Cover Feature road warrior

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Busi n e ss i n di a u the m aga zi n e of the cor por ate wor ldCover Feature

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Busi n e ss i n di a u the m aga zi n e of the cor por ate wor ld Cover Feature

would you go bananas if you had to spend the rest of your life growing bananas?

you’re in good company. that was the ordained career choice for nat-arajan chandrasekaran, chief execu-tive officer and managing director of the $11.57 billion tata consultancy services (tcs) and Business India’s Businessman of the year 2013.

“it wasn’t literally growing bananas,” says the 50-year-old chan-dra. his father wanted him to manage his extensive estates in tamil nadu. But presiding over plantains (and rice and sugarcane) wasn’t his idea of professional achievement. farming may have been in his blood, but it was not in his soul. he has, however, ended up growing something much more important – people.

tcs is the country’s largest pri-vate sector employer, with a total employee strength nudging 300,000. the company hires 25 professionals every hour. it has 118 nationalities on its rolls. “we believe that the core strength of the company is people,” says chandra.

the tata group information tech-nology (it) major today stands head and shoulders above organisations of far bigger size and vintage. it is india’s most valuable company with a market capitalisation of `4,22,634 crore (as on 30 december 2013). at $68 billion this is second only to ibm amongst interna-tional it companies, ahead of accen-ture and hp (see chart ‘up, up and away’). two years ago, it was no 4.

at a time when global it spends were declining or static and some other indian it majors were slip-ping, tcs under chandra was setting a scorching pace. in the year ended march 2013, revenue was up 29 per cent at `62,989 crore. net profit jumped 34 per cent to `13,917 crore. for the quarter ended september 2013, revenue at `20,977 crore was up 16.6 per cent quarter-on-quarter and 34.3 per cent year-on-year. “it

was a great quarter,” says chandra.the margins at tcs are now

higher than many other it software and services companies, who have been whales on such metrics. “it’s the highest in the industry now,” says shashi Bhusan, senior research analyst at broking house prabhu-das lilladher. “what i like about the company is its flawless execution. and, with it spends on the rise, there

are better days ahead.” adds a report from jm financial: “tcs’ operating performance stands out when com-pared to the peer group, both indian and international. its efficient exe-cution, client mining, strong service portfolio and widest geographic foot-print should enable it deliver supe-rior revenue growth and margins.”

in chandra’s tenure, tcs has also become the country’s biggest wealth creator. according to a motilal oswal study, tcs has come out tops in the 2008-13 period, overtaking itc, which had led in 2007-12.

how have chandra and tcs made it to a point where they seem to be in a different league altogether? chandra says that the organisation has been proactively reinventing itself. “when i took over, we had a pretty large, $6 billion enterprise with 140,000 peo-ple,” says chandra. (he became ceo & md on 6 october 2009, but had been ringing in changes since he was appointed chief operating offi-cer in september 2007.) “every large organisation needs to reorganise and reinvent itself. i took some basic principles. first, we had to create cus-tomer centricity at the core. second, we had to be nimble; we had to act like a small company with the lever-age of a large company. third, we needed units that were sufficiently large in size and had the empower-ment to take decisions. fourth, we had to provide a lot of career oppor-tunities for people.” though he puts people as the fourth point, in chan-dra’s book it is the bedrock on which the new edifice was built.

the new, nimble tcs has 23 ver-ticals serving different industry segments. each has about 5,000 professionals. it has a ceo (an erst-while vice-president almost all han-dling large portfolios), a deputy, a finance head and an hr person. in other words, it is practically a com-pany. “we have created entrepre-neurs within tcs,” says chandra.

in the beginning, all 23 ceos reported to chandra. But that was

road warrior

ON THE WORLD STAGEWorld’s top IT companies by Marketcap

($ billion)

As on 30th Dec 2013

InfosysHPAccentureTCSIBM

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Natarajan Chandrasekaran travels 20 days every month. He is the very successful marketing face of TCS and the Indian IT industry

INDIA’S MOST VALUABLE

ICICIBank

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TCS

Marketcap (` cr)Share price (`)

As on 30th Dec 2013

4,22,634

2,86,094

2,55,840

2,47,467

2,01,077

1,82,827

1,60,353

1,36,120

1,31,754

1,26,470

2,150

884

323

288

3,491

287

670

547

330

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If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium

Natarajan Chandrasekaran is on the road or, to be more accurate, in the

air. He is en route to Brussels on a flight that will take him there early morning. The airline doesn’t matter; he is carrier agnostic. He spends the flight sleeping or reading. “No in-flight movies,” he says.

