Forbes India: Cognizant CEO, the Winner of the Magazine’s Best CEO (MNC) Leadership Award for 2013, Talks About Balancing Cognizant’s Present and Future

“Francisco D’Souza knew he had to peer into the future to keep Cognizant relevant. And he had to do this without taking his eyes off the present,” writes Forbes India in a special cover feature on D’Souza titled “The Art of Focus and Refocus”. D’Souza is the winner of the magazine’s 2013 “Best CEO” leadership award in the Multinational Company category.

The magazine states that D’Souza won this award “for refocusing Cognizant after the 2008 shock so as to deliver superior growth based on customer-orientation” and for having “married short-term aggressive performance without sacrificing investment for long-term growth.”

Referring to the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S., D’Souza says, “None of us had seen, or been in, anything of that magnitude. There was no playbook.” His plan, the magazine notes, was going back to the basics, which meant Cognizant’s senior management would spend more time with the customers and “look at the world through the customers’ point of view and not through our own”. It adds, “D’Souza and his team quickly developed a theme that would guide them and their clients through the crisis, shining through the fog.”

The magazine points out that Cognizant overtaking its peers would have made any CEO happy, but not D’Souza. “For him, it doesn’t matter how far you have come from where you started. What matters is where you are compared to where you could have been,” says Mahesh Venkateswaran, Managing Director of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud at Cognizant, who has worked with D’Souza for over 16 years.

The magazine writes that D’Souza’s success, in part, can be attributed to his personality. “Frank (D’Souza) has the unique ability to focus on multiple things at the same time,” says Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice-Chairman of Cognizant. “Beyond D’Souza’s personality, the driver has been his manner of execution,” writes the magazine. “And the way D’Souza has executed his strategy has lessons for all,” it adds, highlighting three salient aspects of D’Souza’s leadership approaches: Create an operational structure that discourages short-termism, build a team that gives you flexibility to move, and never forgetting the small stuff. “Frank is like a Lytro camera. He can change the focus after the picture is taken,” notes Venkateswaran.

D’Souza says, “No matter how big, how great the crisis seems to be, you shouldn’t forget the small things. It’s easy to forget these things because the enormity of what you have to do is large, or seems to be large, and there is a tendency to say that ‘what we are doing is so big, so everything else is unimportant’. But in a crisis, these smaller things...they become more important.”

Click here to read more.