Bagdadi believes in situational leadership and allows his team members to solve their problems themselves. "Team conflicts primarily happen due to lack of roadmap or clarity of goal, inter group conflicts, and focus on one-upmanship. And if one shows enough trust and delegates well, majority of team problems get resolved. Being a flat organization, where command and follow does not work, we try to provide opportunities to express and deliver to our team members without walking on each others toes," he says. One of his key tasks includes selecting and building the next in line team thereby ensuring a consistent dialog and ability to coach subordinates.

The Beginning
A true-blue Mumbaikar, Bagdadi was born and brought up in Mumbai, where he completed his schooling at Elphinstone Technical High School and intermediate from St Xaviers College. Armed with a mechanical engineering degree from VJTI, Bagdadi joined New Standard Engineering as a shop floor engineer. "Even though I was a mechanical engineer I was inclined toward IT. Many doubted my choice, since this was at a time when computers werent a rage," he says. In 1979, he finally got an opportunity as a trainee computer programmer in Godrej & Boyce where he rose in the ranksfrom being a team leader to the functional programming head.

While completion of his diploma in systems management, Bagdadi bagged a scholarship from Japan for a six-month software engineering course. Tokyo was the place where Bagdadi got his first taste of studying abroad and "learnt a lot at NEC". Back from Tokyo, Bagdadi joined Godrejs management services group with the idea of providing a consultative function to various departments on how to use technology.

After working for eleven years at Godrej, Bagdadi moved on to join a Godrej JV with GE known as Godrej-GE Appliances where he worked as a CIO for nine years. After his long innings with Godrej, Bagdadi changed a few jobs and joined CFC Countrywide in 2004 where he was the second employee.

Projects Implemented
Engaged in providing offshore processing and IT services to its parent company, Countrywide Financial Corporation (CFCI) is a provider of diversified mortgage financial services in selected markets. Since going live in May 2004, the company has made three sites operational across two cities, providing more than 1,400 BPO seats, 1,200 ITS seats, and approximately 100 KPO seats. The IT infrastructure architecture uses state-of-the-art hardware configurations with fail-proof capabilities. The IT infrastructure is chosen from approved standards providing vitalization, cross platform integration, complete application manageability through single source, and management and controllership through best in class tools. This has provided the organization with flexibility, interoperability, ability to implement vitalization, and identity management fulfilling the primary objective of the organization.

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