At Zaventem Airport, tcs country manager Jipson Mathew is there to meet him. “It would not be unusual in other companies from the industry for some-one in my position to almost never meet the global ceo,” says Mathew. “Chandra is different as he goes out of his way to be accessible to managers and remain connected with the ground situation.”

Mathew is at the airport not to pay obeisance to his boss; Chandra always finds time to meet his people. But the drive to the hotel from the airport may be the only time Mathew will get Chan-dra’s uninterrupted ear. Even though the Belgian operations are more than 20 years old and are among the largest in Europe with over 1,300 employees, there are always issues to be discussed.

Come morning, however, there is something else on the agenda. Chandra is out running. “A couple of months ago, he ran the tcs Amsterdam Marathon, along with 1,000 of our clients and over 600 employees from all over Europe,” says Mathew. Chandra hasn’t run the Brussels marathon – the Manneken Pis Corrida. The fourth edition took place on 26 December and attracted more than 2,000 participants. That’s a small number; the tcs New York Marathon in November 2014, which is register-ing online entries, is expected to attract 100,000 runners.

The Manneken Pis is run by night; it starts late evening. That is probably Chandra’s busiest part of the day. But he has run in darkness before. “I got into running when I was 44,” he says. “One fine day, I decided I was going to run. I couldn’t run 10 steps. I got up early in the morning because I was so shy. I was not slim, to put it mildly.” In a few months, however, Tubby had shed his excess avoirdupois and Chandra was running full marathons.

Former ceo S. Ramadorai takes some

credit for putting Chandra on this path. “When Chandra joined as my execu-tive assistant in 1996, I persuaded him to move closer to my Worli home. Being a morning person, I was used to being up at 4 am. I enjoyed a morning walk at the Worli seaface and would often urge Chandra to join me. He must have dis-liked this initially as he was not a morn-ing person. Over time this became our routine. This eventually got him hooked to fitness and now marathons. I can claim some credit for his becoming a believer.”

If it’s Wednesday, it must be Rome

“In 2012, we held a summit in Rome for our top 200 clients across

Europe and Chandra was there,” says Prasad Meharunkar, country head for south Europe. “He makes it a point to be available for our clients.” Headquar-ters, however, are in Milan not Rome. “It’s the commercial capital,” explains Meharunkar.

Italy is not yet big business. tcs works with three of the top 10 Italian groups including marquee customers such as Ferrari. “But it is a small operation,” says Chandra. “We are figuring it out.”

If it’s Thursday, it must be Montreux

A short hop away (for Chandra) from Milan is Montreux in Switzerland.

tcs has several clients in Zurich. Some of the gnomes who preside over the real-life version of Harry Potter’s Grin-gotts have turned to tcs to put their systems in place. “Chandra visits Swit-zerland many times every year to meet clients and partners,” says Heinz Gehri, who heads tcs in Switzerland. “He is also here once a year for the World Economic Forum at Davos.”

Montreux is not too far from the route of the Lausanne Marathon. It has a jazz festival that would have charmed Chandra’s family; his wife Lalitha and 15-year-old son Pranav often go to jazz concerts together – “Just the two of us”. There is also a Marmot’s Paradise – which houses 14 species of the ground squirrel. Chandra has been on a trip to the Galapagos Islands with Ramadorai. He was fascinated by the giant tortoise, the sea cucumber and the blue-footed booby which inspired Darwin’s The Ori-gin of Species. He intends to return one day with his family. Meanwhile, his con-tact with nature is kept up at the Ban-yan Park office in Mumbai. Chandra shares the campus with 40 species of butterflies and a colony of shrieking fruit bats.

