Of all the Questions we had for N Chandrasekaran, the newly crowned CEO and Managing Director of Tata Consultancy Services, nothing, in our mind, was more important than this. TCS needed 140,000 employees to get to $6 billion in revenues. How many will it need to get to $12 billion? He chose not to put a number in his answer. But one thing is evident: TCS has to defy the basic laws of arithmetic from here on. It cannot hire another army of 140,000 to add the next $6 billion. His predecessor S Ramadorai sums up TCS’ and the Indian IT services industry’s next big challenge rather aptly: “Growth cannot be linear to the number of people (we employ).”

This could potentially turn the tried and tested IT services business model on its head. In the past, companies have grown as fast as they could hire programmers, project managers, consultants, relationship managers and salesmen. They were never short of business. They were almost always short of people to implement all those orders they kept winning. That explained the high attrition levels in the industry.

But all that changed when the developed world went into a recession; emerging economies escaped with only a slowdown. Suddenly, business dried up. And many IT services fi rms were left with huge workforces and not enough business to employ them productively. ‘Th e Fall of the Software Professional,’ a June 2009 Outlook Business cover story portrayed the pain that the industry and its workforce (thousands were retrenched) had to endure.

IT firms are now emerging from the slowdown, bruised, but not broken, and certainly wiser from the experience. Every company that is of any standing now wants to break out of the challenge of linearity of revenues.

That is the backdrop to everything that Chandrasekaran is now trying to do in TCS. In the earlier economic environment, companies were just riding the wave. A managerial mindset was enough. Now, companies have to eke out revenue opportunities. Th ey need to spot ideas and work with an entrepreneurial, even risktaking, mindset to make growth possible.

That is why he wants to create many companies within one large company, each with its own CEO, CFO and the like. He wants to stamp out the old managerial mindset, and breathe in a more aggressive, entrepreneurial approach. Incidentally, this resonates with his personality traits.

The remaking of TCS, the Chandra way, is going to be a fascinating story. Only the early chapters have been written. But when TCS gets to $12 billion in revenues, Chandrasekaran’s success may be measurable with just one metric: how many people did it take?