A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Malcolm Frank, EVP of Strategy and Marketing, Cognizant.
The idea that the exponential growth in computing power, performance and bandwidth is transforming every aspect of every business is a given. How companies manage those transformational forces to gain competitive advantage by better understanding and serving the needs of their customers is not. No wonder consulting and managed services devoted to helping companies along this journey is a big and fast-growing business. Cognizant is one such consulting company that has itself experienced explosive growth as a result of its digital transformation service offerings.
In fact, over the past ten years, Cognizant has outperformed the likes of Google* in terms of investor returns. Only Apple, the world’s most valuable company by market cap, created more shareholder value over the same time frame than Cognizant.** During this period, Cognizant has grown from approximately 15,000 employees to over 215,000.
Malcolm Frank, EVP of Strategy and Marketing, Cognizant. Co-Author of Code Halos: How the Digital... [+]
The person at the center of communicating and demonstrating Cognizant’s value proposition is CMO, Malcolm Frank. Rare among marketing leaders, Frank is a consulting practitioner with P&L responsibilities to go along with his strategy and marketing responsibilities. Not surprisingly given his profile, he has also not followed the usual path to the CMO ranks, most of whom are steeped in brand and product marketing from companies like P&G or held senior roles at advertising agencies, or both.
“I came from a different path in marketing. It's deeply formed my view on what’s the appropriate approach. I can remember when I played college football one of our coaches said, ‘Your value to the team is how close you are to the ball at the whistle.’ I often think of marketing in that way; your value is how close are you to a customer. Do you deeply understand what’s going on there? Particularly in our market,” says Frank.
The former Yale defensive end, rose to his CMO position by first becoming a CEO.
“I studied economics in college and then I was a commodities trader right after school. But when I was about 24, I took this role at a start-up in Boston that was on MIT’s campus, Cambridge Technology Group. It was executive education for IT leaders of Fortune 500 companies on how to rethink technology and the role of technology in their companies,” says Frank.
As a result, he was able to interact with hundreds of senior IT executives a month on the role of technology, their challenges and what other areas they were starting to focus in. This was also just at the time that enterprise applications were coming to the fore, and so technology was moving from data processing to becoming a strategic asset in these companies.
“To be there at the genesis of that, but then also to be that close to clients on an ongoing basis, deeply informed my view of marketing. It’s about constantly listening and paying attention. In doing that, patterns start to emerge and it becomes clear what clients want, what role you can play, and how you need to position your product or service against that. That’s where it started for me. I think it was a good foundation at least for our industry,” says Frank.
Frank views his company’s thought leadership as paramount to the firm’s success. Frank is himself a published author, having co-authored the recently published book, Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business, which was named the Best Business Book of 2014 for general business by USA Books.
“We’re fortunate because in our industry, technology is reshaping everything, so people want to engage in that conversation, but I think that metaphorically you’ve got to walk the path. You’ve got to continue on the journey and that journey is about having a conversation with the market. One thing I recognized a long time ago is that the market is always right and I learned that from trading and it really applies to marketing as well. Marketers can get in trouble when they think they’ve got a monopoly on truth, or they’ve got one scenario in their head, as opposed to how the market really thinks and really behaves,” says Frank.
Frank is very much a man of the world, but still retains his small town sensibilities, having grown up in Oberlin, a small town in northern Ohio. “There’s a great college there, but it’s a pretty small place, about 8,000 people. But it was a wonderful place to grow up in many ways. So I really cherish and feel fortunate to have been able to grow up there,” says Frank. From Oberlin, Frank earned his degree in economics and history from Yale.
Like many Ivy League school graduates he found himself working on Wall Street in the trading pits for an option arbitrage firm, Singer-Wenger Trading,trading Gold, Silver and crude oil futures. Yet he yearned to be part of something more, much like the histories of Florence during the Italian Renaissance and the rise of the invention of the banking system or London at the dawn of the industrial revolution that he often studied and read about. “It was really valuable experience, because you understand risk management in a very real sense and you understand how markets work, so from that perspective I thought it was terrific. But it became clear to me, although I admired what a lot of folks did there, it just wasn’t for me,” says Frank
“It was always in the corner of my mind and at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I wanted to participate in building the future. I think that’s what led me to what’s going on in IT. There’s this sense of building the future and participating in that, and I’ve always found that to be a very exciting element of our business. That certainly wasn’t crystallized when I was 21 or 22, but it became that pretty quickly and I knew what I was looking for when I went up to MIT’s campus and saw that sense of excitement at the Cambridge Technology Group,” says Frank.
From there he co-founded his own IT consulting firm, Cambridge Technology Partners and later another management consulting and systems integration firm, NerveWire Inc., which was later acquired by Wipro. Prior to joining Cognizant in his current role he was the co-founder, President and CEO of CXO Systems, an independent software firm acquired by Cisco in 2005.
Frank joined Cognizant in 2005 and has been at the center of the firm’s own exponential growth path over the past ten years.
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*In comparing the annual compound return to investors over a 10-year period, as of May 21: With Cognizant’s closing share price of approximately $65 on May 21, 2015, the company has outperformed Google in annual compound return over a 10-year period from May 21, 2005 to May 21, 2015. Dec. 31 annual compound return comparison: From Dec. 2008-Dec. 2014 (6 year-period following the global financial crisis), Cognizant outperformed Google in annual compound returns. In other words, if you had bought Google and Cognizant at the same time, you would have seen higher returns by owning Cognizant.
**In comparing the performance of tech titans Apple and Google with Cognizant, only Apple has consistently created more value to investors over the past 10 years. (compounded through 2014)
