Folks, we finally have 100 on the Board! No, not 100 crores (not yet), but a headcount of 108. I think it’s a significant milestone. In the early days I had decided I would be involved with EVERY hire until the first hundred. I would meet and share our Vision with every person who we will be offering a position to. I think I did manage to meet most all. I have spent an order of magnitude more time doing this than meeting customers.
You will agree that we are a great team and we found great people; and when great people found us, we responded.
I write ( wrote the first draft) this note on a plane, on way back from Bangalore, after doing a jam packed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of, guess what?...yes ...interviewing. Looks like I will be continuing to be involved with EVERY hire beyond the first 100? Yes. Of all the stuff I do (and don't) I decided that there are two things that I will not distance myself with...one: hiring... and two: anything that affects the brand.
And so I continue to seek and search for the great folks and try and be really discerning and when they meet QAI standards try and get them over.
The QAI 100 Team is a team to beat. Very few organizations are characterized by such passion and such talent. Such integrity and such simplicity. Such energy and such empathy.
I also believe that there is an invisible set of forces at work, a self selection that goes on; "seek and they shall come phenomenon" ... . The universe is connected. Things are meant to be. People you meet are no accidents.
Look at the early Qaiites....
Many many moons ago, QAI had its humble office in a building in Delhi - SEVEN Community Center. I get a call from a lady, Mrinalini, she says "I have heard that you folks do some CMM stuff", and proudly says "my husband is an authorized Instructor for CMM, the only one in India. He is in USA next few weeks and we have a software business. "Guess where this lady's business was located in this large country called India? In SIX Community Centre, East of Kailash. The very next building. Her husband's name - Ajay Batra.
I am on a business trip to USA and a young MBA, Vishal, is given charge to "run" QAI in my absence. He decides that this young girl called Sudha needs to be fired, and I agree. I come back, and ask Sudha to shortlist people for hiring, her replacement. She finds this five feet BA in English literature graduate, who was selling torches to taxi stands a few weeks ago to earn some pocket money. We see a sparkle in his eyes and pay a handsome amt of Rs 3,000 per month. This boy Samrat Dasgupta, goes on to be an assessment team member in QAIs PCMM assessment with BILL CURTIS! After QAI, a stint at IBM Daksh in Quality, does great....makes it to Accenture, in Quality, and in a space of five years earns enough to make anyone look handsome!
QAIs SEI consultancy is flourishing and we have no Lead Assessor. India has only a couple and IFlex has one and Wipro has one. We wonder what we must do. Rajesh Naik bumps into this..... (One of the few LAs in Bangalore airport), gets him interested, tells me to take it from there, and I do and we introduce sometime in December, to QAI,- Santa, our first LA.. And then with some SEI permitted inbreeding we have several LAs.
We have our eyes on this wonderful (and handsome) Quality Manager, in a company called Eurolink. There’s only one snag. Eurolink is a customer. And our policy and values don’t allow us to hire a person we are interacting with. Rajesh recommends restructuring, in the process Mukul decides to leave, we ask the CEO if its okay to hire Mukul, he has no choice but says yes! (no one dares not follow Rajesh's advise)
Ramaswamy and I meet one day in Bangalore and three years later Rama, remembers this then small co QAI and applies for a position on the QAI web site! Rama's mail is about to get deleted with all the obscene spams. But it doesn't.
At one time QAI had four Aries out of a total of five staff. Rajesh, also an Aries, strongly recommended that I change the hiring criteria, and till today probably doesn't agree that it was mere coincidence that I was an Aries too.
And we make mistakes too. Ajay Kabra--one of QAI's highly competent, highly appreciated, very popular consultant and LA was met by me in Mumbai many years before Ajay chose to go and return from USA and talk to us again. Ajay tells me we didn't make an offer then!
Umesh was running his own firm. Umesh takes on an assignment for QAIs Project: Software Dioxide. Soon Umesh decides that QAI will be his only customer.
While QAI has always chosen tough customers to service, its been a tough customer for its people. That has rattled many and many have chosen to leave. And many of those are the best ambassadors that we will ever have. And there many who have met the standards and sustained. In Pradeep C's words its A League of Extraordinary Men (and women). I totally agree.
Let’s not forget the "woman" I hired, through which we got us QAI. I was a PhD student in USA, had gone there after IIT, was coming back to India for a one year break, and was looking for things to do. I hired my friend’s wife to do research at $5 an hour paying out of my princely sum of $10 an hour that i used to earn as a research associate. There is NO internet at that time, there is NO software industry in India, and there is no India on the map of Americans. She discovers QAI USA in a CD ROM based database of American industries. She gives me a dot matrix printout of QAI amongst 17 other org profiles. I see potential. Steve Bender, then QAI USA, decides to repose trust in us. The rest, as they say, is history.
I can go on and on! I must have missed so many other significant people on-, boarding war stories.
Well, another day, another milestone.....
