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Penguin Books Ltd - S Ramadorai

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184 pages

English

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In 2003, Tata Consultancy Services set itself a mission: Top Ten by 2010 . In 2009, a year ahead of schedule, TCS made good on that promise: in fourteen years, the company had transformed itself from the $155 million operation that S. Ramadorai inherited as CEO in 1996. Today it is one of the world s largest IT software and services companies with more than 240,000 people working in forty-two countries, and annual revenues of over $10 billion. The TCS story is one of modern India s great success stories. In this fascinating book, S. Ramadorai, one of the country s most respected business leaders, recounts the steps to that extraordinary success, and outlines a vision for the future where the quality initiatives he undertook can be applied to a larger national framework.

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Gestion et management

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 février 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184755770
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0650€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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S. Ramadorai

The TCS Story and Beyond
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Prologue
1. AN AUDACIOUS VISION: TOP 10 BY 2010
2. 1968-96: BUILDING TCS
The Early Days
Big Wins in Financial Services
Traversing the Import Regime
3. 1996-2002: THE LATER YEARS
Change of Guard
The Y2K Phenomenon
4. TRANSFORMING FOR THE FUTURE
Nurturing Talent
The Innovation Journey
The Globalization of TCS
Digitization and the Creation of One TCS
Inorganic Growth through Acquisitions
Branding
5. GOING PUBLIC: THE TCS IPO
6. THE TATA LEGACY
7. TECHNOLOGY AS THE ENABLER OF DEVELOPMENT
Technology and Innovation
Technology and India
8. TOWARDS TOMORROW S INDIA
The Future of Healthcare
Education and Digital Inclusion
The Environment and Sustainability
Illustrations
Epilogue
Appendix I
Appendix II
Author s Note
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PORTFOLIO
THE TCS STORY & BEYOND
Born in 1944 into a Brahmin family at Nagpur, Subramaniam Ramadorai is a man steeped in simplicity and discipline. Ramadorai retired as CEO & MD of Tata Consultancy Services in 2009, after serving the company for thirty-nine years; he continues to work with TCS in the capacity of Vice-Chairman, and is actively involved as Chairman/Director of various Tata and non-Tata companies and educational institutions. He took on a public service responsibility when the Indian government appointed him as the Advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Skill Development Council with the rank of a Cabinet minister. Ramadorai was awarded the Padma Bhushan, one of India s highest civilian honours, in 2006 and the CBE in 2009. Among his many interests, Ramadorai is passionate about photography and Indian classical music. His wife Mala is an accomplished musician and an active educator; his son Tarun is a Reader in Finance at the Sa d Business School while his daughter-in-law Purnima is a film producer in the UK, where she runs her own production company. Mala and Ram live in Mumbai.
For my wife Mala and son Tarun
Prologue
WHEN I RETIRED as TCS Chief Executive in 2009, many friends and colleagues asked me what I was going to do with all the spare time on my hands. I smiled and said I was sure I would find things to keep me busy. As it happens, today my family and friends complain that I am busier than ever before.
Retirement has certainly given me the chance to be reflective. As I look back at the long and winding road I have traversed, it gives me a sense of warmth that I have made so many friends and of course a sense of satisfaction for what I, and others in TCS who shared my vision, have achieved.
As a child I was a regular from a typical Tam Bram (Tamilian Brahmin) family. I am told I was naughty and restless, always disappearing out of sight. We were fortunate to live the city life and yet enjoy the simple pleasures in our family village. I loved the outdoors and would have liked to have spent much of my time playing games and flying kites. I enjoyed watching the brightly coloured paper gliders swaying in the breeze at the end of a string. But much to my dislike, there were more serious and scholarly pursuits to follow, for my traditional upbringing placed great importance on education and religion including chanting Sanskrit slokas or prayer verses each morning.
I was born on 6 October 1945 (my parents pretended I was born a year earlier, in 1944, so I could go to school a year earlier since I was too mischievous to be kept at home). I was the fourth of five children, all born in Nagpur, Maharashtra. Although my mother s family came from south India they settled in Nagpur, typical of quite a few South Indians at that time. My maternal grandfather was in the Posts and Telegraph audit department in Bombay and subsequently retired to Nagpur. My paternal grandfather was born in Sengalipuram (Shivakalipuram as it is known in the shastras), a famous village in Tamil Nadu where he was the village accountant (his name, Kannakupillay, in Tamil means a person who keeps track of accounts ). He also owned some land which was used primarily for rice farming and which we cultivated until the 1970s.
