It’s 10.40am on a Friday, and the staff on duty at the Trident, Gurgaon, are beginning to get suspicious of me.
I’ve been ambling about and shuffling a sheaf of papers for the past 10 minutes, circling one of the lobby’s corner sofas like a predator patrolling his territory. I’m a bit early for my breakfast meeting with N.V. Tyagarajan, the 48-year-old chief operating officer of the business process outsourcing (BPO) firm Genpact, and the staff would really appreciate it if I stopped wearing out the carpet in the interim, thank you very much.
Dressed in a crisp dark grey suit, and wheeling a suitcase, Tyagarajan is the very image of the roving executive. His handshake is firm. “Hi. I’m Tiger,” he says by way of introduction.
On target: Tyagarajan joined GE because he wanted a career, not just a job, and became an architect of the BPO business in India. Jayachandran / Mint
The story of how “Tiger” became his prefix of choice (it’s even on his visiting card) takes him back nearly 40 years. “I went to a Catholic school in Mumbai, and in (the) second grade we came out of a poetry class, having just learnt
Tiger, tiger, burning bright by William Blake,” he says. The name “Tyagarajan” was proving a little too phonetically complex for his Mumbai classmates, and “Tiger” filled that gap competently. “It’s not a bad name to have in the corporate world,” he says.
It is Tyagarajan’s approach to business that has undoubtedly made the name stick. “It’s the way you attack a problem,” he says softly, carefully measuring each sentence before speaking. “Break it down into parts, think about a logical, rational, step-by-step solution—that’s the way I think about a lot of things.”
It’s an unnervingly precise mechanism for decision-making, but “unnervingly precise” is an accurate descriptor for Tyagarajan’s career, from his early days in Pond’s India to being the COO of the $1 billion (around Rs5,000 crore), 37,000-employee Genpact, which was previously called GE Capital International Services, or Gecis, and was a captive arm of General Electric.
Tyagarajan orders a “strong” masala chai. “Drink of choice?” I ask. “Not really,” he says, his wispy moustache curling as he breaks into a grin. “But I’ve had two espressos since morning, so I thought I’d take a break from coffee.”
The early proof-of-concepts for Gecis, the prototype for the Indian BPO industry, were beginning to float around in 1997-98, when Tyagarajan was working with GE Capital. He, along with other BPO pioneers Raman Roy and Pramod Bhasin, conducted pilots (“basic call centre stuff”) that became hugely successful. It excited then GE boss Jack Welch when he visited in 2000. Till 2004, Gecis remained moored to the GE port, providing BPO services only to in-house companies. Tyagarajan, meanwhile, left for the US in 2002 to work with GE Commercial Finance. He returned when Gecis became Genpact, an independent company. By then BPO had become a buzzword.