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
Award: Best CEO Multinational
Francisco D’Souza
CEO, Cognizant Technology Solutions
Age: 45
Interests outside of work: A gadget freak, believer in Maker movement and likes to spend time with his children.
Why he won this award: For refocusing Cognizant after the 2008 shock so as to deliver superior growth based on customer-orientation. Married short-term aggressive performance without sacrificing investment for long-term growth.
Francisco D’Souza, the 45-year-old CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions, should have a persistent headache. Pain, after all, does afflict those who are forced to look at the world through two different kinds of lenses: Telescopic for one eye and microscopic for the other. “A telescope to consider opportunities far into the future, and a microscope to scrutinise the challenges of the moment with intense magnification,” is how McKinsey’s global managing director Dominic Barton once put it.
There is no escaping this duality if you are in the IT sector today; you don’t have a choice but to consider both the short term and the long term. The crisis is interesting, two-pronged. On the one hand, there is a slowdown. The momentum that helped the Indian IT services industry grow from a few million dollars to $100 billion (from exports and domestic sales), bestowing its top executives with superstar status, is lost; there is a struggle to generate revenues. On the other hand, it is facing the kind of disruption that occurs only once in a decade or so. In 2000, it was the internet. Now, it is social media, mobile, analytics and cloud computing. Together these technologies are changing the way businesses are run and, in order to retain relevance, IT services companies have to evolve.
This change is risky. There are examples of companies that took the new technologies too seriously and got burnt. Consider Infosys. Many of its problems over the last few years can be traced to its ‘Infosys 3.0’ strategy, with its focus on products and platforms, and with its ambition to create tomorrow’s enterprise. The leadership was so enamoured with that vision that they dropped the ball on the cash cow—application development and maintenance. NR Narayana Murthy was compelled to come back from quasi-retirement, and one of the first things he did was to acknowledge this lost focus.
Cognizant did a rejig too, dividing its business into cash cow, immediate future and long-term future, calling these horizon one (H1), two (H2) and three (H3), respectively. D’Souza took charge of H3.
They had found that companies, expectedly, wanted to cut costs but, at the same time, they were also willing to invest if it helped them ‘variablise’ their costs (ie, keep the costs in proportion to the volume of business through outsourcing, using contract workers, etc). That was because there was no clarity on how long the crisis would last and the direction the economy would take. They were seeking ways to ramp up or down depending on how the tide turns. For Cognizant, that showed a clear path. D’Souza and his team quickly developed a theme that would guide them and their clients through the crisis, shining through the fog, if you will.
(This story appears in the 01 November, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)