The best predictor of your future is not past performance; it is the combination of your past, your willingness to accept your gifts and deficiencies, your willingness to commit to a plan in which you leverage your gifts and address your deficiencies, your willingness to execute your plan, your willingness to be vigilant to the results you achieve, and most importantly your willingness to course correct continuously.

—John Mattone

NV “TIGER” TYAGARAJAN GREW UP in the culturally diverse city of Bombay, India, where more citizens were from “somewhere else” than in any other Indian city. From his early days in school to his college life, this would become important as it informed his life in a profound way. A small family of five, the Tyagarajans were close knit and committed to education.

Luckily, a good education was attainable at only one dollar a month. And not only was Bombay full with people of all nationalities, but it was rich with various religions as well, a true metropolitan city. In classes of up to 60 students in the local Catholic school, sometimes 10 languages were spoken. There were Catholic students, Muslim students, Hindu students, and Jewish students, all speaking English. Tiger didn't know it at the time, but it was a tiny microcosm of his future life in New York City.

After these formative educational years, Tiger did his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, studying mechanical engineering. Tiger was a natural, excelling at the logic-driven approach an engineering degree required, and yet he felt a mild dissatisfaction with mechanical engineering. Like many future leaders, the gut instinct would be an insight into his future. Tiger realized very early on that his passion lay not in machines, but people.

To earn a master's degree in marketing and finance, Tiger attended the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, spending two idyllic years in what seemed to be the perfect fit. He was able to use his love of numbers for finance combined with his passion for people to drive the marketing needed to bring people to the products they needed.

A sweet spot was found.

Straight out of grad school, Tiger started working for the Indian subsidiary of U.S.-based Chesebrough-Ponds, selling, of all things, cosmetics! After just seven years with the organization, which had been recently acquired by Unilever, Tiger's sales management responsibilities included the country's largest region, accounting for a whopping 40 percent of Chesebrough-Ponds' sales.

Those years proved to be heady and intense—a great training ground for single product marketing. But it was time for a change in course, so Tiger set out to enter the world of financial services. When offered a position with Citibank's retail mortgage lending business, he accepted. In six different jobs in three years at Citibank, Tiger was almost instantly tagged as the “cleanup guy,” the person designated to clean up various messes, often very serious. His most effective strategy for doing so? Attracting then developing a team of A players.

Around the same time, GE Capital announced plans to set up a financial services company in India. Tiger, a fan of Jack Welch, knew that he could build a career in a company as big as GE, where he could move from one company to another within the organization over the course of his professional life. He joined GE Capital India as one of only five employees in India, head of risk for consumer lending.

As planned, Tiger stuck with GE, eventually relocating to New York in 2002 as global head of operations and Six Sigma for GE's commercial lending business. Finally, Tiger joined Gecis, which is now Genpact.

Based in New York, Tiger is credited as one of the industry leaders who pioneered a new global business model and transformed a division of GE (formerly GE Capital International Services) into Genpact, a leading business process management and technology services company with $2.28 billion in annual revenues in 2014. With nearly 68,000 employees across 25 countries, Genpact designs, transforms, and runs intelligent business operations, including those that are complex and specific to a set of chosen industries. The company generates impact for more than 800 clients, including more than one-fourth of the Fortune Global 500 representing key vertical industries. Based on the company's GE heritage and Lean Six Sigma DNA, Tiger spearheaded the development of Genpact's Smart Enterprise Processes (SEPSM) proprietary framework for making business processes more effective and driving transformation for global enterprises. Genpact is publicly listed on the NYSE under the symbol “G.” Tiger is a Genpact executive officer and serves on the company's board of directors.

Tiger frequently writes and speaks about global talent issues, continuous skill development, and the importance of building a strong corporate culture. He is also passionate about diversity and serves as one of the founding supporters of the U.S. chapter of the 30% Club, an organization of CXOs focused on achieving better gender balance at U.S. companies. Tiger is also a member of The Wall Street Journal CEO Council. I talked to Tiger (Skype) while we were each seated at our respective desks, both littered with far too many electronic devices.

At the age of 90, when I'm on my deathbed and I'm beginning to say good-bye to the world, I'll sit back and think about how I've spent those years. Do I want to say that 30 years of my life, I slept? No. I'm scratching my head and saying how bizarre is that?

Particularly if you also have the view that even on the last day of my ninetieth year, I'm still learning. And I think, why should I waste time sleeping? Of course, my wife has a big problem with that discussion.

And as you may know or may not know, Bombay is probably—more so in the days I used to be there growing up in the '70s—much more of a metropolitan, cosmopolitan city than any other city in India. I think today a few other cities are, halfway, 80 percent there, Bangalore, for example, and Delhi, but in those days it was only Bombay. So Bombay had a mixture of people coming from all parts of India, so there's not one group.

And it had probably a larger population of people from outside of India than any other city in India. Again, today probably Bangalore has a good number and so does Delhi. But in those days, Bombay had the most. So why is that important? It's important because from the time I went to school, I dealt with people who came from extremely different backgrounds.

