Harry Robertson, the unsung hero who created history and strove to bring India to the centre of the globe by creating the first-ever global shared service unit in India, laid the foundation for an entirely new industry segment in India – an industry worth about US$25 Bn from global in-house centres, employing ~800K employees, with indirect employees of 2 to 3 Mn, and making India the global hub for offshore services.

Harry has been a role model for many aspiring leaders. He inspired a great team to venture into a new business. By being a great human being, he did not just build a centre, but built emotional bonds with the people to become very much part of a large extended family. Harry crossed the Rubicon as the warrior against the winds to become a great winner. When Harry retired from the company in 2001, the New Delhi centre set up by him was named the ‘Harry Robertson Centre of Excellence’ in his honour and in recognition of his pioneering path breaking journey.

Harry qualified as a Chartered Accountant from prestigious public accounting firms in London during the mid ‘70s. After pursuing the early part of his career with the audit firms, he was selected by American Express in 1979 for their Corporate Audit department. An inflection in Harry’s career came during 1993, some 25 years back, when he was chosen to lead the setting up of the first-ever global finance transformation centre for American Express in New Delhi – the Financial Resource Centre. Harry took up the challenge and got a team in place that started from a small project office and created an offshore centre at Mathura Road, New Delhi. Creating a world-class office facility in a record time, they migrated ~300 jobs from 13+ divergent countries of the JAPA region.

Despite pressures, the team continued writing and rewriting the engagement & deployment rulebook along the way – a first by any global corporate at that scale. Soon FRC-E became a global business service centre for Amex and started servicing diverse geographies and languages. By the turn of the millennium, it had crossed ~1000 headcount mark, and became a true multi-time-zone operating centre and laid the seeds for a larger game plan for American Express. Having expanded the offshore operations over the last 2 decades to cover many other global functions and processes, the FRC has become an incubation centre for range of multidimensional process transformation projects. India is, today, the second largest country for American Express Global Corporation after US in terms of number of employees.

Harry now lives in the city of London in the UK and spends his time largely editing a monthly church newspaper for the Diocese of Arundel & Brighton. He was recently felicitated by SSF in the business services excellence space and recognised as the ‘Pioneering Transformation Leader In Global Shared Services’ for Leading the first-ever Global Shared Services Mission in India and Bringing Impactful Transformation through People, Process & Technology, delivering everlasting Value to Business, Industry and Society.

 

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The Budget of 1991 marked the beginning of a series of economic reforms in India, introduced by the then Finance Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. These reforms were aimed at liberalizing the economy and encouraging foreign investment. It was further streamlined by the next Finance Minister, P Chidambaram to curb a widening fiscal deficit and attract more foreign investment into Asia's third largest economy – and to bring India on the Global map. These reformist policies, rapid advancement of technology and global winds of change combined together to put India at the centre of the transformational changes in the Business Services industry.

The quality,service orientation and willingness to think 'outside the box' convinced the Amex leadership that indian employees were world class

 

Challenge for Change: Pioneering Transformation

Soon thereafter, in 1993, in another part of the globe, some 7000 miles away, in United States of America, a visionary gentleman by the name of John McDonnell, who was the Worldwide Controller for American Express’s TRS company, came up with a very bold reengineering proposal called ‘Challenge for Change (C4C).’ It envisaged consolidating 46 separate global accounting centres into three mega Financial Resource Centres, or FRCs.

The FRC locations covering the Americas and EMEA were pre-determined to be at Phoenix, Arizona, USA and Brighton, UK respectively. The country location for the JAPA region was yet to be ‘discovered’. Countries under consideration were China, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and India. Initial screening during the selection process included parameters like receptivity to foreign investment, long-term strategic importance of the market and the availability of economical and skilled labour. For those countries that qualified, considerations assessed during the final selection process included factors such as telecommunications, laws regulations and taxes, business environment, transportation, and economic and political risk. It was a very thorough assessment.

• Europe, Middle East and Africa
• Japan, Asia Pacific and Australia

India was finally selected as the preferred destination – mainly because of the quality of talent pool, English speaking population, low costs of doing business, readiness to adopt western style practices, and the liberal economy that encouraged foreign investment. John had visited India in the past and was impressed with the quality of the people he met. Also, American Express had already been in business in India for over 70 years. The quality, service orientation and willingness to think ‘outside the box’ convinced John that Indian employees were world class.

Simultaneously, John began to have conversations with several in-house leaders for the possible position of the head of the proposed unit, which was by then decided to be setup in New Delhi. John firmly believed that setting up of such a centre in an organization at that scale can be done only by an experienced, tried and tested leader with grit, integrity, hard work and tons of faith. I think he singled me out quite early in the process, as I had worked with him previously. Together we created a working plan on how to take the project forward.

To begin the transformation process, the Controller’s finance organisation in New York began sharing the C4C initiative globally so that no finance employee was ignorant of the tremendous opportunities that were soon to be realized. The non-finance business leaders were brought on board with support from the highest levels in the company. It is probably significant that John was able to persuade Chairman & CEO, Harvey Golub of the transformative potential of the C4C program, who soon became a keen supporter of the project.

