Assignment Summary: Choose any person from the supervisory management field as t

Question

Assignment Summary:

Choose any person from the supervisory management field as the topic for a 4-6 page research paper. The person to be interview/profiled can be someone who is known by the student or someone who the student has an interest in learning more about.

Answer the basic questions about this person and his/her supervisory management experience. Students should provide answers to the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” type of questions in a professionally written business report. Use a combination of interviewing and online research to seek the answers to these questions as they relate to the interviewee/profile subject’s supervisory management experience.

Explanation / Answer

Business Report on Mr. Krishna Gopal, Global Head - Sales & Leadership Hiring & Talent Management, Tech Mahindra Ltd

Mr. Krishna Gopal, commonly known as KG among his colleagues, can be counted amongst the new breed of techno-business professionals who combine their passion for technology with business understanding to achieve business outcomes.

He has a rich experience of more than 23 years primarily in sales and marketing across various industries be it consumer durables chemicals equipment retail and software services his prior employment included leading Indian conglomerates like Godrej, Asian Paints and also Satyam. His work tenure also included a year where he worked in Saudi Arabia. He likes teaching and also has taught at various business schools in Mumbai. He has a successful track record of incubating new businesses in the emerging markets of Middle East, Africa and India. At Sify he spearheaded the evangelizing of e-commerce in India during its inception. At Mahindra British Telecom he initially incubated their e-governance initiatives in India during the 1999-2001 period when e-governance was at its inception in India. Subsequently he incubated their telecom foray into the Middle East and Africa region and grew it to 5 times the average vendor revenue levels.

Mr. Krishna Gopal is currently the Global Head - Sales & Leadership Hiring & Talent Management, Tech Mahindra Ltd. (TechM). In his journey of 15 plus years with TechM he has been associated with various roles and has recently experienced a shift from sales role to HR role.

Achievers In the Making (AIM) is a program started under his leadership and purview. AIM program seeks to train and launch young people across Tech Mahindra into Sales/Account Management/ Client facing roles.

When asked about AIM, the baby of KG’s team, he said, “What happened was we found that engineers joined the firm and then left in a couple of years wanting to do an MBA and when you go to an MBA school to hire all that these engineers or rather the new freshly minted MBAs want to do is sales so we said why don't we give them an opportunity in the company itself to help transition engineers into a sales role. That's how AIM was born. It's been now about five years and we are in the seventh batch. A couple of years we did two batches and it's been a wonderful program.”

AIM is a two months of virtual training, one month of face-to-face training and two months in the field (on-the-job) training. AIM has shown about 80 of the EMAs globally in the market and AIM has done close to 110 million dollars’ worth of revenues.

KG has been popularly known as a person who has been able to groom talented individuals to the team. The challenges that he faced in grooming these high performers and game changers to the culture came essentially into two areas to him. One is when he transitioned people from largely a delivery role into a sales role to be able to get them to become entrepreneurial, to be able to get them to start doing some ownership and so on so that is a lot of exhortation plus a lot of making them do kind of a training. The other is when you bring in people from outside and getting them to adjust into a culture like TechM’s. He ensures that they are buddy with the right people, they are mentored well.

Apart from AIM, he also started another program which he and his team named – SEAL. Under this training, the Sales Leaders and Sales Personnel if TechM, based across different geographies are hand-picked and trained on an intensive location based one week training. They are groomed on their sales skills, taught about the various new services and products offered by TechM, given the necessary exposure, introduced to the top management in person. This intensive training has received recognition from the CEO of TechM, Mr, C.P. Gurnani.

Now, into global hiring as well, KG has a huge team functioning under him. He not only keeps traveling to locations like Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai, but also travels outside India to conduct the SEAL training successfully.

Mr. Krishna Gopal is very active on the social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. "Social media channels have become watering holes where all the influential, digital savvy people congregate," says Krishna Gopal. He is of the belied that gone are the days of sifting through heaps of CVs to find the right talent. A direct message to potential hires on Twitter or LinkedIn saves time and effort.

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