Galapagos in South America is far away. But a trip won’t have much impact on Chandra’s frequent flier record. “I’m

Band on the run

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obviously unwieldy. some 18 months back, another layer of eight people was created with three verticals reporting to each one of these people. the geog-raphy heads, who coexist in the new system but with clearly defined roles, continue to report to chandra.

Governance processanecdotal evidence says that the restructuring has worked. and no one can quarrel with the numbers. But is there an inbuilt danger? could the units and the ceos become uppity and want to one day carve out iden-tities independent of parent tcs, as has happened in engineering giant larsen & toubro.

“we are not building silos,” demurs chandra. “we have hori-zontal units like infrastructure, bpo and digital, which bring the com-mon expertise. the structure forces each vertical unit to leverage the rest of the company and, at the same time, take decisions, be accountable and move on. we have been able to get the best of all worlds.”

there is more to it, of course. a governance process has had to be put in place. that’s the organisational skeleton. it works, says chandra, because people talk to each other. that sounds like commonsense. But in the days gone by, there were sev-eral tata group satraps who commu-nicated only through written notes. tcs has not inherited any of this baggage of the past.

what particularly enthuses chan-dra is that in setting up these verticals, the company has created a powerful leadership bench. “any time i want to start a new initiative, i can pull out a leader – because he has a deputy to take over – or a deputy,” he says. “we have a good leadership pipeline.”

such a structure wouldn’t work without the right people – and the right leader. chandra is a great moti-vator. “he can carry the team,” says krishnan ramanujam, global head of enterprise solutions, who has been associated with chandra for 23 years.

chandra knows several thousand people at tcs. more importantly, he shows that he cares. suresh srini-vasan, managing director of the Bangalore-based kamsri printing

a million miler in multiple airlines,” he says.

Elsewhere at tcs, they are targeting many million miles too. Following in Chandra’s footsteps, thousands of run-ners have sprung up across the organ-isation. A programme called Fit4Life set a target of 5 million km of collec-tive running during 2012-13. It man-aged only 1.6 million km. But this year 3.3 million km was achieved by the end of December.

Fit4Life works through groups of tcs employees who encourage each other to run. If they can’t run, they walk. “I am one of many runners that took to endurance running due to Chandra’s example,” says Sunil Robert, head of marketing, Americas – tcs bancs. “tcs has created an ecosystem that encour-ages running marathons not just for employees but also our clients and other

partners. Fit4Life is an initiative that intends to raise the consciousness of all tcsers to embrace a healthy lifestyle. In addition, the Fit4Life App developed by tcs helps employees look up and reach out and connect with each other.”

Fit4Life has developed a life of its own. One manifestation is the Cor-porate Challenge organised in various parts of the country. Groups from other companies are invited to ‘run miles and bring smiles’; this has a csr component.

Fit4Life December 2013 was dedicated to ‘brisk walking’.

The marathon may have been a fad when Chandra started his run. Now, it is more like a unifying thread across the organisation. Chandra himself has run 13 marathons; tcs has sponsored sev-eral. “I am addicted,” explains Chandra. His favourite training runs when abroad are in Hyde Park in London and Central Park in New York.

Can a run be the binding glue in a huge organisation like tcs? It may have worked; tcs has one of the lowest attri-tion rates in the business. It stood at 11.9 per cent (it services: 9.9 per cent; bpo: 16.3 per cent) for the 12 months ended September 2013 against an industry average of 14-15 per cent.

It is not just at tcs that Chandra is spreading the marathon mantra. His wife Lalitha is his running mate in the literal

sense of the term. His 15-year-old son Pranav also runs. “You see life when you run instead of seeing it from the car win-dow,” says Lalitha. “We went to Srinagar on a holiday and, early morning at 5 am, the three of us were running around Dal Lake. We are waiting for Pranav to reach 18, when he will be officially allowed to run a half marathon. Then all three of us will run together.”

