Murthy and Premji Over Breakfast

Mayank was kind enough to forward this link of the conversation between Narayan Murthy and Azim Premji arranged by ET. Like most Indians, am in awe of these two gentlemen who have transformed brand India over the years!

Some nuggets from this interview!

1. Premji - "Our experience as a company is that if your top management is not global, they tend to collect people who are of the same kin. It is the most difficult transformation."

Murthy - "What is a global mindset? It is about thinking of the whole world as your arena, being comfortable in interacting with people from multiple cultures, looking at the various markets while strategising, leveraging talent from all cultures, making sure that all cultures are comfortable in your milieu and that you have a fair representation of different cultures."

2. Murthy on the Tata-Corus deal - "When somebody writes the business history of India in the 2000s and 2100s, this will be described as a turning point in the history of the mindset of the Indian entrepreneur. That's what I'm excited about!"

3. Murthy on business then - "In 1981, when we founded Infosys, we were very clear from day one that we had to be focused on global markets. That was a tough exercise because the friction to business was extremely high then."

"It would take two to three years and 50 visits to Delhi to get a license to import a computer. We had to wait in front of the Reserve Bank of India for 10 days to travel abroad once. It was almost impossible to open offices abroad or get a consultant in marketing or in quality because there were severe restrictions on what you could pay them."

4. Murthy on Azim - "First of all, Azim is the least pretentious person. For example, he would call me once in a while and say, Murthy I want to meet you. I would say, look I'll get back to you when I am free and he would say, don't worry I'll talk to Pandu. Look, it is the chairman of Wipro who says he will speak to my secretary."

5. Premji on relationship with competition - "Relationships are getting multifaceted. As an example, we find that we are able to work with IBM mutually globally and we compete with them like hell in India. Particularly on large projects, we are competing all the time. At the same time, there is mutual collaboration and mutual competition."

6. Premji on China - "It’s both friends and foe. They are friends because we see them as part of our global delivery model. We see them downstream as a potential market like they see us as a downstream potential market. Their threat is because they are trying to emulate the India global delivery model in services and they will compete with us."

Okay, go ahead read the interview...Goes without saying, when the history of the great Indian awakening will be written, these two software titans would have a chapter each for their vision, innovativeness, courage and high ethical standards!

Simplexity and the Change Agent

I was in Cambodia for a planning conference over the last week. That should partly explain my absence from the blogosphere. The hotel(I suspect the city) was somewhat Internet unfriendly:-)
And once again I enjoyed my break from our media dominated/ saturated world. That makes it twice in the last two months.

The conference was held in the beautiful temple city of Siam Reap. In a country that has been ravaged by civil strife, it was great to see it bounce back with spirit and simplicity. The combination of a tourist friendly nation and the heritage of Angkor Vat temples was breathtaking...

I could have come back with just a touristy notion which often is superficial and 'feel great'. But for the cello recital of Dr. Beat Richner - a Swiss doctor who in the past 15 years has opened three children's hospitals in Cambodia, all run from private donations! The doctor holds a cello concert in Siam Reap every Saturday night to raise money for the hospital.

During and after the cello recital Dr. Richner made an impassioned plea for money
and blood for the Cambodian children. Opened our eyes to the WHO and most of the West's obsession with glamour-diseases like SARS and AIDS and the blind eye turned to non-glam diseases like diarrhoea, tuberculosis and simply anaemia.

Complex and horrific health facts came to the surface which had been camouflaged by the carefully crafted sanitisation of the senses. 70% of Cambodia doesn't have access to safe drinking water. Appalling rates of HIV infection among the kids and very little access to health facilities and corruption!

Our conference was around the idea of 'change'. But of course advertising has it's limitations in a commerce and capitalism dominated world. So the issues were about changing out mind-sets, our way of thinking so that our clients could sell in the end more soap, more cola, more chips to the 'haves' of the world!!(Okay, I am being unfair to my occupation. It has its limitations at the end of the day!)

However, as I drove back to the airport, the image of an angry Dr. Beat stuck in my head and consciousness. He is the real change agent and a citizen brand. And am glad that my company has commited money and time for his cause.

One of the drifts that I had spoken about earlier this year was about Simplexity. The ability to hide the underlying complexity of a product, an experience, a nation behind the veneer/ facade / shell of simplicity...And I felt that Simplexity in my gut at Siam Reap!

Citizen Brand : Pashupati Nath Singh

It's funny how some of the best weekly articles surface in the Sunday TOI - a newspaper brand which I love to hate. Some of the write-ups on insights, cultural shifts, trends are good Sunday-reading-for-planner-types!

Came across this nice write-up on Pashupati Nath singh - a story about one man's efforts to mould under-privileged children into self-reliant beings.

65 year old Singh, runs the Patuck High School, tucked away behind rows of road-side shops and a well-kept garden at Vakola(Mumbai). Singh's students are largely under-nourished, under-privileged slum children often with severe learning disabilities. The courses here go beyond bookish knowledge and very often are centred on giving them confidence.

Pashupati Nath Singh, is a former director of Voltas. His 'Leaders of Tomorrow Project', aimed at bright children from Mumbai's slums is immensely popular among the slum/ street children near the airport, Mahim, Malvani, Dadar and Bandra.

Apart from reaching out to 3000 students in 26 schools in the city, Singh also annually adopts 32 poor meritorious students from the ninth grade for his India Scholar Award, a scholarship that ensures that these students are groomed by Singh and his academic partners till they graduate.

If interested, you can dig into the complete write-up in Sunday TOI(Dec 17). Meraj - you stay closest to Singh's school. Maybe, you can dig up the details if you wish...

I think if we can convince some of our clients to dole our money or to adopt the school, it would be a really great 360 project! Somebody like Bournvita(?)

I plan to compile such inspiring( relatively unknown) citizen brands. With the huge disparity between the classes, urban-rural divide, pg 1 and pg 4-6 lives,the only way India can truly shine is by supporting such grass-root citizen activism...And all of us can do our little bit. Any volunteers? Lets talk...

I strongly feel Planners need to be sensitive - not just to the tracking figures of cola/car/ cosmetic brands but also to the societal changes all around us! Often our lens is too focussed, our vision too narrow, our thinking too self-obsessed...Blue sky thinking -->Real 360 brand thinking should be about enveloping the consumers/ people at the fringe, bettering their lives. Cause branding has to be a big part in the new marketing/ 360game...