On a Wednesday evening in April, in a conference call from Mumbai, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan tried to get ahead of the first question.

It was his first earnings call as CEO-designate of Tata Communications. He had been in the job for 10 days. The investor-relations team had prepped him for this moment. The team’s head, he said, was “looking at me very anxiously”. There was, apparently, a right answer to what comes next: what is the company’s north star?

Lakshminarayanan declined to give one. “I’m still finding my way around our corporate........

© The Ken