The soaps-to-software sultan

On July 19, Wipro announced its first quarter numbers. Revenues were up 34 per cent to Rs 4,203 crore and net profit by 17 per cent to Rs 726 crore compared to the same period in the year. The highlight of the day, for the media at least, was not the results. It was the fact that Rishad Premji, 30, the elder son of Azim Premji, was joining the business. Eager journalists were vying to get the Premji Senior's view on whether they were witnessing the first chapter of the succession plan at Wipro. Premji looked exasperated; he has repeated a number of times that ownership and management are two different issues, and that succession in an operational role will be on merit.

Incidentally, Premji, who likes to delegate, is himself no software geek, despite holding an engineering degree from Stanford University. But he has mastered the art of delegating and holding people accountable even as he motivates and rewards them. That strategy has served him well-he has turned Wipro, which was a small vegetable oil producer in 1966, into a $4-billion (annualised) software to hardware to FMCG MNC. And he has turned conventional corporate wisdom on its head while doing so.

Even though almost every management consultant worth his salt talked about core competence and called on Wipro to jettison its non-it businesses, Premji refused to fall in line. He was very clear about it: if his role model company, GE, could sell everything from bulbs to aircraft engines, and as long as a business made financial sense, Wipro would be present in it. As if to reiterate that, Wipro Consumer Care recently acquired the Singapore-based Unza for Rs 1,010 crore, making it the second-largest buy for the company ever.

What has set Premji apart is that while his Indian peers have hesitated to make bold acquisitions because of fears over integration and cultural fit, Wipro, through its "string of pearls" strategy, has made a successful go of it. Even as news began to filter out that Wipro would move in for a large acquisition in Germany (rumoured to be Lufthansa's BPO unit), the man with a silver mane leaves the individual business units to decide on operational issues as he focusses on strategy and the larger picture. And by the looks of it, he's not done as yet.