While many technology success stories are loud and headline-driven, Tata Elxsi’s journey is marked by quiet, consistent innovation—an approach that helped it overcome serious challenges and engineer a remarkable turnaround. ‘Designed to Win: The Tata Elxsi Story’ (Penguin India) brings this understated success into focus, tracing how one of the Tata Group’s most influential companies built global leadership across transportation, media and telecom, and healthcare through design-led thinking and cutting-edge technology—even at a time when Ratan Tata himself questioned the brand’s name.
Authored by S. Devarajan, former Managing Director of Tata Elxsi, the book draws on firsthand experience to offer practical lessons in leadership, strategy, and innovation—making it a compelling read for business leaders, professionals, young engineers, and startup founders alike.
‘Designed to Win’ has received tremendous early praise from industry stalwarts, and inspires young engineers and entrepreneurs alike. The book offers leaders and managers a candid, unvarnished account of corporate transformation and sustained innovation.
Tata Elxsi may not be the first company that comes to mind when you think of the Tata Group. Still, it is a highly valued member that is revolutionizing the fields of transportation, media and telecom, and healthcare.
Tata Elxsi offers innovative solutions in the advancement of electric vehicles, connected cars, design-led passenger experiences, and software defined vehicle solutions. It also supports media and telecom companies by transforming network operations, enhancing advertising technology and improving content monetization for broadcasters and streaming platforms.
Furthermore, the company develops intelligent medical devices and pioneers novel patient care practices.
With a diverse client base that includes prominent names such as Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan, Mahindra, Comcast, Echostar, and Panasonic, Tata Elxsi has dramatically transformed itself into one of the most valued companies of the Tata Group, consistently delivering growth.
What drives Tata Elxsi’s success? What strategies has it employed to overcome significant challenges and emerge as an immensely successful organization benefiting shareholders, investors and consumers alike?
What lessons can readers learn from Tata Elxsi in entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, strategy and many other management areas? This book is an attempt to answer these and many such questions to enlighten readers about a little-known but unique Tata group company.
Devarajan founded ‘Transmation Consulting’ to provide technology companies a platform to accelerate and transform their business strategies. He is an independent director on the board of Tata Play Limited, and serves on the boards of Prime Focus Ltd, Prime Focus Technologies Ltd, and Quess Corp. He also sits on the board of DNEG India, one of the largest VFX companies in the world, with eight Academy Awards to its name.
Dev is part of the investment committee board of the Karnataka Semiconductor Venture Fund. Previously, Dev was the managing director of Cisco Systems in India, where he set up and managed Cisco’s largest R&D centre outside the USA. Before joining Cisco, Dev was the managing director of Tata Elxsi and Jone of the youngest directors on the Tata Board. He successfully turned around the company from being loss-making to one of the most successful tech companies within the Tata Group.
Dev has also served as a president of the Manufacturers Association for Information Technology (MAIT) and a member of the IT Hardware Task Force, and the IT Vision Task Force set up by the chief minister of Karnataka.
In order to delve deeper into the journey of Tata Elxsi, Sonakshi Datta of GoaChronicle posed a few questions to the author of ‘Designed to Win: The Tata Elxsi Story’.
‘Designed to Win: The Tata Elxsi Story’ Author S Devarajan
How is Tata Elxsi revolutionizing the fields of transportation, media & telecom, and health?
Tata Elxsi has done more than three decades of work in this field. We created state-of-the-art products and applications for others to follow.
Advanced electric vehicles, connected cars, design led passenger experiences and software defined vehicle solutions, which also include autonomous cars.
In the Media and Telecom space, Tata Elxsi revolutionized network transformation, Ad-tech, and content monetization for broadcasters and streaming platforms, apart from creating animation products such as Maya etc.
In the space of Health, Tata Elxsi stomped ahead in innovating digital health and telemedicine, intelligent medical devices and design led patient care experiences.
How would you describe Tata Elxsi’s success journey? What were the challenges the company faced while growing, and how were they overcome?
Tata Elxsi started differently from other IT companies. We decided not to address the routine enterprise business that other tech companies are pursuing. We decided to stay in design, engineering, simulation and animation. We were deeply technology focused and no other company in the country worked in that space.
By the time the company was incorporated in India, we were deeply cash strapped and in staggering debt. We raised money from the market and restructured our business for us and reworked our strategy, making us the top player in the technology space in India.
This focus has continued ever since, making us the niche high end player that Tata Elxsi is, even today. That is our DNA.
What were the most important lessons that Tata Elxsi’s growth journey taught? How are those lessons incorporated in the current times when facing challenges, if any?
The team makes the company. Be a leader with a high emotional quotient. Believe in your team and carry them with you. Their growth is your growth. Be the number 1 or number 2 in the business you are in, or else don’t be there. Stay updated and stay challenged and stay motivated.
Tata Elxsi is a little-known Tata Group company, yet it is unique. What makes it so different, and do you think people should know about it as much as they know about its sister companies?
Tata Elxsi is still a boutique company in the Tata Group. It’s like an award-winning art movie (not very well known and popular) and not a box office block buster. So, people in that space know about Tata Elxsi. I could boldly say that only 10 percent of the tech companies in the world play in this space. So that’s the reason why many people don’t know about Tata Elxsi.
We work in the area of media, transportation, and medical technology and all these are niche spaces. Everyone knows about the car infotainment systems they play with when they drive a car, but not many may know that the technology could be from Tata Elxsi!
What makes ‘Designed to Win: The Tata Elxsi Story’, a must-read for all, especially for entrepreneurs and management professionals?
They should know that when you build something new and world class, success does not come in a straight line. It is quite often messy, painful, with many setbacks. But if you are true to your purpose and build the right team and keep pushing forward, you can build something extraordinary.
This is a book about an unvarnished corporate transformation. There are no shortcuts. Leadership is about standing in the storm with your people, making the hard calls, and inspiring belief when the odds are all stacked up against you.
