About Sundeep Patnaik

As career transitions go, Sundeep Patnaik is the master. He originally hails from Odisha, in the Eastern part of India, and started life after secondary school studying metallurgical engineering. But these days he works from Hyderabad with a firm involved in movie production and Hollywood studios. That company, Revolution Entertainment Services builds IT products which support the entire lifecycle of movie/films/ad production.

He admits its been some journey and he is not finished yet. He originally took a degree in metallurgical engineering & material sciences from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology ( VNIT), but his first post-college employer was US financial giant Citi where he undertook several different roles, much of them grouped around technology, coding for example, but he had slightly different ideas about where he wanted to go.

“I wanted to interact with clients. I wanted to solve business problems. I wanted to have conversations to understand, ‘what can we do better’? And I went to my boss and asked him, ‘hey, boss, do you have anything that I can do apart from the coding job?’ Because that seems to be a little boring for me. So he said, okay, would you be interested in pre-sales because we were building a new product. And this was something that we were selling to other banks. So he said, yes, so I started off with the pre sales job within Citi bank,” is how he explains the shift.

But he wasn’t done with re-inventing himself. “I happened to meet a a senior a friend of my brother, who was the head of HR at a particular company and during the conversation he asked me what did I do.  So I told him, hey, this is what I do, and he's just like, you know. Would you be interested to move into talent or HR. And I said, of course I can, I can give it a try. So from being a pre-sales guy from a developer background to being a human resource guy, I moved to join a company called ISpace software Technologies way back in 2004 as HR recruiter. That was my first brush with human resources or talent,” he explains. He admits transitioning from being an engineer and technologist to HR was definitely a road less travelled, a paradigm shift, as he calls it.

But next stop was Wells Fargo, the US bank, who were setting up an offshore delivery centre in Hyderabad and Patnaik was among their first HR professionals. “In the close to 4.5 years,  I ramped up the team from being a 36-employee company to a 5,000 strong company,” he explains.

But he believed he was still missing something, he wasn’t sufficiently rounded. “I was saying to myself, I have to understand business. I have to understand strategy. I have to understand finance, because if I have to take up the role of a head of HR, or lead some business, I probably do not have the skills. I'm a little like a horse with blinkers on, running in one direction.,” he remembers. It was time to learn all these other facets of business and time for an MBA.

Sundeep’s brother had previously attended UCD and he strongly suggested Sundeep put UCD on his list of possible MBA destinations, as the one of the very few English-speaking country in the EU.

“I did my research and I realized that, hey, you know, this course is very interesting. The correct curriculum was something that I really loved because you had all the elements that I was looking forward to, starting with corporate finance to financial reporting, to corporate strategy, to human resources, entrepreneurship it had more or less everything that I was looking forward to,” he explains.

Unfortunately a visa was not available that year, leaving him in something of a quandary, although he reached out to his old bosses in Wells Fargo.

“I was very keen to get into consulting environment because it gives you better opportunities to work on multiple projects. So my old boss, he said, okay, I will call my friend in Deloitte, who was my boss's friend, and he called him up and Deloitte called me for interview. So I got through, and I joined Deloitte in 2011,” he explains.

At the second time of asking, the Visa came through and while his time in Deloitte was relatively short at that point he enjoyed that first period thoroughly. Then he was finally off to Dublin to take up a full time MBA spot at UCD.

Initially language, food and weather were a challenge for Sundeep, or they were, as he likes to put it ‘initially unfavourable'.

“But you know, it took me some time to get used to it. But then from day one, I got so busy with the courses that I didn't have time for anything,” he recalls, adding that classes with Professors Pat Gibbons and Damien McLoughlin particular favourites. He also notes how Prof Niamh Brennan at the time, helped him catch up with his class (he arrived a week late) by giving him some one-on-one tuition, which he is forever grateful for.

“I think the most exciting part of the MBA program was all the case studies that we went through. Starting from the story of Nokia, which was at one point the world's number one cell phone company to Elon Musk and his story, to case studies from the food and beverage industry. You know, case studies from retailers like Zara,” he recalls.

