Hiral Chandrana Podcast Transcript
Hiral Chandrana joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Hiral Chandrana. Hiral Chandrana is the global CEO of Mastek Group. He is responsible for the global profit and loss and strategy of the organization. In addition, growth, customer success, and employee experience. Hiral has over 25 years of global experience with a proven track record in IT services and digital solutions across a diverse set of industries.
He has worked with Wipro Limited, Electronic Data Systems, and Progressive Business Leadership roles. In his last role during a 14-year stint at Wipro, he served as a Senior Vice President and Global Head where he transformed the 3 billion application business to digital. In addition to driving strategic cloud partnerships and mergers and acquisitions, he also has an extensive expertise in consumer retail manufacturing and healthcare related industries and working with Fortune 1000 global clients across the US, UK, Europe, and the Middle East and Asia Pacific.
Hiral has an engineering background with an MS and MBA from the United States. He has attended various executive leadership programs at Wharton, Duke University, and Berkeley.
Well, good afternoon, Hiral. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:21] Hiral Chandrana: Thank you, Brian.
[00:01:22] Brian Thomas: You’re very, very welcome. And I appreciate you making the time. We’ve got a lot to cover tonight. I know a lot of times it’s hard to make calendars and time zones meet, but Hiral, thank you again for joining us.
[00:01:33] Hiral Chandrana: Appreciate it, Brian. Thank you.
[00:01:35] Brian Thomas: All right, Hiral, this is where we start. We want to get into your story so we can get your story out to our global audience. You’ve got quite the career in technology as a board member, you were senior executive, and now you’re the CEO of Mastek Group.
Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:54] Hiral Chandrana: Thanks, Brian. I’m not sure if there’s any secret to be frank, but there’s about three principles that I’ve always followed through my career and some of them have stood the test of time.
So, number one, always embrace challenges and always take up roles that challenge you. Number two don’t necessarily look for perfection, right? I mean, it’s important to make progress. Sometimes you get too caught up in the details and not enough to make progress.
Progress is important, not perfection. And number three, a positive attitude is critical. And that really determines the direction of your career. So that’s really helped me throughout my last couple of decades. And it’s really kind of exciting times ahead in this world of emerging technology.
[00:02:33] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. And thank you. I like how you broke those three items apart. And like you, I share the same sentiment around that positivity. It has done so much for my team, my growth and just over the years has been something that I can look back on and say that absolutely made a difference. So, thank you.
Hiral, we’re going to talk a little bit about Mastek. Mastek offers such a broad range of services to many industries. We talked about public sector, healthcare, et cetera, right? And you offer the services in the area of cloud and digital transformation, DevOps, application modernization, and the list goes on.
How are you able to have year-after-year growth in a highly competitive market, serving so many customers?
Yeah, it’s a great question, Brian. And like you rightly said, we offer a range of services in sort of variety of markets, although our biggest markets are US, the Americas, UK, and some parts of Middle East and the area of services from digital to cloud engineering to data.
Are in some ways unique, depending on the industry, depending on the market. But there’s some things that kind of do become critical. One is customer focus, right? Since it’s a crowded industry and we’re not the biggest player, not the smallest player somewhere in the middle. So it’s important to differentiate.
It’s important to be unique and have some deep expertise in specific areas. So, we like to say, hey, yeah. What we do, we do really well, but we don’t do everything right. And that’s really helped us and the customer focus going deeper with our customers, understanding and partnering with them very closely.
Mastic has these three sorts of words which we use as taglines. You can think of it as operating principles, almost trust, value, velocity. And those apply not just to our customers, but those apply to our employees, our communities, our investors. So trust is a foundation, we like to think of ourselves as adding value to our communities as well as to, as well as to our customers and employees.
And then of course, velocity, which is speed in the right direction is critical as well in today’s world.
Thank you. And I appreciate you breaking that down for us. That is awesome. And obviously, you know your products and services very, very well. And you do such a great job of serving your customers in these markets.
So, thank you for sharing, Hiral. We are a technology platform, publication and podcast. I’m a techie like you. And so we ask all of our guests, no matter what level of Technology they’re involved with, if you’re leveraging any of that new and emerging technologies in your business or tech stack.
Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:04:58] Hiral Chandrana: Yeah. You know, Brian, as you’ve seen and I’m sure others in the audience have seen the evolution of technology over multiple decades, today we talk about Augmented reality or blockchain or AI and fundamentally some of those are even cloud, right?
Some of those have existed for a very long time. It’s just how things have really surfaced in terms of processing power in terms of just the sheer nature of the data crunching that’s available today. So, it’s important to you know, track that and that’s how we have also adopted as time has progressed, but I like to always point out when we talk about technology that sometimes it’s not just about the technology or the platform.
It’s about how we apply it to various industries, right? You mentioned healthcare. We work with a lot of hospital systems or providers and, one particular use case, we’re talking about automating the payroll for 30, 000 nurses so that they can provide, patient care and experience at the homes of senior living facilities.
And so, these are examples of how you’re applying technology to industry and real life use cases.
[00:05:57] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’re absolutely right. You don’t always have to be on the bleeding edge of some of this technology, but it has to make sense and provide a viable solution for your customer. So, I really appreciate that as a former CIO.
Hiral, can you share something from your career experience for those that are listening this evening that would be helpful for them looking to grow their career in either tech or leadership?
[00:06:21] Hiral Chandrana: Sure, absolutely. I mean, the first thing I’d say is don’t shy away from taking up new responsibilities.
Don’t shy away from asking for help, it could be from your team members. It could be from your peers. It could be from anyone much younger than you. Right. There’s always the thing about fail fast, experiment. I truly believe in it though. I think you learn a lot sometimes by failing or by making mistakes.
And as long as you’re improvising, learning from it and doing better in the future. And when you’re 80% ready you’re a hundred percent ready. And so, spend time with technology, spend time with, I have a lot of respect for deep architects and technologists because they really provide a very unique perspective.
So that’s always learning. But yeah, don’t hesitate in taking up new opportunities because once you get into them you figure out a way to make it work.
[00:07:04] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate your perspective again, growing your career in that tech space up through to your current role now as the global CEO.
So, I appreciate that. Hiral, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:07:18] Hiral Chandrana: Thank you very much, Brian. Appreciate it.
[00:07:20] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Hiral Chandrana Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
