Financial Chronicle: Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza Named “FC Businessman of the Year”

Francisco D'Souza, CEO, Cognizant

“The rise and rise of Cognizant has hinged on a simple mantra: low profile, high growth. The man driving that strategy is chief executive officer Francisco D’Souza,” writes Financial Chronicle. “Among the youngest CEOs in the software services sector, he has, in the year that is about to end, guided the company past the Rs $10 billion revenue mark and pulled off a large game-changing acquisition. For that feat, D’Souza is the FC Businessman of the Year, especially because Cognizant’s achievements in 2014 were no flash in the pan. They were a result of a well thought-out gameplan that D’Souza put in place a year into his tenure as CEO and at the height of the economic slowdown in 2008.”

“Clients are always willing to listen and act on good ideas. Good ideas always come at a premium regardless of the environment,” D’Souza says in an interview. Excerpts:

“We are in a world where we have to do both efficiency and innovation at the same time. This dual mandate, we identified three years ago, after having spent a lot of time with our clients post the financial crisis. We consciously set out to seek what we need to do to build a company in Cognizant that can help clients on both sides of the dual mandate. This is the year when all of that came together. This is the year where our clients took the digital agenda really forward in many cases. Our clients have started to invest, to really drive digital. The learning of the last two or three years has been that…at the client interface, the dual agenda is integrated.

The natural instinct in times of change is to retreat to what you know; the natural instinct is to draw in and I think perhaps we’ve learned over the years that we have to fight that natural instinct to retreat. You will have to turn the adversity on its head and move outward and take some risks during these periods of times. There is a saying that crisis is a terrible thing to waste and I think it is true.

Growth rate at Cognizant has never been the end goal. It’s the outcome of a series of decisions that we made and strategies that we put in place and so growth has never been the primary goal. The factors that lead us to high growth continue to be in place. And so as a result of this, we continue to post industry-leading growth rates.

The market opportunity is very large and growing. Then there is a tremendous opportunity for us where we need to generate lots of good ideas for our clients on their dual agenda. The way you generate good ideas would help to grow faster than your competition. Over the years, we have been investing back into the business, and hence, have operating margin lower than the rest of the industry. We have been using that for innovation and for generating ideas and concepts that take us faster than competition. As long as we do it, I think you can expect to see us grow faster than the rest of the industry.

The true differentiator in Cognizant is the culture of the place. In our industry, the moves you make in the market and the competitive advantage you gain in the market place tend to be fleeting in some cases. In the end, the only sustainable competitive advantage of Cognizant is the culture of agility. Those who move faster than competition and have the ability to move faster than competition in certainty wind up winning. Because none of us can predict the future and the future is unfolding faster than ever before. So your ability to sense and respond to the future is the only sustainable competitive advantage and that is what we have in Cognizant—it is this culture of entrepreneurship; this belief that we can tackle the toughest business problems in the world, and this ‘can do’ attitude of the people.

From a Cognizant standpoint, I think the best days are ahead for this company and that is what motivates me to wake up every morning and come to work. We’ve got a tremendous opportunity. We’ve positioned ourselves very well.

I think we’d be in a digital world in five years—a world where one day our physical lives and our digital lives would converge together. Everything we do will be instrumented and measured. You will start to see services and software converge a little bit more. You’d see, potentially over the next five years, very dramatic opportunities for us to drive opportunities for clients to drive robotics, automation so on and so forth. You’ll see a company that will be at the forefront of the digital and physical convergence. We would truly be the company that our clients would prefer to build the business models of tomorrow.”