Review: Engineered in India by Mohan Reddy is a must for entrepreneurs

– Dr Ganesh Natarajan A “Rags to Riches” narrative or an engineers’ guide to do better engineering for India and the world? Mohan Reddy’s Engineered in India has all the elements of a compelling entrepreneurship tale in the tumultuous periods of India’s own journey from a poor struggling new democracy to a global leader in providing services and products to the world.
The book makes for compelling reading because it recounts the entrepreneurial odyssey of a middle class Indian with all the family pressures and competitive and environment hurdles that many of us have faced in building companies in India with a different “point of view” from the hordes.
What makes the man and the book stand-out is the almost serendipitous building of a range of new services from India – digitization to geospatial services computer aided design and product manufacturing and the willingness to combine an incremental innovation approach to occasional disruptive innovations for key clients. This much needed ambidexterity of approach should be one of the key learnings from the book.
Also Read BVR Mohan Reddy’s book ‘Engineered in India’ to release on Sep 19 A heartening feature of the story is the approach to “deploying tools instead of throwing bodies at complex problems” that led to the company he founded, Infotech Enterprises (now Cyient) establishing market and opportunity share leadership in many key domains.
The willingness to collaborate with strategic partners who were leaders in their own countries, build intellectual property and add commercial software services to the portfolio to catch up with IT industry peers demonstrates the alacrity with which a true entrepreneurs builds and adapts strategy to suit the demands of each phase.