The avid traveller is set to hang up his boots at work, but wants to visit Antarctica some time soon. For now,
K. Ramachandran, 58, CEO, Philips Electronics India, is busy with the hand-over to his successor Murali Sivaraman. Ramachandran retires from Philips coming October after a 14-year stint. His 33-year long professional voyage started at the Tata Group, where he stayed for 19 years. He joined Philips in 1993 and went on to become the first ever Indian Managing Director and CEO of the company in 1998. A voracious reader, Ramachandran has not yet decided what he wants to do after retirement. "I plan to take a sabbatical for a few months and think about what I want to do next." He is looking at options like joining boards of companies, mentoring young managers or travelling to lesser-known places. Surely, a tireless retiree in the making.
A new calling
Six years after being instrumental in starting Dell's operations in India,
Ganesh Laxminarayanan, 39, is taking charge of the company's BPO operations in India as VP & MD of Dell International Services India. After the rather sudden departure of his predecessor Romi Malhotra, Lakshminarayanan, who used to be vp for Global process engineering for the contact centres in Americas, India and Manila, has been tasked with leading the India contact centre. "We are present in four cities in India and have around 11,000 people. Given that we sell directly, our contact centres are the face of Dell and the first real contact point for an external customer." Hence, he dons the headphones as an agent every month and talks to his customers across the globe-hoping to ring in the perfect selling proposition.
Band of boys
Rumourmongers have had a field day ever since he took a sabbatical and went to Harvard Business School to complete the Advanced Management Program in March 2007.
Roopen Roy, 54, former Managing Director of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) India, has finally put to rest speculations, joining as the Managing Director of Deloitte & Touche Consulting India, floated to consolidate the consulting services of $23-billion (Rs 94,300 crore) Deloitte in India. Says Roy, who severed his three decades of association with PwC: "My team in India is well-positioned to build on Deloitte's global capabilities." Roy is not alone. Three other former PwC partners-Joydeep Datta Gupta, Jaideep Ganguli and Arindam Guha-have also switched camps with him. Will the exodus stop at that? It's wait 'n watch for now.
Rising clout
Arun Sarin, 52, CEO of £29.350 billion (Rs 2,37,735 crore) Vodafone Group Plc, who was instrumental in the aggressive buyout of Hutch-Essar, will need to put on his thinking cap for a new role. Gordon Brown, the newly anointed Prime Minister of UK, wants this Pachmarhi (Madhya Pradesh)-born son of an Indian army man, to be a member of his specially created Business Council for Britain. The council will "advise the government on its ongoing policies and priorities and conduct its own reviews on the areas it believes will determine the future economic well-being of the UK." That's quite a tribute to Sarin's competence, considering that until 1999, this Indian-American-he's a us citizen-had hardly anything to do with Vodafone, let alone British business.
Just reward
Four years ago
Meena Ganesh, 44, sold CustomerAsset, the pioneering BPO outfit she had started and grown to 4,000 people with her husband K. Ganesh, to icici OneSource (now First Source) and spent a year helping in the integration of the two companies. Once that was done, Ganesh signed up with retail giant Tesco to set up its India BPO and it operations, Tesco Hindustan Service centre. Leaning on her strong industry expertise, Ganesh quickly grew the centre to around 2,500 people and was entrusted with critical it and BPO tasks for its parent. After all the hard work, comes the reward. Ganesh is now on the 60-person executive committee that is the decision-making body of the retail giant's business. "This move proves the critical role employees at Tesco HSC play; rather than sheer numbers...we look at how important the work we do is for our parent," says Ganesh.
Come-back time
For somebody who was the third employee of Cisco in India and had 10 long years of association,
Jangoo Dalal's sudden departure as the President and Country Manager of the networking giant came as a surprise. Now the reason why he did it has become clear. Dalal, 42, has taken over as the MD and CEO of D-Link, which is also into networking. While Cisco is already an established player that dominates the market in its segments in India, D-Link has had mixed success. Dalal himself could not be reached for comment but in a release put out by D-Link, he says, "D-Link, with its integrated strategy of local R&D, manufacturing, and extensive sales and service network, is truly poised to serve the Indian customer's needs. I look forward to the eventful journey that lies ahead of us." We'll be watching.
(Contributed by Venkatesha Babu, Kapil Bajaj, Ritwik Mukherjee, Rahul Sachitanand, and Anusha Subramanian).