Within the first 48 hours I walked up to him and I said, “You know, I really need to learn a lot. I don't know anything. I know that I'm supposed to be your boss, but you know this and I know this that I can't do anything unless you teach me. Are you willing to teach me?”

Even though we were an outpost in India, much of what we did was Jack's doing. I learned a lot from his example. At some point in time when we were four years into that journey running financial services for GE Capital in India, we decided to set up this business, which is to provide services to GE Capital businesses in the U.S. and globally and, over time, services to all the GE businesses. This was the business we set up.

And very early in that journey, a lot of the culture that we embodied was the GE culture. So what was that? An intense focus on process, which means that if you have a problem that you're trying to solve or if you have an opportunity that you're trying to attack, one of the best ways to go after it is to deconstruct it—deconstruct the process that gets you to the answer, the from and the to and then get down to the deconstructed, granular layout of that process.

And then check out what's working, what's not working, how to improve it. It coincided very nicely with my engineering background and engineering thinking.

We had the easy job of building an organization from scratch and immersing them in process thinking, metric student thinking, in order to drive improvement using things like Lean Six Sigma.

The other part of our culture would be a culture that says everything can be continuously improved, it never ends.

And so the culture of continuous improvement again, correlates to curiosity. The word that we use and we've now used it for 15-plus years to describe our customer focus is maniacal focus on the client.

We have to behave irrationally. Rational decision-making, when it comes to client, is actually not a good thing.

However, I think deep in the organization, we would all still argue that given a choice, it's better to find a person who is hungry to learn and capable of learning versus someone who may not be very good on those two dimensions, but knows exactly what needs to be done in that space.

Our belief is that what you know today is guaranteed to be irrelevant tomorrow. So what qualities are imperative? One is willingness and the other is the capability. And are you passionate about it? For us, that becomes important. And that correlates well with curiosity, with inquisitiveness, with complete humility.

I'm really looking for inquisitiveness, curiosity, learning, desire, passion, and all of that. And obviously you know, all of that, the ability to work with a broader group of people in order to be able to drive that.

We learned a bunch of methodologies, tools, and programs from them in the first seven years of our existence as a part of GE. And the last 11 years, we've been an independent company. We have a strong hierarchy of programs that we run starting with very young team leaders. How do you coach them and train them, both in and out of a classroom setting? It's all about experiential learning from each other.

So 50 people in the room go through a two-week program that arms them with the methodology and the truth that hone their skills to be able to manage teams better.

We spend a lot of time bringing people together into these programs. We have a pretty significant investment in these programs. Our leaders spend time teaching the program.

So that's one behavior that we love, which is share your wins and losses continuously so that everyone can learn.

Part of the reason it's so volatile and uncertain is actually technology, because the moment you have cycles of change being so short in terms of new things, the new destroys the old. By definition you have volatility.

But if you go back to one of our tenets of our culture, it's process, it's discipline, it's execution, it's say-do ratio—when I promise something, I deliver it. That is a way to address the chaos. There are no questions asked. That's the culture we have. And our clients love that culture.

And then you combine that with a culture maniacally focused on clients. The client is often right. And therefore, listen carefully to the client and find a way to execute to it. That's the culture we have.

But here is the problem with that culture in today's world that I'm trying to change: Our clients are beginning to say, “you should tell me when what I'm asking you is completely wrong. You should tell me when I'm an idiot. You should tell me when you are unwilling to accept what I'm asking you to do.”

This is a shift. Now the clients are not saying, “I'm the expert,” the clients are saying, “You are the expert.” That's a big cultural change and our teams are grappling with the combination of both. It doesn't mean you give up the say-do ratio, it doesn't mean you give up the client focus and promise, but it does mean you have to figure out how to incorporate the change.

So, that's one culture change. The other culture change is a shift in vision: people want to be presented with the dream. They want to be sold on the next most beautiful, best thing. It doesn't matter if that thing doesn't yet exist, they're willing to get in line. And that's a big shift. Selling an aspiration, a dream.

And the other thing that I tell them is do not choose based on short-term material numbers, because there's going to come a time when you actually realize it has not advanced you to where you need to be, to where you want to get to.

Compounding long-term makes a huge difference. Step functions make a huge difference. And therefore, if you chart your career over 30 years and if your goal is be something big, to create wealth, then do not necessarily jump into the one that's the highest paying today, because that may not be the best path.

You must follow the path and the passion and then be flexible and nimble and move in different directions.

The last thing is start by saying you don't know anything. The end of your college is not the end of your learning. I do think that one of the dangers in society today (and I think the United States probably has the biggest danger of this) is people think about lives as 20 years of learning; 40 years of contribution, both to companies and society and to oneself; and then 20, 30, 40 years of so-called retired life.

That thinking creates a situation wherein we have a stagnant workforce that's unprepared for the new world.

We live in a dynamic, changing world. The only way to thrive is to be willing to learn anew every day, to have a childlike curiosity and sense of wonder, to approach adversity with humility, and to never waste a moment.