Ramalinga Raju has grown satyam into a billion dollar enterprise by betting on encouraging entrepreneurs within his firm...or so he says!

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When 4Ps B&M caught up with Rama Raju, CEO, Satyam Computer Services Ltd. and asked him about how Satyam plans to be among the Big 3 rather than the Big 4, he strongly asserted that investments in leadership will be a key differentiator for Satyam. Indeed, leadership in itself can be a very important barometer of the company. The trends with regard to CEO succession for the top IT giants in India do make for quite an interesting comparison. The Tatas seem to have an immensely unshakeable faith in S. Ramodarai, who has been CEO for over the past 12 years. The Infosys CEO baton, in contrast, has passed from Narayana Murthy to Nandan Nilekani in 2002 and then to Kris Gopalakrishnan in 2007; which has been hailed as an outcome of outstanding succession planning. As far as Wipro is concerned, the less said the better about CEOS. Azim Premji had famously quoted in 2005, “Wipro doesn’t need a CEO!” Nevertheless, the company is now following a unique joint CEO structure, with Girish S. Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani at the helm since early 2008.

Which brings us back to Satyam, and also back to Rama Raju, who, besides being the brother of the iconic Chairman Ramalinga Raju, has been the MD of the company since 1996 and CEO since 2005 (there was no CEO designation at Satyam before that, as company officials tell us). If we go by first impression, also considering how Ramalinga Raju is the most visible face since inception; it appears that Satyam is a case where ownership and management are one.

Do note, however, that we used the word ‘appears’. On the contrary, within Satyam, a powerful entourage of leaders is being created as we speak, who, the company claims, will enable it to make the next big leap soon. Rama Raju tells us that distributed leadership and minimal bureaucracy are the key aspects that Satyam is focussing on. He says the company has “some 2000 value creating entities and 800-900 projects for a few hundred customer relationships.” Furthermore, he says that even as far as succession planning goes, he has people in mind, though he did not wish to name them, who could take up his position when he retires in another 10 years. If we look at the senior management, there are a number of knights in Raju’s army who, though they are not so well talked about, are actually quite ‘mission critical’ to Satyam’s hitherto elusive ‘Big three goal’.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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