Signatures Of 12 World Famous Personalities

SiliconIndia : Friday, 31 May 2013, 19:25 IST

Handwriting and signature speaks for itself. It is believed that a person's handwriting or his signature gives you an instantaneous photograph of his mind. The study of scientific handwriting analysis has explained the relationship between one's handwriting and his personality.

However, it is quite difficult to conclude a person's character just by his signature, but we could derive some interesting facts about the person, such as, if the signature has a large initial letter of the first and last name, it indicates a strong large ego, if it's a small writing we can assume the person is detailed or someone who concentrates deeply, and if the signature has flowing writing it may indicate the person is outgoing.

Here in this article we look at famous personalities and their interesting and cool signatures, which provide us with some amazing information about them.

#1 Bill Gates
Microsoft's chairman, what you see is what you get

Handwriting analysis experts believe Gates is a man of detail. The round dot over the 'i' in his signature talks about his traits. He is patient and will take time to listen to whatever you say; his signature also indicates that he is a very quick thinker.

#2 Tim Cook

Apple's CEO, Tim Cook has two 2 of his signatures online one is his sloppier signature, which indicates, that he does not want us to know much about him or you can say that his mind is moving faster than he can write. He may be not interested in hearing all the ordinary details but would certainly appreciate if your plan has got some creativity.

His other signature is much clearer; maybe he felt the need to be clearer, realizing his signature is on a big check. This one has very large "C" in last name, indicating his respect or regard for his family line.

#3 Google CEO Larry Page is a good listener

The vowel letters in his signature is wide open suggesting he is a good listener, however, the wide gap between the first and last name says that he loves his personal space. So, make sure when you get to meet him, not to stand too close when you speak to him.

#4 Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln's signature is quite larger than his handwriting, however in terms of text and signature they are well organized. This highlight is that what we see outside is exactly the same person inside. Usually the similarity between the handwriting and the signature shows honesty and high integrity.

#5 Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and CEO

The signature of Jack Dorsey is short but talks a lot about his traits. The @ symbol, identifies him with what he does. The k is ending downwards, if that’s the way he normally signs it signifies that he looks back at his earlier life and derives strength from his past experiences. It also highlights that he is looking at his past life how he was and       where he is now.

#6 Mahatma Gandhi

Father of the nation's signature is extraordinary, even though his signature seems quite unique; it reflects his courageous and kind traits. His unyielding determination characterized his actions.

#7 Albert Einstein

Einstein did not like to be contained or limited by others, this equally reflects in his signature. His hunger for creativity made him discover important theories. His signature indicates he is a man of vision and determination who likes to think forward.

#8 Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs

His signature highlights his humility; at least what he feels about himself, if not his work. The low upper loop in signature usually indicates someone who is down to earth, and whose focus is on the here and now. The "t" which is leaning towards the left and the capital and no breaks between the letters, suggests that he will never stop what he once did, until he gets the work completed.

#9 Adolph Hitler

Hitler's unusual analytical strokes in his last name, shows a rare, incisive mind. His instinct for diplomacy made him a world class persuader. His signature highlights his strong and focused mind

#10 Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer

His signature is quite interesting for couple of reasons. He crosses the 't' in his first name Stephen indicating his enthusiasm and forward thinking, and the "ll" in his second name indicates that he is an intellectual person and takes pride in his accomplishments. He sets his own standards and doesn't care what others think.

#11 Princess Diana

 Here the signature and writings have no space. Usually the way of spacing the signature indicates the person feels being part of the society and a strong sense of belonging to the society. The underlined signature normally highlights a person, who likes to have recognition from the public and to be the centre of attraction.

#12 Michael Jackson

The King of Pop signature reflects his strong desire to express what he feels inside. He gets carried away with his emotions which usually reflects in what he does, which is actually good to a certain extent, as it helped him achieve greater heights in his music career.

