Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a phenomenal story, but what makes the company so special? N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Sons and former CEO of TCS, says, it is all about collaboration among people.
“We all liked each other; we liked to hang out together; we gave a lot of importance to people; we had huge respect for each other; we never pulled ranks; we created opportunities and tried to bring the best out of everyone and we were connected, open and very inclusive. We never had a situation where I have decided, and I go on. We had that culture all through, whether it was a strategy, new business. We never had an issue of working with each other,” he said after releasing the Tamil version of the ‘TCS Story and beyond’ written by S Ramadorai, former CEO of TCS.
“In the early days I used to work for S Mahalingam but when I became CEO, he was my CFO. We never had qualms about it because we are one family, we gave our best, we brought the best that we could bring out of us and from everyone else We were very aspirational. We were all aggressive but internally,” he said.
“Running a global company is not easy, it is very demanding. For 20 years – 10 years with Ramadorai and 10 years after Ramadorai – I used to travel 200 days in a year and Ramadorai used to do the same. This is not because the company was selling its services to clients but it is very difficult to create a culture unless you meet people. You are operating in different markets, hiring people in different markets and each market has its own culture. How do you blend in to those cultures? There were cultural and certain performance traits that got deeply imbibed in the company. We used to be passionate about customers. To live is not easy because the world out there is very demanding, and this took a lot of years. Ramadorai captures some of these moments – people; hangout; customers – in the book. “I am glad he chose to translate it into Tamil,” he said.
According to Ramadorai, the essence of this book is to inspire the readers to be solution-oriented at all times so that people in the country can reach out their true potential and essentially move toward collective prosperity.
On the future in the IT industry, Ramadorai said that technology disruptions that are taking place whether in synthetic biology, nano-technology, Big Data or 5G, cyber security – are moving at an accelerated pace. But, one big thing is climate change and sustainability where technology is going to play a very critical role.
Published on
March 04, 2022