The marathon runs in the family. Soon, the family will run in the marathon. u

New York Berlin Boston

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& packaging, is a friend of chan-dra from his childhood days. “i give chandra a missed call when i want to speak to him,” he says. “he always returns the call, no matter where in the world he is.” explains chan-dra: “if someone is trying to contact me, how can i not respond, even if it an unknown number.” these days, however, telemarketers have forced chandra to rope in his secretary as a first line of defence. “i tell indira to respond to all unknown numbers and find out what they want.”

one of the numbers he has dialled on the people front is an inhouse platform-styled knome. this is a combination of all that is best in social media. the average age of a tcs employee is 28 years. even if the geriatrics in the organisation do not understand what twitter and face-book are all about, you have to cater

to the young.chandra admits he was worried

before launching knome. it could have become an instrument for wast-ing time, a sort of digital water cooler with the organisation’s gossips not even having to move from their work-stations to populate the grapevine. it could have been a centre for raves and rants, for taking potshots at the man-agement. as it happens, it has worked out perfectly. it is a medium for com-munication and for finding common touchpoints, very necessary in an organisation of 300,000. “there is no other way to get such a large organisa-tion to unite,” says chandra. “people can debate, contribute, share ideas. productivity goes up. empowerment goes up. it is a beautiful thing. it is self regulating. as long as you are doing the right thing people cheer you. if you are doing the wrong thing people

vote you down. you have groups on analytics and insurance and you also have groups on painting, ballet danc-ing and running.” it’s clearly been more power to the people.

closeness to people does not mean that chandra is a pushover. col-leagues say that he is a hard taskmas-ter. he drives you to a point where you are outdoing yourself, but it’s the velvet glove; he believes in let-ting you get on with it. But, if you are goofing off or he thinks you are, the iron fist is trotted out. “our culture is performing but friendly,” he says.

where there are no compromises is with regard to customers. employ-ees are high on the totem pole, but customers are higher. this makes it very different from, say, hcl, which believes in ‘employees first, custom-ers second’. customer centricity is the reason why chandra travels so

F.C. KohliJoined as GM in 1969. Made director in-charge in 1974. Became deputy chairman in 1994. Retired in 1999.

A time of discovery. Entrepreneurship.Fighting scepticism Under Kohli, TCSgrew from 10 consultants in 1969 toaround 14,000 by 2000. An engineerfrom MIT, he understood the power oftechnology. Kohli introduced the rule: Earn before you spend.

Revenue in 1996: $160 million

S. RamadoraiJoined in 1972. Took over as CEO in 1996. Retired in 2009. Currently vice-chairman .

Expansion. Took TCS to being one ofthe global Top 10 consulting companies.In 2004, steered what was then thelargest IPO in Indian history. Expandedglobal footprint to 142 offices across42 countries. Moved into Latin America,China and Eastern Europe.

Revenue in 2009: $6 billion

N. ChandrasekaranJoined in 1987. Became chief operating officer in 2007. Took charge as CEO and MD in October 2009.

Restructuring and return to entrepreneurship. Took TCS to India’smost valuable company. Second mostvaluable in the world after IBM. Nearly3,00,000 employees. Restructured thecompany to make it more nimble.Set up 23 verticals.

Revenue in 2013: $12 billion

The hallmark of an entrepreneurial organisation is continuity at the top and the freedom to operate. At TCS,all the CEOs have had long innings and the Tata group mandarins allowed them to

operate without interference

THE MARATHON MEN

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much (see box ‘Band on the run’). he is a road warrior – the ace salesman for tcs and india. “if you are not meeting clients, you are not hearing anything,” he says. “it is important to know what clients think of you, what they think of the future.”

“chandra is highly connected with clients and, despite his busy schedule, always makes time to meet them and keep nurturing key rela-tionships,” says heinz gehri, who heads the switzerland operations and has known chandra for 12 years. “every time he passes through swit-zerland, he makes it a point to meet some clients or have an informal dinner with them, patiently trying to understand their business issues and priorities and looking for ways in which we can be a more valuable partner in their strategic objectives. he also has a tremendous memory and recalls names and the previous conversation – even if it took place many years ago – with great ease.”

adds prasad meharunkar, country head for south europe, whose asso-ciation with chandra goes back 20 years: “chandra makes it a point to be constantly available for our cli-ents. it is not unusual for him to change his programme on the fly to come in and meet a client who has just called in and wants to discuss a potential opportunity or an issue.” and Jipson mathew, country head of tcs Belgium, finds chandra is an engaged leader, “who takes supernor-mal time and effort to get to know the clients of the company as well as his own extended management team on the ground”.

