Glass Is Glass ; the Exit of Another Senior Vice President, This Time, Head of Sales Basab Pradhan, From India's Best Known Software Firm Raises the Original Question: Is There a Glass Ceiling at Infosys?

Summary

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On July 19, Infosys Technologies announced that Basab Pradhan, its head of global sales, was leaving the company for an entrepreneurial venture. The move clearly took the company by surprise; it had thought highly enough of Pradhan to promote him to the post of head of global sales when Phaneesh Murthy left Infosys in 2002 (actually, Pradhan ended up with a third Murthy's job; Murthy was also Chairman, Progeon, and head of global marketing). "I had some great opportunities to grow when I decided to quit; (I left because) I wanted to do something that hasn't been done before," says Pradhan, explaining his reason for leaving the company. He has already poached four Infoscions, Sandeep Shroff, P.R. Ganapathi, Ramesh Gopalan, and Nitin Gupta for his venture that will have, he adds, a product-oriented offshoring model.

July 22, some three days after Infosys announced Pradhan's decision to leave the company, was Hema Ravichandar's last day at work. The 43-year old head of hr at the company (she was designated Senior Vice President, Group hr) has, in the short time since, rushed headlong into the world of consulting and says she wants to do something related to hr across industries.

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Glass Is Glass ; the Exit of Another Senior Vice President, This Time, Head of Sales Basab Pradhan, From India's Best Known Software Firm Raises the Original Question: Is There a Glass Ceiling at Infosys?

That's the official version. The unofficial version is that Pradhan and Ravichandar left because they had gotten as far as they could at Infosys. With five founders (all are on the board; see The Famous Five) and two other executive directors (Mohandas Pai, CFO and Head, Administration; and Srinath Batni, Group Co Head, Worldwide Customer Delivery; the two, Infoscions joke, are almost "family"), goes this theory, there's only so far an executive at Infosys can go. The caveat readers would do well to read before they subscribe to this 'glass ceiling' story is that most p...

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