Himang Infra Recasts the Core, Builds Novel Ideas to Stem Crisis

Abstract

Srivatsava (Sri) , an IT sector professional with international exposure returned to India to attend to certain family level exigencies, and decided to stay back in the country. In the year 2008, he founded Himang Infrastructure Solutions Pvt Ltd, a Chennai based real estate company which operated in the affordable housing segment with great success. An important character in Himang’s growth story was Gopu, the project manager, who was adept at managing resources and completing projects on time. Gopu had a creative bent of mind which occasionally surfaced in certain ideas that he would propose to Sri who looked at those ideas as a distraction and ignored them. India’s real estate sector faced slowdown on account of a range of macroeconomic conditions from 2015 onwards, forcing Himang to retrench staff and cut back operations. In mid-2017, even as he continued to struggle with Himang’s dwindling fortunes, Sri chanced upon a surreptitious stream of work that Gopu had initiated. Using discarded items like drums and pipes at Himang’s construction sites, and out-of-work labourers, Gopu constructed a functional sewage treatment plant (STP) for an existing completed project of Himang Infra. Upon discovering this surreptitious project, Sri’s immediate reaction was of incredulity, exasperation and anger at being kept in the dark. He was also annoyed at the fact that just when he needed all his employees to rally around the crisis, some were spending their energy elsewhere. Being the CEO, Sri had to now decide how to handle the situation. What was he to make of Gopu’s disregard of organizational hierarchy and about the surreptitious STP project.