Part IThe Story
The advice was delivered politely and in public. At one of the first shareholders' meetings of Western India Vegetable Products Ltd. after the death of its founder, an investor stood and suggested that the new chairman sell his shares to an older colleague. The business, the man explained, was too complex for someone so inexperienced to run. The record does not preserve his name, which may be the only mercy history has shown him. The new chairman was twenty-one. A few months earlier he had been in Palo Alto, two quarters short of a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, planning to stay in America and work for a while before going home to the family firm. Then the telephone rang, and his mother told him that his father, Mohamed Hasham Premji, had died of a heart attack at fifty-one.
"I had no choice," Azim Premji said, forty years later, in the clipped manner that interviewers would come to treasure and dread in equal measure. "I went home and I jumped into the company feet first, right from day one. There was no time to grieve my father."
What he went home to was a vegetable oil mill in Amalner, a small town in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, roughly 300 miles northeast of Bombay. It made a hydrogenated cooking fat sold under the brand Sunflower Vanaspati and a laundry soap called 787, which was less a product than a byproduct, the residue of the oil process given a number and a wrapper. Annual sales were about $2 million. One account calls the company "poorly managed"; another says it was weighed down by debt. The young chairman had no business training. So he did what engineering students do when the exam is tomorrow and the material is unfamiliar. He bought business textbooks and read them at night.
"His comment really got my determination up to prove him wrong," Premji said of the shareholder, years later, in a television interview. It is one of the few moments in a long public life when he admits to something as unruly as spite.
He would, in the end, take the man's advice, though not in any way the man could have imagined. Over the next half century Premji built that mill into Wipro, a technology services company with roughly $10 billion in revenue and more than 240,000 employees. He became, for a few delirious weeks in 2000, the richest Indian who had ever lived. Then, in tranches of 8.7 percent, 12 percent, 18 percent and 34 percent, he gave the shares away. He did not give them to an older colleague. He gave them to a trust whose purpose was to fix the classrooms of the Indian public school system, the schools attended by children whose parents could not afford anything else.
The boy who was told to sell his shares ended up owning almost none of their economic value. Few people have finished an argument with a stranger so completely.
By the Numbers
The Premji Ledger
21Azim Premji's age when he took charge of the family company in 1966
$2MApproximate annual sales of Western India Vegetable Products when he inherited it
53 yearsPremji's tenure at the helm of Wipro, 1966–2019
~$10BWipro revenue, fiscal year ended March 2026 (₹96,497 crore)
242,021Wipro employees, December 2025
67%Share of the promoter group's Wipro stake whose proceeds go to philanthropy since 2019
$21BTotal endowment committed by Premji to the Azim Premji Foundation as of 2019
The Rice King Who Stayed
Every account of the Premjis begins in Burma, and with a nickname. Mohamed Hasham Premji, a Gujarati Muslim trader whose family roots ran back to Kutch, had made enough money in the rice trade to be called the Rice King of Burma. The family belonged to the Khoja community, Shia Nizari Ismailis, a mercantile people with a long habit of moving across the Indian Ocean in pursuit of trade, prices, and sometimes safety. They settled in Bombay. Azim Hasham Premji was born there on July 24, 1945, two years before Independence, into a city and a country that were about to be cut in two.
Five months after his son's birth, on December 29, 1945, Mohamed Hasham Premji incorporated Western India Vegetable Products Limited. The boy and the company are almost exactly the same age. For most of the next eighty years it would be hard to say which of them was raising the other.
The oil mill in Amalner went up around 1947. The product, vanaspati, was sold to retailers who sold it loose, scooping out 50 or 100 grams for customers who arrived with their own containers. This is worth holding in the mind: a commodity with no brand loyalty, sold by the spoonful to people counting every paisa, in a market where the wholesaler kept most of the margin. Everything Wipro later became—the consumer brands, the computer business, the offshore engineering centers—started from a cooking fat that people carried home in their own tins.
Then came Partition. Muhammad Ali Jinnah invited the Rice King to come to Pakistan. One account says Jinnah's offer included the post of finance minister. The sources disagree on the details and agree on the answer. Mohamed Hasham Premji declined and stayed in India. He gave his loyalty to the new country, along with the plain fact of his fledgling oil business, and went on to become the first Indian chairman of the Bombay Electricity Board and to sit on the boards of the Reserve Bank of India, the State Bank of India, and the Life Insurance Corporation. In the first years of the republic, a Muslim trader from Kutch helped govern the central bank of a country that had just been partitioned along religious lines.
It is tempting to treat that refusal as a founding myth and leave it there. It reads better as a wager about belonging, one the family kept renewing for decades. Azim Premji would grow up to describe India, in a 2010 convocation address at IIT Delhi, in terms his father's decision had already underwritten: "As a hopeful Indian, I look at our country as one which is rich in ethnic and cultural diversity and one that has an effective, secular democracy which will help us build an enduring society." Hopeful is the operative word. The Premjis' choice to stay looks less like confidence than like a commitment to keep investing in a country before it had proved anything.
The other parent matters at least as much, and is mentioned less often. Premji's mother, whose name appears in an early-1980s photograph at the Amalner plant as Gulbanoo Premji, was a qualified medical doctor who never practiced medicine. She spent close to fifty years building and running a charitable hospital in Bombay for children with polio and cerebral palsy. "It was not an easy task," her son wrote in his letter to the Giving Pledge. "It was very difficult to get the funding and even harder to organize everything and make it run efficiently. Yet she tackled every kind of challenge and never stepped back from her purpose." He called her "the most significant influence in my life."
So the two inheritances arrived together and pulled in different directions. The father left a business, the mother an institution. The father taught that integrity was the point of commerce—"Integrity was the most important of my father's lessons," Premji told India Today in 2000. The mother taught that the hardest part of doing good is not the money but the organizing. Premji spent his first thirty years acting on the first lesson. He spent the next thirty learning how much the second one cost.
He attended St. Mary's School in Bombay, where by his own cheerful admission he was not a model pupil. Decades later, a child at an awards ceremony in Bengaluru asked whether he had been naughty. "Yes, I was very naughty when I was a kid," he answered. "In those days, you got rapped on the knuckles, you got hit on your head and you had to be kneeling outside the class for a really long time." Picture it: the future chancellor of a university of education, kneeling in a corridor outside a closed classroom door, punished in the ordinary way of Indian schools in the 1950s. He would later spend billions trying to make those classrooms places children might want to stay inside.
He went to Stanford for engineering, though not out of vocation. "I came here for engineering," he told a Stanford audience in 2006, "because at the time when I came here the Government of India only gave exchange for an engineering education for undergraduate." Foreign currency was rationed, and the state decided which ambitions could be paid for in dollars. "I must warn you," he added, "that I never was a very good engineer."
Turning Turtle
The first transformation of Wipro was so unglamorous that later admirers usually skip it. Before the computers came the consumer brands. Before those came the problem of the wholesaler.