Raghuram Rajan | Conflict management and economic growth

Societies with well-functioning institutions allocate the burden of distress in predictable ways. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint
Live Mint :Raghuram Rajan :Fri, May 31 2013. 04 05 PM IST

Can countries without a reliable and effective legislature or legal system do better to protect against downturns?

One of the most interesting aspects of the prolonged economic crisis in Europe, and of the even longer crisis in Japan, is the absence of serious social conflict—at least thus far. Yes, there have been strikes, marches, and growing anger at political leaders, but protests have been largely peaceful.

While that may change, the credit for social peace must go to institutions such as elections (“throwing the rascals out” is a non-violent way to vent popular anger), responsive democratic legislatures, and effective judiciaries. All of these institutions have successfully mediated political conflict during a time of great adversity in advanced countries.

This suggests that a major reason for underdevelopment may be that such institutions, which allow countries to cope with distress, are missing in poor economies. Economic growth permits conflict between social actors to be papered over. A downturn, however, usually exposes or sharpens latent social tension.

Why do the benefits of growth seem to be easier to share than are the burdens of adversity? This is not a trivial question. Perhaps the answer lies in human psychology. If consumption is shaped by habit, an income loss is very hard to bear and one might fight to avoid it, while fighting for additional gain when one is doing well is less important. Also, because conflict may destroy growth opportunities, it may be seen as costlier when growth is strong. For example, squabbling between workers and management may drive away investors—and thus the chance to start new projects. But if there are no new investment opportunities on the horizon, squabbling is less costly, because the existing plant and machinery are already sunk costs.

Regardless of why conflicts are greater in times of economic adversity, how a society deals with them depends on the scope and quality of its conflict-management institutions. The Oxford University economist Paul Collier has shown that years of weak economic growth typically precede civil war in poor countries. Even after establishing peace, the probability that these countries will relapse into conflict is high.

Not surprisingly, these states typically have weak conflict-management institutions—patchy law enforcement, limited adherence to democratic principles, and few meaningful checks and balances on the government. Similarly, Dani Rodrik of Harvard University has found that the countries that experienced the sharpest declines in growth after 1975 had divided societies and weak conflict-management institutions.

Societies with well-functioning institutions allocate the burden of distress in predictable ways. For example, people who suffer the most adversity can fall back on an explicit social safety net—a minimum level of unemployment insurance, for example. In the US in recent years, federal and state legislatures prolonged unemployment benefits as joblessness persisted.

Similarly, debtors and creditors can rely on credible bankruptcy proceedings to determine their relative shares. With an explicit institutional mechanism in place to dictate the division of pain, there is no need to take to the streets.

By contrast, when institutions are too weak to offer predictable and acceptable settlements, or to protect existing shares, everyone has an incentive to jockey for a larger slice of the pie. Outcomes will be mediated more by actors’ relative bargaining power than by pre-existing implicit or explicit contracts. Often, bargaining will break down. Everyone is made worse off by strikes, lockouts, and even violent conflict.

Can countries without a reliable and effective legislature or legal system do better to protect against downturns?

One answer may be to use arrangements that depend in a limited way on the legal system for enforcement. For example, labour contracts in many developing countries effectively prohibit employers from firing workers. This is regarded as inefficient because firms cannot adjust quickly to changing business conditions.

Often, such prohibitions are attributed to overly strong unions that hold the economy hostage. But, if slow or corrupt courts mean that a worker who is wrongfully dismissed has no legal recourse, perhaps the prohibition on firing—enforced by mass protests against violations, which are easily and publicly observable—is the only way to protect workers from arbitrary decisions by employers.

Job tenure may also serve as a form of social security, because the government performs miserably on providing a safety net and private insurance markets do not exist. Thus, an inflexible contract can protect workers when the preponderance of bargaining power is with firms.

Such inflexible arrangements are not without cost. In a downturn, too many firms will fail, because they cannot shed labour. Alternatively, knowing that they cannot fire permanent workers, firms may remain tiny in order to remain below the authorities’ radar. Or they may hire informal workers who have no rights, or pay inspectors to look the other way (a related point could be made about workplace safety in Bangladesh’s garment factories).

