TCS 2.0: AN EXCLUSIVE WITH N CHANDRASEKARAN PART 1

You won't believe how many people have mailed me in the last two days. People who are from India who are here not for a race, for something else, and people who live here who have nothing to do with the marathon, and they've been meeting me housing Central Park. I was in New York. It's great to see the TCS brand everywhere, and I think it's just a good feeling. I think it's definitely getting the word out there about TCS. Millions of people are coming to know who TCS is. I told you yesterday that our brand lags who we are, and that's something that we've got to break.

First of all, what's more important is to continue to gain mind share with our customers, to be their strategic partners. I think at the moment we are doing very well. If you look at the growth rate as well as the absolute revenue that we add, we rank number one in incremental revenue every year. So we seem to be doing things right. Now we just have to keep up the momentum.

I think it's very difficult to predict a timeline, but I think we are positioned well. So let's see.

A good question, but I would like to give you two perspectives. The first perspective is that the size of the workforce you have pretty much depends on the geography footprint from where you deliver the services. If your cost base of those locations is lower, that will also reflect in the overall revenue you see. So that's the first aspect that has to be taken into account. But specifically on the quality of revenues, I would say that TCS today ranks as one of the best companies with clients. We see the attraction with the kind of work we do. If you see the thought leadership engagements that we do, I think we get faster.

All these metrics are important, but you just have to see them in the overall perspective. They are important to the extent that you drive your business and grow your business in a manageable fashion. But at the same time, you've got to see the revenue per employee in the context of the locations in which we sell.

I think today the brand is much different from what it was a few years ago. Today, if you look at our client segments, they have a single list in terms of the company they want to work with. TCS pretty much is at the top of that list. There are verticals in which we are stronger, situations in which we are stronger, and there are also just need somebody to be stronger. So you win in the places you are stronger; in the places in which you have gaps, you invest.

I think, first of all, I'd like to say that I don't worry so much about competition like you seem to do. But when it comes to our own positioning, all I would say is that if you look at our journey, we have been consistently ranking higher in every single metric. We are the only tech company in the top 50 in terms of the combination of growth and profitability. So there are many metrics in which we rank high. But that is not to say that that is a point of arrival. These are things that give you an indication that you are on a journey to get where you want.

First of all, a culture or a belief that we can be the leading company irrespective of the size, in all the parameters we want to measure. So it's a question of rallying the troops, getting the leadership team to aspire very high, and that's something that we have done. The second thing is the ability to identify specific market opportunities and then have an entrepreneurial spirit to be able to scale them.

All of that is part of the organization structure, but part of that is putting the processes by which decision making is not really decentralized. I think that's the second part. I would say the third one is the entire communication inside. We very quickly migrated to our internal social media, so all our employee communication network is not a one-way communication. It's how the troops communicate, how they connect, how they share ideas, how they question, how they form communities, and how those communities interact. So all those things I think we have been able to migrate pretty quickly.

I think there are a few. First of all, we are about 315,000 professionals men and women, and we will continue this year definitely, because the model works. And as we scale, we need to be able to maintain the agility. Even I would say that we have to become more agile. So how do you do that? What kind of tweakings do you need to do in the structure? That will remain an important item. I think the second thing I would say is that there will be business model transitions as we go, because the technology is forcing those. This is your main digital transformation. The companies we serve, as they adopt these technologies and reinvent their business models, they are looking at what they score and what is context. The way to support them in their core and the way to support them in their context will change. That will require new business models. We can call it software platforms, we can call it SaaS, whatever you want. There are lots of abbreviations. So I think we have to make those transitions very effectively. The third I would say is that our brand has to catch up to who we are in terms of the capability we bring, the thought leadership we bring to customers. And I would argue that probably anyone would agree that there is a gap between who we are and what the brand perception is in some markets, not in every market, at least in some markets. So we need to work on that. So one of the things that we really need to fix in these next five years is for the brand to get its rightful place.