N Chandrasekaran, MD & CEO, TCS opens up in a candid chat with Axis Bank’s Shikha Sharma about leading and his vision for India’s number one software company.
Below is a verbatim transcript of the interview on CNBC-TV18
Q: How long did it take for you to shift the culture from a family culture to a high performing one?
A: There is no destination here, right. It’s a journey. I think we are higher performing today than yesterday, more today than last year and I am pretty sure, more in 2014 than in 2013.
Q: The question which I keep wondering about is: Is there an ideal tenure for a CEO? What is your take on this?
A: My take is that as long as one has the energy and the passion and the ability to lead and the conviction that everyone below is looking up to that leadership, I think one can continue and either you feel that you have lost it or you are slowing down or you don’t have the energy or you start feeling that people are not looking up to you then time to move on.
Q: What is your vision for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) from here? Is it about doing more of the same or do you have any radical new plans. You were talking about some of the big moves that you are making
A: TCS has a huge opportunity. There is no question about it because this industry has tremendous opportunity ahead because there is going to be more technology in everything; more technology in every industry, in a bank, in an insurance company, in retail, in healthcare, in human being, in an athletic. The rate at which technologies are hitting, the pace is increasing day by day so the business models will evolve. It is not about whether we do more of the same or we can never do more of the same, as much as people may tend to think that we have been doing the same thing for last 30 years, actually it is not.
We keep doing new things from client perspective, from service perspective, domain perspective, solution perspective, technology perspective and business model perspective and while we will have our own view of business models like nonlinear and intellectual property base etc. the fundamental thing is about creating value to client and what is that value is all about what is the point you are trying to solve. It’s not consulting or IP driven or whatever, it’s about solving a problem which the client is facing.
Today the biggest problem clients’ face is how to adopt digital. We say that every company has to re-imagine the future in the context of all these technologies. So, that is the main point today because people do not know where to start. It’s not about building a few mobile apps. So, we will do many things and what we will do at different points in time depends on the client readiness and the market readiness. Sometime it will come early then we got to patient. So, it is important to do the right thing at a right time and we will have to work on our brand and we need to do many more things. We need to be known in the entire community in entire market because in the community we serve, we are well-known. People directly serve, we are well-known but that is not going to be enough so, many things to do.
Q: Do you see TCS remaining largely in the services and solution space or do you think there will be more balanced portfolio towards IPM product and if I look at the track of Indian software companies, the growth and delivery has been phenomenon on the solution side but we still haven’t seen any Facebook or any other product companies like that come out of India. Do you think that might change over the next couple of decades?
A: I think in India definitely it will change; there will be innovation, there will be new products and new platforms, new technologies coming out of India. I think TCS will definitely be a big pair in the services and solution space. There will be other businesses that we will be there but I am not worried about any mix.
I think services and solutions are very important. They have got huge potential in future and you will need more and more of it and so we will continue to invest and at the same time we will definitely grow -- even if I build few billion dollar business in product space at that time we will be a company more than USD 20 billion then still it won’t be a balanced portfolio. I do not like the world portfolio personally. I like growth. So, the moment you start saying that I am doing five things, let me balance growth here, profit here then you get yourself limited. So I feel growth is the source of energy. I will do where growth is.
Q: If you take a broader outlook to the software industry in India, do you think we will ever have the successes that you see in Silicon Valley. What does it take to build an atmosphere like that because we have all the capability but we somehow do not seem to be able to innovate in India like Indian innovates outside India?
A: We are in democracy and our own technological investment is only in the last two decades especially in last 10 years. So, our industry revenue in 1991 was 100 million to 100 billion in 20 years is not bad.
Q: The growth is phenomenon but my point was that we do not have a wining app product come out of India?
A: The growth has come because this was an opportunity but there will be innovation. It also need for people to have that freedom probably 10-20 years ago it was hard for people and even if you go back to our generation when we went to school, we were told to get 100 in math and do engineering or MBBS, do something and get a job. So, getting people to be entrepreneur is this generation and so it will happen, a lot of bright people in this country.
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