How many CEOs is Infosys away from becoming a company like Accenture, Google or Amazon

If the investors, board members, employees and the experts tracking Infosys believe Saturday's new CEO appointment is anything conclusive, they must be smoking their own kool aid.

Describing what's going on as just another CEO hunt will be trivialising the massive disruption staring India's over $100 billion IT industry, not just Infosys.

Infosys' future
The hunt for Infosys' next CEO isn't just a leadership transition or a generational shift from the company's iconic founders; it's a long, slow and painful quest to find answers for building a software company of the future. And CEO exits and appointments are going to be just one among several traumatic transitions the company will have to go through until Infosys figures out its future.

The question is not whether Infosys has finally found the right leader to steer through the ongoing technology disruption and stabilise the ship. The real question is how many CEOs is Infosys away before it becomes a next generation software company, and challenge Accenture. Not even an IBM. But Accenture and Google and Amazon.

even mudslinging as the past few tumultuous years at Infosys have shown. Three years after the founders of India's most iconic software startup, Infosys, appointed Vishal Sikka as the first non-founder CEO, the experiment became ugly with NR Narayana Murthy himself confronting the management, asking the company to come clean. Sikka quit in August this year, saying he couldn't take it anymore, raising doubts about whether Infosys will go back to its homegrown leadership pool and play it safe.

Notwithstanding the questionable behaviour of the Infosys board and relentless nagging from its iconic founder Murthy that led to an ugly exit for Sikka, it's really encouraging to see the newly appointed chairman Nandan Nilekani hasn't given up on the bold quest.

After Sikka's exit, many in the industry, especially Infosys rivals, mocked at the handling of a non-founder CEO and said the company will go back to the safe option of trusting an insider with the top job.

For his part, Nilekani proved them all wrong by getting an outsider to be the new CEO of Infosys.

Is Parekh the one?
Finding someone who understands technology and has the chops to lead a large, multi-cultural and complex organisation, makes a good start. And in Salil S Parekh, Infosys seems to have found a leader who can do all that. But that can only take Infosys so far.

As I wrote in a FactorDaily article titled "Indian IT may not be on its deathbed yet, but the threat of disruption is clear and present" in October last year, this is not the first time Indian IT is facing such a crisis. It has had at least two near-death experiences since it was born nearly 30 years ago. Its last existential crisis was when the global economy crashed after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, and the top customers froze their IT spending. Later, in early 2009, the chairman of India's (then) fourth-largest software exporter, Satyam Computer Services, admitted to a fraud, sending shock waves across the sector, and raising doubts about the sustainability and governance standards of Indian IT companies among existing and potential buyers.

The latest disruption is the toughest to deal with because it's all pervasive and there are really very few leaders who can combine futuristic insights with the ability to steer through the ongoing changes.

The Sikka experiment...
For all his irrational exuberance and hurriedly executed and questionable acquisition strategy, as described by the critics, Sikka did bring some important cultural changes.

Breaking the Bangalore mould was clearly a timely cultural shift. Sikka did that by first, making Silicon Valley his home, and then hiring and shifting Infosys top leaders there. CFO Ranga's relocation is where it all started sounding an overkill.

But the intent was perfect. How can Infosys break the mould, acquire the positioning of a new-age, global services company, which is closer to its customers in the world's biggest market for software services.

Then came a massive push for automation and design thinking. Both great ideas, but poorly executed. For instance, while setting targets for automation, the company should have tweaked its incentives structure too, by linking delivery managers' bonuses to the amount of automation they can drive in every project. As for design thinking, it was perhaps just skin deep. Below the superficial layer of the organization, the thinking remained old world.

It's sometimes fashionable to scrap everything the past regime did, both good and bad, to ensure freshness. In Infosys' case, there are certain good things during Sikka's stint that brought a cultural change in the organization.

The new leadership needs to assess what's good and bad dispassionately before scrapping anything.

Nandan's task far from over
When Nilekani came back as the company's non-executive chairman after Sikka's departure, the immediate responsibility for him was to find the next CEO, and bring stability. But these two tasks were perhaps the easiest, at least for someone of Nilekani's stature.

The real crisis facing Infosys today is how will it build the foundations for a company that will be around in the decades to come. And while Parekh should make a good leader in leading the current organisation, it's the future that continues to look worrisome.

What Nilekani now needs to do is to build a board that combines futurism and singularity with real world understanding of technology. A board that on one hand, asks management all the tough questions, but also has the vision to guide Infosys to its future.

All this will need Nilekani to stay longer at the board. And while many including me believe that his skills are better utilized in building far more important things for the country, Infosys needs Nilekani more than ever before. And that's because India's entire IT industry will be closely watching every move Infosys makes under his watch, and learn from it.

And incubating a new, separate Infosys will make a bold, but timely step in that direction.

The old and the new Infosys cannot coexist.

(Pankaj Mishra has been a technology journalist and editor since the year 2000 with several publications including The Economic Times, Mint and TechCrunch. Based in Bengaluru, he writes about people and companies taking technology mainstream in India. Pankaj is the cofounder, writer and CEO of FactorDaily. The story was published in Bangalore Mirror )