How I sold software made in the 'country of snake charmers'

My tenure at the telecommunications department caused headaches I hadn’t anticipated. But at the same time I found myself involved in interesting projects, some of which had profound consequences for India’s economy. GE chairman Jack Welch’s visit to India was one such instance.

Welch and his team arrived at eight and we were assembled to meet him. After the pleasantries and coffee we got down to business. Welch knew we were aware of what he wanted, so he asked, "Sam, what do you propose?"

My answer surprised him. "Jack, I want to sell you software."

"I’m not buying software," he said. "I want to sell you engines, that’s what we are here for."

"Jack, I’m not buying engines."

"Strange," he said. He had come all the way to India, expecting a very different conversation.

"Then what do we do?"

"I guess we have nothing to do," I said.

"Let’s have breakfast."

There was dead silence. The GE guys just sat there, perplexed. I could feel the waves of discomfort washing over my guys. They felt awkward. I was locking horns with Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric. This wasn’t the way to start a conversation. There wasn’t any need for confrontation.

After a long silence, Welch broke the spell. "Okay," he said, "tell me what you want to tell me about software."

I had prepared a 35mm slide presentation. India, the title read, Country of Snake Charmers, Sadhus and Software. The slides rolled on.

People think of India as a land of mysticism. But we also make software.

A slide showed a priest praying in front of a computer. We have a young population with advanced education and great ability. We have a large number of software engineers. GE can benefit from our software talent. India can develop software for GE.

Welch watched. He listened carefully. "What, specifically, do you want?" he said.

"Given a choice," I said, "I would want a 10-million-dollar software order from you."

"I’ll tell you what," he said.

"I’ll send you 11 top people from my company; you convince them first. I’ll send them here in 30 days."

Thirty days later, eleven GE executives appeared in Delhi from their plastics, consumer goods, appliances and other divisions. Our job now was to show them around and give them a sense of our software capability. The truth was that the Indian software-consulting industry was just being born. Tata Consulting had a few people, Infosys had five, Wipro eight or ten.

While we didn’t have the proper organisational infrastructure back then, we definitely had better software engineering talent in India. What I wanted to do was show GE the quality of our people.

It so turned out that the GE executives were very pleased with the visit. At its conclusion, they announced that they would be giving us the 10-million-dollar order.

Today, these software companies have gone global. Together, they have over half a-million employees and a market cap in the area of hundreds of billions of dollars.