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The ground floor of the Tata Teleservices office in New Delhi?s Mathura Road is still under construction. Drilling machines pound the concrete walls. Workers, laden with dust and paint, go furiously about their work.
Upstairs, it?s a different picture. In a huge spic-and-span room, hundreds of young men and women sit quietly before computer screens and dutifully punch keys. Here, inside a capacious chamber, sits Naresh Malhan, the chief operating officer (COO) of Tata Teleservices.
Telecom is an extremely competitive market and the 55-year-old Malhan has been at the helm of affairs only since last year. But under his leadership, the company is already beginning to see a growth in market share and a rise in revenue.
It isn?t common that a lecturer of psychology heads a top corporate team. But Malhan isn?t a common man. Consultancy is common to academics these days. Back in the Seventies it was almost unheard of in India.
But the boy who grew up in a family of teachers and loved playing basketball during his Hindu College days in Delhi wasn?t satisfied delivering lectures to one batch of students after another. Malhan explains why. ?There was no challenge,? he says. ?I was pretty clear I didn?t want to teach forever.?
Even during his lecturer days in Allahabad University, he often took up independent, national-level assignments. For some corporations, he was designing psychometric selection tests and in-house training programmes. At other places, he was making senior executives more effective at work.
In 1979, an offer came from tyre multinational, Goodyear, and Malhan took it up eagerly. He was taken in as manager of training. But soon, he was doing a variety of jobs: from production to sales and marketing to corporate strategy.
Change came in 1987 when Malhan joined Modi Xerox. He went on to head the marketing division by 1995. Malhan sums up those years: ?The teaching assignments taught me conceptual orientation. At Goodyear, it was a hands-on job. And at Modi Xerox, I learnt how to deliver results at the company level.?
The senior executive quit Modi Xerox in 2000 to join as CEO of Essar for Rajasthan, Haryana and UP (East). Under him the company?s revenue grew from Rs 1 crore a month to Rs 15 crore a month. Malhan looks back at the tasks he performed with immense satisfaction. ?I took it to profit without taking a single paisa from the shareholder. That was the beauty of that assignment,? he says.
When Essar became Hutchinson Essar, Malhan retained his job but, in his own words, the new management gave him terms he couldn?t accept. Frustrated, he made a telephone call to the Tatas. ?I got the job 65 minutes later,? he recalls. Initially, he was just looking after the Andhra Pradesh circle. But, a good performance ensured that he became the northern chief operating officer by May, 2004.
For someone who has discharged a variety of duties successfully, Malhan has a simple definition of a good job. ?The job should give you a sense of accomplishment. It should be something where you can contribute,? he says. A good job tests one?s skill and competence. It also allows a person to improve and upwardly revise one?s own capability. ?To be satisfying, it must be challenging,? he says.
Such clear thinking emerges from the fact that Malhan is also a certified trainer for Systematic Analysis of Ideas, a programme that is self-explanatory. The course helped him look at issues from a listener?s viewpoint. And it helped in making a leader out of him.
Malhan believes it is a passion for excellence, the desire to do things right and deliver that separates a leader from the rest. ?You can see it in any walk of life,? he says. He?s confident that both he and Tata Teleservices are on the right path.