King leads Mott MacDonald into the new Modi era

Ian Halstead catches up with Liz King, the new Managing Director of Mott MacDonald's India business.

Transforming India’s creaking infrastructure network is the country’s greatest strategic challenge; whether that be its highways, its airports, its ports or its urban travel systems.

With challenges come opportunities, of course, and the massive potential for UK consultancies, advisers, urban designers, architects, and even providers of funding to win business is evident.

Equally, the scale of India’s infrastructure requirements – most spectacularly the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor – is so huge that competition for work will come from powerful global rivals, notably China.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also made it clear that he’s looking to new sources of investment and expertise, not least by his visits to Myanmar for the ASEAN Summit, and then Australia for the G20 Summit in November.

It’s vital therefore that UK-based organisations looking to become India’s partners of choice, for the ambitious administration, choose the right people to devise and deliver their India strategies.

Mott MacDonald has turned to King to lead its 1,200 staff in eight offices. She has been with the consultancy since leaving university in the 1980s, and has excelled in a series of senior management roles.

Certainly, she has a purposeful and organised air, suggesting an ability to base decisions on research and sound analysis, but also a powerful sense of what is right and fair.

“I do like to get things done and believe I’m very structured in my thinking. When there are obstacles, I’m incredibly persistent in overcoming them, and when change is needed, I’m very happy to change things,” says King briskly.

“Equally, I think the best way to deliver success is to give people clear roles and targets. I’m a great believer in empowerment, and in moving people around to where they can add value to the business.”

“I’ve seen people absolutely fly when they’ve been given the right opportunities, and had someone believe in them.”

Mott MacDonald has been in India for over 40 years and has been working on the Delhi Metro project for more than a decade, so its credentials and track record are well established.

Its Indian business is also almost 100% staffed by locals, which King believes gives the business a significant competitive advantage.

“If you were coming as an expat, to a business starting from scratch, it would be very difficult to pick everything up and would take a considerable period,” she says.
“The political structure is very complex, with the Federal Government, the State Government, then three further layers of administration. One state is also very different from another, in terms of language, culture, customs, economic performance, and attitudes to business.”

“Companies which hope to do well here also need to understand which ministries are traditional in their behaviours, and which are more transformational, and of course the Indian hierarchical culture is another challenge, so the knowledge which we have acquired here over the years is absolutely invaluable.”

“Saying that, you also need a great deal of patience and understanding, because the red tape is ever present and there can be a lot of steps you have to go through to get anything signed-off.”

Infrastructure projects in India are often characterised by delays, so Mott MacDonald’s achievements on the first two phases of the Delhi Metro – intended to carry between 600,000 and 850,000 passengers daily by 2021 – earned it not just the lead consultancy role for phase three, but much more elsewhere.

“Our work on Delhi Metro has taken us into every other metro project in India. We’re designing and supervising construction on similar schemes in Bangalore, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Kolkata. We are also the technical and general consultant for the Jaipur metro project,” says King.

“We don’t operate all those contracts in the same way, but we tend to have a project manager, and technical expertise based locally, then overall supervision led by our ops director in Mumbai, monitoring each project.”

“We’re right in the middle of the tunnelling phase in Delhi, with the first breakthrough taking place in August and a further seven phased over the next couple of years, so that’s very exciting and also an interesting technical challenge.”

Mott MacDonald’s involvement in work is much more than about Metros though, however headline-grabbing such projects inevitably are.

King’s role requires her to oversee several hundred projects; from small-scale business advisory to medium sized industrial schemes, and from long-term health and education programmes to managing the complex sewerage renewal scheme for the teeming city of Mumbai and its 20 million inhabitants.

“We have very experienced project managers and a tremendous depth of expertise throughout the country, so for me, it’s largely about making sure that everyone is working together, and operating in the most efficient way to deliver maximum value for our clients,” she says.

“Looking ahead, there are certainly many growth opportunities. The ‘Make in India’ concept certainly chimes with us, because we’re already designing plants for major companies, including Adani Group, Godrej Industries, Hindustan Cola-Cola Beverages Private Ltd, LANXESS and Mars International, so we’ve got a strong blend of private sector and public sector work.”

“From a company perspective, we have around 350 staff in global design centres here at the moment, and we’ll be looking to expand that activity across our different operational sectors.”

It looks as if ‘shop talk’ will be part of King’s life in India, as her husband also works for Mott MacDonald there, as a regional business improvement manager.

However, the couple do have two daughters in their early 20s, so of just the right age and inclination to pop out to India for holidays and festive times, and provide a welcome distraction.

What next?
Contact: Yukti Agarwal,
Infrastructure Sector Advisor, UKIBC
T: +91 (0) 124 453 7800
E: Yukti.Agarwal@ukibc.com