Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman, Cognizant

Lakshmi Narayanan is the vice chairman and ex-CEO of Cognizant. He was in the campus today. Mr. Narayanan holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Cognizant is one of recruiters from Great Lakes. So, all of us were very keen to know his expectations from us for obvious reasons.

He asked a question, where is IT industry heading?

He talked about the way IT companies have evolved where the work is done by collaboration now. He talked about all the models. Earlier the rival companies tried to capture a particular domain. Markets have become customer centric these days. Earlier customers used to come for solutions. Now, a bunch of IT companies go to the customers with the services they can offer and value adds and all of them work together seamlessly.

When asked what they look for in a candidate. He promptly replied, he looks for 3 capabilities.
1) Domain Capability
2) Technology Capability
3) Process Capability

He candidly admitted, it is difficult to find all 3 in one person. So, they look for people who can learn things quickly.

He took question from our curious batch before the session ended. Everyone was surprised to see the way he communicated with us to clear our doubts. One question asked to him was, how Cognizant managed profits even in Recession times without any layoffs? To which he said, there was a financial firm in US which was on the verge of bankruptcy and could not afford the services anymore. So, they asked to stop it. Cognizant Management said, we will provide services for 6 more months and you can pay later or if the condition doesn’t improve, you don’t have to pay. We will forget it. And after 6 months the same firm came back with more customers. A big cheer followed from the Junta.

It was great fun hearing him and having confidence in us and recruiting every year from Great Lakes. It was a huge learning experience to get first hand information from the top Management leader himself.

Looking forward to more of these lectures.

Cheers’