Zoho: Coming From an Emerging Market Has it’s Advantages – Part II
My Conversation with Zoho CEO, Sridhar Vembu
In my last post, I spoke about my conversation with Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corporation, an innovative software company headquartered in the US, but with most of their employees based in India and China. I wrote mostly about the ingredients of the company’s success. In this post, I’d like to delve a bit further into Sridhar’s vision and philosophy and its applicability to Latin America.
While I was speaking with Sridhar, I was reminded of John Hagel’s book, The Only Sustainable Edge. In it, Hagel mentions two important areas touched upon by the Zoho CEO. The first one has to do with Zoho’s ability to offer customers value at an affordable cost which is in synch with Hagel’s assertion that technology innovations are opportunities to “create more value at less cost.” Zoho’s location, recruiting, training and company culture paired with its bet on cloud computing make are certainly aligned to a goal of creating more value at less cost for their customers. Additionally, Hagel points out in his book that managing across two cultures “can create new opportunities to enhance performance by drawing on the best of both cultures.” Certainly, this is not news to Sridhar who lives and breathes it every day. Read more