"The initial phase which we went through," Premji explained at Stanford, "was transforming a very commoditized business which dealt with only wholesalers to building a very strong consumer brand business which dealt with the retailers who dealt with customers and with very strong inputs of branding and very strong inputs of distribution." In practice this meant hiring people the company had never employed: marketers, salesmen, financial professionals. Vanaspati gave way to bakery fats. Then came toiletries made with ethnic ingredients, hair care soaps, baby toiletries. In 1975 the company set up Wipro Fluid Power to make hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders, about as far from cooking fat as Amalner could get. Lighting followed, along with toilet soap in 1985 and, later, the Chandrika brand that its chairman would famously use himself.
In 1977 the company became Wipro Products Limited and, in 1982, simply Wipro Limited. Wikipedia calls the name a syllabic abbreviation of Western India Vegetable Products. Other accounts expand it as Western India Palm Refined Oils. The disagreement is fitting. Even the company's name started out as one thing and was quietly repurposed into another.
A colleague's memory gives the scale of the place before the next turn. "When I joined Wipro in 1979, the turnover was just Rs 30 crore and profit was not even Rs 1 crore," recalled A.K. Sabat, who headed accounts and internal audit from 1979 to 1982. "The company had just moved to vanaspati from sunflower."
Then the Indian state did Wipro an enormous favor, entirely by accident. In the late 1970s the government, with George Fernandes as industries minister, enforced foreign-ownership rules that drove IBM and Coca-Cola out of the country. IBM refused to cede control to Indian owners. Its departure left India's computer users without a supplier and without servicing, and that gap was the opening.
Premji went for it. "He used to ask me: 'Can we give that much money (to computer engineers) which we give (our) Vanaspati employees?'" Sabat remembered. The question explains the corporate structure that followed. Software engineers and soap salesmen could not share a pay scale, so the businesses were separated, and the computer operation was launched as its own entity. Ashok Narasimhan, then the chief financial officer, became its first head. The team assembled in Bangalore in 1980. In 1981, working out of a lab at the Indian Institute of Science, it produced the first Indian minicomputer built on the Intel 8086 chip. A technical collaboration with an American firm, Sentinel Computer Corporation, gave Wipro a hardware business. In 1984 a software division began writing a spreadsheet and a word-processing suite.
One minor detail from that hiring round would take on a different weight later. Among the candidates shortlisted to run Wipro's hardware business was a young engineer named N.R. Narayana Murthy. He did not get the job. He went on to co-found Infosys, the company that would become Wipro's great Bangalore rival, and remained Premji's friend. The history of Indian information technology could fit into a single interview room in 1980.
Premji's own account of these years is so modest that it borders on concealment. "I think one advantage which we had," he told the Stanford audience, "is be completely turned turtle on our business." The phrase is nautical: a ship capsizing, keel to the sky. He was describing a deliberate capsizing, a company flipping itself over more than once. He also made a point that most founders miss. Each new industry, he argued, made it easier to hand the company to professionals. "We were able to intake fresh people, fresh leadership, fresh people from campus. I think the fact that we were transiting businesses so much made it much easier to be making a movement from so-called family-managed company to what we consider a very professional company today."
The usual story of an Indian family business becoming professional involves a patriarch giving up control, a board revolt, a generation lost. Wipro's version was quieter. Each reinvention brought in outsiders who had never known the old order. Nobody was displaced, because each new business had no old guard to displace. "We made it a point not to employ in the company any family members," Premji said. "So the signal was very clear."
Keep that sentence in mind. Like many principles, it held until it didn't.
Three Years Outside the Gate
In the mid-1970s Premji went to the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad to recruit, and nobody would let him in.
He told the story in 2014 to graduating students at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, and it is one of the few in which he lets himself look foolish. "I was in my early twenties, running a small business which no one had heard of," he said. (He was in fact around thirty by then. Memory had made the humiliation younger than it was.) "Hindustan Lever, the leader in our product category, and other similar blue chip companies were clearly the places which business school graduates wanted to join. Lever, then perhaps 100 times our size, did not even know we existed."
"Suffice it to say we were not taken seriously. I was not even given a chance to have a dialogue with the students."
He came back empty-handed. Then he went back again, and kept going, to IIM-A, to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, to other campuses, chasing recent graduates who had already taken other jobs. "I did not relent," he said, "and I also did not change what I was saying about the company. I presented Wipro with absolute candour."
"After three whole years of trying, we finally succeeded."
It began with a couple of hires and became, in his phrase, "a steady stream." By the early 1980s Wipro was invited to every top campus. The early recruits had been told exactly what kind of company they were joining, a small vanaspati maker with large intentions, and most of them stayed for their whole careers. "Many of them played a determining role in shaping Wipro."
His preference for candour over salesmanship shows up again and again across the decades. A former Wipro engineer, writing after Premji's 2019 retirement, remembered an annual employee session at which a colleague confessed that he had persuaded his father-in-law to buy a Wipro Finance product, which then underperformed. Premji's answer was blunt: never recommend a Wipro product to anyone out of loyalty, only if you are convinced it is the best in the market. At another session an indignant salesman demanded to know why Wipro Systems bought personal computers from HCL, then Wipro's fiercest competitor, instead of from its own sister division. "All our businesses have the freedom to decide how best they want to run them," Premji said, by this account without visible emotion. "If they do not find your offering good enough, they will go to competition."
The same patience went into recruiting senior people. In the 1980s Premji went after Ashok Soota, an executive he wanted to run the products business, and kept at it through Soota's skepticism until he agreed. Soota later dedicated his book on entrepreneurship to Premji and two other mentors—"because these are the three people from whom I learnt the most." He went on to co-found MindTree.
The early business-school recruits rhyme with the boy at the shareholders' meeting. Both are stories of a small, unproven thing turned away by the established and the comfortable, which keeps returning without changing its pitch. Both end with the gatekeepers coming round. Premji seems to have understood early that you cannot persuade a gatekeeper, only outlast one.
— Azim Premji, to Forbes, 2006I went home and I jumped into the company feet first, right from day one. There was no time to grieve my father.
The Sunflower on the Pocket
In May 2006 a writer from Stanford magazine, Joel McCormick, arrived at Wipro's headquarters campus on the edge of Bangalore. He had come through dust and diesel, past construction sites and cows foraging in roadside garbage. Inside the gate he found something he compared to a miniature Singapore: quiet gardens, footpaths, buildings that would not have looked out of place in Palo Alto. Premji came into the conference room with his white hair swept back, wearing a khaki shirt embroidered with Wipro's sunflower logo. "But for his patrician bearing, and the setting," McCormick wrote, "you might have mistaken him in that garb for the man who last changed your muffler."
"Okay, let's go," Premji said. McCormick timed it: one minute and twenty seconds of small talk.