Thus, the attempt to protect workers with rigid labour laws may have the unintended consequence of generating too few protected jobs. This may be the situation in India, where most workers have few rights, and the few large firms that are established in the formal sector tend to use a lot of labour-saving capital in order to avoid hiring protected workers.

Change is not easy. Protected workers have no reason to give up their benefits. Moreover, removing rigid protections without offering alternative, contingent safety nets and judicial redress is a recipe for conflict. At the same time, some protection is better than none, and if most workers are unprotected, change becomes necessary to avoid even worse conflict.

Sustainable change in developing countries requires reforming not only specific arrangements, such as rigid labour laws, but also more basic institutions, such as the legislature and the judiciary, to make them more responsive to people’s needs. If developed countries’ citizens want to feel slightly better about their economies’ slow growth and high unemployment, they should contemplate how much worse matters could be without the institutions that they have.

The view expressed here are the author’s own.

Raghuram Rajan, professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the chief economic adviser in India’s finance ministry, is the author of Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy.

Crisis call: Infosys brings back Murthy as Chairman for Re 1

(This story, written by NS Ramnath of Forbes Indiabefore the decision to bring back NR Narayana Murthy as Chairman of Infosys was taken today, gives you the backdrop against which to view the changes. Infy was limping, and its peers were gaining ground. Murthy’s return is intended to reverse the slide and to acknowledge that the Infosys 3.0 strategy has as yet failed to deliver.)

By NS Ramnath : First Post :1 June 2013 39 mts ago

As you drive on the flyover to the sprawling Electronic City from Bangalore, you can’t miss the shiny, glass buildings on the Infosys  campus. One is a pyramid, another looks like the bow of a ship and yet another has a big hole right in the middle.

What lies inside this building, which goes by the number 44, holds a key to the future of the 32-year-old software company. Inside, Infosys Experience Centre showcases a range of new products that its engineers developed in the last few years, some of them a direct outcome of its Infosys 3.0 strategy.

One application helps Infosys clients reduce incoming calls by nudging end users to solve problems without having to reach out to a contact centre. Its algorithms use unstructured data (from Facebook, for example) to figure it all out. Another app lets a client (say a bank, which is squeamish about telling a third party what it plans to do with its customers, and yet is interested in emerging technologies such as social, mobile and big data) build its own big data application using algorithms in Infosys’s library. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping the databases you want, the visual tools you want to use.

Inside the building, engineers trade jargon like Hadoop and NLP as they walk around. One can feel the raw energy of a well-funded startup. It is a feeling one associated with Infosys 10 years ago, when it seemed it couldn’t take a single misstep, and journalists mobbed around the top management to ask them questions on… how to run the world.

Today, the questions are different: They are based on a suspicion that perhaps the top guys don’t know how to run Infosys.

While its peers are sprinting, Infosys seems to be limping. Its revenue growth is slower than the industry (which means it is losing market share); its operating profit is dropping too. It has let Cognizant—a company founded 13 years after Infosys—run past it. Once known for consistently beating its own estimates and market expectations, it missed its revenue guidance a number of times before deciding to temporarily stop giving guidance. The market has beaten down its stock.

This sense of gloom is in stark contrast to the scene inside Building 44. And here’s the interesting part—the polar opposites emerged out of a single seed: Infosys 3.0. The same strategy that is cementing the future of Infosys is in a way leading to its poor performance today.

Agreed, this is not the most popular explanation for the company’s woes. The prevalent reasons revolve around its leadership or its aggression or its portfolio mix. There’s a bit of truth in all these, but none of them explain why these weaknesses should matter so much to Infosys.

