If I could hire a lucky person or a smart person, I would hire a lucky person: Rishad Permji

Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji believes that if the core values of the company are solid, it can evolve, survive and succeed. And those were one of the many lessons he shared over his conversation with Nasscom President Debjani Ghosh during the Ascent eConclave that took place on Friday.

The conversation took off from discussing the book, “The Story of Wipro”, which traces the journey of Wipro from being a family-run vegetable oil manufacturing business to becoming a global tech leader.

As Ghosh rightly pointed out in the beginning of the chat, there is no doubt that Azim Premji played a vital role in shaping the company but the book is not just about one person. It’s more about a shared value system, and how an organisation survived and thrived over all these years.

Rishad Premji mentioned that the company was founded in 1945 and his grandfather ran the company for the first 20 years till Azim Premji took over.

“For the first 20 years he was called ‘Sethji’, it was a traditional, family-run business. In 1966, when my father took over, one of the first things he got rid of was this mindset of ‘Sethji’ - that was the first step of the organisation moving away from being just a family-run setup to a more institutionalised, professional organisation.” Premji said.

“He (Azim Premji) was obsessed with the fact that there should be no other family member in the business and there were no other family members who were a part of the organisation till I joined in 2007,” he added.

Azim Premji shaped the company with some very strong tenets in mind. The main focus was on building an organisation with strong core values and then hire people who very strongly resonated with those values, Premji said. He also marketed the organisation well to attract the right kind of people. “The recipe for success was hiring professional people, empowering those people, getting out of their way to let them do what they do best,” he added.

One of the other important things in the company is the interview process, amd that still stands, Premji said and then went on to narrate a story about his father’s obsession with the interview process. He shared a story about how a meeting that was meant to last for a couple of hours lasted for nine since his father believed that it was important to get people on who fit right. The company has an obsession with reference checks too, Premji added.

“I’ve tried to inculcate the same values. I will meet all the people who join the company above the vice-president level, the top 225, before they join. I meet every one of them informally once a year,” he said.
Looking back at the last 50 years of Wipro, when asked about what he might have done differently, Premji spoke about his strong belief in luck and about learning from mistakes.

“I’m a big believer of luck. If I could hire a lucky person or a smart person, I would hire a lucky person. Luck plays an inordinately important role. There are a lot of brilliant people with great ideas, doing great work, and don’t reach where they deserve to reach,” he said.

He stressed the need to have a strong set of core values since the world is constantly changing and there is really nothing you can take for granted. “Strategies can evolve, basis the situation you are in, but the one thing that can help you survive these situations is the strength of your values, what you stand for, what you build, and your purpose as an organisation. You cannot be divorced from the world that you live in.” he said.  
“Our values have not changed much over the last 50 years, the essence has remained the same. It was called Wipro Beliefs in 1971, the Wipro Promise in 1998, and it is called the Spirit of Wipro today,” he added.

“My big learning after taking over in 2019 was to realise that our ways of working were outrbig challenge. Our behaviours are our biggest challenges. You can articulate great values but people experience your behaviours, as a consequence of which they interpret whether you live your values or not,” Premji said and added that it is important to inculcate the right behaviours to succeed.

He mentioned that he has been spending a lot of time working on his habits and how those can be brought in to the work and the values.

“One of the important things that should be a part of your habit is to call out things. If you do not call out things people will think you are comfortable with it. And how you call it out also matters much more,” he said and added that it’s also very important to understand yourself and assess yourself correctly.

Speaking about how leadership is changing in today’s day and age, Premji said that successful leadership in today’s world is one that is open to collaborating, listening, learning, unlearning, and changing. A good leader also needs to be empathetic, authentic, and vulnerable.

“Leaders are not in charge of things, they are in charge of people who are in charge of things,” Premji pointed out.

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