http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Francisco-DSouzas-meteoric-rise-Inevitably-outside-Goa/articleshow/19136720.cms
In just a few weeks, the very Goan name of Francisco (Frank) D'Souza has abruptly emerged right amidst the most famous and admired titans of global business. While IT industry insiders and observers have long admired the spectacular trajectory charted by D'Souza at Cognizant Technology Solution Corp, the multinational services provider and outsourcer, the 2013 results of Glassdoor.com's global survey of more than 5,00,000 corporate employees marked an unprecedented milestone. The 44-year-old was rated 6th best CEO in the world, polling significantly ahead of legendary tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Larry Ellison. In breaking entirely new ground for Indian industry, D'Souza also outranked Larry Page of Google, and Tim Cook of Apple, who helm the giant corporations which define the current era of the information age. This eye-opening news came right on the heels of another amazing breakthrough for Cognizant's deceptively boyish-looking CEO. Last month, he agreed to join the board of General Electric, the third-largest company in the world, with bewilderingly huge multinational interests in energy, technology, finance, and the consumer and industrial sectors. It is the first such appointment in Indian corporate history. As the youngest member of GE's board, D'Souza has become firmly established as one of the most admired business visionaries in the world. Looking back now, D'Souza's childhood uncannily suited the making of a globetrotting multinational executive. While the family roots are in Anjuna, his father Placido D'Souza grew up in Pune, and travelled the world for more than three decades in a stellar career for the Indian Foreign Service. The elder D'Souza served in Switzerland, Indonesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, as Indian ambassador to Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Zaire, Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea, as consul general to New York, and high commissioner to a slew of Caribbean countries as well as Hong Kong and Macau. In the wake of his father's career, Francisco lived in 11 different countries, studying in local schools, and often in the local language. His childhood was divided across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, which he has explained forced him to always "survive and thrive in a 'flat world' long before the flat world came into vogue". After two business degrees (including an MBA from Carnegie Mellon), D'Souza plunged straight into information services and technology, from the beginning characterized by an extraordinary willingness to adapt and reconfigure, as well as a rare appetite for risk in order to pursue distant goals. What D'Souza has already achieved for Cognizant is one of the greatest corporate stories of our time. The company only came into being in 1994, more than a decade after most of its competition had already been firmly established. As recently as 2007 (when he took over as CEO) annual revenues totalled $1.4 billion. It has been a stratospheric ride, as Cognizant scorched all competitors to grow to more than $7 billion in revenues in 2012, an astonishing 30% compounded annual growth. Often expanding at double the rate of its competition, Cognizant has now outpaced Wipro and Infosys, while adding more than 1,00,000 employees in just five years. The company is now a member of the Fortune 500, the FT 500, the Standard and Poor's 500, and the Forbes Global 2000. Corporate dream runs like this are always diplomatically credited to a team effort. But everyone acknowledges that Cognizant's secret weapon is its dynamic CEO. He has consistently dared to tweak, shake up and reconfigure existing strategies to pursue avenues that his competitors had not even considered (like building venture-capital structures within his own company, and repeatedly seeking advice from successful innovators from other industries). It is surely these characteristics which attracted GE's leadership, and earned such impressive plaudits in Glassdoor's survey. Quite ironically, these are also attributes we are in desperate need of in D'Souza's ancestral land. For a very long time, Goa's business affairs have been distinguished by a stubbornly defended status quo, resulting in a paralyzing stasis that continues to benefit only a handful of entrenched interests. Those with get up and go are almost always forced to literally get up and go, and leave the state. Thus, we see virtually no value added to Goa's economic scenario for generations, with rampant nepotism, cronyism, corruption, and nakedly selfish exploitation of community resources still defining "business as usual". But stories like those newly written by Francisco D'Souza demonstrate it is not like that elsewhere, even just across the border in other states of India, where innumerable sons and daughters of Goa are experiencing an entirely different 21st century. What is it going to take to make it happen here?