Take leadership. No other IT CEO among the top five companies has been as pilloried by stakeholders as SD Shibulal. (In the company’s recent annual strategy meet in Mysore, he had to face tough questions from founder NR Narayana Murthy.) According to Glassdoor, a website that lets employees vote on their CEOs anonymously, Shibulal has the lowest approval rating among his peers—51 percent (N Chandrasekaran of TCS  has a rating of 88 percent, Cognizant’s Francisco D’Souza 92 percent, Wipro  ‘s TK Kurien 78 percent, HCL Tech  ‘s Anant Gupta 68 percent). Critics say Shibulal is an operations man—without marketing background and lacking vision.

However, studies show that employee ratings are often biased by company performance, and a company’s performance is determined by the strategic decisions taken in the past. No one expected Shibulal to infuse new vision into Infosys. He was there to execute a strategy conceptualised when Kris Gopalakrishnan was the CEO. And, by all accounts, he was the right man for that job. “Shibu is one of the most determined people I have met. If he starts something, he will finish it,” Subhash Dhar, then the head of sales and marketing, told my colleague Mitu Jayashankar when Shibulal took charge.

Infosys 3.0, the strategy to take the company to the next level of achievement, has not delivered for several reasons. Reuters

Consider the second reason: Lack of aggression. So much was made of Infosys’s reluctance to make a big acquisition that when it acquired Lodestone last year, there was a sense of triumph among its leaders. (“I don’t think ‘Infosys’ and ‘conservative’ should be used in the same sentence anymore,” said Shibulal.) But the growth in other companies was not driven primarily by acquisitions. In 2008, HCL Technologies acquired British SAP consulting firm Axon, but its own growth was driven by infrastructure management. Cognizant makes only tuck-under acquisitions, good to open doors, but too small to drive growth straightaway. In a note to its clients, JP Morgan pointed out that TCS has not made a single worthwhile acquisition since Citi’s BPO arm in 2008; and in any case, its growth was driven not just by BPO.

Shibulal’s own explanation for Infy’s struggles—of blaming it all on the market—doesn’t carry much water either, given that others also operate in the same market. It is true that Infosys has a higher percentage from consulting and systems integration, which are discretionary spends. However, its competitors and some analysts point out that it’s not as high as the 30 percent that Infosys says it is, since a good part of systems integration is about maintenance.

The reason really comes down to something that people don’t usually point out to: Infosys 3.0.

All major players embarked on new strategies around five years ago. HCL Technologies, under its hard talking CEO Vineet Nayar, decided to put its force behind infrastructure management and re-bids. Cognizant, which was bigger than HCL Tech, under its young, ambitious and methodical boss Francisco D’Souza, added more verticals and geographies like consulting and infrastructure management in Europe. TCS was more global and had a finger in all these. Its efficiency-driven CEO R Chandrasekaran reorganised the company into smaller units of USD 250 million each. In all these cases, the restructuring was done to make the individual parts grow faster. There was no big change in the direction (and when there was one, it fell on a separate business unit, or a set of business units).

But Infosys 3.0 was a very different exercise. It came from the recognition that there was a significant change happening in the world of business. “It was not created out of the sky. I met over a 100 clients myself,” says Sanjay Purohit, who was chief strategy officer when it was designed, and is now in charge of products, platforms and solutions division. This is similar to Cognizant’s Horizon 3, which looks at emerging technologies such as social, mobile, big data and other products.

But Infosys 3.0 was much broader in scope. It also encompassed the other parts of the company, including the core operations business (application development and maintenance, infrastructure management, BPO), and the transformational business (consulting and systems integration).

While the sales teams in other companies were mostly selling more of the same, the Infosys sales team was also selling a vision of the future. The company conducted over a hundred workshops with senior leaders of client organisations, laying down how the emerging technology trends will change their business, and why they should partner with Infosys to get ready for that change. Infosys changed its tagline to ‘building tomorrow’s enterprise’.

