Rajat Puri leads Legato Health Technologies by showing his genuine nature and humility. “I am a strong believer of showing your vulnerability as a leader to your team,” he said. “You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but you should surround yourself with smart people, listen and learn, but act decisively.”
As the President of Legato Health Technologies, a technology and business operations service company to U.S. health insurers, Puri is adamant about listening intently and making informed decisions. He is also adamant about taking chances.
Over the past four years, Legato has had a very exciting and fast journey starting and building itself as Anthem’s global in-house center, Puri said. “What started as a transformation initiative to reduce Anthem’s reliance on outsourced vendor partners, moved very quickly from concept and discovery to establishing the first foreign entity in December of 2017,” he said.
At the time, Puri was the leader over Anthem’s vendor management organization which gave him the visibility into just how much dependency there was on contractors and suppliers. This sparked an idea for him to look into why the company couldn’t do it another way or even a better way. The idea was to insource all of this work under the subsidiary name of Legato Health Technologies to avoid paying suppliers’ margins and to encourage a stronger collaboration with U.S.-based stakeholders and the associates doing the work.
“While the idea itself to create a global in-house center was great, it was Rajat’s ability to build relationships with key stakeholders to take a chance on this idea,” said his colleagues. “There were some risks to opening a startup in a foreign country along with having zero brand name recognition for the subsidiary, but Rajat made sure that he and his team identified all potential risks and ways to mitigate them early on.”
According to his staff, Puri has demonstrated time and time again his ability to lead large groups of teams and grow an organization from scratch, ultimately earning the respect of his associates, his peers and his leaders. “He has the respect of his peers, which has been earned through his ability to form strong partnerships and drive results,” his staff said. “Rajat pushes his leadership team and his associates to envision how to make Legato world class and is known within the company as challenging the status quo to inspire continuous improvement.”
