Tech-driven philosophy

T Radhakrishna
21 May 2003

Bangalore: On a cold Saturday morning in January 2003, 84 teams across the globe pitted against the best in the Satyam Community to vie for the top position. This was the first-ever Satyam Problem Solving and Multi-Location Contest in India — ProSolve 2002.

The participants at their Satyam offices spread across the globe sat down to a programming challenge set to them by professors of IIT-Kanpur in India. The teams had to collaborate to rank problem difficulty, deduce the requirements, design test beds and then build software solutions using C, C++ or Java.

The contest comprised of eight problems that needed to be solved within the given span of five-and-a-half hours. The problems covered a spectrum of subjects like Matrix theory, numerical methods, combinatorics, graph theory, optimisation problems, computational geometry, number theory, dynamic problems and back tracking.

These problems were given a domain flavour such as that of insurance and banking. Satyam Computer Services is practising a new form of leadership these days. They are morphing their employees into technology leaders, who can wrap technology into elegant solutions from knotty business problems.

ProSolv 2002, built along the lines of the competition organised by Association for Computing Machinery''s (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), is an attempt to identify and nurture analytical and abstraction capabilities of Satyam''s employees (referred to as associates), to encourage competitive spirit and building tech communities.

Today, the rules of leadership have changed. And given the speed of change, leaders must be able to build organisations that understand the demands of the competitive environment so well that individual managers can execute without constantly requiring guidance from above. "In the 21st century, leadership at all levels is the key," says Rajul Asthana, assistant vice-president, technocrat and leader of the Satyam Learning Centre (SLC).