A perennial optimist

A man who always prefers to consider a glass half-full rather than half-empty, P G Kamath, General Manager-India Operations, Lexmark International, tells Srikanth R P that facing challenges head-on has helped him overcome many a hurdle that came his way

P G Kamath, the new general manager, India Operations, Lexmark International says his most handy qualification has been his MBWA degree. And no, this is not a new management degree, which has just come into fashion. In fact in Kamath’s lingo, it is simply “Management By Walking Along”! A look at his career graph and track record is apt proof to Kamath’s philosophy.

While management degrees and higher educational qualifications are always handy, Kamath’s success in his professional life proves that if a person wants to succeed then nothing can really stop him. For instance, colleagues and even rivals are surprised when he makes no bones about being just a commerce graduate. But he has not let this come in the way of his career and has relentlessly worked his way to the top. Today he is one of the few who understands the highly disorganised IT channel industry in India. No wonder, when Lexmark lured Kamath from Ingram Micro, most industry analysts saw this as a coup of sorts.

While most friends were sceptical when he resigned from a a well-established and strong position at Ingram Micro to join a relatively new company, for Kamath, this was nothing new. In fact, facing challenges head-on has always been a typical Kamath trait. For instance, in a channel industry, which is known for its defaults, Kamath’s stints in his early career days came in handy.

His earliest stints

In the year 1985, when his cousin (who had an engineering firm) casually mentioned to him that he had problems recovering payments from some big clients, Kamath deployed his persuasive skills to solve the problem. He eventually joined the company and the experience taught him ways of dealing with big firms like Reliance and Bombay Dyeing. While the stint at his cousin’s firm gave him confidence to deal with big firms, his first job at S B Billimoria & Company as an auditor gave him the basic grounding in accounting and financial areas. Being a family-owned enterprise, he decided to part ways after a brief stint of two years with his cousin. His family was not too pleased with his resignation, especially as he had no professional qualification, but Kamath was confident of making it big.

Kamath is a strong believer in hard work and destiny (in that order). And destiny did favour him when he bagged a job at Sujata Electronics, which was then a well-known distributor of electronic components. When the firm advertised in a daily newspaper for the post of ‘executive assistant to the president’, it listed ‘MBA’ as one of the minimum qualifications for the post. But undeterred, he applied for the post. Says he, “As with the case of any HR department, the lady in charge of HR at Sujata Electronics was not keen on my application. And saw to it that it was the last one to be reviewed. But destiny was on my side and the president was keen to see a person who had the guts to apply even though he did not possess the minimum qualifications.” Kamath’s passion and innovative ideas saw him joining the company on the same day he was interviewed.

Taking the initiative

Though he was only an executive assistant to the president, he took an active interest in the company’s affairs. During his stint, he developed the export business from scratch and expanded the company’s operations to different countries like Russia, Poland and Yugoslavia. Always on the lookout for an opportunity, he saw a great potential in manufacturing monitors and keyboards in India. But the management of Sujata Electronics did not want to make any substantial investment. Rather than curb his instincts, he decided to call it a day and moved on to Bhoruka Electronics. This was a perfect fit for Kamath as the company wanted to manufacture monitors. Says he, “Whenever there is an established leader, there are lot of duplications, which bring down the quality of the leader. We knew that if we played our brand as a quality product, customers would readily prefer our product over a popular brand.” But the same perennial problem once confronted him: The management did not want to invest more in expanding the business.

Moving on his own

After parting ways with the company, Kamath along with a couple of friends started his own business of selling LCD projectors and convinced over 50 corporates to give up their old overhead projectors. Says Kamath excitedly, “The way I used to talk about the projectors, people used to think I was the inventor of the product. To date, my experiences show that if a marketing or sales person feels that he owns the product—the sales follow naturally.” During this stint, Kamath also interacted with Spectra Innovations almost on a daily basis. Prasad Mamidanna, the founder of the company, saw Kamath’s talent and invited him to join Spectra Innovations as area sales director. Kamath was given no office to start off with and ran the company’s operations from his bedroom, which consisted of just a fax machine. If an order for a given number of components came, Kamath had to literally run around, not only for getting the components, but also delivering it. In the subsequent years, Kamath fully established the channel business.

This, in essence, is how Kamath has always been—a perennial optimist. In his current stint, Kamath surely has a tough task on hand, like taking on established competitors like HP. But industry rivals are extremely wary of the new spearhead in Lexmark’s armoury, as Kamath has done it in the past and he is most likely to do it again.