Global Leadership Summit: Aspiring leaders should focus on their own journey, not external expectations, says Rishad Premji
He believes that the best you can do is the best you are capable of, and that competition is ultimately with yourself, not others.
Rishad is also sceptical of the focus on valuations and the “unicorn” obsession in the startup ecosystem. He believes that companies should focus on building valuable businesses instead of chasing valuations for their own sake.
Below is the verbatim excerpt of the interview.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who’s been groomed to be a leader, who may take over at some point, or who has the aspiration? One thing you keep hearing is, you’ve got big shoes to fill, and you were told that as well.
Premji: You can’t worry too much about what other people think. It’s exhausting to worry about what everybody else thinks and everybody’s giving you advice. When you run the race, I think you’ve got to look to the side to know where people are, but you’ve got to focus on the front, because the more you focus on the side, the more it slows you down. You’ve got to focus and look at the front. I believe that. I would say that’s the number one advice I would give – deeply focus on your journey. Don’t worry too much about what the naysayers say. Don’t worry too much about what other people’s expectations of you are, because I find those are exhausting and they drain you and they slow you down.
The big learning I’ve had for myself personally is, the best you can do is the best you’re capable of. So ultimately, that’s all you can do. And so if people have other expectations, you’re just going to disappoint them. And there’s some who you’ll delight, but the best you can do is the best you’re capable of. And ultimately, the journey of competition is against yourself. It’s really not against anybody else.
Q: As one of the leading software and IT companies in the world, you must be meeting a lot of startups every day. So when somebody gives you a pitch saying that we’ll achieve unicorn status in five months, or we have a valuation of, say, $5 billion $6 billion how do you see those statements?
Premji: That’s the first red sign in my view. You have to focus on building businesses that sustain and then ultimately value will come. You cannot start your journey by saying, I want to build a value of x, y and z. That’s very turning off. That’s the first red sign that pops up when people talk about valuation as opposed to building valuable businesses.
I know there are some venture people in the room, but I just find that we’ve overhyped in our country this whole focus on unicornism. We celebrate that too much. There are thousands of other companies that don’t make it, but serve a need and are successful, but they don’t make unicorn valuations, and it doesn’t make them non-successful companies.
Q: When we speak about Wipro, more than 80 years ago it was a company that was first into the edible oil business. You have evolved and how. The company has given back so much to society. In 2019, Azim Premji gave a $7.9 billion stake to the Azim Premji Foundation and this was a way of giving back to the industry, to the country, to the society. So that was great news. But I would like to ask you, what has kept the company going for the last 80 years?
Premji: A lot of luck. I think luck plays a huge role. There are lots of smart companies, smart people, but you have to be lucky in life. I think that is an important component that you shouldn’t underestimate. It allows companies to survive and thrive in a lot of change.
I don’t think these things were planned, but I think these things have really helped the company stay alive and stay agile and adapt. We defined who we stood for and our values very early on. We didn’t define them intentionally for the first 25-30 years but 54 years ago, in 1970 we did. And I think making sure that you never compromise on that, making sure that that becomes your guiding light, making sure that you attract people who deeply and truly align to what you stand for, I think, is incredibly important. I deeply believe that culture matters infinitely more than strategy, and that can help make or break a company.
The second thing I would say is, we were entrepreneurial. We encourage people to take on big roles young. We were risk-taking. We were not afraid to fail. And we took lots of chances, some of them that worked out, some of them that failed miserably. We got into the finance business in 1996, which was a major disaster, but we weren’t afraid to try things. And the third thing I would say is a part of that entrepreneurial sort of spirit, we empowered people, and there was great autonomy. I was joking earlier, that I’m the executive chairman of the company, I can get my computer fixed faster than most people, but if I have to convince our CEO to do something that he doesn’t want to do, it’s going to be a very, very tough job for me, and I can’t just dictate that. So there’s great empowerment and great autonomy that comes with that empowerment. I think that’s really helped the company as well.
Q: I was watching an old interview broadcast where you were speaking, and you said that, I was trying to figure out, when you you’re trying to hire somebody, what should you look for? Should you look for commonality? Should you think whether you can have a drink with that person? And you were advised none of that. Don’t look for commonality. What would be your advice now?
Premji: I was talking to one of my board members as I was looking for someone and I was saying this – do I like this person? Can I have a drink with him in the evening? Can I have a cup of coffee with him? And he said, that’s the completely wrong way to look for people. You should look for people who are very different than you. They challenge you, they make you uncomfortable at times, but they’re highly functional. And that comes from the diversity of experiences. That comes from the diversity of industries you’ve worked in, roles you’ve played, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, your life experiences. It just comes from being different and I realised at one point many years ago, I had someone in my team, but every time I had to review him, I was stressed. I was like he’s going to push me, he’s going to ask me difficult questions, etc. But I found that brought out the best in me. So I’m a big believer in trying to find people and keep people in your team that are very different than you. You don’t necessarily have to be friends with people you work with either.
