‘I would like to go where no one has gone before’

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: hands. Remember, others had done it before.”

What is absolutely unmistakable is Bhasin’s style of playing down his achievements by adding a dab of humour to them. “I thought of the idea, bounced it off to my boss Gary Wendt and he said yes go ahead.” Over ten years down the line, Bhasin says that it wasn’t very difficult to convince the bosses at GE headquarters as, “nobody had any idea what the hell I was doing.” And once the idea clicked, it just exploded, he says. Having come a long way since then, Genpact is today India’s largest BPO and was listed on the NYSE in August 2007. Though Bhasin says that once the idea took off, he did not have to do a lot after that, but that’s again him playing it down. If infrastructure was a problem then, it’s a problem even now. Add to that rupee appreciation, high attrition rates and talent crunch. And it seems Bhasin must be losing his sleep everyday. “My tendency is to go deep into certain areas rather than go everywhere. That’s why you hire great people.”

Talk about his leadership style and he says, “We are not very different from the culture at GE, very high-charging and very extreme.” Has Bhasin’s high-energy rubbed onto Genpact or is it GE’s gift to its one time captive? One can’t make out. “I am a very demanding boss and I like to be one. This is not a democracy and I am very clear about it,” he says, revealing his stricter side. It doesn’t take him too long to list his weaknesses, too. “There are somethings about my style that I should change. I should have changed them 10 years back. I lose my patience very often. I can also be very irritable, unnecessarily. But, we have set very high benchmarks,” he explains.