How Wipro became Steve Hamm’s Tiger

Wipro is like a submarine with its periscope perpetually up and scanning the horizon. It’s on the lookout for techniques established by others that it can apply to its work…(Wipro chairman Azim) Premji never caught the “not invented here” disease so prevalent in the US tech industry. That’s the notion that companies should create everything themselves, whether it’s technology or a way of doing things.
 
Or so says Steve Hamm in Bangalore Tiger, a book on India’s growing software power that is to be released on October 25. But why did Hamm, a BusinessWeek journalist, focus on Wipro when it is neither the biggest nor the most profitable software major in India. Here’s what DNA Money’s Uttara Choudhury found out.

Why did you do the book?

When I returned from a reporting trip in Bangalore in June of 2005 I found on my phone mail a message from a McGraw-Hill Professional Books editor asking if I’d like to write a book about the tech industry in India. I figured that since I had been following the Indian tech companies since 1999, with ever-increasing depth, this would be an excellent opportunity for me. Indeed it was. I was able to put to use much of what I had learned from years of reporting about the worldwide tech industry and globalisation.

Why did you pick Wipro and not Infosys or Tata Consultancy Services who are bigger?

I considered focusing the book on Infosys or TCS as well. Infosys said it wouldn’t cooperate, and TCS is related to Tata, McGraw-Hill’s publishing partner in India, so we decided that would be a conflict of interest. Also, Wipro was a good choice in its own right because of the human interest story of how Premji transformed it from a cooking oil company into a tech powerhouse. In the end, Wipro was extremely helpful. And so were the many former Wipro executives who I spoke to, such as Vivek Paul, Rich Garnick, and Subroto Bagchi.

Can you share some key insights about The Wipro Way with specific instances on this?

The Wipro Way takes all of the inputs Wipro picked up over the years from the best practices of some of the world’s best corporations and then adds its own secret sauce. One of the most impressive management practices I discovered at Wipro was Premji’s insistence on “zero politics.” He requires his executives to be open and fully collaborative with one another. He doesn’t tolerate the destructive office politics and self-dealing that is so prevalent in American companies.

In the book, you have hailed Azim Premji as a thought leader like Microsoft’s Bill Gates. What struck you as extraordinary about your colourful protagonist?

Both Gates and Premji are pioneers in business model innovation. Gates saw that by providing the operating system for the PC, he could control an industry. Premji saw that by providing an engineering lab for hire to the world, India and Wipro could rewrite the rules of global competition in the tech services business.