N Chandrasekaran's Story Of Remarkable Life & Career At TCS | CNBC TV18 Timeless Conversation

I grew up in a little small town in South India, a town called Moolum, a very idyllic setting. I was the fifth child of six for my parents. It's a town with one school and one hospital, that kind of setup. I got educated there in school in Tamil medium. My father instilled in me very strong values. He always inculcated values of integrity and accounting for everything, reflect on a daily basis. My mother is probably the person who influenced me a great deal in terms of hard work. I have never seen anyone else till today who can work as hard as she can. Even today, if I feel that I've had a very packed week and I work very hard, unconsciously it comes to my mind how hard she used to work, and immediately all the effort I put in pales in comparison. I went for a basic course in applied sciences, but both my father and I felt that I was not cut out for that, so I took up a Master's program in Computer Applications. I did this program and then I came to TCS for doing a project work towards the end of my course. I was working on a BOROS project and also a PC project, so I ended up working 20 hours a day. After 3 months into that, my manager asked me, 'Would you like to join TCS?' It was a dream those days, so I said yes. I think it was August 1986.

You learned in every program. In some, you learned how to be a great programmer; in some others, you learned to be a designer; in some others, you learned people skills. But what I realized is that whenever you make those transitions, every time you make the transitions, you had to pick up different skill sets. I learned from a manager at one of my clients. He always used to come at 6:30 a.m. in the morning and he would leave at 3:30 or 4, but he would clear everything by 8:00, and then he would say, 'It's important to be free because you don't know what hits you. The moment it hits you, you have to collect it and you have to give it to somebody else so that something else hits you.' So I realized that it's so important to delegate, and I realized that it's very difficult to run a big monolithic organization. What worked until then, I was sure that will not work because I will struggle. So I started listing down what are the basic principles that we should have in designing the company. We came up with four or five simple things. One is that the company should be very collaborative, but at the same time should have smaller units where people will have manageable sizes of work. Second thing, the best of TCS, rather the power of the larger organization, should be leveraged while they're being very agile. Third is that we should create leadership opportunities. So we have now all these 20 plus units, and we have some of them are called presidents, some of them are called vice presidents depending upon their size, the scale of operation they manage. The fourth thing was we felt the company should be flat, we should not have too many levels. And the approach of cutting hierarchy has paid off.

When I was 44 in 2007, I just went for a checkup and was detected with heavy diabetes. I went to NIMHANS and the doctor spent 2 hours with me and then said, 'You are a smart man, you should have smart goals. You should reverse diabetes.' He said, 'I want you to do minimum 13,000 steps a day.' So I said, 'Okay, if we have to do 13,000 steps, then why not raise the bar and I'll walk more than 13,000?' And I said, 'No, I'll run more than 13,000 steps.' So that evening we went and bought all the shoes and everything else and came ready. Next day morning, I was so shy that I didn't want to run at 6:00. I started running at 4:00 in the morning, and I couldn't run 10 steps, but then I kept at it. Then I figured out that I really love running. I think running has taught me a lot of things. I become a lot more patient, I become a better listener, and I become more observant. I'm a reflective person, running helps me to reflect a lot more.

We wanted to do the right thing honestly. It never occurred to us that some people asked me, 'You could have made it as a retention.' We said no, it is not about retention, it is about saying thank you. I think I figured out it's not about compartmentalizing your life. Most people say that they work all their life and spend all their time in office so they don't have any time for home. That's not the way it should be. She's first of all a very cheerful person, so it's very difficult to even get her for a minute where she is upset or moody or anything. She's always cheerful, so our home environment is always very energetic. When we got married, she had a fantastic job in investment banking. Out of her choice, she gave up because she wanted to move with me to UK, and she has not regretted it. I think she has contributed a lot all through these years. She has always been there for me. I think we are in a very good place as a firm. We have the scale, so we just need to make sure that we continue to stay the course in terms of our execution, humility, focus on customers, focus on people and society at large, but at the same time become more and more innovative and make all the bets that we need to make and be agile enough to be ahead of the curve.