ET Awards for Corporate Excellence: N Chandrasekaran of TCS wins Business Leader award

MUMBAI: His father was a farmer and he says he’s never applied for a job. We’re talking about the head of India’s largest information technology services exporter Tata Consultancy Services, one of India’s highly valued companies based on stock price. The story of Natarajan Chandrasekaran’s rise to the top of the Indian IT industry borders on the unbelievable.

“I am delighted and humbled by this honour,” he told ET. “I thank Economic Times and the jury for this recognition.”

Born in 1963, Chandrasekaran grew up in a small village in Tamil Nadu. The country didn’t have computers then, but early in his life, Chandra — as he is popularly known — decided he wanted to swap ploughing for programming.

He obtained a master’s degree in computer applications from the Regional Engineering College in Trichy in 1986. He did his college project work at TCS and two months into this, he was offered a job –– probably the most successful campus hire made by an IT company.

After joining the firm in January 1987, Chandra made his mark quickly. He moved from working on billing software and mainframes to being one of the point persons on the General Electric and US federal government contracts.

Skillfully managing large deals — the lifeblood of IT companies — he became executive assistant to the then TCS chief executive S Ramadorai in 1996 and part of the company’s core leadership team. For some time after that, the joke within the company was that ‘TCS’ stood for ‘Take Chandra Seriously’.

The company took Chandra very seriously, indeed. He took over as CEO and managing director in 2009 when Ramadorai stepped down at a turbulent time for the world economy and the IT outsourcing industry.

The global financial crisis and the recession that followed shook the very foundations of the IT industry. Large deals that Indian IT companies had come to bank on were scrapped and clients held back even basic spending.

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But during the tough times, TCS proved its mettle. Today, it’s not just the largest Indian IT company, it is also the most profitable one, with industry-topping margins. TCS was the first Indian IT company to cross the $10 billion-a-year revenue mark and is still growing at an incredible magnitude.

There was much discussion, but Chandrasekaran emerged as the unanimous choice of the jury. The big contribution TCS makes to the Tata Group and the strong performance of the company went in his favour.

But the choice wasn’t made merely on perception. The jury didn’t make their pick until it conducted a rigorous analysis and was satisfied TCS had outperfor med its peers under Chandrasekaran.

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Now worth more than Rs 5 lakh crore on the stock exchanges, TCS has over 360,000 employees and revenues of over $16 billion.

Under Chandra, TCS has taken several initiatives to maintain growth rate. It has been making bold bets on artificial intelligence through the launch of its Ignio platform.

Chandra has had his share of failures and seems to have learned from them — the sign of a great leader. He was the chief architect of iON, the company’s cloud product, but its lofty goals, such as $1 billion in revenue in five years, failed to materialise.