Planned Opportunism

In the first few years of the new millennium, at the height of the boom in the offshore call-center business, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the Indian technology-services giant, made the counter-intuitive decision to divest its call-center operations.

Why? Because although outsourced call centers were a fast-growing piece of its current business, TCS’s leadership had come to believe that they would soon be burdensome. Employee churn was exceptionally high, forcing the HR department into a round-the-clock effort to hire and train as ma.....