Leadership Styles at MNC like Infosys, Whipro HCL etc. Team Leadership at WIPRO

1. Team Leadership at Wipro
Wipro's Co-CEO Model “Are Two CEOs Better Than One?”
03-10-2015 Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao 1

2. Case Title:
Leadership Re-organisation: Wipro's Co-CEO Model
Abstract:
In April 2008, Wipro, India's third largest software services firm announced the appointment of
Girish Parajpe and Suresh Vaswani as co-CEOs for its IT business. Over the years, divergent
personalities like Ashok Soota and Vivek Paul brought in their style of management and moved the
business ahead. Wipro expects the appointment of co-CEOs would enable the company to take
advantage of blending complementary skills and experience, easing the strain of responsibility and
workforce synergies to help the company move up the value chain in the global software industry.
However industry experts are sceptical about the model, as such earlier global attempts have not
been too successful. But in the Indian scenario, specifically IT, companies have managed well with a
collective style of leadership. Will Wipro achieve what it set out to do by appointing joint CEOs or
will it be pulled in different directions by the two leaders?
Pedagogical Objectives:
• To different leadership styles and challenges faced by leaders.
• To leadership changes in Wipro and how it affected the business.
• The rationale behind the decision to appoint joint CEOs.
• The likely impact of the decision.
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3. About Wipro
• India’s third-largest software services firm
• Mumbai- and New York-listed company
• Revenues grown to nearby $4 billion in 2008 from $1.35 billion in
2005
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4. CEO’S SINCE 1981
• Ashok Narasimhan: Founding CEO & president of Wipro's IT business —Wipro
InfoTech and Wipro Systems (software business)
• Ashok Soota: Joined Wipro Infotech in 1984 as president and then became CEO
of Wipro Systems in 1991
• Vivek Paul: Joined Wipro in 1999 after Ashok Soota left the company to start
Mindtree. Led the company for six years till 2005
• Azim Premji: Chairman and CEO from 2005 to 2008
• Girish Paranjpae & Suresh Vaswani: Took charge as joint CEOs in 2008 and ran
the company for almost three years
• T K Kurien: Assumed the post of CEO in April 2011
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5. Wipro’s organizational structure
• Wipro’s organizational structure is complex and sometimes puzzles
outsiders.
• 1 Chairman,
• 2 Executive Director & Joint CEO, IT Business,
• 1 Executive Director & CFO.
• 8 independent non-executive directors
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6. Wipro’s IT Business
• The IT business has two organizations —
• Wipro Infotech – (serves India, West Asia and Asia Pacific.)
• Wipro Technologies – (handles the global business)
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7. Wipro’s Business Matrix
• In functional terms, the company has a matrix structure with 3
verticals and 2 horizontals.
WIPRO
Functions
1 2 3
1
2
3 X 2 Matrix
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8. The Verticals
• The three verticals are
• $1.06 billion Technology Business (which is in the product
engineering and the telecom service provider space)
• $1.4 billion Enterprise Business (targeted at manufacturing,
healthcare, retail, etc.)
• $799 million Financial Services Business.
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9. The Horizontals
• The two horizontals are:
• $1.1 billion Global Practices Business (testing, package
implementation and technology infrastructure services)
• $290 million Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operation
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10. Wipro’s Business Matrix
• These verticals and horizontals are headed by executives who were
expected, after Paul’s departure, to function as CEOs.
WIPRO
Functions
$1.06 billion technology
business
$1.4 billion enterprise
business
$799 million financial
services business
$1.1 billion global
practices business
$290 million BPO
3 X 2 Matrix
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11. Wipro Timeline
• Former CEO Vivek Paul left to join Texas Pacific Group(A private equity firm)
• Wipro has had no CEO since Paul’s departure
• Chairman Azim Premji owns more than 80% of Wipro and took charge
by combining the roles of both chairman and CEO.
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12. Chairman and CEO
• Premji got inevitably overburdened.
• “It pushed too much of the operating load on me and was getting
counter-productive,” says Premji.
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13. Change
• That situation changed when Wipro announced in mid-April 2008 the
appointed of not just one CEO but two:
• Girish Paranjpe
• Suresh Vaswani.
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14. Girish Paranjpe
• University of Mumbai
Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com.), Economics,
Accounting 1974 – 1978
• Daly College
XI, english maths 1964 – 1974
• Paranjpe has been with Wipro since 1990
• Most recently was president of the BFSI (banking, financial services and
insurance) vertical of Wipro’s global IT business.
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15. Competency of Girish Paranjpe
• Start-ups, Pre-sales, Team Management,
• Business Analysis, Cloud Computing, Finance
• Operations Management, CRM, Business Intelligence
• Solution Architecture, Product Management, SaaS
• Integration, Strategic Planning, Consulting
• Core Competency : Cost and Profit Orientation.
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16. Suresh Vaswani
• Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
PGDBM, 1983 – 1985
• Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
B.E., 1976 – 1981
• Vaswani is a 23-year veteran at the company
• Before his promotion, the president of Wipro Infotech.
• In addition, he oversaw some areas of the global practices of Wipro
Technologies.
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17. Competency of Suresh Vaswani
• Vendor Management, Outsourcing, Pre-sales, Managed Services,
• Program Management, Business Development, Global Delivery,
• Information Technology, Solution Architecture, CRM, Security,
• Team Management, Infrastructure, Testing, Executive Management, Integration,
• Project Management, Software Project., BPO, Cisco Technologies, Technical Support
• System Deployment, Business Analysis, Social Media, Solution Selling, SaaS,
• Enterprise Architecture, IT Outsourcing, Telecommunications, Data Center, Manufacturing, New
Business Development
• Core Competency : Action and Result Orientation.
