The Hindu Business Line : Intend to improve on succession process: Premji

The Wipro Chairman, Mr Azim Premji, is set to take his flagship company, Wipro, to new heights. This much is obvious, after the company made several recent acquisitions. He has plans to open BPOs in other places across India like Vizag, Mysore, Kolkata and Chennai. He also wants to open a BPO and an integrated centre in software development in Bucharest, to service clients in Germany and France.

But Mr Premji is pushing for more, almost-Mittal style but he's ambitious to grow Wipro organically as well. As he told CNBC-TV18, "I think we have demonstrated in the last 8-9 months about the number and the frequency of acquisitions we've done. But what people have not realised is how much homework we have done before making these acquisitions, and I still feel we should be doing more."

He says that in the next six months, everyone in Wipro will know that they are smart risk-takers and he thinks this will lead to "more innovations and not to more inorganic growth, because we are not looking at acquisitions as a growth strategy, but we are looking at it as expertise building."

He adds, "We have had an innovation process for about six years but what we have done in the last six months is that, we have gone into a new structured process called quantum innovation. Today, innovation projects' business accounts for five per cent of our revenue, which is about $100 million a year or about Rs 500 crore a year. "

He is one of the few CEOs who has a succession plan in place, that may or may not include his own sons. But it is the process that gets reviewed every year by the board and he's hoping to fine-tune it.

Excerpts from an interview given to CNBC-TV18

One of the ultimate innovations possible is likely to be in the area of succession planning as far as Wipro is concerned, I know you very often said that in India people confuse ownership with management. How do you plan to address that because in corporate India, succession planning is being treated in a casual manner?

Succession planning is fundamental to people's business. We have a very structured process at the board level. Succession planning extends to the top 75 people in the organisation, in terms of who is ready today and who is ready in the next 2-3 years and who is a potential five years from now.

This is a regular process, which goes on all the time. So, if you are asking me whether successors to me have been identified in the organisation, then of course we have. We would be a fool as an organisation, if we did not have that as a systematically thought-through process, which we review in depth with our board of directors, at least once a year. We intend to keep improving on that process.

Is there going to be a new CEO anytime soon?

I am the CEO for all practical purposes today. So, when I will decide to retire there will be obviously a person who takes over from me.

A critical challenge that is facing the IT industry is the attrition rate, especially on the BPO front. So, are there any innovative ways, in which you have managed to track attrition because it's been fairly high, even as far as Wipro is concerned?

We have been able to tackle it but not to our satisfaction — attrition control is never to one's satisfaction. We would like to have attrition, which is below 10 per cent, and we are running at about 12-13 per cent rate of voluntary attrition. I think at the end of the day, it is leadership and the most important investment one can make to have people continue with you and have people enjoy continue with you is, to see that the supervisor is a good person as a supervisor.

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