The only problem was, all these happened at a time when clients were worried about saving today’s enterprise. The economic crisis had shrunk IT budgets and CIOs were looking at ways to keep the lights on at a lower cost. Companies which were flexible on pricing could grab these contracts when they came up for renewal, like HCL did. On the blueprint, Infosys’s new matrix structure should have ensured that the team pursued tomorrow’s opportunities as well as today’s business. But, in reality, that did not happen. “The company lost the plot on the core business,” says a senior executive from a rival company.

To get a sense of why this did not work, contrast Infosys’s approach with that of Cognizant. When Cognizant restructured itself to align with the emerging technologies, it clearly defined the contours of each set of business units. Horizon 1 was about its core business—such as application development and maintenance—which contributed most of its revenues. Horizon 2 was about emerging businesses that it had entered in the last three-four years. And Horizon 3 was about new technologies that would drive its future growth. The responsibilities were clear. D’Souza was incharge of H3, while Gordon Coburn, Rajeev Mehta and Chandrasekaran were in charge of the first two.

However, Infosys 3.0 was a philosophy that pervaded the entire organisation and all its businesses irrespective of their maturity within Infosys. (Infosys 1 was about establishing global delivery capability; Infosys 2.0 was about scaling the global delivery model in different verticals; Infosys 3.0 was about building tomorrow’s enterprise.) Its sales team was asked to pursue Infosys 3.0 opportunities (of creating tomorrow’s enterprise), as well as make the sales in existing businesses (maintenance, testing and business process outsourcing). In 2011, while he was still a COO, Shibulal explained this to analysts in terms of a matrix organisation, in which the sales team would find a balance between scaling up the existing businesses even while selling the vision of the future.

The numbers show the sales team was getting carried away with 3.0. As a result, it was losing its edge in core markets. In North America, the biggest market for all Indian IT services companies, Infosys fell behind Cognizant in March 2011 quarter. (Cognizant’s quarterly revenues grew from USD 1,012.1 million to USD 1,069.9 million that quarter, while Infosys revenues shrank from USD 1,025.5 million to USD 1,020.5 million.) A quarter later, it happened in its largest vertical, banking and finance. The inevitable happened a year later: Cognizant overtook Infosys in overall revenues too.

Infosys was losing out on another of its traditional strengths, dealing with large clients. The number of USD 100-million clients went from 13 to 15 in the last two years. At the same time, for TCS, it went up from 8 to 16, and even for underperforming Wipro it went from 3 to 10.

Two other issues within Infosys made this more complicated. The first is its devotion to profitability. The desire for profitability shows in sales and marketing expenses. Says Sudin Apte, CEO of Offshore Insights, an IT-focussed consultancy, “Infosys continues to underspend in S&M [sales and marketing]. While they are spending couple of millions more and percentage has gone up from 4.8 percent few quarters back to just about 5, it’s still much less than what their top three peers spend. Further, not only the improvement in S&M—both spend and client outreach activity—is improving only a bit, its pace is also very low. We believe both the increase in S&M and pace are falling short of what is required and Infosys does not have time at hand and its problems are big.” The joke within Infosys campus is, it’s not “income – expenses = profit” at Infy, it”s “income – profit = expenses”.

So, what stops the company from investing more in sales and marketing, or getting more flexible about pricing?

One, it believes that when demand conditions get better, it will get the growth back, without compromising its profits. That, in fact, is the promise of Infosys 3.0. With the new strategy, it is possible to be both a growth leader and a margin leader.

But, there’s no denying that it’s right now standing on shaky ground. It’s telling on what’s perhaps the most important resource for an IT company. Subhash Dhar, who spoke approvingly of Shibulal’s ambition, has quit Infosys. The company has seen at least three other high-profile exits, and many more smaller ones. (In March 2008, its attrition rates were just 1 percentage point more than that of TCS; now it’s 5 to 7 percentage points more than its bigger rival.)

