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COVER STORY
“LEADERSHIP IS ALL ABOUT
TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE”
FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN EMERITUS OF INFOSYS, N R NARAYANA S MURTHY,
DIVULGES THE WAY HE TRANSFORMED INFOSYS IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH
SRAY AGARWAL AND NIDHI GUPTA
Narayana Murthy graduated
with a degree in electrical
engineering from National
Institute of Engineering,
University of Mysore. He completed
his masters from IIT, Kanpur. He
started his career with IIM, Ahmedabad.
His entrepreneurial stint begun
way back in 1976 when he started a
company named Softronics but the
venture failed to take off. He then
joined Patni computers and finally in
the year 1981, he founded Infosys.
Today Infosys has its offices in 29
countries and development centers in
India, China, US, UK, Australia, Canada,
Japan and many other countries
and has an employee base of 145,088
of 85 nationalities.
When did you realize that you
need a leadership change in the
company and started building
new generation leaders who can
replace old generation leaders?
Once the economy was liberalized
in 1991, and we got listed in India
in 1993 and got listed on NASDAQ
in 1999, we became better known
in the United States. More and
more CFOs realized that there is a
company who is going to grow, a
company that is committed to the
United States, it listed on our stock
A LEADER THINKS OF SOMETHING
THAT IS UNIMAGINED BY THE
REST OF THE PEOPLE. FOR
ANY LEADER TO SUCCEED, HE
SHOULD BE WELL-ROUNDED IN
THE BUSINESS OF LEADERSHIP
exchange and therefore we should
work with them. So when you
combine the internet boom with
the Y2K boom, this was a remarkable
stand where there was excellent
growth opportunity. Therefore,
we realized that if the company
has to grow rapidly, we need
to develop the next generation
leaders. In fact, we established our
leadership institute in 2000.
What were the key areas or skill
set which you wanted to focus
while inculcating or pre-planning
these leaders?
Leadership is all about transformational
change. It is about making
impossible, possible. A leader
thinks of something that is unimagined
by the rest of the people.
Therefore, in order to help our
younger people become such leaders;
we realized that our institute
has to depend on three important
tenets:
1.Our company is our campus:
If you want good ideas to come
from the people, then there should
be a sense of pluralism, there
should be an environment of
openness, curiosity, questioning,
enlightened democracy and this
will happen only in a campus environment.
2.Leaders thrive in a certain
context: If we want our leaders to
succeed in Infosys, they should be
well-rounded in the business of
leadership. They should understand
our business. We believed
that, for leadership training, our
curriculum is our business. Leadership
training will help them understand
the intricacies of sales,
finance, software development,
and infrastructure building.
3.Our leaders are our teachers:
We felt that if we want our leaders
for being trained to be successful,
then they must listen to people
who’ve actually handled the problems,
issues, the dilemmas, and
the success of the company. It was
like a real time as well as context
based training. They must understand
the context of the company
very well and in order to teach
this, who has the best credibility
than the leaders who are actually
taking the company forward today.
For example, I used to give a
course on leadership, my style, my
belief and my convictions.
Please throw a light on some of
the transformational changes
brought by you in Infosys?
I realized that immediately after
the economic reform, many foreign
companies started coming to
Bangalore – IBM, Microsoft, Citibank
etc., and if we wanted to
grow, retain our people, and at
the same time attract new people,
then we have to transform the
company. The shift was needed.
We had to create a campus and we
knew that no MNC would do it,
not at that time at least. We decided
to go slightly outside the
city and create a green environment,
create excellent offices,
wonderful technology, and make
sure that the employees are very
comfortable. Many people were
not very enthusiastic about it.
This was a big transformation,
which I would term as “transformation
of mindset”. The second
count your chickens before they hatch 20 april 2012