Tracing the story of Shiv Nadar, a recent book on top entrepreneurs studies how HCL’s investments in R&D have resulted in the company gaining expertise in the hugely profitable aerospace and defence sectors. “Its latest success story is in the field of proprietary technology, allowing it to offer image processing solutions for a whole range of applications, including high-resolution images from satellites,” writes Vikas Pota in ‘India Inc.’ (www.nicholasbrealey.com).
Such capabilities include processing images from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), real-time video capture and image exploitation in surveillance and reconnaissance missions done through the use of embedded technologies, enhanced fusion vision for situational awareness applications, and automatic vision inspection systems for quick inspection of components in manufacturing, the author elaborates.
Pota notes that, in the IT world where technology becomes obsolete on a regular basis, Nadar is credited with creating technology cradles for incubating and developing new, high-potential, and cutting-edge technologies. “He is affectionately referred to as Magus, a Persian term meaning wizard, for his magical ability to conjure up whatever he desires… It’s also a reference to the magical quality he brings to a management style that relies heavily on delegation.”
One of the quotes of Nadar cited in the book is about the need to stay paranoid because you don’t know in which corner which one of your assumptions is going to go wrong. Any business goal is built on a set of assumptions, and you have to constantly test the assumption to see whether it stands valid today, Nadar explains.
If you don’t do this, businesses will fail, or fail to produce the results that we wanted them to get to, he cautions. “So it is important to be extremely restless, to achieve the goals.” Suggesting that this is the way it should be for an entrepreneur, Nadar instructs entrepreneurs who are coming out of the restlessness ‘to sell the company and go away.’
Good collection.