Q: I also wanted to ask you, when we speak about moments of reckoning in promoter-driven companies and family-driven companies, there can always be differences when you’re changing gears, when you’re changing the leadership at the top. Were there differences in your thinking on how Wipro should chart out its future? In what ways did you mirror the thoughts of your father? Did he give you any advice when you were taking over as chairman of the company that this is something you must follow, or at some point you said, I’m going to follow my own path over here?
Premji: It’s interesting, and I say this often, and people can take it for what it’s worth, but I deeply believe this, which is, I don’t think we’re a family business. I’m the only family member that works in the company. There’s nobody else that works at Wipro. My father is a non-executive director of the company, and that’s very important. And for the longest time, we’ve been highly professionalised. We are professionally run. I’m very clear on my role. I’m an executive chairman, so I play an important role, but I’m very clear on the differentiation between ownership and management and how my role, to some extent, blurs on that. And that’s an important point, just in the ethos and the autonomy and empowerment that I talked about earlier.
My father and I are very different in many ways. But I think the one thing that he was incredibly gracious about is that when he retired in 2019, he truly retired. Because you can’t have a big personality like that on the back of your shoulders. And what he said to me was, look, I’m always accessible and always there if you need something, but I won’t be in your way. And he’s a demanding board member and asks difficult questions and all of those kinds of things, but he is not in my space in terms of doing work and I deeply, appreciate that.
What have I learned from him? He’s unfazed by success. It’s not important to him; it doesn’t sort of show up. I think I’ve learned that- the importance of just being grounded and unfazed by success, because good times come and bad times come, and you can’t let them ride you too much. A deep openness to learn, and willing to say, I don’t know, a willingness to say I need help, a willingness to sort of learn from any level of the organisation. Just a deep, sort of learning mindset, I think, is what I have picked up with him.
The one area I would say I’m different in is I would probably say I’m a bit more empathetic with people. I understand more easily, and I enjoy people more perhaps, than he does, and that’s just a DNA thing more than anything else.
Q: You’ve evolved as a leader, you’ve worked on yourself. And I think that’s a big advice to people out there that you have to change, adapt, be vulnerable. I don’t know how many of you would know, but Rishad started his career with GE, and you’ve had tough times. All of us when we’re starting, we want to make those sacrifices – we want to put our health, family, mental health, emotional wellbeing everything aside to achieve that one goal, we want to show our leader that we’re there for the company and we can be groomed for tomorrow, but we’re not doing justice to ourselves. Tell us how you’ve changed? Of course, you’ve always stood by your values, integrity, but in the last five, six years, what are some of the things that you’ve prioritised and changed your thinking?
Premji: I learned this very early on when I was at Bain, and I had a very young analyst working for me, and we were working on this very intense project for three weeks in a row, and he prioritised himself on some elements, and I loved it. It was his father’s birthday on a Saturday, we were working seven days a week for three weeks in a row on some private equity project. And he said, Rishad, I can’t come in on this day because it’s my father’s birthday, and it’s incredibly important. And I was incredibly frustrated. But I was frustrated not so much because he had said that, but because I wouldn’t have said that. I would have thought of myself as too much of a slacker, not prioritising the right things, etc, etc. and that’s frankly continued for the last four or five years, when I started thinking a little bit more about myself and my own health. So I’ve just focused on a few different things. I’ve focused on sleep. I’m very purposeful about sleep. I’m very purposeful about exercise, and I’m very purposeful about eating right. The eating right thing began only last year, but the sleeping and the exercise began five or six years ago, and I’ve been tracking this closely over the last five or six years, and I just find it has deeply helped my mental health. Just how I show up, just my orientation, my positivity, whether I’m happy or not, whether I’m irritable, whether I’m constructive, whether I have a can do attitude, whether I snap at people, all of those things. And I’ve really found that it’s so important to focus on these things, because we’re all human, whether you’re the MD of a company or whether you’re somebody starting from campus, we’re all human. And if we’re not focusing enough on ourselves, it’s going to show up later on.
And so at least one thing we’re doing at Wipro very intentionally now is talking a lot about mental health, talking a lot about keeping well, providing access to lots of tools and people and systems where people can access that, and it’s remarkable how people are using it and appreciating the fact that we’re talking about these things because I think it’s incredibly important.
