For a man under pressure, S D Shibulal seems surprisingly relaxed, as we settle down to talk in the boardroom next to his office, at the heart of Infosys’s leafy corporate campus in Bangalore. Outside lie 80 acres of carefully manicured lawns and shiny glass buildings, with 10-seater stretch golf carts ferrying visitors in between.
It is a pastoral scene and one that gives few hints of the corporate drama unfolding within India’s most celebrated IT group. “There is no good time for transformation but if you don’t do it, you will not survive,” he says in a quiet voice, his neat, greying moustache turning up at the edges. “Change is hard for people. And this has been a seminal transformation.”
The 57-year-old is explaining how, since becoming chief executive last August, he has been pushing through a shake-up of the company he cofounded three decades ago. “You are resetting expectations. You are recreating processes. You are changing people’s aspirations,” he says. “But look at the history of corporates in the world . . . Whatever makes you successful today is not going to make you successful tomorrow.”