Last fortnight, Wipro became the first major company in the country to sack employees found guilty of working simultaneously for its rivals. Its chairman Rishad Premji has had no hesitation in calling out “moonlighting” for what it is, outright cheating.
The hardline stance the company took on the issue should have come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the man who chaired it for over 50 years and put in place the foundational principles on which it rests today. Azim Premji, who hung up his boots in 2019, wouldn't want it any other way. Nearly 30 years ago, he was slightly late for an interview I was doing with him for a business magazine. I was told later that he had been dealing with an important issue. An employee had fudged a train bill, seemingly a minor violation and one which in many other companies wouldn’t need the chairman’s intervention. For Premji, though, it was major enough to get personally involved.
Very early in his tenure, Premji put down what he called the three Wipro Beliefs. Top of the list was integrity, along with respect for people and customer-centricity. Over the next 50 years these beliefs, now termed Wipro Values, became the cornerstone around which the company was built. Through all the external changes and even the company’s own evolution into an IT services giant, these have been considered inviolable and each one of its 2,50,000 employees, across both its IT and non-IT businesses, is expected to follow them.
In our book on Premji, The Man Beyond the Billions, there’s a story that Ram N. Agarwal, who spent over three decades with the company, told us: "I was less than one year old in the company, I remember, and somebody who was a very close relative of the family (Premji) from Pune was looking for a dealership of the vanaspati business for the western region. Now, in 1978, this dealership was big. But when I spoke with Mr Premji about what to do, he was very clear: any decision had to be made on merit. Eventually we did not give the dealership to the family."
No surprise, then, that Wipro hasn’t been tarred by the menace of related party transactions, a common feature among Indian business families. It's the reason why the company, along with its Bangalore twin, Infosys, enjoys an ethics premium in the market. An investor knows what he sees is what he gets and every number that is put out can be trusted.
So do its business partners. Thus, in 1989 when US multinational General Electric (GE) was looking to partner with an Indian IT firm for its medical business in India, it first appeared to have settled on a Wipro rival. Premji wrote to GE’s boss Jack Welch urging him to consider Wipro on the basis of its ethical standards. His contention: if GE wanted a firm that matched its value system, Wipro was the right choice. GE subsequently went with Wipro and the joint venture has flourished over the last 30 years. Since then India's top IT firms have used ethics as a competitive strength. Wipro and Infosys, along with Tata Steel made it to the list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies in 2021, an honor roll of 135 companies spanning 22 countries and 47 industries which have been recognized since 2007 by Ethisphere for their unwavering commitment to business integrity.
For the business that Wipro is in, that’s basic hygiene. Often in IT services the same outsourced vendor can be working for competing clients. Market leader TCS, for instance, has a banking client list that comprises Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Citi and ABN Amro. Confidentiality in such a situation isn't desirable; it is critical. Often, these firms also work on developing applications for their clients. In a looser environment it would be easy to use the work done to develop an app of their own and put it out in the market after an interval. That they don't is the reason why India has 60 percent of the global IT outsourcing business.
When you have lakhs of mostly young people working for you, monitoring each one is neither feasible nor worthwhile. Surveillance, as Microsoft chairman Satya Nadella recently said, isn't the key to ensuring employee productivity. Nor can it be a way to enforce ethical behaviour. That has to come from a deeply embedded value system. Which is why the best Indian IT leaders like Premji, Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani have constantly harped on it.
It is also the reason why they can’t have an indulgent attitude towards a blatant breach of contract, which is what moonlighting tantamounts to.
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