chandra has always been accus-tomed to driving himself hard. says krishnan ramanujam, global head of enterprise solutions: “even in the old days, we worked hard and we played hard. i was part of chandra’s team on the prestigious resolution trust corporation project in the washing-ton dc area in 1993. i can still recall the early morning tennis games, and movies and pool games at the rio centre in the late evenings and week-ends, despite working 80-plus-hour weeks for months on end.”

late nights or not, chandra never compromises on delivery. if

clients are his prime focus, execution keeps it company. it’s been that way from the beginning, says srinivasan. “when he sets out to do something, he first thinks it through. But once he decides, you can be sure that it is done. i am not saying he is super-human, but it is difficult to beat his sheer determination and inner resolve to achieve.”

that’s a view shared by many of his friends and colleagues. “he is focused on execution,” says harish mehta, founder of onward novell and one of the leading lights of the national association of software and services companies (nasscom).

mehta remembers that when chandra’s name came up as the pos-sible next vice-chairman of nasscom,

he had just taken over at tcs. “every-body said he would be too busy – he was restructuring at tcs – and would not accept.” But he did. once he became chairman (the vice-chair-man becomes chairman the next year), there was a series of meetings which decided that nasscom needed restructuring. “then, by god, he moved ahead,” says mehta. “he was completely focussed on execution. it’s not easy to bring such a huge change, not just within nasscom but in all the stakeholders such as the government and policymakers. chandra has clarity of thinking.”

“chandra has displayed strategic agility and a strong focus on execution to maintain, and indeed strengthen, market leadership in a volatile and

With wife Lalitha: running mate

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If you have been brought up on a diet of C++, sql and

basic, there is a tendency to think in acronyms. In its early days, tcs was a division of Tata Sons. Many of the Tata Sons’ directors were on the wrong side of 60 with all the attributes that age brings. Inevitably, tcs was expanded – both within and outside the company – as Tata Civil Service. The first chief Fakir C. Kohli experienced the opposite phenomenon; even today, he is known as fck.

tcs is no longer a bureau-cratic structure, if at all it ever was. But old habits die hard. When the name of Chandra was being whispered as the ceo in the making, there was another version of tcs – Take Chan-dra Seriously. Today, the latest is Till Chandra Sees. It doesn’t make much sense to the ceo: he says he is in no way a micro-manager. He may have been. “I have seen him mature and transform from his somewhat micromanaging style of the early days to a culture of deep trust and empowerment of his team,” says Krishnan Ramanu-jam, global head of enterprise solutions.

“From the very beginning, Chandru (his diminutive in his early years) looked at a broader picture,” says his friend Suresh Srinivasan. “But, having looked at it, he was able to focus. He always had a Plan B. He knew what he wanted.”

That may not have been totally true when he was debating his career options. Chandra grew up in Mohanur, a temple town in Tamil Nadu. His father was a gentleman farmer with extensive estates. “He wanted me to take up farm-ing,” says Chandra. “He wanted me to do a course in agriculture from Coim-batore.” Chandra jibbed. He did a BSc in applied sciences instead.

“In those days, you became a doc-tor, an engineer or a ca,” says Chandra.

He tried for iit, but couldn’t get through the entrance exam. (If he had, he would probably have ended up as a mid-level manager in Jamshedpur.) After bsc came dissonance. He thought of doing his ca. He tried out farming for six months. “I was miserable. My father was misera-ble. So, we decided I should do some-thing else.” An ad in the papers about a Master of Computer Applications (mca) course in Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirapalli, caught his attention. And he promptly enrolled.

Why computers? “I was good in math,” says Chandra. “Besides, those days you went for areas in which there were jobs.” The course itself was a

breeze. Chandra had always stood first in all subjects while at school. College wasn’t a simi-lar cakewalk. “But I was always a very good student,” he says.

