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In search of the happiness code

Ashok Soota has the kind of iconic status in the IT industry that very few in the field can boast of. But his charm is that he wears that tag very lightly.

Ashok Soota has the kind of iconic status in the IT industry that very few in the field can boast of. But his charm is that he wears that tag very lightly. As soon as I enter his corner office located amidst decidedly verdant surroundings, Soota wants me to have a look at the impressive lawns. ?There is a pond there as well,? he says. Happiness, he adds, has a lot to do with environment.

?Hope you wouldn?t want me to dwell too much about what happened in the recent past,? Soota asks anxiously, referring to his exit from MindTree, a company that he co-founded. Happiest Minds Technologies, the firm he started after exiting MindTree, completed one year of existence on Wednesday.

Soota says he created Happiest Minds with the aim of creating ?happiest people and customers?. The happy employees have hunted down 25 customers for the firm over the last one year. ?One thing I don?t want to do is, go too fast,? he says.

The 70 year old IT leader will complete three decades in the IT industry in 2014. His Wipro stint lasting over 15 years, laid the foundation for what the company is today. In 1983, Premji was looking to start a mini-computer business, and was searching for the right person who could take the business forward. Soota was referred and Premji instantly knew he had a winning candidate at hand.

In 1997, Soota told Premji that he wanted to become an entrepreneur after turning Wipro into one of the leaders. But Premji talked him out of it. But a couple of years later when he again spoke on the same theme, Premji relented. ?I think Premji knew that I would eventually go, once I had that chat with him in ?97. I remember walking out of office after work on a February evening in 1999 and then making a call to Walden. They were willing to put $10 million on the table, and I took $9.5 million. MindTree was born.?

MindTree?s initiation into the world software coincided with the dotcom bubble burst. It was a very tough time for the company. ?We had to realign and restrategise,? says Soota. The company had a fast start and hit the $100 million mark pretty quickly. Soon it was the next big thing in IT circles. But towards the end of the decade the company was badly hit by the economic slowdown and certain decisions taken on the product front. Before anyone could sense a crisis, Soota announced his resignation, leaving industry watchers in a state of shock. ?That?s all in the past,? says Soota, not wanting to talk more about his exit from MindTree. ?I have set up Happiest Minds with 12 co-founders. All of us have the same objective. ?We are clear that people are key to any service organisation. Very few companies are built on the belief that happy employees can give rise to happy customers. Our entire organisational focus is built around this theme.?

The company is looking to focus on business intelligence and analytics, cloud computing and unified communications as three major drivers. ?We want to get to the $100 million mark in the next five years or so. An IPO will follow as well. Currently, though, we are focusing on building our capabilities,? says Soota.

The possibilities are endless. ?Long ago when a research report said that the Indian IT industry will be worth $50 billion soon, no one believed it. Today it is a $100 billion industry. And it will grow further,? says Soota. ?So there will be many more opportunities and I want Happiest Minds to be prepared to take them when they come.?

Soota continues to remain friends with many of his former colleagues at MindTree. He always knew how to let go of things. ?Happiness is, after all, what we are chasing right through our lives,? he notes.

Soota has led a charmed life, on his own terms. As a manager at Shriram Refrigeration, back in the old economy days, he would have had no clue how his life would unfold. The key thing was that Soota was not afraid of taking his chances. Otherwise he would not have accepted an offer for a computer hardware job when no one knew such a thing existed. He again broke the status quo when he moved on from Wipro and started MindTree. And then he did it once more with Happiest Minds.

Soota hates that walk towards oblivion.

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First published on: 03-09-2012 at 03:13 IST
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