The transformer
Wim Elfrink wants to radically transform Cisco’s business and thinks India can lead the way in this makeover.
The Global Citizen
‘Wim’ Willem Pieter Elfrink
Age: 57
Place of birth: Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Who he is: Chief Globalisation Officer, Cisco and EVP, Cisco Services
Has worked with: HP, Rank Xerox and Olivetti
Owns houses in: France, San Jose and Amsterdam and is Bangalore’s highest rent payer
Has worked in: The Netherlands, France, Italy, USA, UK and India
Recently read: Gun, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Listens to: Rolling Stones; Dire Straits; Scorpions; Jimi Hendrix
Likes to holiday in: Dubai, Maldives
Enjoys: Running marathons, skiing, snow boarding and swimming
Over the last three decades, ‘Wim’ Willem Pieter Elfrink has been through a series of inflection points. As a young executive, he started his career with Olivetti, just as the firm was making its transformation from electromechanical to electrical equipment. His second career move saw him work with Xerox, at a time when the company was growing beyond its core photocopier business. His third move was to join Hewlett Packard (HP), then a $10-billion test and measurement firm timidly testing the personal computer market. The biggest turning point of his career, however, was his move to India’s IT capital Bangalore to lead a radical transformation of Internet gear giant Cisco’s business.
The shift, back in 2006, saw the 57-year-old Elfrink designated uniquely as Cisco’s Chief Globalisation Officer and overseeing its Indian as well as global services operations from the firm’s million-square-feet campus in Bangalore, named the Globalisation Centre East. He was handpicked by Cisco’s CEO John Chambers to lead the firm’s makeover that entailed setting up a second global headquarters in Bangalore and building solutions for both emerging markets and economies close to India’s IT capital, including West Asia and Africa. The upshot: Cisco recently reached the landmark of earning $1 billion in revenue in India and before the downturn hit it was growing at 20 per cent annually.
Today, India ranks among Cisco’s top 3 growth markets. At the same time, Cisco Services, which Elfrink has been heading since 2000, has grown to be a $6-billion business from $5 billion in December 2006. By locating a globalisation centre in Bangalore, Cisco wanted to have access to 70 per cent of the world’s population within a five-hour flight distance of Bangalore. Being 12 hours ahead of California, the company could also follow a 24/7 business model. As a result, Elfrink spends up to 60 per cent of his time travelling between the US and India and much of his other time on Cisco’s high-end TelePresence video conferencing system, talking to teams as far away as San Francisco and Seoul.
The company plans to eventually have 20 per cent of its top talent in India, and as part of its new globalisation programme some 60 families of expatriates have moved to Bangalore. Rather than be a company with a single headquarters, Cisco is leading the way in splitting its business and, according to reports, eventually plans to have 4-6 globalisation centres based on the model it pioneered in Bangalore.
“I have made an art of inflection points,” Elfrink says when we meet him in Bangalore. “I moved 2,000 km from my home in The Netherlands for my first job in Italy, where I learnt a new language and ate new food.” Over the last few decades, he has graduated from being a young techie writing machine code to building teams and businesses with HP. It wasn’t smooth sailing all the way, though; Elfrink joined and left the Dutch consumer electronics giant Philips within months after a clash of cultures. His son, now 22, is severely autistic, and so the Elfrinks have invested in an intensive care facility to take care of him. “This gave us some time for pause… for five years I took it relatively easy setting up a foundation (run by his wife) to help similar kids,” he says.
He joined Cisco in 1997 as Vice President of Customer Advocacy in Europe, where he tried to evangelise a radical new concept, which focussed on creating customised service offerings for clients, rather than adopt a one-size-fits-all model of business. In 2000, he was given global charge of the services business and moved to the firm’s HQ in San Jose, California. Along the way, he rode Cisco’s rise from being an Internet plumber into a global communications giant. It is this journey and its evolution that finally bought Elfrink to India.
