Be mindful, curious, Vishal Sikka tells Infosys staff

Expect Vishal Sikka, chief executive officer and managing director, Infosys, to utilise every opportunity he gets to address Infoscions or the outside world to tell the cautionary tale about the inherent weakness about country's IT sector and the knowledge economy in general.

Be it blogging during New Year's eve or giving opening address before giving out the Infosys Foundation awards on Monday, the overarching theme was India is missing the wood for the trees.

"Today most of the resources are in the hands of corporations of which Infosys is a great part. And yet the day to day work that I find myself engaged in is mostly about short-term needs. One can even argue as shortsighted things, 90 days cycle and staying true to operating within very well defined boundaries. The muscle memories of our corporations tends to become geared towards these short-term cycles," Sikka said while addressing an august gathering that included Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and also founders of Infosys like N R Narayana Murthy, who is president of the Board of Trustees, Infosys Science Foundation.

In recent time Sikka has asked Infy staff to be mindful, curious and go for what he calls design think.

"And in the end when we look at the problems of the world around us we find that these are the problems one cannot think when one is constrained by narrow windows of time," Sikka said during the prize distribution ceremony.
Sikka of course was talking about the problems of humanity rather than Infosys's own but the message for the domestic IT Industry wasn't lost.

In a coincidence, an awardee in his acceptance speech touched upon the need to convert Indian IT industry from being predominantly service oriented to product driven, much like a company called SAP where Sikka once worked for.