BandyWorks (B): Tom Bandy—Growing, Letting Go

Tom Bandy was no stranger to entrepreneurship and the problems brought about by success. Having honed his programming skills in the 1980s, he had already founded a database company that had seen great success—and then had been squeezed out by investors. In 2005, he founded BandyWorks, a computing services consulting firm, self-funding and achieving great success only four years later. In 2011, however, a development crisis popped up within BandyWorks's product development team in Bangalore, India. The stakes were high. Bandy had noticed an issue before it became a huge problem, and he felt reasonably confident that they would get through the crisis if everyone was primed to perform. But he knew he could not be the only one catching these potential lapses. Eventually, he would miss something critical, something would fall through the now-visible management cracks, and BandyWorks would be compromised, perhaps permanently.