WITH electronic chips competing for grain as the commodity of the computer age, it pays to have a salesman at the helm.   

Hewlett-Packard Co. thought so and placed Singaporean David Tan in August last year to manage its business in the Philippines, a country that, Tan says, is very important for the world’s largest computer-maker.

A former account manager for five years with the International Business Machine Corp., Tan is credited with strengthening HP’s outsourcing center here, which is one of only three that the Palo Alto, California-based company maintains worldwide.

Tan is also credited with steering HP’s business amid uncertain impact from a downward spiral of the American economy and the “cost-optimization” line of company chief executive Mark Hurd.

Likewise, aside from being managing director for the Philippines, Tan is also the concurrent head of HP’s technology solutions group.

He does all these and still manages to make it to his home in Singapore every weekend and be back in Manila every Monday early morning straight from the airport to HP’s Philippine office in Makati City.

In this interview Tan, who worked mostly in sales for 15 years with HP, shares how he manages such tasks with an impeccable management style.

Is it difficult to be a managing director of a multinational company like HP?

My 16 years in this company, it showed me different jobs, different roles, different challenges. For instance, after five years as general manager, they moved me into a global role, handling accounts mostly in the region where I visit customers in Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. You still have a general manager function because you look at the margins alongside customer satisfaction. But my level of interaction would not be from the people on the ground alone because I have a team. That spanned two years before I became country sales director in Singapore, where I talked to partners, focused on sales and services, the whole gamut of operations. Based on that experience, that’s how I decided I can capably perform this role [Philippine managing director] right now, which is to take charge of the overall country operations of HP. My years in the industry gave me the knowledge and expertise in information technology. My position now, however, gives me a more focused market—the Philippines.

Did you change anything when you came onboard?

I think I added more. One of my jobs is to proactively promote HP Philippines and the Philippines itself to the HP community and customers. Second, I looked at my team and saw we needed to have more numerical than intangible measurements. I spent a long time with my team with different sites in the Philippines. One of the things our founders exercised is having clear measurements. So every day we measure business fundamentals; we have a table showing top-line goals, revenue goals, customer satisfaction rates, product goals. It’s a report of how we perform.

HP is also focused on the people-style of management. I do that by “walking around,” what our founders Bill [Hewlett] and Dave [Packard] started. This style is marked by personal involvement, good listening skills and the recognition that “everyone in an organization wants to do a good job.”

Lastly, I listen to my team and give them the flexibility to work toward our goals in ways that they determine are best for their own areas of responsibility.

Maybe this is also natural for me because of my character: I can’t sit still. I like to go down and see people.

Is having clear measures part of Mark Hurd’s policy of cutting costs?

Mark doesn’t always emphasize cost but cost optimization. He says you also need to deliver top-line expectations. He’s looking at it from both sides: top-line growth point of view and cost point of view. That’s how we’ve been applying it.

HP has maintained a lead in the industry it belongs, posting double-digit sales growth despite the US economic recession. How can you explain this phenomenon?

Aspects of Asia’s business may be affected by US recession [such as Asian exports, for instance], but HP in the region has managed to thrive because of the growth of its emerging businesses, such as HP services.

In the Philippines, HP’s global delivery center [GDC] has experienced rapid growth over the span of only five years. The center is a key player in knowledge process outsourcing or IT outsourcing because of its known skill in technologies.

In the services space, HP is a strong provider because it has adhered to quality standards known in the industry, such as CMMI maturity levels of 3 or 5 across all centers and ISO 2000 certification for service management. Notably, the Manila center is the first to attain such certification in the Philippines. Manila is also CMMI level 3-certified, and almost 90 percent of its service management professionals are ITIL-trained or certified. [CMMI is an industry standard for application development and maintenance. ITIL or IT infrastructure library is an industry standard framework for IT and applications support.]

Sales of electronic chips in the Asia-Pacific region continue to grow alongside the rice and grains crisis. Do you see such sales growing steady this year despite the crisis? Why? What do you think is the underlying factor?

Like rice and grains, IT has also become a basic necessity especially to businesses. Without IT, businesses will be less productive that will eventually lead to higher cost of operations because you will be hiring people to do manual jobs. Definitely, businesses will need technology.

We’re seeing sales as steady as last year. Asia is where people are coming to for more investments. The sentiment is of growth. Multinational companies coming to the Philippines and starting operations here are pretty impressive. And that’s where growth is coming from.

The Philippine market, in particular, is a growing market for HP. The Philippines definitely contributes significantly to the total revenues of HP in Asia-Pacific and Japan.

And HP is a multinational organization. While we depend on the Americas for growth, we also depend on other regions and other countries for growth, too. The US could be slowing down but there could be growth in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Last year, we were fast growing in Asia; we can say the same thing this year.

Intense competition could be expected with the US recession and crisis. How would you steer HP Philippines in these times?

HP has been focused in driving growth from its wide range of products and services that it offers to both consumers and the enterprise markets. HP Philippines has managed to thrive because of the growth of its emerging businesses, such as HP services.

The Manila global delivery center, which offers applications and infrastructure development and support, has grown from only over 300 employees in 2003 to over 1,500 in 2008. Affirming HP’s growth is the expansion of its offices. The GDC has two sites in Makati and Ortigas, and will soon expand to a new office in Fort Bonifacio.

Personally, my philosophy is very clear. As long as you keep close to your customers and your partners—you keep on walking—you should be able to identify and cultivate business with them.

We have a huge offshore operation here that I’m going to tap and I’m going to use. Go to a more mature market like Australia; they don’t have an offshore operation.

So my focus is really growth because the Philippine economy is growing and I have to grow faster than [this] growth. My only formula in this is really to stick to the customers and partners and listen to what they want.

Can you say most of your knowledge comes from authors of books you’ve read? What are you reading right now?

Oh, I love books. Right now, I’m reading something by Dale Carnegie, which is on leadership. Another is on business optimization, because I’m in the IT business. And—I juggle these books—Speak Like a CEO. n

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