Claudiu Constantinescu, Phd., Regional Manager Central Europe at Endava Romania, was a speaker at the recent True Leaders Awards online gala, organized by ICAP Romania and Business Review. In the panel discussion moderated by entrepreneurship expert and BR contributor Claudiu Vrinceanu, the Endava representative addressed the questions raised by Vrinceanu such as: “What was the key for your success? How did you manage to increase the company’s profitability, the number of employees and stay in such a low risk area?”, “How has the crisis affected you? What were the biggest changes you made in 2020 to adapt to the COVID crisis?”, “What do you consider to be the biggest risk to your industry during this period?”, “How do we create a regime supported by digital transformation initiatives?”

“We learned a lot this year. Crisis times can also be learning moments.” Constantinescu started his intervention. “They force a hard reset of the market and also force us to innovate and to leave our comfort zone.”

On the challenges of the IT industry in 2020

“The IT sector was somewhat pampered for a long period of time, not even the financial crisis of 2008 affected it so much, but this can also be a pitfall, as IT companies could fall in the trap of their own success. The average age of employees in the IT sector is very low, and people are the key feature of tech companies and we must keep in mind that many of them, who are now involved in the leadership of their companies, have never experienced such a crisis. This means they might not be very prepared for big shocks like this one, but their training, adaptability and innovation capacity were helped them in overcoming their lack of experience. This might sound like a very broad statement, but in reality adaptability is not something which happens over night, it’s learned and involves a lot of preparation and planning.” Says Claudiu Constantinescu.

On leadership and digitalization

“We invested a lot in management and leadership skills. It’s very difficult to coordinate teams of hundreds of people whiteout investing in leaders.” Constantinescu says. “A very big opportunity is represented by the digitalization drive in the public sector. The pandemic forced us to go in this direction and we must continue moving forward.”