Writing in Forbes India towards the end of 2011, Apte said absence of charismatic leaders weakened the company’s ability to get access to Fortune 500 boardrooms. Nothing has changed, he now says. “In addition, compared to their peers like TCS and Cognizant, quantity of effort that Infosys is putting for business growth in existing clients—say on account mining, client hand holding and support, and proactive solution proposing to clients—is, per Offshore Insights estimates, approximately 15-20 percent lower. This is clearly the reason for their slower growth.”

Sitting in one of the rooms in Building 44, Sanjay Purohit is quick to dodge a question on what he would do about the fall in short-term growth, if he were in his previous role of CSO. “That’s a wrong question. Strategy is about the long term.”

It’s true. That question should have been addressed to Shibulal. But Shibulal didn’t speak toForbes India for this story, nor did he respond to questions over email. Infosys’s spokesperson said he was abroad, busy meeting customers. Investors would hope it’s not so much about building tomorrow’s enterprise, as it is about getting revenues. In this quarter, and the next and the next and the next. Not getting that will undermine its future, irrespective of how good its strategy is.

 NS Ramnath writes for Forbes India

Infosys brings back N. R. Narayana Murthy as exective chairman

N. R. Narayana Murthy has been reappointed as the executive chairman of the board. Photo: Mint
Live Mint :Pankaj Mishra : Sat, Jun 01 2013. 11 43 AM IST

Narayana Murthy’s son Rohan Murthy too would join the company as his executive assistant

Bangalore: Nearly seven years after he stepped down from all executive roles at Infosys Ltd., the company’s iconic founder N. R. Narayana Murthy has been reappointed as the executive chairman of the board, replacing the new leadership led by ICICI Bank Ltdchairman K. V. Kamath put in place in August 2011 that failed to help the company regain its bellwether status in India’s $108 billion information technology industry.

“This calling was sudden, unexpected, and most unusual. But, then, Infosys is my middle child. Therefore, I have put aside my plans-in-progress and accepted this responsibility. I am grateful to Mr. K V Kamath—the chairman, the board, and every Infoscion for giving me this opportunity. I intend to do my best to add value to the Company in this challenging situation,” Narayana Murthy said in a statement.

The Board will take up in its meeting on 15 June 2013, the resolutions for convening an extraordinary general meeting within the requisite period, in order to seek approval from the shareholders for appointing him as the executive chairman and whole-time director for a period of five years commencing on 1 June 2013, Infosys said in a statement. During his five year term, Narayana Murthy would draw a token compensation of Rs.1 per year.

Founded in 1981 by Narayana Murthy and six others, including Nandan Nilekani, S. Gopalakrishnan andS. D. Shibulal, Infosys was considered the bellwether of India’s $108 billion information technology (IT) sector until three years ago.

In the past two years, the company has missed its revenue and profit growth forecasts several times and has been overtaken by Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. in annual revenue. It also pursued the new 3.0 strategy doggedly in an environment when outsourcing customers are only looking to save costs.

Last year, Infosys missed the lower end of its revenue forecast at least twice and stopped giving quarterly forecasts. The sluggish growth rates and increasingly impatient investors prompted Infosys to re-examine its strategy and it started cutting prices for select clients. The company also entered into revenue-sharing agreements with companies such as IPsoft Inc. to drive up business volumes, even at the cost of margins.

In an interview with Mint on 7 May Narayana Murthy had denied any plans to come back at Infosys, but added that it’s “difficult to predict what will happen tomorrow”. Narayana Murthy, 66, who served as chief executive officer (CEO) from 1981 to 2002 and as chairman from 2002 to 2011, said he has no immediate plans to do so.

“At this stage, looking at the data that I have, I wouldn’t say that. So, who knows what happens in the future, I am not gone, cannot say what I will do tomorrow, I may not be there tomorrow morning. So, it is not possible for me to predict what will happen tomorrow,” Narayana Murthy had said.

