top">New Delhi, Tuesday, May 27, 2008 : You are what you choose to be, or so they say. And Pawan Sharma, President, KPIT Cummins Global Business Solutions and Head Diversified Financial Services is clearly a person of his choice and says it so. That, and his ability to trust people ensures that he leads by example. His believes that being trustworthy is his inherent strengths and that doesn’t’t happen overnight. “In life, trust is what matters and it comes only if you start with trust,” he says.

When you ask him why he moved to the BPO industry, having done business development and marketing roles at big IT companies, he says he wanted to do some ‘real business’. “Unlike what most people construe, BPOs today are the backbone of any business. An employee in a BPO firm dose exactly what one does in a bank or a manufacturing unit, the only difference being that they are doing it several thousand miles away,” he states.

Being a ‘people’s business’, the BPO industry requires better and more efficient management more so considering the speed at which it is growing. And being comfortable with people is one of his biggest strengths and an area where he can really contribute. “What’s great about the BPO is that it offers high powered careers for people from the non-engineering and non-medical sectors and there is a lot of talent that this segment can demonstrate,” he says. “The only challenge is that you need to guide the energies in the right direction.”

A computer engineer from Pune University, Sharma career spans companies like HCL, IBM and HP. He helped HCL set up its BPO in Belfast. “At HCL I was managing and running operation in Belfast and being in India was only a notion,” he says. But being a ‘Pune lad’ at heart, the pull from home was too strong for him. Sharma joined KPIT Cummins four years ago to help them set up their BPO business and to head their Diversified Financial Services division.

KPIT Cummins Global Business Solutions (GBS) is a 100% subsidiary of KPIT Infosystems. GBS specializes in the areas of providing consulting in governance and regulatory compliance, transactional BPO/KPO and enterprise support to its customers. GBS focuses on fewer verticals because, as Sharma believes, the key is not in how many things you do but in how many things you do best. “And that is the hard call an organization needs to take,” he adds.

On the personal front Sharma is an avid book reader. And his favorite is the Bhagwat Geeta. “I love the book, not because I am a fanatic but because the way it has been conceived and the way it has been written,” he says. There are very few books that go into such depth of the topics and characters that it covers he believes. Sharma feels that a lot of the positive strengths of the book can be even applied in management. He also feels strongly about environmental issue. He believes that there is an urgent need to build alternative energy sources, reduce emissions and ensure that our future generations do not suffer for our carelessness today