The sunflower is the thread worth following here. It began as the brand on a tin of cooking fat in 1945: Sunflower Vanaspati, scooped into customers' own containers in Amalner. In 1998 Wipro relaunched its identity with a "Rainbow Flower" and the line "Applying Thought." Forbes's 2007 billionaires list, which ranked him twenty-first in the world with $17.1 billion, noted that he "often wears shirts with the company logo embroidered on the pocket." Half a century after leaving the cooking-fat business, the richest man in Indian technology still wore its flower on his chest. It is the kind of detail a novelist would cut for being too neat.
Then there is the legend of his thrift, which has been told so often it has hardened into folklore, partly true and partly embroidered.
He drove a Ford Escort until about 2004, then moved up to a Toyota Corolla. He spoke of the Escort with an engineer's affection rather than any nostalgia for hardship: "They re-engineered the entire suspension system for it. It can really take the rough roads." He flew economy and avoided five-star hotels. He wore Indian-made clothes and an Indian-made watch, and washed with his own company's Chandrika soap. When a Globe and Mail reporter met him at Wipro's new office in Mississauga, an industrial suburb of Toronto, the company had laid out pastries, hot drinks, and a platter of fruit. Premji took seven strawberries and a cup of tea.
In Bangalore in 2000, when he was worth somewhere between $35 billion and $39.5 billion depending on the week and the magazine, he worked from a spartan tenth-floor office in the Du Parc Trinity complex and, according to India Today, jogged up the stairs every day alongside the rank and file. He insisted on paying for personal calls made from his office phone. Old-timers called him Lalaji, a term more often used for a careful shopkeeper than a tycoon. He carried a yellow legal pad to meetings and took meticulous notes. He insisted that both sides of a sheet be used when photocopying. After everyone had gone home he would walk the office switching off lights and fans.
Sundeep Khanna and Varun Sood's 2020 biography, Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions, written from interviews with hundreds of current and former executives after Premji declined to be interviewed himself, adds the best stories. He once wanted to buy a Fiat registered in Wipro's name. He brought in the finance department, because he wanted to play by the rules and pay, but the car had been depreciated to zero on the company's books, and the purchase collapsed because there was nothing to pay for. Friends were thrilled when he finally bought a Mercedes, until they learned it was second-hand. When his staff showed him plans to cater a client visit with meals from a five-star hotel, he said: "If our cafeteria is good enough for our employees, it should be good enough for clients too!" On a trip to the United States he was visibly pleased when two of his senior-most executives bought lunch for the three of them at Burger King for less than $7.50.
The same biography notes the counterweight: this was a man who "didn't bat an eyelid" when an employee in the vegetable oils business lost ₹25 lakh in a year on a trading position.
That pairing is the key to the whole act. The thrift was never really about money; Premji could absorb a ₹25 lakh trading loss without blinking. It was about signals: what a chairman's behavior tells employees about whose money is in the building. The phone calls, the Fiat, the cafeteria all say the same thing: this is not mine. At the time it looked like personal eccentricity. Read backward from 2019, it looks like rehearsal. A man practicing trusteeship on a Fiat would one day practice it on $21 billion.
He hated the attention that wealth brought. In March 2000, as Wipro shares with a face value of ₹2 touched ₹9,600 and the company was briefly valued at three times Infosys, he told India Today: "I feel like a zoo animal these days. I would rather concentrate on doing my job, insulated—as far as possible—from what happens on the stock markets." He stayed the richest Indian for five consecutive years. Years later, Open magazine ran an interview with him under a headline that sounds like a summary of the decade: "Being rich did not thrill me."
There is a temptation, which most Indian profiles give in to, to make him a saint of austerity. The austerity was real, but it was also a style, a kind of bespoke modesty that suited a patrician man who wore khaki and liked the effect. Joel McCormick noticed the patrician bearing; the muffler-shop shirt did not hide it. Premji was not pretending to be ordinary. He was demonstrating, with some theatrical skill, that being extraordinary did not have to be expensive.
Black and White, Nothing Grey
"What is unique about Premji is that there is only black and white, and nothing grey, when it comes to his focus on integrity," Shailendra Singh, Wipro's Africa head, told Forbes Africa in 2014. "And he will pay any price for it."
Most executives' talk of integrity costs nothing. Premji's had a price tag, and his companies paid it in electricity and customs duty. India Today reported in 2000 that Wipro had endured power blackouts and the confiscation of import consignments because it refused to pay bribes. In 1970s and 1980s India, an industrial company that would not grease the local utility or the customs house was choosing, in effect, to work with the lights off.
A former Wipro engineer who joined in 1986 and stayed thirteen years remembered the policy from below. Sales staff complained that the no-bribes rule made it impossible to compete. "Azim Premji's response was unequivocal," he wrote: "refuse to pay bribes and then negotiate with your supervisor to reduce your targets." Most chief executives who issue ethics codes never get to the second half of that instruction. Premji did not simply forbid the bribe. He wrote down the revenue the bribe would have won, and he made middle management absorb the loss instead of quietly passing it back to the salesman.
Sometimes the honesty paid. The same engineer recalled a government department awarding a prestigious contract to a vendor that offered "free" software. Wipro appealed, explained why the software could not possibly be free, and the customer reopened the process.
He set out his test at the third convocation of Azim Premji University in September 2015, and it fits him exactly: practical, slightly old-fashioned, aimed at shame rather than law. "Whenever you do something, ask yourself whether you will be willing to talk about what you have done to your friends, to your parents, to your spouse without feeling small or guilty... There is also the newspaper test—which means if what you have done gets published in newspaper headlines tomorrow, how will you feel?"
He had made the larger argument thirteen years earlier, in December 2002, delivering the Bhogilal Leherchand Memorial Lecture in Mumbai under the title "Leading in Turbulent Times." The Enron scandal was months old. Premji cited a Brookings estimate that American corporate scandals had cost $38 billion in their first year, and Paul Krugman's view that their damage to the U.S. economy exceeded that of September 11. His conclusion was cultural, not regulatory: laws and board reforms could not by themselves guarantee ethical behavior, so governance had to rest on shared values that leaders practiced consistently. Wipro was by then listed on the New York Stock Exchange (it listed in October 2000, and its American Depositary Shares rose 19 percent on the first day). In 1998 it had become, by the company's account, the first firm in the world awarded the Software Engineering Institute's Level 5 certification for quality. For an Indian company selling to American corporations, being trustworthy was a large part of the product.
A clean record is not the same as a perfect one, and the shadows deserve to be stated plainly. In December 2009 Wipro discovered that a junior employee had embezzled $4 million. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the company's internal controls, and in December 2016 Wipro paid a $5 million penalty without admitting or denying the allegations. In 2020 five former employees in the United States filed a class action in New Jersey alleging discrimination against workers who were not of South Asian origin, claiming that more than 80 percent of Wipro's 14,000 U.S. staff were South Asian. In February 2023, by then under the next generation of leadership, the company was criticized for offering around 4,000 graduate hires optional revised packages at nearly half the original salary. None of this cancels the half century before it. It is simply what happens when values that once fit inside a chairman's yellow pad have to be stretched over a quarter of a million people.