His business plan for Cisco is based on the premise that the developing world accounts for more than half the world’s GDP and will be home to over seven billion people by 2050. To target new markets, Cisco plans to sell not only its conventional equipment, but also devise new products and solutions. On October 6 this year, Cisco unveiled another part of its plan, when it announced an alliance with Sunil Mittal’s Bharti for developing co-branded solutions specifically for Indian enterprises. Elfrink and Mittal also connect regularly about larger industry issues such as broadband penetration and sustainable development.
Mahindra & Mahindra is another key customer for Cisco in India and the company outsources software development work to both Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam. Elfrink and Anand Mahindra, Vice Chairman, M&M frequently link up to discuss the growing heft of India and the developing market and ways for the companies to collaborate All this work, however, doesn’t mean he has no spare time. Straight after his interview with us, Elfrink heads home to his sprawling mansion in Epsilon (he reportedly pays the highest house-rent in Bangalore, coughing up Rs 19 lakh per month), a swish gated community near Bangalore’s HAL Airport. At 3 p.m., it’s time for his daily hour-long yoga session followed by time spent with his two young sons, competing with them in the family swimming pool. And while most of us finish work as the sun sets, for Elfrink, it’s just a short break. He can often be found at home video conferencing as late as 4 a.m. “I don’t commute to compute,” Elfrink explains. “I don’t believe in five-day weeks nor do I sleep a lot. I can get by with less than five hours.”
Perhaps this burning desire to work hard and yet enjoy life to the hilt can be traced back to his early years —the swinging ’60s. Elfrink was in his twenties when Woodstock happened and Hendrix was the flavour of the day. “It was the 1960s, the start of a new era. It was all about the democratisation of universities and I was fascinated by everything happening around me,” he says. For Dutch youth, this was also a time for rebuilding, especially for Elfrink, whose father was a prisoner of war in a German camp. “I wasn’t very interested in academics, but was fascinated by music, especially designing and building amplifiers,” says the self-confessed Rolling Stones and Dire Straits fan. It was this fascination to enter new territory and design new products that led him to experiment in life. While his love for amps was the catalyst for his entry into the world of technology, it is his globetrotting ways and exposure to different cultures and peoples that he’s now leveraging in Bangalore.
India, he says, has taught him to adapt and innovate in life. So, while in his younger days he was a skiing enthusiast and a marathon runner (he has run 42 marathons till date) at 57 he realises his protesting knees need a different sport. Elfrink has found the perfect alternative in India: a personal yoga instructor teaches him every day.
Yoga, of course, is not the only thing he has learnt while in India. It has also taught him some new management skills. “The biggest customers for my services business are in North America and Europe and I need to trust my team to deal with them when I am in Bangalore. So, we have moved from a centralised decision making process of command and control to one of teamwork and collaboration,” he says.
So, what’s next? In Bangalore, Elfrink says he gets plenty of time to think of new business opportunities for Cisco in India and across the world. “Look at the traffic on the road,” he says, pointing to the city’s chaotic Ring Road. “The solution to this is not building more roads, but smart commuting.”
Despite his ambitious plans, he’s well aware that only a small fraction of the working population globally thinks like him. “Maybe 5 per cent of them are adventurous and will consider such a move,” Elfrink says. “We like India because the schools here allow our children to remain kids for longer. There is no hurry to grow up.” He hasn’t mastered an Indian language yet, but speaks Dutch, French and Italian, besides English. He also took classes in Mandarin with his sons. His sons, too, have become trilingual. While Elfrink is committed to stay in India for one more year at least, he doesn’t think it will be enough to complete the transformation of Cisco.
“After two years, we have created some awareness within Cisco about globalisation. This is now the most fragile phase of our rollout, where we need to expand aggressively,” he says. Already, operating committees, which oversee businesses, are being quizzed on specific globalisation plans and more executives are keen to join Elfrink in India. “Two years ago, we had no idea the downturn would hit us so severely. Today, I have no idea about what will happen in a year. You must be prepared to react and have a business model that will evolve,” he signs off.
