There is a leadership vacuum at Infosys, with the return of Nandan Nilekani:

ET Now: There are two ways to exit the top tier at Infosys. On the one hand, many people say that there was a team that was probably not performing well and now they are leaving and this will probably be a positive for the stock in the long run. On the other hand, skeptics argue that there are many people who have been running the company for the last several years and it is not a pint-sized company, but a behemoth of Rs 1.70 lakh crore. Why has the company exited so high profile?

Mohandas father: There is a leadership vacuum in the company, because they made the wrong choice of CEO three years ago and it is still going on. The company did not perform and in June 2011, they appointed three members to the board and all three of them are now gone and all three are extraordinary individuals.

Ashok Vemuri is now the CEO of another company, V Balakrishnan has left and started his own fund and BG Srinivasan, I have been told, will now join another company as CEO.

So obviously, all three have been CEO materials. It is clear that chemistry did not work, or that they were not fully empowered. The board needs to sit down and make a good legacy plan and set up a new team because the whole level of people at the bottom of the executive board is gone now and many of them were outstanding performers.

Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either. They were awesome people and they are performing elsewhere.

So there is a need to work in groups and people need to come together. They need to forget the past and focus on the future, reorganizing their company based on what the market needs.

The market has changed and so its model needs to change, its management structure needs to change and the people who have ruled the company for 30 years need to resign and hand over the reins, because they have survived for so long. Therefore, I hope that in the next one or two months, the board will merge with NRN and stop this problem for once.

ET Now: Where could the breakthrough come from at the moment, because you have already said in the past that the board and Mr. Murthy have to take responsibility for the exit. It just seems like the exit series isn’t over. Does this mean that the company has to consider building a completely new team from outside and hiring some expensive resources from outside?

Mohandas father: My point is that the lower level of BG Srinivas, V Balakrishnan and Ashok Vemuri is an extraordinary level. You have a lot of good people who run the unit. But they run the unit and it takes them a year or two to bring the enterprise.

The location of the enterprise is very different from the location of a unit. You can be a great unit person, but you need some advice and some experience to run a complete enterprise in a very competitive environment.

Gone are the leaders of the whole generation who could handle the enterprise. The people at the next level have done a very good job and there is great management, but they have to make a connection between themselves and the NRN who will be the executive chairman and stay for the next three years. That connection needs to be fixed and it depends on the NRN to make it.

Now it can be done by anyone on the plate as CEO. He would be inexperienced, he would not run the enterprise, but being very efficient he would be able to take it in three to six months.

However, this requires a different style of working for the NRN. This means that some amount of bleeding will occur. In fact, it has to happen when the next generation comes, because obviously those who are too senior will not stay and have to do a clean up. So in the next two-three months we have to see a radical change.

It is very difficult to predict whether we will have an outside team, because this kind of team is not in any other company, let us remember. It is a very large company with 160,000 people and a market value of $ 25 billion or $ 30 billion.

So it requires a certain level of expertise and the board and chairman have to work with them very carefully. So their work is done and if Nandan Nilekani is asked to come back it will help, because he can provide a link between the chairman and the people at the next level and help advise them for the next few years, because he was an extraordinary person to connect with. , His style is very inclusive and he is a person who strengthens his team and gives them full strength to move forward and stand by their side. So bringing back Nilekani would be a great strategy.