Telecom & software in south asia 5

In 1966 Premji had to cut short his engineering studies at Stanford University due to his father’s death. He joined the family business of vegetable oils “vanaspati”, bakery fat, hair care soaps, lighting products, and hydraulic cylinders.

Since that time , Premji has taken astute business decisions such as making PCs when IBM was thrown out of India in 1975 . Along with keeping the core values of integrity, innovative solutions, human values and value for money.

As with Murthy , Premji is known for his simple living and high thinking, travel by economy class and staying in value-for-money hotels. He believes in his own company and currently owns 75 percent of the company's shares.

In 1984 Wipro pioneered the concept of sharing wealth through stock awards , although , some of his core executives have left Wipro and gone to launch their own companies having felt that they could have done better had they been awarded in a better fashion.

Wipro launched the Stock Options in 1999 . They have been the first in India in 1997 to start the Sigma Six Quality Program [ a quality metric that uses the concept of leadership of teams by high quality professionals as Judo/ karate “Black Belts” ] which has been followed with great success at General Electric

Premji is of the opinion that with the Internet population in India at a small number , E-Commerce will not be feasible until a number of 25 - 30 million Internet users is reached by 2005. He also feels that the India customer has to evolve and that the Indian mind-set is more touch and feel. as opposed to the western consumers who have more faith in the products available over the net.

The Indian Information , Communications and Entertainment [ ICE ] Convergence Bill that was passed recently will be helpful according to Premji in areas such as Telecom regulations and Frequency Spectrum allocation rules.

Premji as the visionary sees India also moving from a manufacturing to a knowledge era.

He believes that due to the communications revolution , physical country borders do not define markets. Thus the movement of goods , services , finance will move to places of lowest cost and global distribution. Benchmarks of customer services have to be immediate .

Further the old advantages of nations based on material resources has shifted to the advantage based on ideas which come from an enlightened and educated people .

Hence in future leadership at Wipro will be based not on Command and Control but on being able to generate excitement and enthusiasm to generate innovative ideas .

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