The Hindu Business Line : Informal <I>gyan </I>

THE Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai couldn't have timed it better. Much before putting in his papers at Wipro, where he was Vice-Chairman and CEO of the global IT arm, Vivek Paul had promised to address the current batch of students. What they could possibly have expected was the usual staccato speech that CEOs are prone to give. Now, (before he takes up his next assignment as Partner, Texas Pacific Group) what the students came up with was a relaxed Paul, joking, reminiscing, lecturing and drawing lessons out of seemingly innocuous actions that the IT industry calls `operations'.

Snapshots from his address:

On his outlook on the next 5-10 years:

It's difficult to make predictions for such a long time ahead. It is clear that the Indian success story is not a flash in the pan. But so far, Indian success has coincided with the success of Indian software companies. That won't be so in future. End-user organisations such as GE and service providers such as Accenture or IBM will add to the success here. For instance, exports from companies having FDI in China are greater than exports from wholly-owned Chinese companies. It's going to be a smooth ride for the said time period in India. The future is golden.

There is talk that wage inflation is undermining the ability of Indian companies to offer quality service at affordable cost. That's not true. Salaries have been rising but not so bad as to make us uncompetitive. Wages have been rising in other parts of the world too. The supply-demand equilibrium for manpower in India is stabilising now.

India as a pasture for business ideas

Till a year ago, I am told, business ideas were not coming up from India. It was an arid desert here. But now, ideas are coming up. Again, they are all from employees of the India development centres of Western companies specialising in products. Not from those in the Indian software services sector. They want to make low cost routers and this and that.

The difference between products and services

Indian software services companies tend to look at the `how' of things. Product companies look at the `what'. The models are different. I don't run a technology company but a people company or a project managers' company. This model is not relevant to a products company.

On joint ventures

I am not in favour of JVs, having served in one myself (Wipro-GE). Behind all the great intention and good ideas, you have two sides who have their own objectives, both giving mixed signals. It's best to have one head and have that set the direction.

How a CEO's directions trickle down to 42,000 people

The Intranet helps. We examine how many objects were created this week, how many flushed out if they weren't used, analyse which managers used which objects and all that. We have web casts where I address employees. We set up mini call centres and have employees call us or e-mail us with questions. At one go, I have answered 660 out of 3000 queries.

His learnings on the job

The single most important thing to learn is humility. You can't be always right.

Stick to a path or shift industries for growth?

It's a bit like driving in Chennai. You can weave in and out of lanes or you stick to one. There's no one right way. Because you weave in and out, you might reach faster. But if you stick to one lane, there are others weaving out, giving you a clear road ahead and you might get on.

On the Wipro vision he helped set

The now popular vision we set for ourselves came only in 2000, about a full year after I joined the company.

Initially people kept asking me, as the new CEO, what vision did I set for the company and all that. I refused to set a vision unless we could prove to ourselves that we were on an operating rhythm. Without that flow in the organisation, we did not deserve a vision. Also, we had to show ourselves that we could scale (add employee count and infrastructure to service more business without losing the culture or equilibrium in the company). By 2000, when we achieved that end, we set out on creating a vision.

Focus areas for the vision

Quality, talent and service lines. Quality may sound clichéd. But all the marketing in the world will not help you if the customer does not feel happy enough with your work to return to you. We had a concept we termed Veloci Q. We got together some 40 people who were responsible for quality and who had different ways of doing things. We got them on the same track. But this is not to mean that one way of doing things was right. When one of these people objected vehemently to something we did hear him out. The message we sent out was that no one person could be right. And that authority did not automatically mean power. But once they had agreed on something they had to stick to it.

`If we had eight hours to cut down a tree, we would spend six hours sharpening the axe.'

For a Finnish mobile phone company (!!) we were asked to rewrite some 1,00,000 lines of code. We actually made an analysis on the failure of the programme and came up with about 10,000 lines of code that needed attention. It brought down cost and cycle time.

Talent was critical. If we had to grow from some 2,500 people in 2000 to about 42,000 now, we had to have a way to communicate equally with all employees. Our intranet, Channel W, was the answer. In addition to the effort we put into it, we had sociologists come over and figure out ways to make it collaborative. When employees left the company, we wanted them to feel `I miss Channel W.'

We also ensured that existing employees had the opportunity to first fill in a vacancy before an outsider was considered. Managers seemed willing to let employees quit rather than give them up to another department. That wasn't the done thing. Now, they cannot prevent an employee from crossing over to another department. These managers too benefit since they can fill in those vacancies with folks from another department.

We have a knowledge repository portal, Knet (that kept adding to the knowledge that employees gained in their work.)

"Building institutions is about successfully being able to sustain competitive advantage not from brilliant ideas but from incremental improvements that occur over time."

Consulting

Consulting was to be our salt and dough. It could not be everything we did but it was to make our work more interesting and tasty.

Is KPO the next thing?

It's only the next buzzword. I don't pay a lot of attention to things like that.

Employee attrition

Especially in the ITES space, it concerns me. Every employee who walks away takes some knowledge away from the company. We tried our best in the case of Spectramind to keep attrition down. We did receive plaudits from employees. But I couldn't understand their saying, "You're great, you're great" and then walking away. I couldn't get this lack of co-relation.

Changing times

We had a customer in Germany whom I used to meet from time to time. Every time I saw him, he used to complain that Indian programmers didn't know enough German. I kept listening to him as he gave me this gyan every time we met. When I met him six months ago, he asked me thoughtfully, `Mr Paul, is there some way your programmer could teach my employees English?'

I didn't know we were evangelising the English language!

His thought for the day

People plan for failure much more than they plan for success.

Life is a bit of being in luck and being ready. Either one is not enough. If you are not prepared, even if luck knocks on your door, you will not make it. But if you are ready, you can grab opportunities when they come to you.

bharatk@thehindu.co.in

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