WOMEN SPECIAL............... SANGITA SINGH OF WIPRO

WOMEN SPECIAL SANGITA SINGH OF WIPRO  ‘I walked into CEO’s room to demand a role’     Sangita Singh was just another employee at Wipro— working as a product sales executive in Portland, US — when she one day walked into then CEO Vivek Paul’s California office and quite literally told him she would like to head the IT company’s marketing division.     The marketing head had just quit and Singh was convinced marketing was her calling. “At that point I did not even know where Vivek Paul sat, and I had to ask a colleague,” she says.     Like most CEOs, Paul’s first reaction on seeing her in his room was to say he was busy. Singh told him she would wait and even had the temerity to tell him she had a flight to catch. She hung around outside his office, and a little later Paul came by. He told her he did not know enough about her. “I told him to give me some time and I would tell him all about myself.”     Paul listened, and then asked her to come back with a plan. “He did not think I would return. But I did, and did so with a plan that I thought was honest and genuine and not a lot of blah, blah.” Three weeks after that presentation, the job was hers. “They decided to take a bet on me.”     That bet paid off handsomely for Wipro. And after four and a half years in that role, Singh moved to head enterprise applications services, one of Wipro’s largest technology service lines. In early 2011, she was brought in to head the healthcare vertical, a space the company is putting a great deal of focus on given the opportunities emerging out of Obamacare.     Today, Singh is widely recognized as one of Wipro’s most rapidly rising — rather, rapidly risen — stars. Time magazine has called her an “outsourcing wunderkind”. She has received the Stevie Award for Best Asian Woman Executive.     Singh did her engineering in Durgapur. She wasn’t terribly ambitious then. “I was like other women of my generation, fairly happy-go-lucky — if something happens, well and good, if it doesn’t, then it does not matter.”     But her husband, who then worked for Texas Instruments, encouraged her and set a high qualitative bar. Some time after she joined Wipro in the early 1990s, her job was to demo certain products, and it involved long commutes in Bangalore. “I had to go on my scooter. My husband could have bought me a car then for Rs 1. 5 lakh, instead he bought me a computer for Rs 91,000.” Singh says there have been as many lows in her life as there have been highs.     “But I have only learnt from my failures — that has been my biggest university. When things don’t go well, I sit back and think how I could have done it better. And then I go out and seek anybody and everybody who can coach me on the facets that I’m not good at, or even if I’m good, how to make them sharper. I also observe people who are good role models, and these could even be my subordinates, or outsiders like Vinita Bali (MD of Britannia).” Throughout her career, she says, she has walked into people’s rooms, like she did with Vivek Paul. “We were quite fearless. I would give credit to Mr Premji (Wipro chairman) for nurturing that culture in the organization.” Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis TOI131202