“The Board has taken this step keeping in mind the challenges that the technology industry and the company faces and in the interest of all stakeholders, particularly shareholders large and small, who have asked for strengthening of the executive leadership during this challenging time. Narayana Murthy’s entrepreneurial and leadership record and the long experience he has had as a technology pioneer makes him eminently qualified to lead the company and provide strategic direction at this point in time,” said Kamath.

The challenge for the Infosys board is to ensure that the company does not become an outlier in an industry where top firms including Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, HCL Technologies Ltd and Cognizant continue to gain market share in the same industry, serving similar customers.

Experts had raised questions about the Infosys 3.0 strategy being pursued by CEO Shibulal.

Experts such as Partha Iyengar, who heads research at Gartner Inc.’s India office, said recently Infosys’s pessimistic stance at the beginning of the year is a cause for concern and it’s time the board gets aggressive.

“If you’re in a position of strength and you’re making changes, then it’s alright. But when your position is weak, you should not be making drastic changes. They made those changes at a time when they came to the realization that the market doesn’t see them at a premium,” said Iyengar.

In another significant departure from the rules imposed by Narayana Murthy himself, the company said his son Rohan Murthy too would join the company.

In order to function more effectively Narayana Murthy intends to create the chairman’s office to assist him during his tenure and has requested the board to permit him to put together a team for this function. The team will include his son, Rohan Murthy, as Narayana Murthy’s executive assistant, Infosys said in a statement.

If appointed, Rohan Murthy’s term as executive assistant to the chairman would be co-terminus with that of Narayana Murthy. Rohan Murthy has requested that he should also be paid only a token compensation of Rs.1 per year, the company added.

B T ;BT Online Bureau       Last Updated: June 1, 2013  | 12:10 IST

Infosys on Saturday announced that the company has appointed NR Narayana Murthy into the board and executive leadership of the company. The company said in a press release that Murthy has been appointed Executive Chairman of the Board and Additional director with effect from June 1, 2013.

K.V.Kamath would step down from his position as chairman of the board and take up position of lead Independent director effective June 1, 2013.

S Gopalakrishnan would be re-designated Executive vice chairman effective June 1, 2013 and would primarily focus on key client relationships and broader industry issues. S D Shibulal would continue to be the Managing Director and CEO.

Murthy's appointment as a director would be placed for the consideration of the company's shareholders in the Annual General Meeting (AGM) on June 15, 2013. Subject to his election as a director at the AGM, the board will take up in its meeting on June 15, 2013, the resolutions for convening an extraordinary general meeting within the requisite period, in order to seek approval from the shareholders for appointing him as the Executive Chairman and Whole-time Director for a period of five years commencing on June 1, 2013.

N R Narayana Murthy said, "This calling was sudden, unexpected, and most unusual. But, then, Infosys is my middle child. Therefore, I have put aside my plans-in-progress and accepted this responsibility. I am grateful to K V Kamath - the Chairman, the Board, and every Infoscion for giving me this opportunity. I intend to do my best to add value to the Company in this challenging situation."

During his five year teunre, Murthy would draw a token compensation of Rupee One per year. 

The press release further said, "In order to function more effectively, Narayana Murthy intends to create the Chairman's office to assist him during his tenure and has requested the Board to permit him to put together a team for this function. The team will include his son, Rohan Murty, as Narayana Murthy's executive assistant."

Business Today in its Feb 1, 2013 edition and cover story 'Is Infosys missing Narayana Murthy?' had reported that Infosys, a company that grew from a seven man start-up in 1981 to the 155,629 person, $7 billion enterprise it is today, has time and again been called India's most admired and respected company. But its halo has dimmed.

An internal restructuring, a leadership vacuum, complacency towards customers, rigid contracting terms, and a stubborn high-margin pricing model have made recording growth at Infosys as difficult as walking on wet tar. So much so, the company is now struggling to beat even the average industry growth rates. Its bigger rival, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has pulled away and widened its revenue lead by about $3 billion, while third-placed Cognizant has already overtaken Infosys in terms of quarterly revenues in the June and September quarters of 2012.