Premji had foreseen that problem himself. Asked at Stanford in 2006 about the hardest part of growing at more than 30 percent a year, he did not mention recruiting, training, or the 20,000-odd net hires a year. "I think the biggest challenge is to scale cultural continuity," he said. "It's not an easy challenge and I think you get into some compromises along the way." He cited a McKinsey finding that the firm could not grow faster than 20 percent a year without compromising what it stood for. "Whether we can do it or not, I don't know. It'll probably require the next generation of people in leadership to be able to do it better."
The Impatience of an Owner
The executives who worked for Premji describe a mentor, and the ones who left describe someone harder. Both accounts are true, and the gap between them is where the man actually was.
Look at the list of Wipro chief executives since 1981 and a pattern emerges. Ashok Narasimhan ran the IT business from 1981 to 1988. The account that circulated afterward was that he had bet on hardware while Premji backed software, and the two fell out. Ashok Soota ran it from 1991 to 1999, then left to co-found MindTree. Vivek Paul, recruited as a star, ran it from 1999 to 2005 and announced a bold plan to take Wipro to $4 billion in revenue by 2004. The company got about halfway. Paul clashed with Premji and departed abruptly. Premji took the job himself from 2005 to 2008, reorganized the company into industry verticals of about $300 million each—"like a mid-sized company even by U.S. standards," he told Wharton's Ravi Aron—and then handed the IT business to two men at once.
Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani were both Wipro lifers, and Vaswani had been mentored by Premji personally. The joint-CEO arrangement, unique among the big Indian IT firms, was Premji's design. He later explained it: "we saw the downturn coming and we did not have one person ready in the organisation who could take the leadership." The downturn came, Wipro handled it, and then the recovery arrived faster than anyone at Wipro had expected. Tata Consultancy Services hired roughly 20,000 people in a single quarter while Wipro added barely 3,000. Cognizant, a late entrant, was closing in on third place.
At a board meeting on second-quarter results in 2010, which insiders called stormy, the directors, led by their chairman and roughly 75 percent owner, expressed strong displeasure. Premji kept the pressure on through constant performance reviews. Nothing changed. Forbes India reconstructed what came next. At 8 a.m. on January 21, 2011, about thirty of Wipro Technologies' most senior executives arrived at the Electronic City campus for what they assumed was another review. They were divided into two rooms according to which CEO they reported to. Paranjpe and Vaswani told them they were leaving. There was stunned silence. Some executives offered to resign themselves, saying they had let their bosses down. The two men then swapped rooms and delivered the news again, until it was obvious the arrangement wasn't working and everyone was brought into one room. Several people, Vaswani among them, were in tears.
The two-room meeting is a small, painful image of the problem itself: a company that had built a structure with two heads and then discovered it could not even announce its own ending in a single room.
That afternoon, at a press conference, Premji said the sentence that defines the episode.
— Azim Premji, press conference in Bangalore, January 21, 2011I don't think we should be making excuses. We have underperformed relative to competition, and relative to our potential as a company.
He gave the job to T.K. Kurien, a ten-year Wipro veteran and, according to the HR chief, the only internal candidate considered. In an interview with The Economic Times soon afterward, Premji was unusually frank about where Wipro had gone wrong. "I think we did not see the growth coming. Like we saw the downturn coming, probably the earliest in the industry." And: "It does not require a genius to fix that. The issues are fundamental." He was firm that the dual structure had not been a mistake at the time. That is either admirable consistency or a particular kind of pride.
Business Today put it more sharply: this could be "just another instance of Premji losing his patience with underperformers." The magazine also noted where some of the casualties had ended up. Anurag Behar, formerly head of Wipro's infrastructure engineering business, had been "shunted out" to the Azim Premji Foundation.
That one sentence marks one of the great reversals in the story. The man moved sideways out of the main business became the founding vice-chancellor of Azim Premji University and one of the most candid voices in Indian philanthropy. He wrote the column, discussed below, in which the foundation publicly admitted one of its own failures. What looked like a demotion from a quarterly-results company turned out to be a transfer to the work Premji considered most important.
Khanna and Sood observe that Premji's management style "cramped some CEOs under his chairmanship," and that his decision to take the top job after Paul, and then to split it, raised eyebrows across the industry. Those who stayed were effusive. "Working with him is in many ways a lesson in living one's life," Kurien said in 2014. Sudip Banerjee, at Wipro from 1983 to 2008, said: "Premji is straight as an arrow. What you see, that you get." In 2006, at Stanford, Premji gave a lecture that included this principle about innovation: people who are "not clones of people already in the organization" must be protected by top management, "because that then becomes the image of the organization that the organization cannot absorb diversity." He believed it. He did not always manage it. Holding both of those facts at once is the price of taking him seriously.
If These Fools in Software Can Do It
The October 2006 Stanford talk, given at the Graduate School of Business forty years after he left the engineering school, catches Premji at the peak of Wipro's confidence, and it is funnier than its reputation suggests.
The run rate was over $3 billion, growing 34 to 35 percent a year. Market capitalization was a little over $20 billion, which he noted put Wipro "in the league in terms of software consultancy of the Accenture's plus in terms of at least market capitalization if not in terms of revenue size." The IT business had more than 60,000 people. "And the interesting statistics is that they drink 1,400 gallons of coffee a day and they drink over 3,300 gallons of tea a day, roughly equal in terms of size." It is a very Premji joke: a fact presented as a joke, or a joke presented as a fact, delivered so flatly that you cannot tell whether he means the coffee or the tea.
Then came his theory of contagion. Indian pharmaceutical companies, auto-parts makers, and a steel company that had just made a very large foreign acquisition had all suddenly raised their ambitions. Why? "I figured we set the example and our fellow businessmen figured that if these fools in software can do it, so can we."
Beneath the humor was a serious economic argument he kept refining. Outsourcing, he insisted, was not mainly about cheap labor. "It's just not based on cost arbitrage, it's just based on talent arbitrage, or based on talent leverage." The West was not producing enough engineers, and the ones it did produce did not want to specialize in computer science. India and China were producing engineers at four or five times the American rate. He gave a figure that struck him: four years earlier, 30 to 40 percent of Wipro's attrition had been people leaving for jobs or study in the United States. Now it was under 1 percent. "That trend is completely reversed."
He was clear-eyed about what Indian IT was not. Asked whether India would move into products and own its innovation, he declined to flatter the room. "I do not see India emerging as a large product innovation country, unfortunately." Services were simply "low-hanging fruit," lower in risk, closer to the remote-delivery advantage. "We are gravitating towards where the risks are less and the rewards are more." He told Wharton the same thing more plainly: Indian firms "chose a path where it was easier to succeed rather than one that was more difficult." He was also willing to tell would-be entrepreneurs in the audience that funding was plentiful but that funds "will not put money on yoyos," and that anyone trying to build a services firm should "for god sake focus."