Put more briefly he says one of the things he learned on the MBA was “what to not do”. He also liked the almost forced diversity element of the course, you simply had to collaborate with other people from different cultures and backgrounds, which was very positive.

“The beauty of the cohort was that you have no other option other than to work with them, because the cohort is submitting all the time and you have to collaborate, which means understanding and appreciating the point of view of others.” Building consensus is now something he prizes and appreciates from those MBA years. He returned to India and resumed his roles in the talent area of Deloitte.

In more recent years however his MBA learnings have kicked in again this time at a product development company supporting Hollywood studios, headquartered in California, known as Revolution Entertainment Services, which he joined in earlier this year. It’s a firm with a start up mentality, he explains, but one that needs to make the correct decisions.

“So the CTO approached me for a role, I'd spent a good 11 years with Deloitte, and I wanted to do something beyond what I've already done. And this was a very interesting role, because I needed to set up the company from scratch. The first thing that I needed to do was look at the financials, because there is investment which needs to be made, and when we procure something right, we have to in our books of accounts, show deprecation of our capital expenditure right. But the first thing that I had learned in my MBA course, way back in 2012, when Professor Niamh Brennan was around, the first few classes were actually about depreciation, depreciating assets. How do you financially report it etc? That knowledge today is helping me do the financial accounting and the reporting along with the finance team, and that is helping my company to make some very prudent decisions,” he explains.

He now sees himself as something of a ‘in-house entrepreneur’ and that fits with his long-term ambition to be an entrepreneur out on his own, doing something almost new in the Indian economy.

“I basically want to help companies,” he states bluntly.

“Most of the IT companies in India are service-based organisations which means you have a piece of work. I'll bill you by the hour. You pay me $25 an hour, and I'll give you a person who can help you with projects and we have a vast talent pool available to do that. But we have the mentality of the services companies. I want us to change that mentality and start thinking about, what value can we add, can we bring a competitive value proposition to a client. I want to create that mentality out here. I want to create the growth mentality of innovation. Because one thing that India lacks if you look at the innovation index, we are pretty low because we're so used to being a service provider. So we need create that growth mentality, that entrepreneur mentality, that product mentality, the innovation, the right sort of drive,” he explains, clearly passionate about the subject.

For now however, he is enjoying the bustle and almost relentless growth of Hyderabad.

“It is the most liveable city in India as per the India Today survey. It has a large urban mobile population, but you also have the local population. It is great when it comes to infrastructure and amenities.  It is also great when it comes to cultural values. You know, you find people from all walks of life, because this is the IT hub. So a lot of people like me moved from the East, so it's a cultural conundrum. And people are extremely hospitable and the crime rate is minimal,” he explains.

He adds that the skyline is Hyderabad never stops changing, matching the dizzying pace of the city itself. Sundeep is a keen observer of all this change and he intends to be observing it for a long time yet as India (and himself) continue to evolve.

Insight Track

Reflecting on your time at UCD, what experience stands out as particularly impactful or memorable?

At UCD, we were a class of 31 students representing 9 nationalities. We were divided into cohorts of 4-5 each per team for our group submissions and projects and it became extremely important for us to bring in collective intelligence to the table to drive collective priorities. While it initially took time to understand each other's working styles and communication, we eventually learned to appreciate diverse perspectives, respect differing opinions, and work towards consensus for logical conclusions. This teamwork reinforced the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It also imparted a valuable life lesson on inclusivity.

Is there a particular book or song you have carried with you for much of your life?

 Creative destruction - Book by Richard Foster & Sarah Kaplan

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received, funny or serious?

‘In life it does not matter what you do for people, what matters is how you make them feel.

What's a hobby or activity you've always wanted to try but haven't gotten around to yet?

Bartending

If you could have a conversation with any historical figure, who would it be and what would you ask that person?

Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was a key figure in India's struggle for independence from British rule. His philosophy of nonviolent resistance, or Satyagraha, inspired movements for civil rights and freedom around the world but in today's world, violence appears to be the predominant means to an end, and a pervasive game of one-upmanship is afflicting the continent. In light of this reality, would he still advocate for his theory of Satyagraha in the current global context?

May 2024