A graduate of IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta, he has worked for Pepsi, Arvind Mills and RPG, to name only a few. A large part of his career has been devoted to working with start-ups and growing them to large-scale operations, a task he finds hugely exciting.
As business head for Pepsico in the early days of the drink's launch, he enjoyed the rush of adrenalin that came from not just launching the famous brand but creating and developing the Pepsi joint venture.
"Those were the days prior to liberalisation and it was a challenge to get an MNC to enter the country. Subsequently, as business head of Pepsi, I was responsible for building the business in Uttar Pradesh and parts of Madhya Pradesh from scratch, initially as a franchised business and later as our own business. Managing the entire transition and turning the operation around within a year was a huge learning experience," he says.
Pradeep, now CEO of Bharti Infratel, joined Bharti eight years ago, starting in Chennai in the fixed line business. He moved to Bangalore in 2002 to launch and build the fixed line and broadband business in Karnataka and subsequently in Kerala as well. He was able to roll out the network in Bangalore just three months after operations were launched.
"The situation was difficult as we were unable to roll out our network fast enough, the skill sets among our teams were not developed enough, and Reliance and Tata were planning huge forays into the fixed line business at the time," he says. "At the same time, we were planning to reorganise the company. Those were really tough days, and I stayed away from my family for over 10 months, doing nothing but getting things in place."
It was a matter of satisfaction therefore to see the business grow into a 1 million customer business in six years, with an absolute leadership position in the broadband business.
Pradeep was heading the South Hub (the four southern states) business for broadband and fixed lines until February 2008 when he moved to Gurgaon as CEO of Bharti Infratel. His responsibility, he says, is to deliver the top line and the bottom line for the business and provide strategic as well as operational direction and leadership.
The company's key strengths, he says, lie in its strong and large base of towers, access to financial resources, a worldclass team with a "can-do" attitude and a strong understanding of telecom, the Bharti brand, strong values and a fast execution culture.
Pradeep's professional interests lie in building and developing teams, and combining strategic thinking with execution skills to build businesses from scratch. When managing people, he likes to keep an open mind, adhere to a transparent style of management, and retain a strong belief that every individual and team can, and wants, to contribute given the right role and environment.
"I like to lead from the front and take decisions based on data and analysis although intuition also plays a key role at times," he says.
Through his work with start-ups, he has found that, at the early stage, a greater hands-on style works best. As things develop and people move along the learning curve, a delegatory style is more appropriate as it allows people to feel empowered and take control of what they are doing.
As a youth, Pradeep was inspired by business leaders who embodied achievement and humility. "I was deeply affected by J.R.D. Tata for his visionary leadership and his quiet dignity and humility. I also have deep respect and admiration for selfmade people who have achieved success through sheer wit and grit, such as Shah Rukh Khan, Dhirubhai Ambani and, closer home, Sunil Mittal," says Pradeep.
He can relate to self-made men because his own family, as refugees from Lahore during the Partition, arrived in Delhi and had to start rebuilding their lives from scratch. His father worked initially for the Reserve Bank of India and later for IDBI.
"I grew up with very strong middleclass values and dreams. Hard work, honesty and a strong focus on security and stability were the themes of my childhood. My parents' dreams were the normal ones of middle-class families – for children to become professionals (preferably doctors or engineers) and have a stable job," he says.
Pradeep went to Air Force Central School in Delhi before studying mechanical engineering at IIT Delhi. Later, he went to IIM Calcutta. It was while he was at college that his thought processes changed a little from the ingrained habits of his middle-class childhood.
"That was a different generation from today. We were less conformist and materialistic. There was more rebellion when we were young than in today's youth so I experimented with a few things before settling down in the corporate world, including working for the voluntary sector for a while," he says.
Pradeep went to Pennsylvania State University for a year to do a Ph.D. in marketing. At that time, his plan was to become a professor in a US university and do some path-breaking research.
"I think the turning point came after a year when I realised that I could contribute more to my country and society by being in the mainstream of business than through research in the US. I also had to return to India within a year due to personal reasons," he explains.
Pradeep's day starts early. He likes to arrive in the office before others so that he has time to catch up with his mail. After 10 a.m., it's a series of internal meetings, mostly reviews of ongoing "transformational" projects that the company is currently engaged in. Lunch is a hurried 15-minute job in the office canteen. After lunch, he looks at the daily performance reports of the previous day and makes phone calls. He likes to meet up with at least one employee every day in an informal chat to try and understand ground issues, both operational and people related. Once a month, he tries to visit the field.
On future trends in telecom, Pradeep says he expects some degree of consolidation and buy-outs amongst the tower companies, a process that has already started. This is no surprise to him because scale and efficiency will play a key role in delivering value to customers, and the pull for that will come from the exigencies of business that telecom operators will increasingly face in the next few years as competition becomes more intense for an incremental subscriber base with decreasing ARPUs and higher pressure on margins.
"At the same time, the need for data services and other value-added services will increase, especially with the onset of 3G technology. This will lead to high-end customers using the mobile phone more and more for entertainment and commerce applications. All this will mean an increase in demand for telecom infrastructure at lower costs and better service delivery."
He expects the sector to continue to expand much faster than the economy over the next five years, in terms of growth in both revenue as well as number of subscribers. He also foresees a qualitative shift as the quantity and quality of services offered will be the key differentiators.
In the passive infrastructure space, Pradeep says that, against the backdrop of an economic slowdown, the focus on funding and building new towers will weaken even as more sites will be required.
"This will mean increased sharing of the existing infrastructure. We see a strong business model developing for our business which is a win-win for the telcos as well as the tower companies," he says.
However, while Pradeep is bullish about demand, he says the industry must move to another level of maturity by pioneering innovative business models and creating global service standards based on the use of technology to meet the expectations of an increasingly competitive market.
Always on the move, Pradeep says that all the travel and moving homes have been tough on his family. Recently, they were sitting around calculating the average time spent in any city and it came to 2.4 years. The one good thing that has come from so much disruption is that his children can quickly adjust to new surroundings. As a family, they are close and try to take a couple of short vacations a year for what he jokingly calls "quality bonding"