As we walk in to meet Nandan Nilekani at the corporate headquarters within the Infosys campus in the Electronics City, he is busy munching an apple. He is on a diet, he says between bites, which he follows only when in India. As his overseas visits are packed morning to night with meetings back to back, midnight flights and strange hotel rooms.

Nandan Nilekani, the 51 year-old CEO and co-chairman, is firmly in place, meeting customers around the world and ensuring that Infosys is delivering on its value proposition, be it in software solutions or consulting services.  And now, destiny's favorite child-Nilekani firmly believes that he was at the right age, at the right time, at the right place and with the right people-and is on a mission: to make Infosys outlast its founders and become a successful entity run by multi-generational leaders across the world.

Nandan M Nilekani CEO & managing director, Infosys Technologies

Who better than Nilekani to appreciate the value of preparedness? His predecessor, NR Narayana Murthy prepared the entrepreneur-founders in the early nineties to lay the foundation for a scalable Infosys, benefits of which was reaped only post-2003 when it went past the $1 bn mark and now on road to achieving $3 bn in 2007.  Hence his obsession with creating the longevity of the corporation-going beyond generations of leaders-while continuing to thrive, prosper and retain its value and culture, the basic DNA. 

So far, Infosys' strategy has been driven through consensus by a leadership team that has been together for years.  In the words of Nilekani, “We have a congruence and commonality of approach. What we have is a collective vision. There may be subtle changes when leaders change. It is not like in western countries where there is a huge change when leaders change. It is more collegial and organic. Core culture and values will be the same. Infosys is really the contribution of many people-not individuals. Sung and unsung people.”

The task, therefore, of creating next gen leaders is easily stated than done. However, Nilekani, naturally inclined to lead and organize, and remain relaxed despite the nature of the challenge, is clear about one thing: “children of the founders will not work in Infosys. It is a conscious statement. We do not want a company that is an inter-generational set up but a fully professional one.”

In a way, most of his time today is spent focusing on grooming leaders, empowering them and creating career plans for them. This is akin to changing tires while the car is in motion-maintaining the fine and steady balance between achieving rapid growth and scale without compromising on the company's values, client satisfaction and culture. “The challenge is how to scale up rapidly and also manage execution well so that you don't miss a beat. How do you do things differently from what you have done in the past and achieve your strategic goals of transformation.”

At the very fundamental level, the current leadership team knows it is all about change and managing change. What it has put in place is a 3-tiered structured approach to change that lets them do future gazing. Every year a 5-year scenario planning session looks into the basic assumptions (both explicit and implicit) made by the company a few years back to see if they still hold good or is there a need to re-jig to suit a new set of realities.

“Companies run on a set of explicit, tacit assumptions about the market, customers, about the future, world and technology. What happens to them often is that some of those assumptions are changing. There is something happening either in the external environment and, internally, where the theory of business is changing,” explains Nilekani.

Once these are set or reset, as the case may be, business units align themselves to the new challenges and business goals. The intermediate 3-year strategic planning exercise that follows scenario planning then focuses on translating the strategic stuff into transformation results. It is here, at this point-at the nuts and bolts level-that operational excellence is maintained in sync with strategic direction. The delivery of this is ensured through the operational quarterly and annual plan.

This kind of assumption setting has enabled Infosys to quickly capitalize on any opportunity coming its way and hit the ground running, at the right time. All of this, in turn, has resulted in 40% of its current revenues coming from services that did not exist five years ago.

Passionate about GDM
One of the country's most cash-rich companies-close to $1 bn-Infosys' reluctance to look beyond software services and its Global Delivery Model (GDM) continue to be sore points (read interview). Nilekani refuses to give in and take the charge head-on stating, “What we do is very strategic, complex, sophisticated and has many business benefits. We are using the knowledge of business, processes, technology, consulting and creating solutions that make global companies more profitable and competitive. Our strength is in harnessing people, processes, technology, intellectual capital to create solutions that deliver our customers' outcomes for their business.”

Indeed, by applying the GDM paradigm to consulting-considered to be high-touch business-it has brought about a certain disruption in the business. By reconstituting the services offering in consulting and disaggregating that into high-touch and low-touch, it has been able to deliver services faster, better and cheaper. And, according to Nilekani, anything that is innovative and that which is faster, better and cheaper will substitute the old.

With the confidence of one who knows what it takes, Nilekani adds, “We are setting the agenda globally for how IT services should be delivered. So we think global players who have done things the old way have no choice but to reengineer to look more like us. The model has caused a lot of internal disruption. They (competitors) have to untie and reconfigure the entire biz model. In the mean time, we are doing what we have been doing better.”

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