Amex Finance created an entire team called Strategic Enablement Services within the C4C framework, for overseeing implementation of overall programme, reengineering and process improvement projects – tasked with facilitating the success of the FRCs. Specifically, the group’s aim was to:

• develop a strategy for process migrations;
• map processes and build detailed plans for migration, integrating technology and human resources;
• coordinate with local and regional managements, agreeing specific actions and addressing issues as they arose;
• provide detailed training to FRC staff in the relevant processes; and
• carry out post-migration consolidation and reengineering.

The New Delhi FRC (FRC-East), which was built ground-up by a team of pioneering leaders and entrepreneurs, today delivers all financial, procurement, real estate, human resources and business transformation support across the entire American Express enterprise. This achievement is incomparable in its level of excellence and has sown the seeds of innovation for many shared services organizations.

The Calling: Why Me?

It was probably my destiny to come to India, though initially it was probably an unlikely outcome. Right after school, I attempted to join a naval college to become a seaman, like my father. I failed miserably at the basic eye test they administered. I was unable to see anything beyond the end of my arm. Another early failure was my inability to get into a university initially. I loved doing everything other than academics – editing the school magazine, chairing the debating society, acting in plays, writing poetry. It’s much later that I woke up one day with determination and set myself over to get a business degree from a university and a professional qualification as a Chartered Accountant. A life of audit seemed to beckon.

Almost immediately we began the ardours and boggling tasks of obtaining various permissions; obtaining a legal entity; achieving Export Oriented Unit (EOU) status; finding a building; fitting it out; obtaining reliable telecommunications and power; hiring and training 300-500 staff, including outstanding leaders; creating policies and procedures; establishing compensation and benefits; and so on. Not least of these responsibilities was communicating to all initial hires our particular ‘American Express Blue Box Values’ – our culture and quality expectations, an expression that I hold very dear to my heart.

I was privileged to work with some of the finest, most gifted and capable people I have known. We learnt together and grew together, sparking off each other, enjoying moments of tremendous humour and moments, much fewer, of crisis- all the time building Shared Services as a successfull bussiness, not just as a resource centre.

 

In November 1994, the FRC-E building was informally opened for the first 20 employees. Two months later, it was formally opened by the President of American Express in the presence of a couple of hundred guests. In another year, the FRC-E had migrated much of the accounting processes and systems from the Asia-pacific, Japan and Australia New Zealand region – and was looking hungrily at opportunities in Europe and the Americas.

A Competent Team: An Underlying Principle

For all the colour, richness and vibrancy of the culture, it is my colleagues that best sum up India for me. I was privileged to work with some of the finest, most gifted and capable people I have known. We learnt together and grew together, sparking off each other, enjoying moments of tremendous humour and moments, much fewer, of crisis – all the time building Shared Services as a successful business, not just as a resource centre. In fact, we had to justify our ‘charge-outs’ to the country/ regional controllers and could not assume our costs would be automatically invoiced out. (but the fact that the FRC activity was increasingly economic made it an attractive proposition).

There were plenty of challenges. I had never heard the term ‘brown out’ until I came to Delhi. The bureaucracy – a gift from the British Raj – can be truly demotivating and soul destroying. There were also always permissions to be got, endless delays, almost half the phones did not work during the monsoon, public transport for staff was a challenge, and so on.

Thankfully, for every problem there is a solution. Once the brainpower of the FRC leadership was focused, anything became possible. For example, to combat the issue of ‘brown outs’ we imported several diesel generators. We even managed to solve the ever-persistent war of generator housing between the Customs Department and Municipal Corporation of Delhi.

As a leadership team, we got together frequently, took time to learn and bond, worked cooperatively, trusted each other and built each other up. We were able to visualize positive outcomes for all challenging situations, while at the same time learning to be humble. Too many good leaders start believing their own hype, stop listening to good advice or discount it, and, as a direct result, fail. Whatever one’s personal merits, there is always someone cleverer, wiser, prettier, more capable than one. We will never know it all; we will be learning all our lives. We learnt to share the praise freely when there were successes. We believed strongly in the value of teams, that the potential of a team is bigger than the sum of the contributions of each individual.

The teams at the FRC-E were special. We hired people who we believed had the potential to be even more capable than ourselves, and we never micromanaged them. We trusted their abilities immensely and trusted them enough to stay out of their way, but insisted on good, frequent communications. Carefully selected, highly motivated and well trained, many of them were to travel throughout Asia Pacific, Europe and the US, working overseas for days, weeks, even months at a time, to migrate work back to India. For some of them, that was a huge cultural challenge and we had to increase our training accordingly. We hired teams with language skills, such as Mandarin, Katakana Japanese, Korean, and several other Asian languages – and shifted them to those specific locations to not only grasp the nuances of the process, but also to absorb the cultural flavours. As we progressed to becoming a global centre, we added the relevant European language specialists also, like Spanish, German, Portuguese and even Swedish. The international experience added perspectives and unique skillsets, enriching their work experience and value. In addition to the usual HR hiring processes, most FRC-E applicants were interviewed by senior leaders, using competency-based techniques. Although this was a time demanding process, it was very insightful to see how candidates dealt with supplemental questions – on a range from glib and shallow to stumbling but authentic.

