Still a youngster when the country was divided in 1947, Renjen’s father was forced to forgo engineering school in the United Kingdom and eventually moved back to Rohtak. In this small town in Haryana, some 80 kms from India’s capital town, the senior Renjen placed down his roots and established an electrical switch-gear firm.
When he was around seven, the young Renjen was packed off to The Lawrence school in Sanawar since Rohtak’s institutes, as his parents’ reasoned, simply weren’t good enough.
“In the town that I was growing up in, that’s what you did if your parents had some means,” he said during a 2014 interview. The Lawrence school, established in 1847 nearby the foothills of the Himalaya, is among the country’s most elite institutions, among its alumni are a list of chief ministers, bureaucrats, business leaders and even members of the subcontinent’s royal families.
By the time he was 14, his father’s business collapsed, boarding school got too expensive and Renjen was asked to return home to continue his studies. “So I’d go to school in the morning, come back and then put in my time,” at his father’s plant, Renjen recalled during the interview. “And I did that for many, many years, four, five years.”
With cash tight, Renjen apparently had very little choice once it came to choosing colleges. “My father couldn’t afford to send me to any other college, so I went to the college in my local city,” he said in another interview.
After graduating with a degree in economic science, Renjen chanced upon a newspaper advert for Usha International, manufacturers of stitching machines and different home appliances. He arrived in Delhi on a local bus, sporting jeans and without a tie, but landed his first job at the company. His early years at an elite boarding school would have undoubtedly given him an edge.
In 1984, Renjen won a Rotary Foundation Scholarship that offered him a ticket to the US—and a place at Willamette University’s Atkinson school of Management.
Till then, he had never travelled outside the country, or even flown on an airplane. “I had this scholarship, two pairs of tight jeans and a couple of hundred extra dollars and I showed up in Oregon, and visited the college there,” Renjen said.
Renjen’s call to attend the private liberal arts institution in Salem, Oregon was conjointly influenced by family; he had an aunt who lived in the city, who helped him in the transition into what would become a permanent move to the United States.
At B-school, Renjen would sit at the front of class and record each lecture on a tape recorder. Inexperienced with the American accent, the boy from Rohtak thought it would be good to listen to the lectures twice over to catch each word spoken by his professors.
Clear that he needed to apply his newly-acquired Master in Business Administration to an American firm, Renjen then went out on an employment hunt that took him from Booz Allen Hamilton to Citibank. Eventually, though, he settled on Touche Ross—which incorporated with Deloitte Haskins & Sells in 1989—and Renjen never left.
“While I was in school, a local magazine picked the 10 best students, and they picked me and profiled me in the magazine,” Renjen remembered in an interview last year. That magazine was picked up by Deloitte (Touche Ross) partner on a flight, who scanned Renjen’s profile and then asked an assistant to call him in for an interview.
Lured by the promise of a consulting job—a profession that he knew precious very little about—Renjen rode a Greyhound bus to Seattle city. And (again) without a suit, he went through round after round of interviews, to eventually land the job. (That sort of sartorial inadequacy during a B-school student’s wardrobe would be frowned upon currently. Thirty years ago, however, he still squeezed through.)
“They were prepared to pay me $37,000 in the early 1980s and they wanted to hire me. And that’s how I ended up with Deloitte,” Renjen explained in 2014. “And 28 years later, I’m chairman of the firm.”
And Renjen’s rise from an analyst to the chairman of Deloitte LLP (as the United States firm is known) in June 2011—and currently, to the position of chairman of Deloitte International (which guides all 47-member corporations, together with Deloitte LLP) — has been designed on one core skill: Mergers and acquisitions.
“I’m good at what I do,” Renjen said. “I’m really really good at what I do, and I’m not saying this with any level of arrogance. The only reason why I’m saying that is because I’ve put in over 25 years perfecting the craft.”
And it’s a running analogy that Renjen employs to describe his journey to the very top of Deloitte.
“This is a relay race,” he told colleagues last year. “I want people to say, ‘He really ran that race well, he didn’t drop the baton, he didn’t screw it up.’”
From June 01, when he takes over as Deloitte Global’s CEO, a brand new lap begins for Renjen.
