Thursday, February 23, 2017

BUSINESS LEADER INTERVIEW SPECIAL…How a business leader gave wings to young minds

How a business leader gave wings to young minds

At a recent event, Azim Premji shared with students his childhood memories, his success mantra and the key to getting eagles back to a village
If you could ask Wipro chairman Azim Premji one question, what would it be?
Would you ask him about the best way to bring back the eagles to your village?
Probably not. It takes a child's imagination (and daring) to ask such a question. And it takes someone of Premji's stature and experience to appreciate its beauty.
At the recent Earthian Awards in Bengaluru, Premji took many such creative questions from a room filled with school and college students, working on sustainability projects. The responses were tailor-made for the young audience -direct and insightful, minus any grandiosity or pretence.

Were you naughty when you were a kid?

Yes, I was very naughty when I was a kid. And in those days, you got rapped on the knuckles, you got hit on your head and you had to be kneeling outside the class for a really long time. At least some of those practices are no longer there. But I spent a lot of time outside the class, kneeling.

A lot of eagles used to come to our village earlier. They don't anymore. How will they come back?

One is throw grains for them. Second, you must grow trees all along the paths of the eagles.They don't normally come and sit on the ground. They come and sit on the trees.

What are the sacrifices that you make to reach this stage?

I worked very hard and I neglected my family.

Who and what inspired you to start Wipro?

Wipro was not started by me. It was started by my father. But I think I contributed to expand its existing product range and to diversify. What inspired me was just the ambition to do better than what we were doing and to grow much faster than we had in the past.

What is the mantra of your success?

Hard work and a lot of luck. Two major things.

How do you get luck?

It just comes by itself. You can't search for it.

You left your college in between. Did it affect your life and ambition?

Well, I left college because I had to take over the responsibilities from my father, who died at very young, at the age of 51. But eventually, many, many years later, I did get a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Getting successful is difficult, but re maining successful is even more so.How do you stay successful?

I agree with you 100 per cent be cause the moment you have success, your expecta tions from the profes sion goes up. But more im portantly, your expectations from yourself go up. And, I think, the only way to have sustained success is to keep competing with yourself.

That's the only enduring thing according to me.

What do you think will be the future of Indian children, especially girls?

My experience says that the girls are always turning out to be smarter consistently. You just look at the quality of questions that you get from the ladies in the audience. They are, in my opinion, far more intelligent than the questions you get from the boys. Girls take their careers more seriously. And girls, particularly in villages, take their careers even more seriously, once their parents give them the latitude to do that.

There are some developed nations, some developing and many under-developed.There is already much environmental damage. What will happen if all the countries run to get the tag of a developed nation?

Development is a concept of relativity. A nation is more developed compared to another nation primarily based on its per capita income. That's the most important criteria that people use for development versus lack of development. But there are also many qualitative aspects that get ignored in the process. The quality of education for instance. Some countries are less developed, but have a very good quality education system.Some countries are very developed, but have a very poor quality education system. Secondly, social values should also be used in the concept of development. There are many developed nations that have social values which are significantly inferior to those of developing nations.

I think it's also a matter of how satisfied people in that country are. There are many people who are not satisfied in very developed countries.The typical example of the American election is the result of a revolt by the middle class, which thought it was getting a raw deal. I think the satisfaction index also becomes important.

What is Wipro's contribution to the smart cities project?

The smart cities project today is more talk than action. It is very unfortunate. It got a lot of attention from the Prime Minister, but its implementation has been very shallow. And wherever the implementation has been there, we have participated actively.I think the key priority for the government today is to get it moving. They first did a shortlist of 25 cities.Then they added another 25 cities. But there is very little action on the ground.

What are the changes that you would like to see in the nation today?

I have seen a lot of changes in my career. But the pace of change today is probably 3x what it was even five and ten years ago. And the changes are across the board. There are changes in society, changes in business, there are changes in the global scene as we've seen with two major election results. Change is just everywhere. And unless you learn to cope with change, you will fall behind. It requires a lot of ef fort and it requires a lot of keeping your eyes open all the time. It requires a lot of relearning from you all the time.


masoom gupte

ET17FEB17

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