‘Wim’ Willem Pieter Elfrink
Age: 57
Place of birth: Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Who he is: Chief Globalisation Officer, Cisco and EVP, Cisco Services
Has worked with: HP, Rank Xerox and Olivetti
Owns houses in: France, San Jose and Amsterdam and is Bangalore’s highest rent payer
Has worked in: The Netherlands, France, Italy, USA, UK and India
Recently read: Gun, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Listens to: Rolling Stones; Dire Straits; Scorpions; Jimi Hendrix
Likes to holiday in: Dubai, Maldives
Enjoys: Running marathons, skiing, snow boarding and swimming
Over the last three decades, ‘Wim’ Willem Pieter Elfrink has been through a series of inflection points. As a young executive, he started his career with Olivetti, just as the firm was making its transformation from electromechanical to electrical equipment. His second career move saw him work with Xerox, at a time when the company was growing beyond its core photocopier business. His third move was to join Hewlett Packard (HP), then a $10-billion test and measurement firm timidly testing the personal computer market. The biggest turning point of his career, however, was his move to India’s IT capital Bangalore to lead a radical transformation of Internet gear giant Cisco’s business.
The shift, back in 2006, saw the 57-year-old Elfrink designated uniquely as Cisco’s Chief Globalisation Officer and overseeing its Indian as well as global services operations from the firm’s million-square-feet campus in Bangalore, named the Globalisation Centre East. He was handpicked by Cisco’s CEO John Chambers to lead the firm’s makeover that entailed setting up a second global headquarters in Bangalore and building solutions for both emerging markets and economies close to India’s IT capital, including West Asia and Africa. The upshot: Cisco recently reached the landmark of earning $1 billion in revenue in India and before the downturn hit it was growing at 20 per cent annually.
Today, India ranks among Cisco’s top 3 growth markets. At the same time, Cisco Services, which Elfrink has been heading since 2000, has grown to be a $6-billion business from $5 billion in December 2006. By locating a globalisation centre in Bangalore, Cisco wanted to have access to 70 per cent of the world’s population within a five-hour flight distance of Bangalore. Being 12 hours ahead of California, the company could also follow a 24/7 business model. As a result, Elfrink spends up to 60 per cent of his time travelling between the US and India and much of his other time on Cisco’s high-end TelePresence video conferencing system, talking to teams as far away as San Francisco and Seoul.
The company plans to eventually have 20 per cent of its top talent in India, and as part of its new globalisation programme some 60 families of expatriates have moved to Bangalore. Rather than be a company with a single headquarters, Cisco is leading the way in splitting its business and, according to reports, eventually plans to have 4-6 globalisation centres based on the model it pioneered in Bangalore.
“I have made an art of inflection points,” Elfrink says when we meet him in Bangalore. “I moved 2,000 km from my home in The Netherlands for my first job in Italy, where I learnt a new language and ate new food.” Over the last few decades, he has graduated from being a young techie writing machine code to building teams and businesses with HP. It wasn’t smooth sailing all the way, though; Elfrink joined and left the Dutch consumer electronics giant Philips within months after a clash of cultures. His son, now 22, is severely autistic, and so the Elfrinks have invested in an intensive care facility to take care of him. “This gave us some time for pause… for five years I took it relatively easy setting up a foundation (run by his wife) to help similar kids,” he says.
He joined Cisco in 1997 as Vice President of Customer Advocacy in Europe, where he tried to evangelise a radical new concept, which focussed on creating customised service offerings for clients, rather than adopt a one-size-fits-all model of business. In 2000, he was given global charge of the services business and moved to the firm’s HQ in San Jose, California. Along the way, he rode Cisco’s rise from being an Internet plumber into a global communications giant. It is this journey and its evolution that finally bought Elfrink to India.