Then, almost as an aside, he offered the definition that would be quoted for years: "Creativity is about making new things. Whereas innovation is about doing new things." And he quoted Feynman approvingly: "I try to fail as fast as I can." His own gloss was more useful than the borrowed line: "Failure should be forgiven and forgotten as long as the lessons are remembered and recycled."
Wipro, he told the room, had set up an Innovation Council that worked "like an internal VC for innovation," with about 500 people and a target of raising innovation-derived revenue from 5 percent to 10 percent within three years. The year before, the company had filed 58 invention disclosures. He also allowed himself a moment of real modesty about the program: "It has moved reasonably well. It could have moved better."
That phrase, it could have moved better, comes close to summing up how Premji graded himself throughout his career. Ask him the secret of his success, as a schoolchild once did, and he gave a two-part answer: "Hard work and a lot of luck." How do you get luck? "It just comes by itself. You can't search for it."
The Trustee's Arithmetic
There is a sentence in Premji's Giving Pledge letter that explains everything that follows it, and it is less about generosity than about a theory of who owns what.
— Azim Premji, letter to the Giving PledgeI was deeply influenced by Gandhi's notion of holding one's wealth in trusteeship, to be used for the betterment of society and not as if one owned it.
Not as if one owned it. Gandhi's trusteeship idea held that the rich are custodians rather than proprietors, entitled to manage wealth but not to treat it as theirs. For most Indian industrialists it was a pious phrase for speeches. Premji took it literally and then built legal structures to carry it out.
The sequence matters. For roughly three decades, he wrote, he "focused on building Wipro in to a successful professionally run organization." Philanthropy came late. Khanna and Sood call it "a late realisation," though their book also describes him as "a philanthropist at heart and a businessman by choice—a man who wanted to give away his billions but realized early enough that he would first have to earn them." Both claims can be true. The desire to give may have been old; the decision to act on it came only once the fortune was large enough to matter.
In 2001 he set up the Azim Premji Foundation, choosing public education because, as he told Philanthropy Age, "children from the most disadvantaged families go to government-run schools." It was not to be a grant-making body handing out cheques to other organizations. It was to be an operating organization working inside government school systems. "My experience in India had taught me," he wrote, "that much harder than committing or collecting money, is establishing effective operational and execution structures." That is his mother's lesson, nearly word for word.
The foundation's early years produced a failure, and the way it handled the failure tells you a good deal about the institution it was becoming. Over four years the foundation built what it described as the largest single library of digital learning resources in India: 125 CDs of lessons for classes I through VIII, in 18 languages including tribal ones, designed to fit the school curriculum. It rolled them out with state governments in thousands of schools. In December 2010 Anurag Behar, the executive moved over from Wipro, published a column in Mint that did something foundations almost never do. "After 5 years, when we took stock at a fundamental level, we realized that the whole thing was at best a qualified failure."
The reasons were plain. Computer uptime in the schools that had computers was "at best 30%," because of electricity and repairs. The software's usefulness depended entirely on the teacher: "With a few exceptional teachers, it became a useful tool. With an ordinary teacher, it was just a means of entertainment." Behar recounted meeting education leaders from Finland and Ontario, who had said the same thing on two continents: "not a dollar will we invest in ICT, every dollar that we have will go to teacher and school leader capacity building."
So the foundation of India's most famous IT billionaire publicly concluded that information technology was not the answer for Indian classrooms. "With a rational mind and a heavy heart, we abandoned our focus on DLR." It is hard to imagine a more expensive or more credible statement against interest. A man who had spent decades selling the transformative power of software was paying for an organization that told the country, in print, that software would not save its children. Teachers would.
In 2009 the foundation reviewed its strategy and decided to build institutions: district-level and state-level centers for teacher development, and a university. In December 2010, to pay for that, Premji transferred 213 million Wipro shares, about 8.7 percent of the company and then worth roughly $2 billion, to an endowment. David Rubenstein, introducing him at the Council on Foreign Relations two months later, called it the largest single gift ever made in Indian philanthropy and, he thought, "the largest single gift made anywhere in the world last year."
Then the tranches kept coming. In February 2013 he became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge, after Richard Branson and David Sainsbury only the third non-American, and transferred another 12 percent. By April he said he had given 25 percent of his wealth to charity. That same year he surprised India's business community by supporting a government proposal to tax the super-rich. In July 2015 he gave another 18 percent of his Wipro holding, bringing the total to 39 percent. In March 2019 he committed a further 34 percent, raising the total endowment to $21 billion and the share of the promoter group's stake directed to philanthropy to 67 percent. The Economic Times ranked it among the five largest donations in the world and the largest in Asia. A book review in 2020 calculated that he was giving away ₹22 crore a day. A 2021 ranking put it at ₹27 crore.
The legal design matters as much as the size. Mint's headline on March 19, 2019, put it in eleven words: "Azim Premji trusts get a share of his wealth, but not voting rights." The trusts received the economic ownership of the shares and their dividends. Control of the company, the votes that choose boards and chief executives, stayed with the promoter group. Premji had separated the two things the shareholder in 1966 had treated as one. The man had told him to sell his shares because he could not run the company. Premji ended up giving away the shares' value and keeping the running of the company. The structure protected Wipro from becoming a foundation's passive asset, and protected the foundation from depending on a family's generosity from year to year. It also meant, as the critics later pointed out, that the family kept control of a public company whose economics belonged largely to charity. Both readings are correct.
The scale of the foundation's present work is the kind that blurs when you write it down. As of June 2025 it was working directly with 2.75 lakh teachers—1.75 lakh in primary schools, one lakh in upper primary—reaching 6.9 million students in government schools, along with one lakh anganwadi workers serving 2.5 million children, and 814 crèches in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha. It has 59 District Institutes, 291 Teacher Learning Centres, more than 2,500 staff, and 1,320 partner organizations. In 2022 it expanded into primary health care. It supports a daily egg, or an alternative, for more than 55 lakh children through Karnataka's mid-day meal scheme, and has announced a scholarship program for girls' higher education intended to grow from 30,000 a year to 2,50,000.
Behind those numbers are individual teachers. Jarina Bee joined a government primary school in a Bhopal housing colony in 2017, fresh from her village and as hesitant as her pupils. "I used to hesitate to talk to children. I also couldn't do it," she told BusinessLine. Through workshops and conversations with experienced teachers in the foundation's network, she found her voice, and her students found theirs. Her story is the 2010 lesson made human: the money flows to people like Jarina Bee, not to the CDs.
The university was created under the Azim Premji University Act of 2010 and began teaching in 2011, initially in two programs, education and development. It worked out of Electronic City until 2020, when it moved to its own campus on Sarjapur-Attibele Road. Its motto is "towards a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society." Its 43,837-square-foot library is open to the public. It runs a free Azim Premji School on campus for disadvantaged children. It publishes a series called State of Working India, whose 2021 edition estimated that the pandemic's first wave had pushed 23 crore Indians into poverty, a figure few institutions funded by a technology fortune would have chosen to publicize. In November 2021 it launched the Schoolbooks Archive, a free digital collection of 5,724 South Asian schoolbooks and related documents going back to 1819. A second campus opened in Bhopal in July 2023, and more are planned in Ranchi and in Palashbari, Assam.
