The leadership team at Infosys is certainly not getting their knickers in a
twist over the entry of global service majors like IBM, HP, Accenture and others
and increasing their offshore mix and delivery mechanism. Nilekani reckons that
they are rather late to the GDM game and would take a while besides effort and
turmoil before they leverage the India advantage.
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| "We are setting the
agenda globally for how IT services should be delivered. So we think
global players who have done things the old way have no choice but to
reengineer to look more like us" |
He likens GDM to the running of a very complex, sophisticated global supply
chain of information. “It is not something that is easy to replicate. We have
created significant barriers of entry around ourselves,” stresses Nilekani.
On Leadership and Longevity
Unwilling to be put into a specific leadership mould, he states: “There is
no cookie-cutter leadership style.” But Nilekani is known for being detached
and relaxed amidst crisis, and his ability to get to the heart of the problem
while everyone around grapples with it, is a pre-cursor to his leadership style.
He attributes Infosys' success to different people who brought different
strengths to the table. It has over the years perfected a system (thankfully not
made into a fool-proof process yet) where the strengths of people are exploited
while a collective safety net deals with the weaknesses of people.
“One of the unique strengths of Infosys is that the organization is more
important than any one individual. Loyalty is to the firm and the vision of the
firm and its values and mission. Therefore, we have a simple rule-the interest
of the firm overrides the interest of any individual. That is the final glue.”
It is also a question of the sum being more equal than the parts.
Nilekani's theory of organizational longevity focuses on creating a set of
leaders such that “collectively they are capable and individually they are
more capable in some of the things.”
Nilekani contends that the attributes of an entrepreneur are great in the
beginning but not sufficient to build a large company. “When you have
entrepreneurs also playing a leadership role like us, you have to change with
the times, otherwise you become obsolete.”
These changes include the conscious steps taken in the early nineties-best
practices in budgeting, financial visibility, education and training, processes
besides building world-class campuses. “We built a system for scaling up and
made sure the right people occupied the right spots to scale up.”
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“We are obsessed
with creating longevity for Infosys”
What are you doing
to build leaders for the future?
Leadership development is something we are concerned with. We are
obsessed with creating longevity for the corporation. And about creating a
company that goes beyond generations of leaders. When the current set of
leaders are no longer there, how do we ensure the longevity of Infosys and
see that it continues to thrive, prosper, retain its value and culture,
and DNA. One of the shortcomings in India is that we don't create
multi-generational leaders. So we are trying to do a lot in terms of
building, grooming and empowering them and creating career plans for
leaders. We are making sure we have a whole crop of people who can take
charge of this company over the next several years. It is reasonable to
assume that leadership will be taken by new generation of leaders. We have
good leaders like Mohandas Pai, Srikanth Batni, V Balakrishnan and others.
I think we are making sure sustainability is there. That is a very complex
exercise.
 Does Infosys intend
to stick to services alone or do you plan to expand beyond it?
I think we should not knock what we do. The services business is very
strategic, complex, sophisticated and has many business benefits. We are
using the knowledge of business, processes, technology, consulting and
creating solutions that make global companies more profitable and
competitive. I think that's our strength. Our strength is in harnessing
people, processes, technology and intellectual capital to create solutions
that deliver our customers outcomes for their business. It may be through
software, consulting or BPO. Whatever it is, at the end of the day, we
look at it from the eye of the customer.
It is a big
opportunity. You don't ask Intel why they produce chips. You don't ask
Dell why they don't make Operating systems. In every business, every
company chooses the playpen in which they wish to operate.
Do you believe the
services opportunity is fairly significant and huge for you to continue
doing this for the next 10 years?
About 40% of our revenues today is from services that did not exist
five years ago. This is by no means a static organization. Everyday, we
are thinking of new services, new offerings, new platforms, new IPs and
new forms of operations on optimization. There is a constant churn of
offerings.
Our point of view is
that globally companies are going through a huge challenge. This challenge
in some sense is similar to what companies went through a hundred years
ago. It is a combination of demographics, emerging economies,
globalization, technology, flat world and regulation. There is a
fundamental change in the way companies are run today. You can't run
companies the old fashioned way anymore. They have to use technology,
process standardization, answer regulators in 50 countries and have to
mine data to get profit. We call this whole thing “Think Flat.”
Companies that think flat will look at themselves and think of changes to
be made to be effective in a changed world. Infosys itself is an example
of a flat company because we operate in that model. So we are well placed
to advise other people on how they can become flat companies. In the next
few years, every industry is going to go through this turmoil. There is a
role for a trusted partner who can provide advice, guidance, consulting,
technology and IP to help customers make the transition. So there is a
huge opportunity.