As part of the mca course, Chandra landed up at tcs to do a six-month internship. After two months, he was offered a job. “Kohli called me in and said: ‘You are an experiment’.” The mca was an unknown ani-mal in those days. “He was the very first to come to us with an mca,” remembers Kohli. “We were very impressed. He rose within tcs because of his knowledge. He kept building his knowledge as he went along. That is what tcs has recognised. India needs people like him. He is very young and will lead the (new) computer revolution.” Thanks to Chandra and the early risk takers, the mca is widely rec-ognised these days. In a recent batch, 15 of them from Trichy had got placed at tcs. “Not my doing,” says Chandra.

tcs at that time was send-ing people abroad on a reg-ular basis. Chandra was soon off to the US, the UK and Swe-den. “I spent 10 years abroad,” says he. “I was lucky. None of my assignments was short duration, going in and out.”

While in the UK, Chandra hopped down to Chennai to get married. It was an arranged marriage with Lalitha Ramachandran, an investment banker with Kotak. “I wanted her to carry on working,” says Chandra. “But she wanted to be with me. Besides, the market (and her business) was down.”

Honeymoon was a hiking expedition to St. Ives in Cornwall. Here too Chandra did things differently – the traditional honeymoon is more indoors than out-doors. “I told him at the time of our mar-riage that I love the outdoor life,” says the 49-year-old Lalitha. “Trekking fig-ured largely in my list. Chandra was also a person like that.”

Climb every mountain

With mentor Ramadorai: standing tall

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competitive environment,” says icici Bank ceo & md chanda kochhar (who was head of the Businessman of the year selection panel this year). “through his leadership, he has dem-onstrated the continuing potential of the indian it sector for growth and value creation.”

Hallmarks of a leaderramanujam describes some other facets of his workstyle. “first and foremost are his uncompromising honesty, integrity and ethical values. chandra is not a shortcuts guy. sec-ond, he leads from the front and gives 100 per cent. this was true when chandra was a project leader back in the early 1990s, with less than 100 people in his team. it is true now when he has nearly 300,000 people. third is his ability to think big and be driven to be the best globally. it does wonders to the team’s self-con-fidence and breaks the barriers in our own ability to think big and have fire in the belly. fourth is his ability to not let his frustrations show. fifth is his ability to carry the team, while clearly drawing the line separating personal friendships from official responsibilities.”

given that so many people at tcs have known chandra for decades, there are bound to be deep personal friendships. it is a hallmark of a leader that he can separate the per-sonal from the professional and yet keep his top team together, some-thing that other peer group compa-nies have been unable to do.

“chandra has an enormous pas-sion to drive himself,” says s. rama-dorai, non-executive vice-chairman and chandra’s mentor. “he is able to bring out excellence in the people around him.” ramadorai is even more pleased because chandra is carrying on in his tradition; the former ceo of tcs had won the Business India Busi-nessman of the year award in 2004. “i am extremely proud that chandra has been conferred with this coveted award,” he says. “he richly deserves this and i would like to wish him the very best always.”

all this success could have made chandra into some sort of corporate monster – the boss from hell complete

Lalitha agrees that having a peripa-tetic husband was difficult at times. “But I guess I have learnt to deal with it. I didn’t know he would travel so much when we got married. But I knew that if a job had to be done then home wouldn’t be on the agenda for him. It would be office, office, office all the way.”

Lalitha describes a typical Sunday when Chandra is at home. “It starts with a long run around 4 am. Our break-fast is very light and then a good south Indian lunch. Then maybe some shop-ping, social calls... Sometimes Chan-dra’s colleagues come over if there is some work. In the afternoon, if there is a cricket match, he is glued to the tv. Sometimes, we may end up watching a Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks movie. Chandra likes watching Rajnikant or

Sivaji Ganesan, followed by great fil-ter coffee.” Qualifies Chandra: “Easy movies; no pressure.” Does that happen very often? Chandra says he is trying to be home as many weekends as possible. “I try to spend quality time here.”

Lalitha and wives like her have their own expanded version of tcs. When S. Ramadorai won the Businessman of the Year award 10 years ago, Business India wrote: “The lonely wives club of tcs has its own acronym for the company – Tele-phone Calls on Sunday. With their hus-bands mostly out on the road, they have to make do with weekly calls.”

