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Forbes India: Principal Correspondent Blogs About Cognizant CEO and His Mentors

In a blog around the cover story on Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza in the May 11, 2012, issue of Forbes India, N S Ramnath focuses on D’Souza and his two mentors: Kumar Mahadeva, Cognizant’s former CEO, and Lakshmi Narayanan, current Vice-Chairman of the company. According to Ramnath, while “Mahadeva’s god-like stature and his razor sharp focus were exactly what Cognizant needed most in the early stages…Lakshmi’s ‘friendly guy – fierce competitor’ image helped the company scale up fast between 2003 and 2006 without losing its entrepreneurial culture.”

“The aura that surrounded Mahadeva helped drive Cognizant. He was precise. He kept people on their toes,” writes Ramnath. “During its early days, Cognizant engaged a management guru to conduct a workshop for its top 10-15 of its top executives. The man asked everybody to write their vision for Cognizant’s future. Mahadeva’s was the shortest, clearest, and most authoritative. It simply read: Make Cognizant a 10 billion company in shareholder value in XX years,” writes Ramnath.

Referring to Lakshmi Narayanan, he says, “Cognizant couldn’t have found a more different personality to succeed Mahadeva…Lakshmi is a ‘people person’.” Ramnath notes that Narayanan always has time for people and is delightfully unaware of hierarchy. “Once, during an in-house cricket match, when a batsman wanted water, Lakshmi ran half way to the pitch to give him the bottle,” writes Ramnath. “At home, his favorite pastime is building toy trains. After building, he gives them away.”

D’Souza, writes Ramnath, is more global than even Mahadeva, and more inclined to experimentation than either of them. Recalling his first big story on D’Souza, Ramnath writes how he and his colleague started their narrative with a meeting in Mumbai to which D’Souza had rushed straight out of a flight from London. “It was not only to highlight the importance of the deal for Cognizant at that point, but also to give a sense of how Frank works—of how he keeps his energy levels high, focus sharp, and empathy firmly in the direction of customers even while working across time zones,” writes Ramnath.

“His [D’Souza’s] colleagues describe Frank as hands on. For the CEO of an IT company, it means endless flights around the globe,” writes Ramnath. “He is also a big fan of the Maker Movement in USA (An extension of the Do-It-Yourself movement, it’s about people who ‘invent, create, remix, tinker, craft, and simply make’ and about camps where people spend making stuff, and encourage children to learn to make).” Citing a weekend when Frank took his kids to the inauguration of a camp and spent an entire day tinkering with technology, Ramnath says, “Inside Cognizant, this desire to tinker with devices manifests as a tendency to question the status quo…In the last few months, Frank raised the bar even further, and made more fundamental—and more far reaching changes.”

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