L&T Group Chairman SN Subrahmanyan ascends to Rs 1,91,300 Cr

SN Subrahmanyan's impending chairmanship of L&T Group shows his commitment, leadership, and innovative vision.

During a break in the program, Mr Waman Danait and Mr Pathik Kothari inquired, if I could meet Mr SD Kulkarni, CEO of Larsen & Toubro, in Mumbai. He invited me to work with his team, we shook hands and that was the beginning of my learning and training, a vision SDK had and he shared It was referred to by a magazine recently as the Leadership Development factory.

Then Mr. AM Naik became the CEO, I met him in a quarterly management meeting where each member recorded his vision. My association with L&T continued when Madhukar Kotwal heading the HED division invited me to work with his team to cultivate a collaborative culture and recently we had a dialogue on wellbeing. L to R Dinesh Chandra, Falgun Chokshi, Anil Parab

I also reconnected with Mr. Anil Parab and Mr. Falgun Chokshi with our common interest in the well-being of all. He also invited me to visit Planet L&T and to meet the L&T team. I was looking forward to meeting Mr AM Naik but due to his health issues that meeting did not materialize. 

I did have a delightful meeting with the current CEO, Mr S N Subrahmanyan. I had read about him in an article "His colleagues reveal that SNS is a down-to-earth, simple man, with an eye for detail and on the well-being of his employees, a deep understanding of technology, and a man who does the hard yard. "

 His views on the Well-being of employees, especially Intellectual and Spiritual wellness resonated with me and I see L&T becoming "Technology for sustainable growth, with the wellbeing of all. In this role, SNS will guide the NSC, which has a major part to play in ensuring safety in workplaces under the new Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSH Code, 2020).

SNS is also one of nine founding members of the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative (CFLI) India. S. Subrahmanyan, or SNS as he is called within the company, has long been the front-runner to succeed A. Naik, executive chairman of Larsen and Toubro Ltd (L&T). Subrahmanyan, 56, has a civil engineering degree and is a postgraduate in business management, according to his profile on the L&T website.

He started with the infrastructure behemoth in 1984 as a project planning engineer and joined the company’s board in 2011. Naik, who has headed India’s largest infrastructure firm for 18 years, had previously said that given the complexity of L&T with its multiple lines of businesses, an executive hired from outside might not be able to steer the company.

Indeed, Subrahmanyan owes his rise to Naik, who had spotted him over a decade ago when he was a general manager in the company’s construction unit. Subrahmanyan is known for introducing innovative practices and has been an early adopter of new technologies, his profile says.

“This (succession) was in the works for quite some time and over the last few years, the path was pretty well known and the fact that it has happened is testimony to the good planning process. I have known SNS over the years and he has broad shoulders. He has a fine understanding of L&T culture and everything that goes with it," said Vinayak Chatterjee, chairman at Feedback Infra Pvt. Ltd.

On 26 August, at L&T’s annual general meeting, Naik put all speculation at rest by clearly anointing Subrahmanyan as his successor. In response to shareholders’ request to stay on beyond his planned retirement at the end of September 2017, Naik patted Subrahmanyan on the back and said: “This is a very strong man here, you know.

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