Don't be a victim of your own success

At a recent industry meet in Mumbai, Wipro's chief strategy of officer Rishad Premji shared his views of surviving success, adapting in a disruptive environment and the leadership traits that he looked for in candidates.

At a recent industry meet in Mumbai, Wipro's chief strategy of officer Rishad Premji shared his views of surviving success, adapting in a disruptive environment and the leadership traits that he looked for in candidates. Edited excerpts from Premji's statements:

On disruption

It's important for successful organisations to sometimes disrupt themselves. We can't afford to be paralysed by fear. We (Wipro) are doing this by building two parallel organisations, one focusing on traditionally-run business and the other on change. And it's a big leadership challenge to accept that these two organisations have to co-exist.

The compensation structure, the smell and nature of the people you have in these different organisations will look very different. The culture has to change as well. Are we open to cannibalising ourselves? Because if we don't, someone else will.

Are we willing to make investments ahead of time? Are we willing to move outside the mindset of innovation only happening in well-funded laboratories inside the organisation into the external innovation system where innovation is happening rapidly to disrupt us?

How do we incentivise people for both long term and short term? Traditionally, we as an organisation have focused very much on paying people for short term, giving stock options on time invested and not performance. We are experimenting with that now. Courage and humility are critical for leaders in this changing environment.

It's okay to try things and fail. I believe that ultimately you have to service stakeholders and not shareholders. You have to be very transparent and articulate in terms of what are the short-term risks, and what are you trying to build over the long term, which may or may not pay off. But I think you have to be bold and try.

Going for more acquisition to get an edge

It's an execution element of strategy. Certainly, it's a lever that's accessible to all companies and we will leverage that as well. But it's also important to drive certain elements organically too. To build belief in certain new ideas inside the core ship as well.

Assessing prudent risk

You have to try different things and you define time frames within which you get to a certain milestone. And if you don't, it's okay to drop them and move to the next one. Making an effort and clearly defining an end point, that's very important.

Also, having leadership which has the mindset to shake things up helps. Often, getting someone from outside is one way of doing it. The other point is the ability to risk losing business in the short term and cannibalising yourself to gain in the long term. Because if you won't, somebody else will do that to you.

Risks that didn't work

As senior leadership, if you are not making two or three mistakes in every ten, you are not taking enough chances.

There are lots of mistakes we have made. We tried to build product at one point. We were a hardware business, which we got out of. So, there are lots of things you try and if they don't work, you get out of it.

There are some things that don't work at all. We at one point wanted to compete with Microsoft and make our own things called W-DOS, which was a major failure. But the appetite to move on is critical.

source: techgig.com