Did you hear the one about the Italian process wonk who gave up his E-Class Benz, his job-for-life at SAP and his Frankfurt home to uproot his family to spend a year in Delhi devising strategy for an India-heritage BPO provider which, at the time, was barely out of its start-up phase? Yes, that actually happened.
I have known Gianni Giacomelli well for 10 years now, and have always described him as a misplaced analyst foraging a career on the sell-side - always one of the smartest guys to talk strategy, and great fun to bring to our HfS summits to face the fury of the buyers. Gianni today has found himself as product innovation and marketing lead for the largest business process services pureplay of all, Genpact, and moved his family from Delhi to the confines of Westchester County, New York.
So without further ado, let's find out what's going to happen in the world of business process operations..
Phil Fersht, CEO, HfS Research: Good afternoon, Gianni - it's great to get some time with you today. I think we last featured you on HFS (see post) about maybe seven or eight years ago right at the beginning of the blog. So it's nice to circle back after all this time and hear from you again. You have had a pretty colorful career in the services and software industries, so maybe you could just take us through some of the highlights.. and how you ended up doing what you're doing today.
Gianni Giacomelli, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, Genpact: Yeah, thanks Phil, and it's especially good to see how you guys have evolved as well. I mean seven years ago, certainly a bunch of talented people - you never have thought that you would end up disrupting the analyst model so it's good to have seen you growing like that.
I would actually like to make a parallel. I mean, you guys have grown and I think it takes perseverance and a lot of work but then it also takes innovation and agility - this stuff takes you, careers take you to an unexpected place. Frankly, I never would have expected starting 25 years ago working in consumer products marketing and analytics then in consulting for BCG and so forth and ending up in SAP, product innovation in a business services companies. I guess it's a little bit of a hallmark of our times, right? You don't quite know where you are going to end up being. I think all that matters is the diversity and what you call colorfully diverse. Because when you have diversity, you actually see things from different perspectives and you end up in places that you wouldn't know but there is a logic, there is portability and I do think that is the crux of what I've
Posted in: Analytics and Big Data, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Buyers' Sourcing Best Practices