My Negatives:

1. In my career till then I had never handled the editorial or news media. I was always in to advertising, marketing and sales promotion.

2. PR was something absolutely new to me. In a way I had joined Satyam under false pretences, because when Raju asked me at my interview whether I knew anyone in the media the only name I could tell him was that of a good friend who handled the advertising function for the biggest media group in AP.

3. When I joined Satyam I had never sent an email in my life nor knew anything about something called the internet. IT was an alien subject to me. I was basically a Mechanical Engineer.

The Beginning

I found that the Bangalore based advertising and PR agency handling the Satyam account was not really contributing much though they charged a high fee. 

We sacked them and through a professional selection process appointed one of the top advertising agencies in the country to handle our paid communication business. 

The first collaboration effort was to bring out the corporate identity manual, called the Satyam Covenant.This was to make sure that all corporate branding effort across the world would be cohesive.

Knowing that an advertising agency is generally not clued in to public relations, I decided to handle the media myself instead of incurring further expenditure in hiring a PR agency. 

My first effort was a disaster. I prepared a press release for our annual result without a headline. 

The next day each publication interpreted the results in its own way. It was rather embarrassing seeing some of the headlines early the next morning.

It was time to start earning my salary. I wrote out a pretty decent brand strategy plan. On top of the list was something I titled "Brand building the CEO". 

I made a slide Auditoriums and conference halls for rent in Singapore presentation to Raju defining various brand positioning attributes for his image building.

1. Entrepreneur

2. Innovator

3. Technocrat

4. Leader

We debated all the positioning points and I explained to him why each one was not right for him. His previous enterprises were not really successful so the first one was out. 

As he was not technically qualified, the second and third points would be difficult to push through. 

The fourth one too would have been a far cry from reality. Luckily, Raju was not an egoist so he accepted my role as a Devil's advocate with some amount of amusement.

Finally, I showed him the crucial slide. Through the months of interaction with Raju one thought that hit me was that he rarely got in to the details of the running of an enterprise. 

All his statements were a bit philosophical and holistic. He also tended to go off on a tangent sometimes. 

To give him a branding that he would be comfortable donning I recommended that he be positioned as a Visionary.

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However, I did go to meet him and I was rather disappointed when he told me the company's name though the company was Hyderabad based and I was in the same city, too. 

He persuaded me to at least meet the company management. The same afternoon I met Ramalinga Raju, Chairman, Satyam Computer Services.

 I had no clue what the company did as IT was not even in my radar being more from the engineering and automotive industry. 

In fact, I even had a stray thought that they assembled grey market PCs.

The meeting with Raju lasted more than an hour and was very pleasant. He came across as a gentle person and very polite. 

Very soon I got an offer of appointment from Satyam. My wife referred to a few people in Bangalore in the IT field before I accepted it. 

Of course, the financial offer was very attractive,too

I joined Satyam as head of corporate communications on August 16.The next day I got a call from Economic Times asking me for a comment on a story that they were running about a check bouncing case against Satyam. 

This troubled me as I had never experienced anything like that in the past. I just mumbled that there was no truth in that story.

About ten days later we had to print some invitation cards for inaugurating our spanking new technology centre. 

It surprised me when Training and seminar rooms for rent in Singapore the printer asked me for 100% advance. He was the same printer who used to give my earlier company thirty days credit without questions. 

I began to worry whether I had made a major error of judgment in joining Satyam. I now remembered that some of my friends in Hyderabad expressed surprise when I told them that I was leaving a leading multi-national company to join Satyam.

Anyway, it was too late to do anything about it. And in 1996 driving a brand new Maruti Suzuki Esteem around Hyderabad was a balm on a hurt ego. 

I put all negative thoughts aside and decided I would carve a positive role for myself and do what was right for the company.

The Company Negatives:

1) Nobody knew who ran the company, including investors. This was surprising as Raju was in the office regularly from 9am to 9pm.

2) The public and investors still associated the name Satyam with construction and textile spinning and not IT.

3) The promoters, based on the flavor of the season had entered all kinds of businesses in the past and failed, including such diverse fields as aquaculture and shoe uppers.

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For those seeking more adult night clubs there is a way to learn all you need to know including quite a few nightclubs photos, nightclub videos, and Nightlife reviews for various Strip Clubs across the city. 

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