Lalitha is a new generation wife. “Technology plays a big part in any relationship,” she says. “Romance was probably building up over the telephone lines.” u

Ford every stream: St. Ives in 1994

Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream

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with horns of pr and a tail of yesmen. But he balances it with his humil-ity. “chandra was never pushy,” says srinivasan. “he is extremely hum-ble.” mehta remembers his reaction when he first met chandra. “he was very open, very humble. i couldn’t believe he was running such a large organisation.” he adds an example: “we must have met so many times, but not even once has he called me through his secretary. every time he calls on his own. i sometimes wonder about that; he’s such a busy person.”

“humility is very important if one has to progress,” says chandra’s wife lalitha. “it keeps all the windows open and that’s when you receive. chandra has always been like that. i don’t think anything would change him.”

chandra makes time – somehow. as a marathon man (see box), he is always prepared to run that extra mile. srinivasan remembers the time he and a common friend happened to be in mumbai. “we met at his house at 6.30 am on a sunday and spent the full day together,” he says. “Before we reached his house, he had completed his morning chanting (prayers) and his one-hour run and was fresh and ready to greet us. he and his family make time for friends. he is always available.”

“if i have to go somewhere where i need him to be with me, he will drop everything and be there,” says lalitha. “he’s very responsive to

what is needed at home and he’s available to both sides of the family – mine and his. anytime the family needs him, they just have to ask and he will somehow find the time.”

it cannot be easy. chandra travels 20-plus days a month (see box ‘climb every mountain’). mehta gives an example of his journeys. “we had all gone to cape town for the nasscom

retreat and chandra said, ‘i have not slept in the same bed for four nights in a row.’ so, after we got back, i hap-pened to call chandra exactly four days later and i asked him, ‘so, are you sleeping in the same bed?’ and he said, ‘no, i’m actually on my way to australia’.”

“chandra came across as a person with an incredible sense of humour,” says lalitha about their first meet-ing. “we come from similar back-grounds; traditional tamil families with a lot of emphasis on our value systems. these were the things he had that were important for me. But sense of humour was most impor-tant – because one needs to be able to laugh at everything in life. that’s what i liked about chandra. he could laugh about anything, even if it was his late working hours. he would laugh about coming home at 2 am and cooking dinner for himself.”

there’s fun at work too. abidali neemuchwala, the texas-based global head of business process ser-vices, recounts the negotiations for a $100 million deal with ge medi-cal in 2001. “one of the key aspects of the deal was the vendor’s abil-ity to deliver globally. i had briefed chandra on what i thought were our strengths and weaknesses. one of the weaknesses was that we did not have many non-indian employees. we were rehearsing the presentation and he was sitting through the final dry run when he suddenly said: ‘abid, why don’t the france and china team leaders present their part in french and chinese.’ we were going before an all-american audience in milwaukee who wouldn’t under-stand a word of it. (But) i believe that idea played an important part in the deal. we didn’t get any questions on global expertise from the client except ‘please translate what you said so that we can score you’.” tcs went on to become the first indian it com-pany to bag a $100 million deal.

successes such as these put chan-dra on the escalator to the corner office. “i used to visit washington on business as often as eight to nine times a year,” says ramadorai. “on these visits, i made it a point to con-nect with as many tcsers as i could.

2,54,076

2,63,637

2,76,196

2,77,586

2,85,250

PEOPLE POWERNumber of employees

Employee cost ($ million)

Q2 2012-13

Q3 2012-13

Q4 2012-13

Q1 2013-14

Q2 2013-14

Source: IFRS Audited Financials

FY13FY12

5,142.95,853.2

TCS Noida office houses about 5,000 associates

TCS Siruseri (Chennai) campus has a seating capacity of 26,000 people

u 67 u

Ja n uary 6 -19, 2014


on one of these visits, i met chan-dra and saw an unmistakable spark in him. i noted this for the future. chandra moved from the us to a proj-ect in the uk. when i became ceo of tcs in 1996, i remembered him and inducted him onto my team as my executive assistant. my judgement turned out to be right, and i worked on shaping and grooming him. in him, i saw excellent execution capa-bilities. he was operationally sound, having wide tcs experience. he was a good team player and, most impor-tantly, he had been tested out and proven in the multiple roles he had had in tcs. i was clear in my mind that he had great leadership poten-tial qualifying him to be my succes-sor someday.”

