged to this day – best in service, best in mass-market distribution, low-cost operations. This is their culture. 

Think about it: When you enter a market in 14th place, why look at it any other way than as an advantage? There is power in being small, in being an underdog. We move quickly, think sharply, and have the power to do things that the top dogs would never do. 

It has been this mindset that has taught me and my colleagues in India three lessons over the years. 

The first is analytical. Worry about today, not the future, definitely not the past. Solve what is here and now. Don’t project too far out or analyse too far back. It distracts your people from the issues of the moment. What you lose today you won’t win back tomorrow, so win every day.

The second is cultural. Enable and entrust people to make decisions at every level. People must be empowered to strategise and execute solutions. They cannot depend solely on the chief executive officer. Empowerment results in a massive machinery of ideas, solutions and execution. 

The third is executive. Stay close to your people. Top management must be informed and available for quick decisions, top-down, to ensure speed, especially in times of crisis. When attacking problems top-down, you can immediately challenge conventions and find solutions. 

These lessons have forced us to maximise the assets we have – whether human, information technology, or infrastructure – more radically than anyone else. 

We have taken on a cluster business model in order to break things of enormous scale down into manageable chunks, keeping our tactics adaptable. We see this in everyone from our sales representatives on the street to our project managers leading telecom-tower construction.

Because of our culture and our people, we are improving our bottom line and are matching up with much larger competitors. Our India operations have found out what the most demanded Internet services are – information services, messaging applications, social-media applications – and found ways to make those work on 2G technology, on less advanced devices and for affordable prices. 

They are connecting people in real ways, with real benefits and on a mass-market scale, and they’re competing head to head with much bigger players. This is who they are, and there is so much to be learned from them.

 

Sigve Brekke is an executive vice president and head of Asia operations, Telenor Group. His Twitter account is @sigve_telenor.