By NR Narayana Murthy

The first time I met Azim, I was working at Patni Computer Systems as head of the Software Group. My boss, Ashok Patni, is the best boss I have ever had. Due to some personal reason in 1979-80, he had decided to spend some of his time in Pune. Since I was reporting to him, I would go to Pune once a week and update him on my Key Performance Indicators. While I was 100% happy with my relationship with Ashok, I felt somewhat uncomfortable with this arrangement and wanted a shift in my job before jumping back to my entrepreneurial journey.

My friend, Prasanna, who was the head of human resources at Wipro, asked me to consider heading the Software Group at the yet-to-be-started technology group at Wipro and arranged a meeting with Azim.

Grateful for a ‘No’

Azim took me to Willington Club in Mumbai for a discussion. He was very courteous and very easy to transact with. Apparently, I did not come up to his satisfaction and I did not get the job. I am grateful to Azim that he rejected me, else my founding of Infosys would have been delayed by a few years. What struck me during the entire conversation was his deep desire to understand the market and the competitors.

Once Infosys started operating in the post-liberalisation era, Azim realised that we were on to something good and his respect for Infosys and me multiplied several times. He would call me several times a year to find out about our progress and our market strategies. I was very open with him and did not hide anything from him since I knew that our superiority with our competitors came only from how quickly we came out with new ideas and how well and quickly we executed them.

He was shy about coming many times to our office in Electronics City and would nudge me to visit him in his isolated turret on the Wipro campus in Sarjapur. While most of the time I went alone to his office, a couple of times I took Nandan Nilekani, Kris Gopalakrishnan and Mohandas Pai with me. We would go into detailed discussions of how we were managing Infosys. Azim and his CEOs, Vivek Paul and Chandrashekaran, would ask a barrage of questions. We truthfully answered them.

Azim and his wife, Yasmeen, are simple people with very good values. My wife, Sudha, and Yasmeen are good friends and share their interest in literary activities. Azim has always led by example in hard work and austerity. He travelled by economy in India and it was a joy to meet him on flights and continue our conversations.

He and I were the only two members of the Indo-French Business Forum who travelled by taxis or subway and stayed in three-star hotels when we went to Paris for meetings. His son, Rishad, and daughter-in-law, Aditi, are chips off the old block in honesty, simplicity, frugality and hard work. I have worked with Aditi in my work with Embrace, a socially relevant startup that she was involved in.

Azim is an honest person. He would accept his or Wipro’s mistakes openly and make an effort to correct them. In 2001, Nandan and Phaneesh Murthy came to me and informed me about how a Wipro salesperson had plagiarised our presentation in Europe verbatim and made a presentation to a prospect. The prospect was amused and he brought it to Phaneesh’s attention. I spoke to Azim about this and requested him to issue an instruction to his staff not to repeat it. He apologised on behalf of Wipro and did what was necessary.

Manage, Don’t Control

Azim is one of the finest exponents of good governance in India. He is the best example for separating management from control. For him, like for us, compliance with the laws of the country always came first. He stands for honesty, decency, fairness and courtesy in every decision he takes.

Azim goes into deep details of an issue and wants to be on top of everything under his control. I use a principle called the Degree of Optimal Ignorance (DOI) in every decision I take. This principle states that your knowledge for any decision should be strategic and not be as much as your subordinate and not as little as your boss. You learn to arrive at the optimality through experience. My conversations with Azim give me the impression that many times he errs on the side of too much of information.

He is aware of it and tries avoid it. One area where Azim and I have agreed to disagree is in our view on tax exemption for exports. I believe that businessmen operating in the Indian market are doing as much value addition to India as us in the export market. Second, we charge our customers in hard currency and are generally insulated from dips in profits due to exchange rate variations and, finally, we are a profitable industry. Therefore, I do not believe in any tax exemption for our industry. But my conversations with him indicate that Azim favours continuation of tax exemption.

It has been a pleasure knowing Azim, Yasmin, Rishad and Aditi. Every one of them is a role model for us Indians in honesty, simplicity, courtesy, hard work, fairness and decency. Azim is taking a leading role in philanthropy in India. His focus area is improvement of primary education. I wish there were more people like Azim in business in this country. Azim completes 50 successful years as the leader of Wipro on August 17. I wish him many more years of a happy, healthy, productive and prosperous life as the leader of Wipro, as a patriotic Indian that he has always been, and as a leading philanthropist.

The writer is founder of Infosys