How TCS Built an Industry for India

What makes some organizations long-lasting? How come some chart a new course that others like to follow? Does this characterize them as 'business institutions' rather than merely 'good companies'? How do two business leaders with radically different management styles embed values and practices into the sinews of a corporation through their thoughts and actions?

These are some vital questions for India's economic growth that find resonance in the incredible journey of India's largest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The narrative relives the highs and lows in the life of this multibillion-dollar enterprise, as seen through the eyes of its architects-Faqir Chand Kohli (96), the founder, and his successor, S. Ramadorai (75). Between them, they spent 40 years making TCS an admirable industry leader and a corporation with agility, innovation and scale.

Based on interviews with Kohli and Ramadorai, the authors provide an insider's account of their grand vision of igniting India's IT revolution. From the evolution of the offshoring model to harnessing the enormous opportunity offered by the Y2K problem, they offer rare insights into a company that they built, brick by brick.

How TCS Built an Industry for India is the first book in the series, Shapers of Business Institutions and is a unique blend of a must-read business biography and a management classic.

R. Gopalakrishnan is an author, speaker and corporate advisor, with a career spanning over 50 years. He spent 31 years in Hindustan Unilever Limited, where he rose to be vice chairman, followed by 19 years in Tata Sons as a director. He now serves as non-executive chairman of Castrol India; an independent director of Hemas Holdings PLC, Sri Lanka; executive-in-residence of S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai and distinguished professor of IIT, Kharagpur. He has authored nine books so far, notably A Comma in a Sentence, Six Lenses and Doodles on Leadership.

Tulsi Jayakumar is a professor of Economics and chairperson, Family Managed Business at SPJIMR, Mumbai. She has to her credit globally acclaimed cases and academic articles, besides thought-provoking articles in the national business papers and magazines.

This book, How TCS Built an Industry for India, is the first volume in the Shapers of Business Institutions series that probes the mindsets, behaviour and actions of 'Shapers of institutions: This book, just as the others in the series, is neither academic nor an anecdotal 'new mantra' book. Management, we believe, is a performance art and not quite a science, and practitioners rarely write about their experiences. Only talented academics and top-class consultants dominate management writing. This series, then, positioned at the intersection of practice and theory, is based on the powerful idea of 'Experience before Theory

Indeed, this book, like others in this series, has been co-authored by an accomplished management practitioner and a serious academic, a combination that is a distinctive feature of these volumes. We have used our experience, in the form of our real-life observations on long-lasting and values-based companies, to posit certain hypotheses. We then ask: Can such hypotheses form the basis of a conceptual business model, which can be validated through field interviews? Such an intersection of practice and theory is what sets this series apart from other books on organizations/business leaders, which may have a preponderance of either practice or theory.