His business plan for Cisco is based on the premise that the developing world accounts for more than half the world’s GDP and will be home to over seven billion people by 2050. To target new markets, Cisco plans to sell not only its conventional equipment, but also devise new products and solutions. On October 6 this year, Cisco unveiled another part of its plan, when it announced an alliance with Sunil Mittal’s Bharti for developing co-branded solutions specifically for Indian enterprises. Elfrink and Mittal also connect regularly about larger industry issues such as broadband penetration and sustainable development.
Mahindra & Mahindra is another key customer for Cisco in India and the company outsources software development work to both Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam. Elfrink and Anand Mahindra, Vice Chairman, M&M frequently link up to discuss the growing heft of India and the developing market and ways for the companies to collaborate All this work, however, doesn’t mean he has no spare time. Straight after his interview with us, Elfrink heads home to his sprawling mansion in Epsilon (he reportedly pays the highest house-rent in Bangalore, coughing up Rs 19 lakh per month), a swish gated community near Bangalore’s HAL Airport. At 3 p.m., it’s time for his daily hour-long yoga session followed by time spent with his two young sons, competing with them in the family swimming pool. And while most of us finish work as the sun sets, for Elfrink, it’s just a short break. He can often be found at home video conferencing as late as 4 a.m. “I don’t commute to compute,” Elfrink explains. “I don’t believe in five-day weeks nor do I sleep a lot. I can get by with less than five hours.”
Perhaps this burning desire to work hard and yet enjoy life to the hilt can be traced back to his early years —the swinging ’60s. Elfrink was in his twenties when Woodstock happened and Hendrix was the flavour of the day. “It was the 1960s, the start of a new era. It was all about the democratisation of universities and I was fascinated by everything happening around me,” he says. For Dutch youth, this was also a time for rebuilding, especially for Elfrink, whose father was a prisoner of war in a German camp. “I wasn’t very interested in academics, but was fascinated by music, especially designing and building amplifiers,” says the self-confessed Rolling Stones and Dire Straits fan. It was this fascination to enter new territory and design new products that led him to experiment in life. While his love for amps was the catalyst for his entry into the world of technology, it is his globetrotting ways and exposure to different cultures and peoples that he’s now leveraging in Bangalore.
India, he says, has taught him to adapt and innovate in life. So, while in his younger days he was a skiing enthusiast and a marathon runner (he has run 42 marathons till date) at 57 he realises his protesting knees need a different sport. Elfrink has found the perfect alternative in India: a personal yoga instructor teaches him every day.
Yoga, of course, is not the only thing he has learnt while in India. It has also taught him some new management skills. “The biggest customers for my services business are in North America and Europe and I need to trust my team to deal with them when I am in Bangalore. So, we have moved from a centralised decision making process of command and control to one of teamwork and collaboration,” he says.
So, what’s next? In Bangalore, Elfrink says he gets plenty of time to think of new business opportunities for Cisco in India and across the world. “Look at the traffic on the road,” he says, pointing to the city’s chaotic Ring Road. “The solution to this is not building more roads, but smart commuting.”
Despite his ambitious plans, he’s well aware that only a small fraction of the working population globally thinks like him. “Maybe 5 per cent of them are adventurous and will consider such a move,” Elfrink says. “We like India because the schools here allow our children to remain kids for longer. There is no hurry to grow up.” He hasn’t mastered an Indian language yet, but speaks Dutch, French and Italian, besides English. He also took classes in Mandarin with his sons. His sons, too, have become trilingual. While Elfrink is committed to stay in India for one more year at least, he doesn’t think it will be enough to complete the transformation of Cisco.
“After two years, we have created some awareness within Cisco about globalisation. This is now the most fragile phase of our rollout, where we need to expand aggressively,” he says. Already, operating committees, which oversee businesses, are being quizzed on specific globalisation plans and more executives are keen to join Elfrink in India. “Two years ago, we had no idea the downturn would hit us so severely. Today, I have no idea about what will happen in a year. You must be prepared to react and have a business model that will evolve,” he signs off.
Man with the Plan Elfrink wants to transform Cisco's business model.
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