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the-south-asian.com July / August 2006 |
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August/September Contents
Sufis - wisdom against 50
years of mountain Heritage cities:
Cotton - the fibre of
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Page 5 of
10 Telecom & Software - Trends & Future in South Asia
(cntd.) by
Salman Minhas
First published in
December 2001
WIPRO- Azim Premji.
Studied Engineering at
Stanford University in 190 - unfinished .
Value /Wealth created
about $ 2-50 billion .
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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