Azim Premji: Creating learners and leaders

Abstract

Azim Premji, Chairman and Managing Director of Wipro Technologies, donned the mantle of leadership at a young age. Under his leadership, the fledgling Rs 70 million (US$1.50 million) company in hydrogenated cooking fats has grown to a Rs 35 billion (US$715 million) IT Services company, ranked by Business Week among the top 100 technology companies globally. With his fanatical belief in delivering value to the customer through world-class quality processes, he was the prime mover in making Wipro the first Indian company to embrace Six Sigma, the first software services company in the world to achieve SEI CMM Level 5 and the world’s first organisation to achieve PCMM (People Capability Maturity Model) Level 5.

In an email interview, Premji shared with Prof S Krishna his formula for a successful company. Premji firmly believes in creating teams of highly charged individuals to deliver superior performance, investing significant time as a faculty in leadership development programmes and taking a personal interest in developing leaders from within as well as inducting fresh talent from outside to bring in new perspectives. Wipro leaders develop a complete business perspective early in their career. They get exposure to all aspects of the organisation: finance, operations and people perspective, and are given early general managerial/CEO responsibility to get a good rounding. This helps them develop a feeling of ownership and the ability to see the big picture early in their careers.

Premji equates quality with integrity – both being non-negotiable. He firmly believes that values should be driven from the top, and describes the process of creating an ethical organisation. Values combined with a powerful vision, he says, can turbo-charge a company to scale new heights and make it succeed beyond one’s wildest expectations. Add to that the ability to attract and retain the best talent and the continuous pursuit of quality, and you have a high-performance organisation that can continuously re-invent itself and succeed. He also describes at length the work undertaken by the Azim Premji Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation established in 2001, with the primary aim of universalisation of elementary education, or ensuring that every child is in school and learning.