Was fairly amused to read reports about Narayan Murthy joining Infosys as an Executive Chariman.
This incident gives a good illustration of how Infosys really operates.It is a company whose founders are loath to let go of control/management.
First, you had the charade of every promoter getting a shot to being CEO by turns.Spare a tear for Mohandas Pai who actually thought that merit was a consideration for the CEO position.
Then we had the charade of NRN Murthy piously claiming that no founder would have an executive position by 60 and non executive position by 65.
This resulted in the curious spectacle of having a great leader like K V Kamath as a Non-executive Chairman !Since they couldn’t trust a non-promoter completely, we had NRN Murthy being appointed as Chairman Emiritus and Kris GopalaKrishnan as Co-Chairman.
I think KV Kamath saw the writing on the wall when Cognizant overtook Infy to be the second largest Indian IT company.He realized that Infy was fast going downhill under Shibulal . While replacing him would not go well with the promoter group, he did the next best thing- he stepped down himself and got NRN to be the Executive Chairman
This is yet another example of the true leadership skills of KV Kamath.
However, NRN Murthy getting his son Rohan Murthy on board shows another kind of skills-nepotism.Earlier, NRN used to piously (and in hindsight, hypocritically) claim that no children of Infosys founders would work with Infosys.Of course, this rule would not apply to his own children !
Considering the track record of promoters, what is likely to happen is that NRN would hang around Infy long enough to groom Rohan.At the right time, the CEO baton would be handed over to Rohan and the show would go on.