The Story
At Deloitte Consulting, Stephen was a top selling partner for many years. After he’d started and grown the customer relationship management (CRM) practice, he decided what he really loved was to serve clients and get back to client service. Stephen sold a deal to create Agilent Technologies, which was a spinoff of HP. The initial contract was $150 million and included building Agilent technology’s foundation from the ground up. It was extremely successful, and the team met an impossible deadline to create the company. After Agilent’s launch, the CFO approached Stephen with more work for the firm. The problem was, it would be too expensive, and the client asked if there was any way the price could be reduced. This was an ongoing challenge, and industry problem, that Stephen wanted to solve. How could he make consulting less expensive for clients, and still deliver the same value to them? His solution was to use global teams. It was 2002, and the Internet was opening new possibilities in the business world. High speed telecommunications could access talent from anywhere. Deloitte had a pre-existing relationship with India, but never in its history had it used global teams there or anywhere else. Deloitte agreed, for just this one time, to use talent from India to meet Agilent’s needs. Stephen proposed the idea to Agilent, with its price cut in half, and the project was a great success. The client was happy, and at the time, it was a significantly profitable engagement for Deloitte. Stephen knew the future was global teams, but unfortunately, it was a time when no consulting companies wanted to do it. The Enron scandal had just happened, and Arthur Andersen had imploded. These events caused the big consulting firms, including Deloitte, to put up firewalls between countries. In the consulting world, what Stephen was proposing was heresy, and Deloitte was not interested in using global teams again. Still, he was determined to pursue his idea. After careful consideration, Stephen quit his job at Deloitte and approached Infosys. At the time, Infosys was an offshore outsourcing company doing server maintenance and other work in India. He flew to Bangalore and met with the Infosys founders, including Narayana Murthy, and told them he could help them build their consulting branch and provide higher value per dollar of consulting investment than Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and all other incumbents. They agreed, and he became Founder & CEO of Infosys Consulting.
The Impact
As Founder & CEO of Infosys Consulting, Stephen brought together an amazing team and found a way to make consulting more affordable for clients. He and his team took Infosys Consulting from zero to $2 billion in revenue by the time he left in 2014. Infosys became a global consulting powerhouse, and was a major competitive player among the big firms. As a result, its competitors followed suit and by 2014, nobody could compete unless they were using globally distributed teams. Stephen believes that this new way of conducting business also laid the foundation for how people work today: with distributed labor, a distributed workforce, and remote teams which has become the norm since the COVID-19 pandemic. This innovative approach to business disrupted the consulting profession and pioneered a new way of working – but it also made an impact on people and families in India. Over the next decade, the big players like Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, and certainly Infosys, created well over 100,000 new jobs in India each – totaling more than a million high-paying jobs that accelerated the growth of the country’s upper-middle class. Global teams have made an incredible impact on the Indian economy and Indian society, and has lifted many individuals and families out of poverty.