If you are a regular at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum, held every February in Mumbai, then you must surely know Alex Blues. Alex is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world in the field of outsourcing, with a track record that includes being a partner at PA Consulting, a Director at KPMG, a director at Orbys, and he was once the European head of Syntel.
Search Google for “Alex Blues Nasscom” and you will find thousands of references to his Nasscom comments in blogs and magazines and just look at the hundreds of videos he has made from the Nasscom event.
Alex is a true friend of Nasscom, and he is a friend of mine too. But this year Alex is not in Mumbai and neither am I. For me the reason is simple. A company was going to send me over there to blog about the event, then they changed their mind just a couple of weeks ago, leaving me no time to make alternative plans.
For Alex, it’s not so simple. He is in hospital in the UK recovering from a car crash that took place many months ago in Kenya. He was on holiday with his wife and, to cut a long story short, she was beaten up by the collision and suffered many broken bones, but is now well on the road to recovery.
Alex needed an air ambulance to get back to the UK and is still very poorly. He is partially paralysed and cannot speak, so although his mind is still fine he is trapped in a world where he can’t speak and can’t move in a coordinated enough way to type or write.
But the doctors are working on the best hand he still has, and his speech, and once one or the other is working again, me and Alex are going to write a book together about how the role of influencers has entirely changed within the outsourcing and global services market. It’s an exciting topic that will take in the analysts, the consultants and advisors, and even the hi-tech bloggers and social media experts.
How people make buying decisions has changed enormously since the old days of buying an analyst report for thousands of dollars and trusting those opinions with a budget of millions.
So I need your help if me and Alex are going to get this project together. He still has all this untapped knowledge about the market and I know that you would find it useful as well, so can you do me a favour please?
Email him on alex@carteblanchebs.co.uk and tell him how much you would like to hear that he is well enough to start working on the book.
Or, what would be even better is if you could take a moment to mail a real get-well card. He won’t be leaving hospital anytime soon so if you can make the effort to buy a real card and send it – like we used to before email – then I know he would appreciate that too.
His wife, Caroline, has promised to read him all your messages. Get them focused on how much he needs to start communicating again so he can get to work on this book and I’m sure his recovery can start sooner.
Alex Blues, A5 Addenbrooke’s Hospital
Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 0QQ
United Kingdom
Will you help me – and Alex – please? Thanks… and I hope to see the Nasscom crowd again in 2013, I miss the food in Mumbai and the random debates about music in Glasgow. You just don’t know how bad Indian food is in Brazil 🙂
One final note. Back in the days before social media had really taken off in the corporate world – like way back in 2008 – I uploaded this video of Alex at the Nasscom conference in Mumbai. I ended up in trouble for it because every time a potential client of PA Consulting was told they might be working with Alex, they would Google his name. One of the first results was always Alex enjoying a glass of wine in Mumbai with the team from Steria. Not quite the image a professional firm wants to see, but it certainly helped PA to understand the power of the Internet…
mark hillary 