The MNC IT services
players are getting into the global delivery model game in a big way. How
would you differentiate in this highly competitive arena?
I think global companies are coming here since their customers are
telling them to come here. They are demanding this because what we brought
to the industry was a disruptive solution. By pioneering and innovating
GDM to its current level of sophistication, we brought in a way of service
delivery that was faster, better, cheaper and innovative than the legacy
way of doing this. In any industry, if there is anything that can give you
faster, cheaper and better service, and more innovative, it will
substitute the old. In that sense, we are setting the agenda globally for
how IT services should be delivered. Our customers, employees and
investors have understood this. So we think global players who have done
things the old way have no choice but to reengineer themselves to look
more like us.
We think this is
causing enormous disruption and turmoil. They have to figure out how to
tackle the backend work, manage internal conflict and the pricing tug of
war. The model has caused a lot of internal disruption. It is like the
innovator's dilemma. They have to untie and reconfigure the entire
business model. In the mean time, we are doing what we have been doing
better. We are going out into the market and expanding. They have to
re-learn the business. |
Nilekani Deconstructed
For a person who joined Infosys when he was 25, Nilekani has come a long way
both in terms of experience and stature. And it is not just by mere luck alone
though that is what Nilekani would ascribe it to in his desire to be not seen as
a larger than life persona.
Mohandas Pai and Kris Gopalakrishnan, colleagues and close friends, say that
he is a natural leader. His penchant for driving strategy and rallying people
around comes with an almost effortless ease.
Nilekani sees himself as a “relaxed” kind of person, who is more
analytical and cerebral than emotional. “I am relaxed, I don't get flustered
too often and I can get detached from any situation. That allows me to step back
and look at things in a more dispassionate way.”
Nilekani, the unsophisticated, small town Dharwad boy rubbing shoulders with
the city slickers and well-heeled at college, grew up literally and figuratively
during his stint at IIT-Mumbai. He discovered his organizational skills and his
ability to remain detached during crisis, when he organized the annual cultural
fest of IIT-Mumbai, known as Mood Indigo.
Reminiscing on those days he says, “Looking back at my contemporaries in
IIT, one thing that stands out is that those who had a well-rounded life have
been the most successful. An important lesson is that you need to be
multi-dimensional in your interests.”
Nilekani's interests include reading and music. His musical tastes extend
to Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Young, Jethro Tull and Don McLean.
He can hold his own with any great professor or CEO on technology and
strategy. Be it holding forth on outsourcing with Thomas Friedman or dealing
with rookies in the company, Nilekani has the knack to get people on to his
side. His innate ability to rally around people and drive strategy was
demonstrated early this year at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Nilekani
conceptualized and took the lead in pushing the “India everywhere” campaign
that caught the world's attention and brought to focus India's strengths and
enormous opportunities.
Kris Gopalakrishnan raves about Nilekani's ability to bring together
diverse sets of people and getting them to work as a team. “He stood out as a
leader from day one at Infosys.”
Obviously, there is no escaping the comparisons between him and Murthy.
Mohandas Pai sums up the two. “We have two great leaders in Murthy and
Nilekani. Their personal styles are very different. Murthy's style is focused,
pushy and aggressive and perseverant while Nilekani is more relaxed and lets you
work at your own pace. He pushes you when it comes to need.”
Another aspect of Nilekani's leadership personality is his knack of
connecting dots at various levels and then correlating it to present the big
picture along with a strategy to match. Pai relates an incident of how
Nilekani's almost intuitive insights took everyone by surprise when a big
customer came visiting. “We all sat around talking and within 10 minutes,
Nilekani had analyzed the CEO's problems and told him what strategy he had to
take to run his business. Everybody was astonished because it was a business
that we were not in!”
Having achieved so much at the age of 50, Nilekani admits that he has been
unusually lucky to achieve so much success. While his personal aspirations are
fulfilled, his larger public goal is to contribute in whatever way he can to
help India take advantage of this “historical opportunity.”
“India is unusually placed to do well in terms of outsourcing, demographics
and the global economy. This is something that comes to a country once in a
millennium.”
As for the Dataquest jury, there was no question about the choice for IT
Person of the Year. The panel was unanimous in its recognition of the
outstanding work Nilekani has done at Infosys over the past year. “Of the
smooth transition at the helm at a time of rapid scaling up and intense
competitive pressure; and of the continuing, and considerable contribution to
'brand India' that Infosys, under Nilekani's leadership has achieved; and
to the Indian technology story on the global platform.” Amen to that!
Latha Chandradeep and Priya
Padmanabhan, CyberMedia News Page(s) 1 2
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