Investor’s Business Daily (IBD): Cognizant CEO Says the Key to Success in the Business World Today is to Learn how to Adapt Rapidly

“Francisco D’Souza is used to surfing the big waves of change,” writes IBD in a special profile of Cognizant’s CEO. “I think the key to success in the business world today is to learn how to adapt rapidly,” says D’Souza.

Referring to his global upbringing as a result of his father being an Indian diplomat who moved to a different country every few years and put his children in native schools, D’Souza says, “We learned to thrive in a flat world long before the term became in vogue. My multicultural experience had a decisive impact on the way we consciously built Cognizant to serve a global marketplace.”

“Clients today need to address a dual mandate — driving costs down in their core business, while simultaneously innovating and transforming their business by leveraging the new SMAC stack,” he says, referring to social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies. “With structural shifts in economy, business and technology, enterprises are forced to re-examine how they operate, moving from merely incremental levels of performance efficiency to building new digital business capabilities. In this context, not only do they need to run better; they need to run different.”

"It [Cognizant] has doubled revenue per client over the past five years,” says Arvind Ramnani of BNP Paribas. “The trend is reflective of the value that Cognizant provides to its clients in an environment where they were consolidating their vendor relationships.”

“I’ve seen CEOs who are strong in leadership or management, but Frank is truly rare in having such outsized capabilities in both,” says Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice-President and Chief Strategist at Cognizant. “I’ve seen him build a galvanized sense of purpose across the entire company with a compelling long-term vision, then give us whiplash by immediately switching to work closely with a particular business unit, holding them to key metrics and deliverables in incredible detail.”

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