The winners: Top honchos of the 13 best managed companies with their awards

The launch: Aroon Purie, Editor-In-Chief, India Today Group, releases the BT issue on India's Best Managed Companies

The hall was restless. Luminaries from India Inc. could barely wait to lay their hands on copies of Business Today featuring the annual BT-A.T. Kearney survey of India's Best Managed Companies. This, in association with Microsoft India, was the award ceremony to coincide with the issue's release in Mumbai.

"It's a great time to be in business," said BT Editor Sanjoy Narayan, "and even more so to be in business journalism." Things were cheerful as never before, the perfect time to celebrate winners-to whom the evening was dedicated. India Today Group Editor-In-Chief Aroon Purie released the issue and explained the award's rationale: to give the industry something to measure overall excellence against. "For companies to succeed, the first thing they must have is passion-passion for their products, customer and for their employees," said Purie. "Also, differentiate yourself. Another mantra for success is innovation," he added.

Echoing some of that, Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India, called this "a great time to be in India and perhaps an even greater time to be an Indian", and extolled the Indian tech companies that had done so much to "ignite our imagination" and the others that turned global excellence from a shibboleth to a profitable pursuit. He quoted C.K. Prahalad as saying that, "Excellence is necessary but not sufficient... we must move beyond best practices to generating next practices." Vivek Gupta, MD, A.T. Kearney India, took the hall through details of the survey. "These companies have been chosen," he said, "because they've shown the path of how to create value and also to create an enthusiasm among their employees and focus on results, and while doing all that also giving to the community."

It was time for the big moment: the actual big award for the evening. It was not a surprise to anyone, really, as Infosys was called into the spotlight for felicitation. Nandan Nilekani, CEO, President & MD, Infosys, collected the award, calling it a "special award for a number of reasons". Rather than "opinion", this selection was based on "vigorous analysis". And Infosys had won with such stiff competition too-all the 13 other companies in the reckoning, to his mind, were worthy claimants to the prize. That said, true to character, Nilekani struck a sober note about future challenges in his acceptance speech. "It's too early for us to declare victory," he said, sounding almost afraid that being handed laurels would induce his company to rest on them, "The real test for Infosys is how it deals in the longevity, how it deals with the intergeneration of leadership, business cycles, and change in environment." The company still had plenty of strategic choices to make, and that, more than accolades for past performance, would occupy him and his team as they strove for long-term significance.

After a quick vote of thanks by BT's Publishing Director Pavan Varshnei in salutation to Microsoft, A.T. Kearney and Canon (official documentation partner), it was time for the rest of the evening. With a ballroom packed with such an assortment of corporate honchos, this part was sure to prove anything but uninteresting.