Clarity: The Vision

Setting a clear direction for the team requires leaders to define the future. The leaders’ clarity of vision is mandatory for the team’s success. One needs to spend time determining and agreeing a clear vision of the future and then, by communicating regularly with the team, ensuring that it becomes a common or shared vision.

Formal, informal, regular and frequent communication structures including team meetings, one-to-one staff reviews, or simply having a chat over a cup of tea, helped me set a clear vision for the team. I realized very early that to be thoroughly involved is key to enabling the vision that has been set. As time went on and processes were being successfully migrated into the FRC-E, the emphasis naturally moved from process migration to process improvement. We borrowed from the experience of the two pre-existing FRCs in Phoenix and in the UK, as well as the expertise of our reengineering and process improvement colleagues.

We succeeded beyond our dreams in each of the areas simply because we did not know we could fail. Failure was not on our agenda. We had setbacks.
We overcame them.

In addition to having to introduce and frequently monitor various new metrics, there was a whole raft of disciplines that were previously unknown to us (or of which we had minimal experience) including Activity Based Costing, Total Quality Process Improvement and Business Continuation Planning. We succeeded beyond our dreams in each of the areas simply because we did not know we could fail. Failure was not on our agenda. We had setbacks. We overcame them.

Invited to give a presentation at the company’s worldwide finance conference in the mid-1990s, I shared the achievements of FRC-E: our vigorous business model for Shared Services with dependable power and telecommunications; emphasis on process improvement; robust and tested contingency plans; comparable numbers of qualified accountants to the other FRCs; strong IT resource; great employee and customer metrics; unchallengeable economics; and a hunger for growth. The reaction was great surprise and much curiosity. It may be my imagination, but the number of visitors began to increase. As our popularity grew, globally we became well known for carrying out a unique and immensely successful experiment. In addition to the in-house visits, a horde of external visitors trooped in to examine what we had done and to ogle, wide eyed. Amongst others, there were Siemens, Ford, World Bank and more.

 

Courage: Stepping into the Unknown

Very early in my Amex days as an internal auditor, I realised that we humans are a very fallible species and mustering courage to remain true to yourself and your calling is very important. On two separate and highly memorable business occasions, I encountered fellow humans who were either too weak or too proud and inflexible to follow a path that is both just and correct. The importance of staying strong and creating supporting internal controls became clearer as I moved around into different and challenging situations. Remaining strong and deploying an appropriate control structure played a role in helping me pioneer the offshore operations at FRC-E.

A Legacy: The 5 Cs

History was made 25 years ago. The financial centre in India is now an integral part of American Express’ global infrastructure and strategy; just as shared services is such an important component in India’s growth story. It is hard to imagine that neither existed 25 years ago. I am proud to have played a part in achieving the impossible and creating this wonderful, new world. It is a world where the Amex brand has shone bright once again. We created new stories and crafted new pathways. We created benchmarks that are being emulated even to this date – and only a few, if any, have been bettered. In achieving this, we created the culture of Total Ownership, by owning the entire Process Value Chain. Such progressive practices have eventually contributed to India achieving its global status in Business Services, including BPO.

History was made 25 years ago….

We created new stories and crafted new pathways. We created benchmarks that are being emulated even to this date

– and only a few, if any, have been bettered. In achieving this, we created the culture of Total Ownership, by owning the entire

Process Value Chain. Such progressive practices have eventually contributed to India achieving its global status in Business Services, including BPO.

 

A wise person once said that each of us is created to do something definitive. Some work has been assigned to each of us, that has not been assigned to anyone else. We may not know what it is right now, but we will be told when its time comes. For me, that was way back in 1993, working out the FRCE set-up strategies in John McDonnell’s office in New York. The same wise man probably also said “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”. So, if I have to add my final message, it is just that: be prepared to change and grow. And try your best to enjoy life – and make it enjoyable for those around you. I have learned a lot. My time in India has been professionally and emotionally uplifting. Probably my personal growth was intricately linked to that of the FRC. We have ‘both’ grown to be very different from where we started.

A need to make a Change, bundled with the right opportunity; deciphering the Calling of the unknown; a set of Competent leadership and teams; a Clear direction; and Courage to go where no one has gone before – has really been our joint secret of success. Later, I realised that these set of 5 C’s can together move mountains. Maybe that’s what we actually did.

In his inimitable and simple way, Harry has narrated his engagement story of creating a new and legendary realm in the world of business services. What may have started as a commission for him wound up to become his life commitment. Though he may not have known at that time, he was leading the world cross a ‘Rubicon’ – a warrior against a headwind. In the current context, if the global industry leaders are to cross their own ‘Rubicon’, they may do well to look at Harry and his 5C’s as a beacon to start their journey – of course, with additions as appropriate to the demands of the ever-changing world.