Wipro gets a duo to replace Paul

News Blog BANGALORE:

Wipro ended weeks of speculation by finally announcing it was appointing Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe as joint CEOs of the company’s $4.3-billion IT business. The company also appointed its CFO Suresh Senapaty along with Mr Vaswani and Mr Paranjpe to the board of Wipro Ltd. ET had first reported on 15th April that Wipro was planning a management rejig and would make important changes to its top tier of leadership.

'The timing is right. The previous structure was great in bringing us till here but we now need to think about what will take us forward. We are facing a US slowdown and we need to re-think how to grow the business,' Mr Paranjpe said in an exclusive chat with ET. 'Wipro is a large and complex business with many challenges and opportunities. We have to combine and strategise for the future,' added Mr Vaswani.

According to corporate VP, HR, Pratik Kumar, Wipro had been discussing these leadership changes for the last six months. He also said that there was nothing unusual in two people sharing the CEO’s position. 'We debated whether it would be one versus two. In Suresh and Girish we have two individuals who are very complementary in the way they work. We feel that two engines can pull faster than one,' said Mr Kumar. “We want to double the size of the IT business in 3 years and two people can do it much better” said Mr Paranjpe.

Wipro has not had a CEO and vice-chairman ever since Vivek Paul left the organisation in 2005. Mr Premji had hand-picked Mr Paul from GE to lead the IT business. Before that, the position belonged to Mr Arun Thiagarajan who was the MD and country manager of ABB prior to joining Wipro. This time Mr Premji has decided to choose the leaders from within the company.

After Mr Paul left Mr Premji assumed the CEO’s role, running the company with the help of independent business unit heads. Till last year he had 13 people reporting to him. With the new CEOs coming in the number of people reporting to Mr Premji will now go down to six. Apart from the two new CEOs, it includes Mr Kumar, Mr Senapaty, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting president Vineet Agarwal and Wipro Infrastructure MD Anurag Behar. The new structure leaves Mr Premji free to focus on “employees, key customer engagements and investors”, says Kumar.

How the business and responsibility will be split between the two CEOs will be communicated to employees early next week, said the company. Among the many options being discussed is for one CEO to relocate to US. Kumar also said that the unusual decision to have two CEOs was not done to accommodate senior managers.

'It wasn’t decided from the interest of any individual but what was best for the business' he says adding that 'Too many engines can derail a train'. When asked why Mr Sudip Banerjee had moved out, Mr Kumar said, “Sudip could have happily continued in the structure, but he wanted a change. But he continues to be close to Mr Premji in his new role'.

From the first quarter of this financial year, Wipro will merge the operations of Wipro Technologies—its global services business—and Wipro Infotech—its India, M East and Asia Pacific business—into one business unit. Instead of looking at the business in terms of different geographies, henceforth there will be just one single IT business unit with two different revenue streams—global services and global products.

One reason is that India and emerging markets are now growing very fast and several Indian customers have now become as sophisticated as the rest of the world. Plus many of its global customers like Cisco and Microsoft now have big plans for India and emerging markets.

Bottomline :

If Paul was the highest paid Indian executive during that time, drawing around Rs 1.9 crore in salaries and Rs 4.9 crore in commission and incentives [apart from stock options for his colleagues ], Wipro must have save helluvalot during these 2 years

Besides, Azim Premji also proved that they don't need a top man at the helm. On the other hand, Paul had done a good job, that he didn't need a successor for sometime as the company would run on itself for sometime

So the bottomline is that Azim saved Rs.14 crores apart from incentives [which must have been quite a bit, so much so that Azim has enough stored up to hire a new guy !

Good management !
.