N. Chandrasekaran begins long road to restoring Tata group’s image
Natarajan Chandrasekaran is only the third person without the Tata name to get the job, and the first without a close family tie to the Tatas. Photo: AFP
Bangalore/Mumbai: Amid the carnage on Wall Street in 2008, as Bank of America Corp. was trying to forge its rushed merger with Merrill Lynch & Co., Natarajan Chandrasekaran boarded a plane for New York to try to reassure the two financial behemoths that an Indian IT company could make the systems of their strikingly different cultures work together.
Chandrasekaran, known as Chandra, was then chief operating officer of Asia’s largest IT services exporter, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS). Over the following weeks he fended off global rivals who smelled an opportunity to muscle in, and set about integrating the banks’ systems and assuaging the new management’s anxieties about outsourcing to a foreign supplier. TCS kept the business and grew it substantially.
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