Leadership and Rowing

Years ago, while attending a conference in Washington, D.C., I heard a well-known keynote speaker draw an interesting parallel. “Running a successful company is like rowing,” he said. I found that simile kind of interesting and kept relating it to several situations after that. I think I can now relate to the idea more than ever before.

It has been an exciting year for me at Mastech Digital. I joined the company last March, and as I look back, I find several reasons to be pleased. Over the last 12 months, we made several changes to the company – some essential, some unconventional, and a few experimental. I am happy to say that most of that effort is now bearing fruit.

One of the first things we did was to significantly upgrade our leadership by hiring top talent in sales, human resources, and marketing. By summer of 2016, we had onboard highly capable leaders who possessed a wealth of experience in their respective functional areas.

Next, we re-engineered our delivery operations and organized them into pods of excellence that focused on recruiting specific technologies. We also shut down an underperforming delivery center freeing up resources towards areas that were delivering the desired results.

Working with Marketing, we then put together a fresh marketing plan that addressed both the current as well as future positioning of the company in the market. We were now ready to embark on our next big thing – we became Mastech Digital (a change from the earlier name of Mastech Holdings, Inc.). The name change was part of the company’s rebranding initiative to reinforce the message that we are fully committed to ‘Digital’ – which are the Social, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud, and Automation technologies. Parallelly, we recast ourselves into a company that started offering digital staffing in addition to staffing mainstream technologies; and also started delivering project-based digital transformation services around Salesforce.com, SAP HANA, and Digital Learning.

All this would not have been possible without the support of a dedicated team that is totally in sync with the vision and goals of the organization. I go back to my comparison of a good leadership team to a rowing team. Only when everyone on both sides of the boat rows in step and at the same speed, does the boat move in the right direction. Else, the boat is likely to spin in circles. I am fortunate to have a very capable team of ‘rowers’ who have been the force behind the progress we have made so far.

Our journey gets even more exciting this year as we work toward introducing enhanced service offerings with well-integrated delivery capabilities.

Vivek Gupta
President and CEO