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Moinak Mitra,ET Bureau

The $638.9 million Sapient Corporation’s website has this very telling header in its ‘About Sapient’ page—Who We Are Begins With Who We Were. It says a lot about a company that started with two people in 1991 as a business and IT consulting firm only to grow into a giant in the interactive and professional services space with 7,500 people across 30 offices worldwide, straddling three distinct businesses. Its 44-year-old president and CEO, Alan Herrick, upholds the transformation, signaling change as the only constant the company has ever known.

The standalone all-glass façade of Sapient’s Gurgaon office houses 2,000-odd people, a part of the 5,000-strong India team. It also exudes a sense of transparency in the group. “If you have to lead people, you have to be open about the issues,” says Herrick, as youngsters stream in and out of swipe doors in tees and denims strung up by common purpose, vision and values — that both Harvard and Yale business schools have pinned up as case studies.

“The Harvard study talks about our idea of strategic context, which is how you connect the purpose of the company, which is very long-term thinking, to our vision which is very milestone and shorter-term oriented, to our culture. And it’s about how all these are connected to drive acceleration in the company,” says Herrick, “Strategic context has evolved into an aid, allowing everybody in the group to see the same future.”

Today, the group operates three very diverse businesses: Sapient Nitro, Sapient Global Markets and Sapient Government. But the overall quest of the company remains the hunt for the human-technology connection. Sapient Nitro focuses on integrated marketing through an amalgam of communication and commerce, accounting for 63% of the group’s revenue.

The overarching purpose of human-tech connection here is in no way different from Sapient Global Markets, which is focused on energy and financial services, or Sapient Government, which largely looks into US Federal government’s processes and also ventures out to enhance the experiences of citizens with governments.

For Herrick, the returns today lie “in new-age thinking on how does one really care for a customer in a multichannel environment where their time is precious and short”. The challenge, he says, is to understand cross-channel analytics in order to gauge consumer behaviour. That leads to a cross-organisational training in agile development.

“Whether you’re working with a trader who has a short attention span or you’re working with a consumer with a short attention span — you need a methodology that will enable everyone to move very quickly and adjust,” says Herrick.

This explains the connect between content and context within the group. “That’s the key to driving change management and our ability to transform the company over the years,” says Herrick. Even the company’s acquisition strategy echoes a similar experience. “The idea is, where could we acquire capabilities that drive organisations with our value proposition,” says Herrick. Unlike most big-ticket buyouts, scale is never a driver. “We’re rather looking at where we can add capability,” he says.

Take, for instance, the Nitro acquisition last year. Sapient had digital technology in its quiver but what was missing was a set of good old television skills that Nitro brought in. The acquisition gave Sapient a 360-degree view of the consumer.

And with the largest concentration of its workforce in India, that opportunity to tap the consumer 360-degree goes much beyond cost arbitrage. “We now have a production studio in India that can create digital marketing campaigns and the country is also becoming a base for our global creatives since we now have both global and local clients in India,” says Herrick. The challenge now is to connect the technology capability in India with the creative side. “What we’re trying to do is create a hybrid world where you have creative technologists, or what we call ‘idea engineers’. We’ve got creatives on the marketing side who create the idea and can’t wait getting into the code. Creatives of today are tech junkies feeding off the same primary driver,” says Herrick.

For Herrick, if people or institutions don’t dabble near the edge, neither would understand what’s next.

Admittedly, few disruptions or transformations in technology have been linear. A few days ago, Herrick was going through his old notes until he hit upon a scrap that read, ‘Pay attention to the internet’, dating back to 1994. Internet in 1994? Well, Sapient did pay attention and Bank of America gave the company $40,000 for executing its internet strategy. “That little engagement changed the destiny of our company,” says Herrick.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com