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18. Confident with Change
• Premji is confident that the new arrangement will work.
• He said, “We believe that two people who have worked together for
more than 10 years and been in the company for more than 15 years
would be able to work very well as a team. The fact that 75% of our
revenues come from global markets, the fact that we are growing at
30% a year in a service, highly people-intensive industry, we figured
that a two-man team at the top would be stronger than one man at
the top. I continue to be executive chairman, but they are the joint
CEOs of our IT business.”
- In an interview with India Knowledge@Wharton,
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19. The Hot Seats
• The two men occupying the hot seat
— in this case, seats
— are equally enthusiastic and eager.
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20. The Gung-ho
• Vaswani:
“Given the size of our business and the ambitions that we have for our
business, two is certainly better than one. We do believe that the
power of two will help us so far as we are concerned, given our
environment.”
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21. The Gung-ho
• Paranjpe:
“Given the enormity of the opportunity and the task at hand, we felt it
was worthwhile to have two of us trying to drive this rather than leave
it to one individual to try and do [everything]. And from a personal
perspective, it can get very lonely at the top. So, having two people
helps.”
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22. My view
“The business environment in India gives a stimulus to
this model of collegial and collective leadership,”
• Wipro’s business in the country is associated with both face of India
• “Indian premium”
• “Indian penalty”
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23. Indian Premiums & Penalties
• The “premium” aspect for companies doing business in India is the
combination of access to a highly skilled labour pool and attractive
wage levels,
• The “penalties” are the uncertainties in the business environment
with respect to infrastructure, power availability, urban
transportation and stability in policy regimes.
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24. Need of two CEO
• Companies like Wipro need two CEOs because of the complexity of doing
business in India
• On the one hand, you have to manage offshore client relationships
and business development by staying really closely tuned to what
is happening in international markets.
• On the other, you have to be embedded in India to manage the
country-specific challenges.
Sometimes these two faces of complexity are quite dissociated from each
other, it may be difficult for the same CEO to handle both ends.
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25. Collegial Leadership Model
• Such a “collegial leadership model” works in some Indian companies
is because what they call
“The Founder Effect.”
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26. The Founder effect
• The founders of companies such as Wipro, Infosys Technologies and
HCL Technologies
• are entrepreneurs in some senses,
• are more principals than employees,
• they have very strong shared values and
• they have seen their companies grow over the years.
Conflicts between CEOs often occur because of vastly divergent visions
and different skills, but that’s not the problem with founders.
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27. View of Ravi Aron
• Ravi Aron, senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Center for Technology
Innovation
• Aron has closely studied Wipro’s strategies for the past 14 years.
• Aron believes the twin-CEO model should work well at Wipro based
on his personal knowledge of the relationship between Vaswani and
Paranjpe.
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28. What’s Aron believes
“Suresh and Girish are very compatible personalities,” he says.
“Both are hands-on, have a great deal of discipline, never miss the
details, and have a strong sense of not going after expensive, blue-sky
ideas until they can be validated by research.” he adds
“There could be tactical differences, but those can be resolved.”
In addition, Premji will be involved in all key management decisions,
and has “always been part of the analytic filter that all decisions must
pass through,” says Aron.
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29. View of Peter Cappelli
• Peter Cappelli is a Wharton management professor and sounds a
cautionary note, he points out that he hasn’t seen the twin-CEO
model work effectively in Western corporations.
“Generally, in the world of governance,
this is a situation to avoid,” he says.
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30. View of Peter Cappelli
“My guess is that what ultimately happens is the co-CEOs confront the
possibility of a stalemate, but there is also the possibility of them
continuing to disagree, and so they may end up negotiating
settlements all the time. In principle, that is not bad if they actually
have the interpersonal skills to negotiate conflicts as opposed to just
stalemates.”
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31. View of Peter Cappelli
• Cappelli also doesn’t recommend shared power at the CEO level by
carving out two autonomous business units as a way to retain top
management talent.
“You are basically structuring a whole corporation around these two
individuals with the goal of trying to keep two people,” he says,
Adding that he doesn’t approve of
“turning the organization on its head just to make that happen.”
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32. In View of Sudhir Sethi,
• Sudhir Sethi, chairman and managing director of IDG Ventures India,
part of a global network of local venture funds.
“Wipro may adopt this approach for two to three years.” “Wipro’s
adoption of a joint-CEO structure is a step indicating to internal senior
management the potential of rising to the top,” he says.
“To the other stakeholders, this move signifies depth of its
management cadre in the IT business. The IT business is large enough
to need two CEOs.”
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33. Other side of the coin
• The other side of the coin, of course, is the notion that this is the easy
way out.
• Wipro has lost some senior people recently.
• Appointing an outsider as CEO — or promoting just one person —
could have led to further departures
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34. View of Nandita Gurjar
• Nandita Gurjar, Group Head of Human Resources at Infosys
Technologies.
“A decision to opt for a joint-CEO structure sometimes also
implies that the two may have co-skills and that
there is no frontrunner,” says Nandita
• She makes it clear, however, that she is not talking about the Wipro
duo, but in general terms.
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35. Conclusion
The leadership style shown by the team Wipro
& the team of Azim Premji, Suresh Vaswani and Girish
Paranjpe is :
 Collegial Collective style of leadership
 Decentralized Leadership
 Team Leadership
 Paternalistic leadership by Azim Premji
 Democratic Leadership by Joint CEOs
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36. Thankyou
for listening
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