My paternal grandfather passed away when he was fifty-two or fifty-three and my father was brought up in the nearby town of Kandur by an aunt and uncle who were very strict. After high school my father went to St Joseph s College in Trichy where he studied mathematics and eventually became a civil servant working for the office of the Accountant General of India. His job meant we moved from city to city every few years. Most of his career he spent in Delhi and subsequently retired from Madras as the Accountant General of Tamil Nadu.
My father was a great teacher. His love for teaching resulted in his taking a particular interest in our academic studies which included teaching us mathematics. I clearly remember his excellent handwriting. He would prepare well for these study sessions and would sit us down and give us mathematical problems to solve. If for some reason we were not able to solve one, he would give us a clip on the ear, which was most painful-but of course we could not protest. Like in all traditional Tamilian households, my father encouraged us to appreciate the arts and music, though he was more a listener than a performer himself
After Independence in 1947 my father s work took him to Shimla and then to Delhi but I went to live with my paternal grandmother Mathuratammal in Sengalipuram since my mother was not in the best of health. My elder brother Sukumaran went to live with the same aunt and uncle that my father grew up with. The couple had no children of their own and in those days it was common, if you did not have any children, to adopt a child from your father s family. I think I remember my mother saying it was against her wishes, but it was the father s side that always decided these things, so she had to abide by it.
My brother came back to live with us in Delhi after the tenth grade, and I came back to Delhi when I was six or seven and started studying at the Madrasi Education Association Higher Secondary School (now known as Delhi Tamil Education Association School); later I studied at the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. I don t remember much from my schooldays except for some stray incidents involving a few teachers who were a source of distress. I did not have too many friends in school, but books were my companions. I liked reading because both my mother and father used to read a lot and so we grew up with a lot of Tamil books and scriptures around us (we also studied Tamil as a subject up to the eighth grade and Sanskrit thereafter at school). Often we went to listen to religious discourses at the temple.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of family trips to Sengalipuram where my grandfather owned land and did some farming, mainly rice. The difficulty of looking after the land and managing the returns led to the family eventually selling the land off in the 1970s.
As children we used to visit our village every year for a month or two. The entire family including our cousins would travel to the village. Even now I have very pleasant memories of these family gatherings, of experiencing first-hand the hard but gratifying life of farming and agriculture, of sowing grains, tending to them and reaping the produce. It gave me an appreciation of nature, of doing things yourself and seeing the results.
Sengalipuram village is where great saints like Sengalipuram Muthanna and Sri Anantharama Deekshithar, as well as the Tamil writer Thiru, were born. The people from this village are believed to have descended from the Aryan Brahmins who moved from central India (Madhya Bharat). At that time Sengalipuram was known because of our dikshadhar or village priest who was very famous for his religious discourses on Indian mythology, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata . As children we used to play around the temple and listen to these discourses at the same time. Sometimes the priest and his entourage would come and stay with us in Delhi, so the house was often full of religious talk and seemed to revolve around things spiritual.
In Sengalipuram we used to go to the riverside to bathe but we were not supposed to take a dip in the river, so sometimes we would just sit on the banks and splash our legs in the water, which annoyed the other people there. They called us the town children and would snigger to each other saying, The city crowd has come now.
We played simple rustic games, one of which was a game called pallankuzhi, played with a wooden board and tamarind seeds. We could never defeat the village kids at this game as it called for a lot of dexterity of the fingers; they were better practiced at it and very quick too, so that was another reason for them to tease us city children. Back in Delhi I played cricket or hockey on most evenings after school with my brothers, who claim that I often insisted on being the captain!
Like most men of his generation, my father demanded-and was given-a lot of respect by his family. He was a strict disciplinarian and I was often in trouble at home because of my naughty ways. For him any activity other than studies was unacceptable. He wasn t interested in the least if we were good in sports or extracurricular activities; all that mattered to him was being extremely good at mathematics or science.
Our misdeeds while he was at work usually became known to him once he reached home from office, and our worst fears would be realized then. Our offences would be rewarded with a spanking and in some extreme cases a cane would suddenly appear and be applied vigorously.
When my cousins came over we were at our mischievous best; egged on by each other we tested how far we could throw stones and the street lights seemed like attractive targets. We must have had a good aim because the stones we threw with our catapults hit their targets often and we broke several street lights.