Before the week is entirely over, just wanted to shed light on a fully worthwhile learning EO-event in Bangalore. It happened on Thursday in the Royal Club of Leela Palace where just one meeting room away from us John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, was apparently discussing the India-strategy of the networking-conglomerate.
Our Bangalore EO-chapter could be at least equally proud of having our guest talking to us. Hema Ravichandar who was heading Infosys’ HR-department from 1992 till 2005 where the company went in an unparalleled growth from 250 to 40.000 people! By the way, Infosys has been winning consistently – with the exception of two times – in the prize of the “Best Employer in India” over the last 10 years. I don’t wonder with that extremely smart lady on board who was giving us a 90 minutes insight about what made Infosys stand apart from all the other IT companies in India which started off from a similar level, but did not remotely get that far.
Hema referred to a conversation she had recently with Nandan Nilekani, CEO and one of the co-founders of Infosys on that topic and they fundamentally carved out 5 factors which made the difference:
1. Finance-Vertical: Early identifying the massive demand in the banking and insurance-sectors for high-quality software at competitive cost and developing domain excellence therein.
2. Quality: Being one of the first getting an ISO-certificate across various departments and being obsessed with precision. The anecdote she told: If you sent a Power Point presentation to Narayana Murthy, former CEO and today’s mentor of the company, he would return it to you with mentioning the number of misspellings and comma errors that where in. I loved that part, could be somehow me … :-)
3. Education: Broadening the scope for hiring great people by internal training and by that, converting e.g. mechanical engineers into software engineers.
4. Human Resources: Formalization of the entire sector. This was obviously the part Hema tackled most during her speech. And it was amazing to see how this company has really thought of everything in order to get an edge to the competition. It is worth to mention that – similar what Azim Premji from Wipro once explained – something as “dry” as HR was a hotbed for innovation. Guess why, if you hired 15.000 new people per year but had to handle 1.2 mn applications.
5. Infrastructure: Given India’s utter failure in the public sector, Infosys understood that it had to take the company’s basic infrastructure fate into its own hand. So one could actually consider Infosys besides a great IT company equally a self-sustaining electricity plant, or an independent logistic provider for bringing and dropping its staff from the workplace back home. If you happen to visit the immaculate Infosys campus in Bangalore once in a while, you will immediate understand why.
So that seems to be in hindsight and in the nutshell a bit of the “secret sauce” of Infosys breathtaking success. A phenomenon which has put India on the global stage like never before and helped coining the term of today’s “Flat World”.
Furthermore, a statement from Hema stood out in my eyes, as it completely confirms my own professional experience: Better have a good idea executed with excellence than a fantastic idea executed “somehow ok”. So it’s really worth going that extra mile to get it really right for the delight of your customer and the entire organization.
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