Expat CEOs struggle to lead Indian IT majors?

There seems to have cultural differences among Indian employee base and expat CEOs. That may be one of the reasons for departure of these foreign national CEOs from Indian IT firms or companies with significant Indian presence - Pareekh Jain, Founder, Pareekh Consulting

Bengaluru: Cultural differences, low engagement with Indian delivery centres, drastic rearrangement of organisation structure and side-tracking of Indian employees are the factors behind failure of expat Chief Executive officers (CEOs) in the domestic IT industry.

Resignation of Thierry Delaporte from the CEO role at Wipro last week, and Brian Humphries from Cognizant last year are indicative of the fact that cultural differences have led to departures of these top-level executives.

“There seems to have cultural differences among Indian employee base and expat CEOs. That may be one of the reasons for departure of these foreign national CEOs from Indian IT firms or companies with significant Indian presence,” Pareekh Jain, an IT outsourcing advisor & Founder of Pareekh Consulting, told Bizz Buzz.

According to him, both Delaporte and Humphries tried to follow the Accenture model by shaking up the organisational structures of Wipro and Cognizant respectively. “However, in this process, these companies didn’t receive the intended outcomes of such restructuring,” he added.

Wipro under Delaporte has brought in several organisational changes. The company has been restructured in geographical terms for better focus and brought in many leaders to head these geographical and strategic units.

However, sources in the know said Delaporte’s engagement level with India delivery centre was low as he was operating out of France. This coupled with organisational restructuring led to a disquiet among long-timers in the company. Subsequently, many senior leaders left the company to pursue outside opportunities.

In the last 12 months, around dozen top level leaders exited the IT major in 2023 alone. Prominent among those included Chief Growth Officer Stephanie Trautman, Chief Financial Officer Jatin Dalal, Chief Operations Officer Sanjeev Singh, and others. Even leaders brought in by the last CEO of Wipro didn’t last long with the company.

“If you see what happened in Cognizant, there were many similarities with Wipro. The expat CEO tried to side-track India’s importance as the major delivery centre. This came at a high cost as many top-level leaders in India exited the company in droves. Attrition touched all-time high for Cognizant post pandemic, which was way above its peers,” a source in the industry said. The person added that with Ravi Kumar taking over, now the ship has been stabilised.

Way back in 2014-2017 period, when Infosys roped in Vishal Sikka as the first CEO outside of founders, the company had to go through a turbulent time. Though Sikka is a person of Indian origin, his focus on driving major part of Infosys’ business from products came in direct conflict with the legacy business. His way of functioning didn’t find much support from founders, leading to his subsequent exit.