fakir c. kohli, the first chief of tcs, had employed chandra. But the two were a generation apart. and chandra had been abroad most of the time during kohli’s reign. But the father of indian it has faith in his successor once removed. “today, chandra deals with 300,000 people,” says kohli. “i had to search for clients in 1974; it was a struggle then. we’ve come a long way and we have a long way to go. But people like chandra will do it.”

chandra has been doing it these past few years and the results are there for all to see. one place his becoming ceo hasn’t made a differ-ence, however, is at home. “chandra continues to work the same way; my life continued as it was,” says lalitha. “nothing has changed. we live in the same house. yes, his work responsibil-ities have become wider, brighter and deeper. But life just went on. it would be wrong to say it (the promotion to

ceo) was expected. chandra and i are practical people. if the ceo position came along the way, it came.”

Critical mass But the years have rung in some changes. “as one ages, there is a cer-tain amount of maturity that comes,” adds lalitha. “we were young when we got married. today, when i get a glimpse of the kind of responsibil-ity he carries on his shoulders, i am amazed at how much he has evolved. he is not the young chandra i met. he is able to handle problems of all kinds and he doesn’t show it. he has not allowed the responsibilities to rub away his innate nature. he may have had a tough day at office but he will stay the same and you will not know what he has been through. he has become more mature but has not allowed that to remove the sense of humour from his personality.”

chandra laughs. he often does. meanwhile, he is planning the next big thing. tcs has reached a critical mass now; it can take on much big-ger projects. the rate of change is much faster. “previously, a technol-ogy lasted 10 years and the adoption cycle was 10-15 years,” says chandra. “nowadays, technologies are com-ing in every six months. we need to make the right bets. we can’t afford to be complacent. Business models will change. things will not change because i say so. we must follow the trend. digital – the combination of mobility, cloud, social, analytics and big data – is the biggest thing now.” that has to be harnessed.

there are other challenges. lever-aging intellectual property. cop-ing with the regulatory regime in

different countries – “the world is a difficult place. we must be sensitive”. the generational change – “young people are not going to change because we say so.” the network – “communication has changed... if you put pen to paper or finger to key-board, it is public. communication is not a challenge but an opportunity.” other opportunities like non-linear (increasing revenues without raising headcount) and small and medium businesses have to be tapped.

chandra feels that education is one area in which tcs will take a big bet. another is technology research. and, of course, digital.

looking back, chandra remem-bers the time when the it budget of some of their clients was more than the annual turnover of tcs. it was difficult to get them to take a minnow from india seriously. that phase is over. “Both kohli and ram have done incredibly well and i have started well,” says he.

there are not too many appurte-nances of this success around him. he uses a black mercedes. But next to it is a nano, appropriately coloured a lemon yellow. is it a symbol of sol-idarity – the tatas’ most success-ful with the least? he doesn’t have time for such things. in new york, he does sometimes stay at pierre, a taj group hotel. But that’s because it is across the road from central park, where he enjoys a run. it could be the intercontinental. “i stay where it is convenient for my next day’s meet-ing,” says chandra. “i am time-ef-ficient. i don’t have the time for beautiful hotels.”

he reads a lot, he says – when he has the time. that can’t be too often. the authors that come to mind are robert ludlum and ayn rand. noth-ing more recent? chandra shrugs. there is John grisham. some tamil literature. management books, of course. But those you read a page in the beginning and a page at the end and they’re done, he says.

that’s not the way chandra’s story will be told. he’s right there in the middle. would a career as plan-tain pasha have been as fruitful?

u p a r t h a s a r a t h i s w a m i and

s o n e e r a s a n g h V i

UP, UP AND AWAY

As per IFRS. Figures for 2009 and 2010 are as per US GAAP

($ million) ($ million)

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

Sales Net profit Share price

6,016

6,339

8,187

10,171

11,569 2,561

2,214

1,915

1,454

1,124

16 Jun 2009 – 27 Dec 2013

(`)

389

2,161

33893890

600

1200

1800

2400

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