One obvious difference that was felt at TCS when I took over the helm was the change in leadership style. I was keen to introduce a ?collegiate team? atmosphere in TCS and I wanted to mould a core group of people into a leadership team, a team that I could trust and whose opinions I would value.

First I brought Chandra in as my executive assistant in 1996, and I made a fundamental change by bringing TCS veterans, with IT expertise, into key corporate roles such as finance and HR?Maha with his accounting background took over finance while Paddy took over HR. I also wanted to create the role of a Chief Technology Officer and after some transitory moves, I appointed Ananth Krishnan in that role. Later I also created the

functions of the Chief Information Officer and Vice President?Transformation.

My core leadership team comprised Maha, Chandra, Paddy, Ananth and Ravi Viswanathan, head of TCS operations in Chennai. Often we just gathered together informally on a Saturday or a Sunday morning at my home in Worli, or at the TCS guest apartment in the same building. We would discuss whatever was of consequence at that point in time. I recall long discussions on the digitization of TCS and exchanges on our quality initiatives and the application for the Tata Business Excellence Model.

Soon I asked Chandra to move into the same building to make access easier. We often discussed issues during a morning stroll, held a quick meeting or compiled a quick list of actions after returning from a lengthy business trip. I found being together in Mumbai certainly drove greater management efficiency and except for Ananth and Ravi, all of the team eventually moved to Mumbai.

I was also on the lookout for a coach of sorts on strategy planning and I already had Harvard Business School professor Pankaj Ghemawat in mind. I had first heard of Pankaj from Kohli, who knew him. When my son, Tarun, joined Harvard and I went there on a visit, I met Pankaj and asked if he would be willing to work for us. After we had worked out the finer details of the engagement, he agreed to join us and quickly became part of the strategy ?huddle group?.

I wanted Pankaj to join us because I felt a completely outside view on strategy would be of great use. I was also concerned that most of the members of the core leadership team were too grounded in operations?something that can be limiting when thinking about the big picture. I thought someone like Pankaj would balance that out.

I had also been introduced to the case study approach at MIT. I had found it of immense value and I knew that Pankaj could introduce this analytical tool into our way of doing things at TCS.

Finally, I thought that it would be easier to win acceptance for a change in strategy, should that be required, if it was backed by the views of a Harvard consultant.

After Pankaj became part of the core group, the nomenclature of the meetings changed and we began to call the core group the ?Think Tank?. Funnily enough our meetings with Pankaj then came to be known as the Pankaj Ghemawat sessions?and later the PG sessions. Sometimes we would meet him as a group, sometimes it would be me alone. Often Chandra would follow up with him.

On one occasion we decided to meet in Boston, away from our respective work environments. The Charles River session, as it came to be known, was a milestone. We got to know each other really well and developed a sense of comfort with each other. I believe the sense of ?one team? was formed at that meeting.

I am sure it helped some of the younger team members like Chandra, Ananth and Ravi to overcome their initial uneasiness.

Over time we developed a heightened sense of communication; we knew exactly what each of us was thinking just from body language or the tone of voice. This was extremely useful especially in meetings with clients.

Each of the PG meetings threw up a whole list of further actions, but I began to get frustrated because people would often wait till the next PG session before acting. So I asked Ananth to start taking minutes at the meetings and to list the actions we agreed upon. At the next meeting everyone had to report the progress they had made. It became a cyclical process?learning led to action and deployment. Learn?act?deploy, earn?act?deploy?that became our mantra.

But we also had to learn to prioritize our efforts because there were too many things happening at the same time. I realized that there was no way we could do it all, so we decided to take up only the top items on the list of actions for each year.

One of the first things we needed to focus on was the need for information: billing, time sheets, delivery metrics and so forth. We knew enough about global best practices through projects with clients like GE. So we borrowed best practices like Six Sigma and the quality management system (QMS) and adapted them to our needs.

From research development and design to innovation

TCS?s research efforts were concentrated in Pune but I was convinced that this model was a very limiting one. I wanted to adopt a distributed research model and to spread our R&D efforts around geographically. I believed that we had to go where the researchers were, rather than asking everyone to come to Pune.

I knew that innovation and R&D in TCS would play a key role in our future strategy and would help keep us differentiated from our competitors. We needed a more systematic approach towards R&D, and we needed to broaden and widen the foundation on which we built our new services and products. I chose Ananth Krishnan for this role; Ananth was young, hungry to learn and had a great appetite for technology and its application.

We expanded our research facilities in Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi and in the UK and the US. Today TCS has nineteen innovation labs across these three countries. Meanwhile, we created a Corporate Technology Board in 2006 to formalize the governance of innovation in the company. The Board provides these research centres with a forum for strategic and agendasetting discussions, a consolidated face to the external world and mechanisms for aligning the innovation strategy with the needs of the TCS businesses.

To build the TCS of the future we knew that we needed to widen our participation within active innovation networks and to seek out new capabilities and new platforms for markets and technologies.

Our labs have collaborated over the years with many external

entities including academia, industry thought leaders, other research labs, various start-ups and venture funds.

These relationships served as a template for a more collaborative and open model of co-innovating. TCS formally launched the Co-Innovation Network (COIN) in January 2007. COIN is a rich and diverse network of academia, venture capitalists, start-ups etc. that together drive innovation in an environment of open communities.

The Corporate Technology Board, led by the Chief Technology Officer, decides and reviews the ?Innovation Investment Portfolio? and monitors the governance of the lab and COIN processes.

TCS, together with the Co-Innovation Network partners, invest in radically new technologies that could lead to breakthroughs for the future. When COIN was launched, a respected IT industry analyst said, ?The TCS Co-Innovation Network has set the bar high for global IT providers.?

At TCS, we see innovation serving our business in two ways. First, it creates a funnel of options for future growth while ensuring that we are delivering continuous improvements and differentiators in our current business. Second, it helps combine creative thinking with sophisticated R&D to deliver solutions for our customers that help them stay ahead in their lines of business.

We also discovered that as this was happening, the organization itself became more sensitized to the need for a ?culture of innovation?.

We encouraged this through initiatives such as the launching of the TCS Innovation Awards, a separate career track for innovators, practices such as academic sabbaticals and greater efforts in promoting collaboration amongst people and projects. In the span of just a few years we had launched several major initiatives and implemented them, had scaled up recruitment numbers and simultaneously scaled up our training capabilities too. We had also established a distributed delivery model, as well as distributed R&D. Strategy was finally leading to deployment and it was reflected in our first billion-dollar revenue year in 2003.

When we achieved annual revenues of $1 billion we crossed a psychological barrier. Traditionally TCS had shied away from publicity, but when we passed the $1 billion mark we behaved in a most uncharacteristic manner. We wanted to celebrate the occasion; we invited the media to the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai and, decked out in specially designed T-shirts and caps, the TCS leadership team strode in one by one to the theme from Chariots of Fire, throwing our caps in the air as we walked on stage. We made the big announcement?we were the first Indian IT company to achieve this milestone and we cut a celebratory cake.

Each of us felt a mixture of emotions; we were proud of our teams, and proud of every TCSer?for they were the real heroes. We felt we had climbed a mountain. But in our hearts we also sensed that there were going to be many more summits in the future. The excitement had just begun.

Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India from The TCS Story? and Beyond by S Ramadorai, Portfolio, Rs 699

The TCS Story? and Beyond

S Ramadorai

Penguin Books

Rs 699

Pp 304