Opinion All stick,no carrot

It was the fourth guard-change at Wipro since it turned from a family-run vegetable oils company to a leading global outsourcing firm. At its Sarjapur Road headquarters,the announcement stunned Wipro-ites and reduced some of them to tears. After all,just three years prior,Premji had promoted the two executives,who have five decades at Wipro between them,to the much-vaunted dual leadership role.

Wipro is currently India’s third-largest outsourcing firm,trailing after Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies. But its peers are growing much faster than Wipro. In fact,at current growth rates,fourth-placed Cognizant Technologies is all set to overtake Wipro in the Indian outsourcing companies’ rankings.

Apparently,there was reason enough to incense the no-nonsense Premji who owns three quarters of Wipro’s stock. Following the quarterly results debacle,Premji’s personal wealth (on account of his holdings in Wipro) had just dipped half-a-billion dollars or thereabouts.

For his blunt,fearless manner Premji has a fan following both within Wipro and outside. Two of his former CEOs refused comment for this column but his admirers think the government should be run with an iron hand like Premji runs Wipro: perform or face the music.

Some years ago,in his typically forthright speaking style,Premji took on the Karnataka government head on for its clumsy handling of Bangalore’s basic infrastructure. For his daring,Premji incurred the wrath of the then chief minister. The result: the road leading to Wipro’s Sarjapur Road headquarters remained crater-marked for years.

More recently,Premji blasted the UPA government for its governance deficit,calling it a “national calamity”. This was just a day after he was conferred the Padma Vibushan award,the only Indian industrialist to be honoured with the country’s highest civilian award.

At the World Economic Forum at Davos,Premji took on the United States and articulated what the Indian government has been unable to do so far: that developing economies are “more than fed up” with being lectured by Western countries like the United States on opening up the Indian economy while they showed no reciprocity to Indian companies.

Among all of India’s entrepreneurs,Premji’s management style is a stand out. The 65-year old billionaire is known to be extremely conservative in compensating even his top rung. In that tech industry,that is swimming against the stock-options tide adopted by his rivals. The insider joke at Wipro is that Premji is “all stick,no carrot”.

Premji’s dislike for ambitious,hero-like CEOs is well-known. At Wipro outperformers are rewarded with operational freedom — what executives jokingly call the Wipro Opium — rather than large pay packages or generous stock options.

Premji,who is known to describe himself as “unemotional”,has been least apologetic about the high-profile exits from Wipro,whether Ashok Soota or Vivek Paul,or the recent Paranjpe and Vaswani.

Premji blamed the last two for not reading business’s U-turn from global recession.

At Wipro,the leadership constant has been Premji himself who continues as chairman and managing director. In September last year,the company appointed Premji’s son,Rishad,33,as its chief strategy officer,setting off speculation whether it was grooming for an imminent leadership takeover of the father’s approximately $17-billion empire.

The newly-appointed CEO
T.K. Kurien probably already knows about the two sure-fire strategies to ease up the unsmiling Premji — good quarterly results and good food. The daunting truth,however,is that even if his tough boss smiles momentarily,Kurien will remain a CEO-on-probation,like his predecessors,for all the years he is at the top job.

saritha.rai@expressindia.com