In 1991 Satyam Computer Services set up “Little India” in a town of about 45,000 people in the heart of the US Midwest. This foothold was about as far removed as possible from Satyam’s headquarters in Hyderabad, India, but it was the home of the four-year-old company’s first Fortune 500 client. From a rented house across from the customer’s software-development center, ten Satyam engineers field-tested the benefits of global IT offshoring by pretending they were in India. They worked nights to simulate the time difference and for six months never met their customers across the street in person, communicating only through a dedicated satellite link. “In the end, the team performed better from Little India than they had while working on site,” Satyam’s founder and chairman, Ramalinga Raju, says today. “It was a great success.”

Now Raju is engaged in another test: fine-tuning a business model designed to deliver uniform client experiences while keeping everyone in the company focused on the same objectives, despite phenomenal growth. For a stable company such an initiative would be difficult enough, but Satyam’s revenues have grown at a compound annual rate of more than 50 percent over the past decade. And the pace can’t...