Sundeep Khanna - Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions

For Lalitha and Mallika,
the two writers who constantly inspire me.

Sundeep Khanna

For my two-year-old nephew Kabir,
with the hope that one day he will grow up to be inspired
by the life of Azim Premji.

Varun Sood

Contents

F OR OVER FIVE DECADES Azim Hasham Premji has been a man of mystery, a tycoon whose personal life is shrouded in secrecy while his business dealings are a byword for transparency. We know that he has a heart of gold, which is why he is now counted among the worlds top philanthropists. Yet this one fact has come to dominate the narrative around the man who has also built one of Indias most successful software companies, in the process turning his seventy-five-year-old family business of vegetable oils into a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate.

There is so much more to Premji the man than merely his philanthropy, though the qualifier seems inappropriate when one looks at the amount of money he has donated.

When we first set out in July 2019 to capture his life in a book, following a prompt from Anish Chandy, our knowledgeable and ever-helpful agent, it seemed curious to us how Premjis beneficence comes at a time when there are so many instances of wealthy businessmen either siphoning money out of the country or blowing it on extravagant displays at marriages and other family functions. For Premji, who insisted on paying from his pocket for personal calls that he made while at work, that would be unthinkable. No matter how many billions he has added to his personal wealth over the years, his lifestyle hasnt changed one bit. As one of his senior leaders said, He continues to eat what he used to, fly the way he used to, drive the same car. Nor is his eternal optimism ever dimmed by the weight of the years or the burden of circumstances. Even as the Covid-19 pandemic started spreading across the world, Premji was confident that a cure would be found to fight the virus. The human mind had done incredible things in the past and would overcome one of the most challenging and disruptive events in modern history. Even in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, when companies across the world were counting their losses, Premjis only question at meetings would be about business opportunities that Wipro was not addressing.

Today, as the world is roiled by an apocalyptic virus, the man is sure to be directing his foundation, now the focus of his life, to see what it can do to alleviate peoples suffering.

What started out as two journalists cynical attempt to explore an icons hidden warts developed into a deep appreciation of his true worth. Yes, he held on to his 84 per cent stake in his company till the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) virtually issued a fiat forcing him to lower it. And yes, he refused to issue fat bonuses to his leadership team. But there was method even to such seemingly selfish acts. The stockpile he built over the years is what allowed this man, who hasnt ever sold a single share of his company, to make the $21 billion donation to his foundation, and the bonuses that he apparently denied his colleagues went to that same cause. Single-minded in his pursuit of what he eventually saw as his calling, Premji never did allow criticism of his actions to cloud his decisions. His own commitment to Wipro has been so fierce that he has turned down invitations to join the global boards of Sony Corporation and Nokia since he felt serving on them might be a distraction.

For years, Premji, who has rarely taken a vacation or even gone sightseeing when travelling for work, has spent all his waking hours in the pursuit of making Wipro a better company. In the process he has had to reduce family time to a bare minimum. Even through the anxiety of watching his younger son Tariq struggle a bit to find his way in life, Premjis workload remained as heavy as ever. In this, as in most other things, the close-knit family remained rock solid in its support of Tariq. Premji, whose fondness for his younger son is plainly visible to his close friends, did share his anxieties with a few of his senior colleagues but that didnt come in the way of the natural bonding between them. The two now often watch shows on Netflix or do other fatherson things together.

To understand Premji, though, it is important to understand the little things he says and does since he is an extremely careful man not given to hyperbole.

Take this story from a few years ago. One evening he went to check out the arrangements for a dinner that his company was hosting for the visiting heads of many of its international clients. A senior Wipro executive supervising the evenings proceedings assured him that everything was in place and dinner had been ordered from the Taj on M.G. Road in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), one of the five-star hotels in the city, known for its cuisine. Premji nodded, but as he walked away he left a small bit of advice for the executive: If the food in our cafeteria is good enough for our people, it should be good enough for anyone else too.

That sums up Premji. Serial entrepreneur and philanthropist extraordinaire he may be, but to him it is still a simple matter of doing what he believes is right, no matter what the occasion. The one big contribution Wipro has made to business in India is the idea that you can run a company ethically. It is a corporate philosophy that is the source of great pride among many of the senior executives that we met while researching for this book. As Anurag Behar, who heads the Azim Premji Foundation, said in one of our conversations, We may not have always taken the best decisions, but I can say confidently that I, along with many others at the company, sleep well at night. How many companies in the private sector can claim to have always run their businesses correctly?

It is what Premji has always wanted. At the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture in 2003 he said as much: If you consider Wipro as a successful organization, the factors I would rate uppermost as contributors to its success are our Values. At the outset we decided that Character is one factor that will guide all our actions and decisions. We invested in uncompromising integrity, which helped us take difficult stands in some of the most difficult business situations. We defined a set of values and beliefs for the organization in the early 70s, before it was fashionable to do so. We decided that upholding those values was more important than achieving business success.

Not that he didnt achieve success. Over a fifty-year career in business, he set up an $8.5 billion IT company, grew a small vegetable oil mill into a privately held billion-dollar consumer products business, created an extremely successful infrastructure engineering division from the ground up and still had the time to set up Premji Invest, one of the most successful family offices not just in India but in Asia.

Not bad for a man who had been an average student at school and was effectively a college dropout when he came back midway through his programme at Stanford following the unfortunate demise of his father. With his older brother having moved to Pakistan following Partition, the young man, all of twenty-one years, found himself catapulted into the sudden breach. Where did he find the skills needed to run a struggling oil mill, far less grow it exponentially? After all, a childhood full of fun plucking mangoes and cycling around his Bandra home couldnt have prepared him for this new role.