When the pandemic arrived in March 2020, the foundation, Wipro and Wipro Enterprises committed ₹1,125 crore to relief, followed by ₹1,000 crore for vaccination in June 2021. In a convocation address to NIT Trichy in November 2020, delivered by video, Premji described about 65,000 people on the ground across some 400 districts: foundation staff, university alumni, partner organizations, and government schoolteachers. Wipro converted its Pune office into a COVID hospital. The company's kitchens delivered nearly three million meals over 74 days.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the Biocon founder and his friend of several decades, called him "a torchbearer for philanthropy" and a mentor in her own giving. This matters because of what the BBC set out to explain in an April 2019 piece headlined "Why India's rich don't give their money away." For a long time Premji was less a representative of Indian wealth than an exception to it.
The Son, the Courts, and the Gate
In 2006, at Stanford, a student asked him how the ownership and leadership of Wipro would change in the coming years. "No, I really don't know," Premji said. "That's an honest answer to give you."
The following year, his elder son joined the company.
Rishad Premji, born January 9, 1977, educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, Wesleyan University, and Harvard Business School, had spent two years at Bain and four at GE Capital in the United States before arriving at Wipro in 2007 as a business manager. The father who had told Stanford a year earlier that "we made it a point not to employ in the company any family members" now employed one. The principle had protected a family firm while it was becoming professional. Faced with the question of succession, it bent.
The company handled the transition slowly and in public view, with something like the patience Premji had once shown at IIM-A. In April 2012, when Wipro bought the Australian analytics firm Promax for about $36 million, a deal too small to need the chief strategy officer, it was Rishad who took reporters' questions on the conference call. Afterward a Wipro executive phoned one of the journalists for a casual chat and slipped in a question: so how did Rishad do? Rishad became chairman of NASSCOM for 2018–19. In 2014 the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. On July 30, 2019, after fifty-three years at the helm, Azim Premji retired as executive chairman and became founder chairman and a non-executive director. Rishad took over. The Times of India's headline was the only one possible: "Rishad Premji has very big shoes to fill at Wipro."
In his last letter to shareholders, Premji wrote that "much of the economic progress in the world has come at the cost of climate change and therefore we have a responsibility towards creating a sustainable community." He was, by then, an old man writing to a company that had outgrown him, using it to address the larger world.
The years after his retirement brought an unexpected kind of noise: litigation. Beginning around 2020, an NGO called India Awake for Transparency, connected to a man named R. Subramanian, filed what the courts would call a maze of complaints. They alleged that assets worth ₹45,000 crore had been illegally transferred from three companies into a private trust and a newly formed company. Premji and his wife, Yasmeen, were named. Premji's lawyers pointed out that the amalgamation scheme had been approved by the Karnataka High Court on March 26, 2015. The Karnataka High Court called the complaints frivolous, and in January 2022 two complainants were jailed for contempt. In March 2022 a Supreme Court bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M.M. Sundresh noted Subramanian's unconditional apology. It recorded that Premji had taken a "constructive" view and agreed to close the matter, provided he faced no further "barrage" of litigation, and the court advised the complainant to start "a new chapter in his life." In May 2024 the Allahabad High Court's Lucknow bench quashed separate criminal proceedings brought against him under the Equal Remuneration Act over a third-party security contractor, noting he had no direct role. The court took the unusual step of praising the defendant, observing that his endeavors had "left an impeccable mark on society."
Then, in September 2025, came the gate.
Bengaluru's Outer Ring Road had become one of the most congested stretches of road in India. The city had grown so fast that the miniature Singapores McCormick saw in 2006, the walled campuses of the technology companies, now sat inside the gridlock like islands. Karnataka's chief minister, Siddaramaiah, wrote to Premji asking whether part of Wipro's Sarjapur campus could be opened to ease the traffic. India Today summarized the request: "Lend me a road, I've a traffic problem to solve."
Premji said no. In a formal reply he cited "significant legal, governance, and statutory challenges." The campus was private property and a Special Economic Zone. "There is no silver bullet to resolve it," he wrote. Instead he offered to have Wipro fund a significant part of a comprehensive, expert-led study to find a long-term solution to the city's mobility problems.
On its face, the episode is a small municipal dispute. It is also the clearest picture of the paradox at the center of his life. Here was a man who had handed most of his fortune to the public school system, who believed, in his own words, that "markets, public systems and philanthropic initiatives all had a significant role to play," and who would not open his gate to the public road. He could be generous in the large sense and scrupulous to a fault in the small one. He would fund the study but not lend the road. The refusal was consistent with everything else: the Fiat he could not buy because it belonged to the company, the HCL computers the divisions were free to purchase, the rules he would not bend even for his own benefit. The gate was not his to open, any more than the Fiat had been his to buy. A trustee keeps the rules of the trust, even when the chief minister asks.
He turned eighty on July 24, 2025. There was no press release from Wipro. Rishad posted a photograph with one line: "Happy 80th birthday to this guy." That May, Time had named Premji among the Titans on its first TIME100 Philanthropy list. PremjiInvest, the family office he founded in 2006 to support the foundation's mission, had grown from a reported $1 billion corpus in 2008 into a fund Bloomberg described in 2024 as betting on AI to support a $10 billion portfolio. It had backed companies from Anaplan to PolicyBazaar to Coupa. The child born five months before the company had outlived his father by almost thirty years, and the company now funded a cause his father had never imagined.
The Question in Sirohi
In early December 2016, Premji sat in the winter sun in Sirohi, a district in southern Rajasthan, watching the morning assembly at a school serving what he called "a severely disadvantaged community." He described the scene a few weeks later, in a New Year's letter to every Wipro employee. "It was deeply engaging for me, because the children were completely and meaningfully engaged."
After the assembly a girl, "probably no more than 11 years old," came to talk to him. She spoke, he wrote, "with genuine joy, about how good and satisfied she felt"—the fulfillment, as he put it, "that comes from something well done." Then she turned the question around. What had he done that made him feel really happy and fulfilled?
"It is not as though this question has not been asked of me before," he wrote. But this time "the question was suffused with the child's genuine curiosity and pure heart, and so became a moment of great clarity and insight for me."
He did not say Wipro, though he loved it: "For five decades, I have been completely invested in Wipro and its people." He did not mention the money. He wrote that the greatest fulfillment lay in knowing that the foundation's work "has some role in shaping confident, thinking, caring and ethical human beings like her." He reminded his employees that almost 40 percent of the company they worked for was by then owned by a philanthropic trust, so their quarterly targets, their client calls, their 1,400 gallons of coffee and 3,300 gallons of tea, were helping to pay for that assembly in Sirohi.
