Man of Mystery

Charan's latest book is about revenues and growth, a concept that has gathered dust in recent years as companies tried to X-Acto-Knife their way to profitability. "Good" growth comes not from cost cutting or acquisitions, he says, but rather by retooling resources and improving cooperation within a company. Actually doing that is the hard part, and that's where Charan seems to add the most value. He worked with Atlanta-based NDCHealth Corp., a health-care-information provider, to change the way it looked at a high-end product for processing electronic claims. Charan suggested starting by figuring out what exactly the customer--hospitals--needed, and then working backward from there, using the entire sales management team to brainstorm. As it turned out, the most crying need was cash flow: It took one hospital with $4 billion in billings more than 100 days to get paid. An NDCHealth offering allowed the hospital to cut 20 days out of the process, saving $20 million in cash in six months. "What we were able to do," says Walter Hoff, NDCHealth's chairman and CEO, "was change our attitude throughout the organization on what was the essence of the product." By marketing its product as a cash generator, NDCHealth sold more than 400 units in the first six months of 2003, up from just 100 in all of 2002. Hoff thinks it will add as much as 20% to the company's revenue.

Business in its most essential form--the family store--is in Charan's blood. A native of northern India, Charan was raised in modest circumstances, part of an extended family of 13 that ran a shoe shop. One of just two children to complete high school, he worked in Australia before coming to Harvard Business School. There, he roomed with John Joyce, who 40 years later remains one of Charan's closest friends. Joyce and others describe Charan in otherworldly, almost saintlike terms. It would be suspicious, frankly, if it weren't so uniformly consistent. "He has a very refreshing absence of duplicity or guile," says Joyce, who named his son Michael Ram Joyce. Even as a student, Charan was exceedingly mature and entirely rational. Joyce fondly remembers how he managed to negotiate their room rate from $375 per year to $248 because it was over the boiler room. "It was neither hot nor noisy," says Joyce, "but the woman on the other side of the counter concluded that he was a gentlemanly fellow. His affability was a plus."

In his second year at HBS, Charan was invited into the doctoral program. He decided it was an opportunity he couldn't pass up, so he tailored his studies to fit the program and finished his MBA in 1965 and his PhD just two years later, becoming, he says, the first Indian on Harvard's full-time faculty. Charan was a wonderful teacher but clearly wasn't on the tenure track. ("I just didn't do the research," he says.) So he left for Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, where he spent three years before taking a tenured job at Boston University in 1976. By this time, his consulting career had taken off, and in 1978, he decided to pursue it full time.

And so began a whirlwind ride that, a quarter-century later, hasn't slowed down a bit. Last year alone, Charan logged more than 500,000 air miles (a recent two-week stretch: New York, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Baltimore, Connecticut again, San Antonio, Wisconsin, Miami, and Singapore). He can't remember the last time he took a vacation. And although he has two assistants who work for his company, Charan Associates Inc., out of an office in Dallas, it is more of a logistical hub for his frenetic schedule than a place where he spends any time. From there, they handle all of his bookings, keep him on schedule, and send him the freshly starched and folded shirts and clean underwear he'll need for his next leg. (One of his assistants says the secret to wrinkle-free express mailing is to pack clothes in plastic.)

Perhaps because he's unencumbered by kids' soccer games or a wife's birthdays, he is utterly reliable, and his equally busy clients respect him for that. A breakfast meeting on Sunday at 7 a.m. in Cleveland and a lunch in San Fran-cisco? No problem. "He's very easy to get a hold of," says NDCHealth's Hoff. "I can call him anytime, or he'll call me and say, 'How's it going?' " He is famous for never missing appointments, often scheduling several different flights simultaneously to make sure he gets out in time. Even on September 11, 2001, when he was stuck in Philadelphia, he hired a car and driver to get him to a meeting in Raleigh.

For most people, this lifestyle would be a brutal sacrifice. But to hear Charan tell it, it is his own priorities that are in order, not all those frantic executives who try to do it all and merely manage to disappoint and alienate everyone around them, from their neglected spouses, to their rushed customers and clients, to their friends who don't bother calling anymore. "This is all vacation for me," he says. "If you love your job, this is the juice of life."