Year of the crisis leaders

Tortured firms found solace in the likes of Nilekani, Chandrasekaran and Limaye

Irrespective of how information technology firm Infosys’ September quarter results turns out today, one thing is clear. The return of founder and ex-CEO Nandan Nilekani as non-executive chairman has steadied the Infosys boat rocked by a not-so-pleasant public spat between another founder Narayana Murthy and the firm’s first non-promoter CEO Vishal Sikka.

Ditto at the Tata group, the over $ 100-billion salt-to-software conglomerate. After the ignominious sacking of its chairman Cyrus Mistry last year, and all the concomitant mudslinging from both sides, the appointment of old Tata hand and TCS CEO N Chandrasekaran as Tata Sons chairman early this year has brought calm after the tumultuous period following Mistry’s exit.

Infosys and Tata are the most high-profile cases this year of crisis managers taking over big companies tortured by internal strife, regulatory action or just plain mismanagement. But look around, and you will find the story of a crisis manager stepping in to save the day at India Inc. repeating itself across sectors, and for the most part, for the better. 

So you have Vikram Limaye stepping into the country’s largest bourse, the National Stock Exchange, as managing director and CEO after its much celebrated founder managers left amid a regulatory overhang, delaying a much-anticipated initial public offering. Mahesh Kumar Jain, the turnaround specialist at Indian Bank, was parachuted to Kingfisher scam-hit and loss-making public sector lender IDBI Bank. And Air India boss Ashwani Lohani—who in his short two year-stint managed to get the national carrier to financial operating profit, improve efficiency and shore up the sagging employee morale—was appointed head of the Railway Board in August amidst a slew of fatal accidents and slipping performance of Indian Railways.

The crisis leaders clearly have had a calming influence. So Limaye, in the short time he has been at NSE, is seen to be moving fast and decidedly on issues plaguing the country’s premier bourse. He has quickly opted for a “consent mechanism” for settling the dispute with the stock market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India or Sebi, and kept hopes of the impending IPO alive. 

Tata’s Chandrasekaran has moved on many fronts—divested the mobile telephony business to Bharti Airtel, settled an acrimonious dispute with partner Japan’s Docomo, spoken candidly on Tatas; unwieldy portfolio of businesses—but above all, he has managed to arrest the free fall in Tatas’ reputation witnessed post the unsavoury battle with its ex-chief.

Lohani, on his part, has been candid to admit that the railways has a sloppy image as far as safety is concerned, and he intends tackling it through hard work and hard facts. For instance, he cites figures that rail accidents are down by almost half this year, never mind the series of quick derailments that virtually drove Suresh Prabhu out of the railway ministry. And for a bureaucrat to admit that to tackle safety issues, the real issue is not money but the huge effort to maintain existing tracks, is indeed brave words for a man in charge of India’s biggest employer—and one of the world’s biggest.

And while Nilekani stressed that his priorities are to bring stability to the company and search for the new CEO when he took over as non-executive chairman of Infosys, he added, almost in jest, that now that he is in the saddle, the media must find something else to focus other than the goings-on at Infosys. Indeed Infosys has been out of the media glare for the last two months, and for the right reasons. When Nilekani takes centre stage this evening to announce the firm’s September quarter results, first part-quarter under his watch, hopefully he will be able to focus the conversation back to performance.