MUMBAI, India – For a man who took his business from a new player into the top tier of the world’s best consulting companies, Subramanian Ramadorai lives and speaks a life without the braggadocio he could easily elicit, but don’t confuse his humility with his ability to manage people and get results. Ramadorai just turned over the reins of Tata Consultancy Services to his hand-picked successor N. Chandrasekeran, but not before taking it from a $140 million business with 7,000 employees when he became the CEO in 1996 to a $6.1 billion world-class business with 140,000 workers. How he did it is a textbook case of how to achieve market share and the unshakeable loyalty of  workers without the bombast and dripping greed that almost sank American and European banks and drove the world into a death-grip recession that has put millions of people out of work and millions more on the streets after losing their homes. 
The obscene obsession with bonuses they didn’t earn that nearly destroyed banks like UBS in Switzerland and Northern Rock in the United Kingdom, that humbled giants like Societe Generale in France, and the unparalleled avarice of American companies now being repeated on Wall Street won’t be seen in the halls of TCS, where you have to earn your keep, a lesson passed down from Ramadorai’s desk, along with genuine corporate social responsibility and not the phony anti-bono attitude of Americans and Europeans.
TCS is under the umbrella of India’s Tata Group, led by Ratan Tata, whose pedigree includes Harvard and Cornell, and who has put his imprimatur on his companies by hiring people like Ramadorai and letting them guide people toward performing instead of wanting bonuses for incompetence. The Tata Group, with operations including steel, cars, chemicals,  has 350,000 employees worldwide, including in the EU, including people like Abhinav Kumar of TCS’s Paris office (disclosure: I know him and like him) who exemplify the code of ethics Tata requires of its workers. Kumar is smart in the quiet, well-mannered way of Tata executives.  A survey this year by the Reputation Institute ranked Tata Group as the 11th most reputable company in the world among 600 analyzed. Ramadorai made a dent as well in the corrosive atmosphere of some EU business dealings when he came to Brussels in June for a discussion at a university where he quietly made the point that while other companies were hiding in foxholes to avoid the fallout of the recession they created with greed, he was snapping up their business by being bold and optimistic, without the false swagger that nearly drove so many EU and American banks and businesses off a cliff. He may talk like Gandhi, but gets the same results and it’s his textbook that should be on the desk of EU and American business schools.
Ramadorai, 56, was educated in India but got his master’s degree from UCLA and attended the Executive Development Program at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he should probably go back to teach Americans some lessons. “At the end of the day you are still dealing with people and they can be taught excellence,” he said. Tata has engendered loyalty from its staff and its customers, because he said, it believes in a word has than has been lost in the buzz of business in Europe and the United States in too many companies, unless you’re talking about a bank like USAA of San Antonio, Texas, the best in the country, and which operates the same way as Tata. You’d have to look long and hard in the EU to find one. “It’s really all about trust,” he said. If you work for an EU or American business, look it up.
 
 Andy@ NEurope.eu