Indus Towers: From Infancy to Maturity

Indus Towers, the world's largest telecom tower company, is a joint venture between three telecom rivals in India. These rivals—Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, and Idea Cellular—combined their telecom towers to provide "shared telecom infrastructure" to wireless telecom operators on a nondiscriminatory basis. The CEO has transformed Indus from a struggling startup with a monopolistic mindset into a customer-centric organization. He now wants to grow Indus. To achieve this, however, he needs to reconcile conflicting objectives among Indus's shareholders. All three shareholders are also his customers; often these dual roles engender different perspectives and lead to different requirements. The CEO needs to determine how to convince the board to take a decision that keeps Indus's best interests in mind while balancing the operators' interests.