Seventy years earlier, a naughty boy had knelt in a corridor outside a classroom in Bombay, shut out, his knuckles stinging. Fifty years earlier, a young man had been told at a shareholders' meeting to sell his shares and step aside. Now an eleven-year-old girl stood in the sun inside a school she was glad to be in, putting a question to a man whose shares had paid, in some small part, for the morning she was describing. She asked what he had done that made him happy.
He wrote down her question on the pad.
A handful of books chart the arc for readers who want more: Azim Premji: A Biography, the briefer A Complete Biography of Azim Premji, and the more recent Azim Premji: From Circuits to Souls. Khanna and Sood's The Man Beyond the Billions remains the most deeply reported, built on the testimony of the executives who worked under him.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles that follow come from the evidence in Part I: the decisions Premji made, the ones he reversed, and the ones he never explained. Several of them run against how founders are usually taught to behave. They work as a set. The thrift, the integrity rule, the trusteeship structure and the willingness to capsize the company are really one idea expressed at different scales.
The principles
- 1.Let each reinvention do the professionalizing.
- 2.Treat a market's expulsions as its openings.
- 3.Outlast the gatekeeper; don't change the pitch.
- 4.Make frugality a governance signal, not a lifestyle.
- 5.Price integrity into the targets.
- 6.Let your own divisions buy from the competition.
- 7.Confess the failure that would mislead the field.
- 8.Separate economic ownership from control.
- 9.Fund operators, not cheques.
- 10.Own the scoreboard in public, then change the structure.
- 11.Sell talent arbitrage, not cost arbitrage.
- 12.Compete with yourself, because success creates gravity.
Principle 1
Let each reinvention do the professionalizing
Most family companies try to professionalize the business they already have, and in doing so they set the founder's loyalists against the newcomers. Premji did something subtler. Each time Wipro entered a new industry—branded consumer goods, hydraulics, computers, offshore software—it entered with a team built "virtually from scratch," as he told Stanford in 2006, moving only a few HR and finance people across. The new businesses had no old guard to resent the professionals, because the professionals were the first ones there.
The result was a family-controlled company that ran, for most of its life, as a meritocracy of outsiders. The constraint came to look like the strategy: a vanaspati firm that could not attract business-school graduates for its existing line attracted them easily for its new ones.
Tactic: When you need to change your company's culture, launch the change through a new business line staffed almost entirely by new hires, rather than trying to reform the old team in place.
Principle 2
Treat a market's expulsions as its openings
IBM's exit from India after it refused to cede control to Indian owners looked like a nationalist setback for technology. Premji saw a customer base suddenly without a supplier. Within a few years Wipro had built the first Indian minicomputer on the Intel 8086 in an IISc lab, partnered with Sentinel Computer Corporation for know-how, and set up a computer business separate enough from the oil mill to pay engineers properly.
The insight is not "move fast when a competitor leaves." It is that regulatory shocks reset the rules of entry, and the companies best placed to benefit are often the ones from adjacent, unglamorous industries with cash flow and nothing to unlearn.
Tactic: Keep a running list of incumbents that regulation, politics, or their own rigidity could push out of your market, and decide in advance what you would build the week after they leave.
Principle 3
Outlast the gatekeeper; don't change the pitch
For three years in the 1970s IIM Ahmedabad would not let Premji speak to its students. Hindustan Lever was perhaps a hundred times Wipro's size. He kept coming back, and he did not inflate the company to win attention: "I presented Wipro with absolute candour." The recruits who finally arrived knew exactly what they had joined, which is why so many stayed for their careers and shaped the company.
Candor in recruiting is a filter as much as a virtue. It turns away people who would leave once the reality of a small company sinks in, and it keeps those who chose it with their eyes open. Premji said later that clients cited the same candor as a reason to work with Wipro instead of its rivals.
Tactic: In your next recruiting pitch, describe your company's biggest weakness out loud, and treat the candidates who stay interested as your shortlist.
Principle 4
Make frugality a governance signal, not a lifestyle
The Fiat Premji could not buy because Wipro had depreciated it to zero, the personal phone calls he paid for, the cafeteria he judged good enough for clients: none of these saved meaningful money. They were messages about whose money was in the building. The proof that this was signal rather than miserliness is the ₹25 lakh trading loss he absorbed without comment. He was tolerant of honest business risk and intolerant of a chairman treating company assets as his own.
₹
Thrift as Signal
What Premji's small refusals communicated to the organization.
| Behavior | What it signaled |
|---|---|
| Paid for personal calls on the office phone | Company resources are not the owner's resources. |
| Tried to buy a company Fiat through finance at book value | The chairman follows the same rules as everyone else. |
| "If our cafeteria is good enough for our employees…" | Clients and staff are not separate classes. |
| Switched off lights and fans after hours | Waste is a moral failure, not a rounding error. |
| Absorbed a ₹25 lakh trading loss without blinking | Honest risk is tolerated; carelessness with trust is not. |
Tactic: Pick one visible personal perk you could claim and publicly decline it under the same rule that applies to your most junior employee.
Principle 5
Price integrity into the targets
Ethics codes usually stop at the prohibition. Premji's no-bribes policy came with its accounting already worked out: refuse the bribe, then negotiate a lower target with your supervisor. That second half is what made the rule credible. It moved the cost of honesty off the individual salesman and onto the organization that had demanded honesty.
The company paid in real terms: power blackouts, confiscated imports, lost orders. Sometimes it won through persistence, as when a government buyer reopened a tender after Wipro showed that a rival's "free" software could not be free. Over decades, being known as the company that would not pay became a brand asset with multinational clients worried about compliance.
Tactic: For every ethical rule you set, write down which revenue target it will cost and who in management will absorb that shortfall.
Principle 6
Let your own divisions buy from the competition
When a salesman complained that Wipro Systems bought HCL computers, Premji's answer, "If they do not find your offering good enough, they will go to competition," set an internal market discipline that most conglomerates avoid. Forced captive purchasing hides weak products behind internal transfers. Allowing divisions to defect exposes them.
The same reasoning applied outside the company: employees were told never to recommend a Wipro product to friends or family out of loyalty, only if they believed it was the best. Loyalty, in Premji's system, had to be earned by the product, not demanded by the badge.
Tactic: Remove any rule that forces your internal teams to buy from each other, and treat the resulting defections as product feedback.
Principle 7
Confess the failure that would mislead the field
The Azim Premji Foundation spent five years building a library of digital learning resources on 125 CDs in 18 languages, then published its conclusion: "at best a qualified failure." The reason it gave for going public was strategic, not penitent. Influential people were treating classroom technology as a substitute for teachers, and the foundation judged that "lethal." Its candor saved other funders from repeating the mistake and gave its own later work, focused on teacher capacity, unusual credibility.
This fits Premji's own innovation doctrine: fail fast, forgive the failure, remember the lesson. In 2006 he added a refinement many leaders skip: challenge new ideas at an intermediate stage, because "too early a confrontation will kill the idea. Too late a confrontation will probably involve an expenditure which could have been avoided."
Tactic: When a major initiative fails, ask whether others are about to make the same bet, and if so, publish your post-mortem.
Principle 8
Separate economic ownership from control
Premji's endowment design is perhaps his most transferable invention. Through a series of transfers in 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2019, the trusts received the economic benefit of roughly two-thirds of the promoter group's Wipro stake, while voting control stayed with the promoter group. That kept the company from becoming a passive charitable holding and gave the foundation a large, permanent, irrevocable income.
P
The Giving Sequence
How a cooking-oil inheritance became a $21 billion endowment.
1945
Mohamed Hasham Premji incorporates Western India Vegetable Products in Amalner, five months after Azim's birth.
1966
Azim Premji, 21, leaves Stanford to run the company after his father's death.
1981
Wipro builds the first Indian minicomputer on the Intel 8086 at an IISc lab.
2000
Wipro lists on the NYSE; Premji becomes the richest Indian on record.
2001
Azim Premji Foundation established to work with public schools.
2010
8.7% of Wipro (213 million shares, about $2B) transferred to the endowment.
2013
First Indian to sign the Giving Pledge; further 12% transferred.
2015
Additional 18%; total contribution reaches 39%.
2019
Further 34% committed; endowment reaches $21B; Premji retires as executive chairman.
The structure has a real cost in perception. Critics can, and do, point to a family controlling a company whose value belongs mostly to charity. But it solved the problem that sinks many founder foundations: the gift weakening the business that funds it.
Tactic: If you plan to give away equity, decide separately who should get the economics and who should get the votes, before your lawyers combine the two.
Principle 9
Fund operators, not cheques
"Much harder than committing or collecting money," Premji wrote, "is establishing effective operational and execution structures." His mother had learned that running a children's hospital for fifty years. He applied it by building an operating foundation—teacher learning centers, district institutes, a university that trains the field's own professionals—that works alongside government rather than around it.
He framed the foundation's horizon in decades, not quarters: "social issues are complex and take a long time to change." That patience is the counterweight to his impatience with Wipro's CEOs. Different businesses run on different clocks, and he set the clocks to match.
Tactic: Before writing a large grant, ask who will be running the program in ten years, and fund that capacity first.
Principle 10
Own the scoreboard in public, then change the structure
When Wipro fell behind TCS, Infosys and nearly Cognizant in 2010, Premji did not blame the market. "I don't think we should be making excuses. We have underperformed relative to competition, and relative to our potential as a company." He then took apart the co-CEO structure he had designed himself, and acknowledged, without much self-pity, that "we did not see the growth coming."
The record also carries a warning. Wipro's long list of departed CEOs suggests that an owner with 75 percent of the shares can make the top job close to impossible. Public accountability is a strength. A pattern of turnover is a cost.
W
The Lieutenants
Wipro's IT leadership under Premji's chairmanship and after.
| CEO | Tenure | Exit |
|---|---|---|
| Ashok Narasimhan | 1981–1988 | Strategic split Reportedly backed hardware as Premji backed software |
| Ashok Soota | 1991–1999 | Founder exit Left to co-found MindTree |
| Vivek Paul | 1999–2005 | Clash Missed a $4B-by-2004 target by about half |
| Azim Premji | 2005–2008 | Owner interregnum Reorganized into verticals |
| Paranjpe and Vaswani | 2008–2011 | Underperformance Dual model dismantled |
| T.K. Kurien | 2011–2016 | Turnaround Sole CEO after reset |
Tactic: When results lag, say plainly in public that you underperformed, and examine your own structural decisions before replacing the people inside them.
Principle 11
Sell talent arbitrage, not cost arbitrage
In 2006, at the peak of the backlash against outsourcing in the United States, Premji refused to describe Wipro as a cheap-labor play. Outsourcing was "just based on talent arbitrage, or based on talent leverage": the West was producing too few engineers, India and China four to five times as many. The framing mattered commercially. A cost story invites a price war. A talent story invites a partnership, and Wipro moved toward contracts where it was paid on the success of product designs it co-developed, sometimes with up-front fees below cost.
He was equally honest about the model's limits, telling a Stanford audience he did not see India becoming a major product-innovation country because services were lower-risk "low-hanging fruit." Knowing what your advantage is includes knowing what it isn't.
Tactic: Rewrite your pitch so that your lowest price is the third reason a customer should hire you, not the first.
Principle 12
Compete with yourself, because success creates gravity
"The only way to have sustained success," Premji told a room of students, "is to keep competing with yourself." In his 2006 Stanford lecture he gave the mechanism behind the maxim: every success builds a dominant logic that pulls new ideas back to the ground, and only a genuinely exciting mission supplies the "escape velocity" to resist it. Wipro escaped vanaspati, then consumer goods, then hardware. It spun off its non-IT businesses into Wipro Enterprises in 2012 and shut its PC hardware division in 2013. Each exit gave up a past success to escape that pull.
The most radical version of this principle was personal. Having become the richest man in India, he spent the rest of his career dismantling his own fortune, measuring himself against a goal his earlier self would not have recognized.
Tactic: Once a year, name the business line or habit your company is proudest of and ask what you would build if it disappeared tomorrow.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Azim Premji, convocation address, IIT Delhi, January 4, 2010A rupee earned is of far more value than five found. In fact, what is gifted or inherited follows the old rule of come easy, go easy.
— Azim Premji, Giving Pledge statementI strongly believe that those of us, who are privileged to have wealth, should contribute significantly to try and create a better world for the millions who are far less privileged.
— Azim Premji, Stanford Graduate School of Business, October 27, 2006Creativity is about making new things. Whereas innovation is about doing new things.
— Azim Premji, Stanford Graduate School of Business, October 27, 2006Failure should be forgiven and forgotten as long as the lessons are remembered and recycled.
— Azim Premji, third convocation of Azim Premji University, September 5, 2015Integrity is the beacon that guides us and the energy that gives us courage. We must not compromise on it under any circumstances.
Maxims
- Hold wealth in trust. Behave as a custodian of the company's money long before you have a fortune to give away; the Fiat comes before the foundation.
- Capsize on purpose. Each reinvention of the business is a chance to bring in people who never knew the old order.
- Read the exit sign as an entrance. When a powerful incumbent is forced out of a market, the vacancy is the opportunity.
- Keep the pitch, extend the siege. Gatekeepers give in to persistence, not exaggeration; tell the truth for three years if you have to.
- Integrity has a price; budget for it. A no-bribes rule means nothing until someone in management agrees to lower the target.
- Loyalty must be earned by the product. Let your own divisions buy from rivals, and never ask people to recommend you out of allegiance.
- Confess the instructive failure. If your mistake could mislead your whole field, publishing it is part of the work.
- Separate the gift from the governance. Economic ownership and voting control are different instruments; design them separately.
- Fund the operators. Committing money is easy; building the institutions that spend it well is the real work.
- Compete with yourself. Success creates its own gravity, and the only lasting rival is the person who already won.
