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Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka

It had gone through over two years of underperformance compared to some of its peers. Sikka’s appointment was a surprise and a relief. Surprise because of his background in software products that was very different from the services space at Infosys. Relief because many wanted a fresh face at the helm. In the four months since Sikka’s appointment, the Infosys stock has risen significantly. In an exclusive interview to TOI, Sikka says he feels a tremendous burden of expectation:

What are your thoughts on the first four months at Infosys?

The atmosphere is electric. People are so excited, there is so much positive energy that has been built up it’s difficult to describe. Never seen anything like this. Ita, may be in the trip to Australia with (PM Narendra) Modi. But that was little different. I walk into these
cheap Michael Kors rooms and people go crazy. There’s a tremendous burden of expectation.

I have to think more about this. But the propensity to change, the desire to improve is awesome in Infosys. Over the last year there was this turmoil, people leaving. I created a team to look at simplification of processes, to deal with problems people have. Everybody in the team was so genuinely passionate about simplifying things. I was very impressed. Our development centre (DC) in Chennai told me they would be the best embracer of artificial intelligence among DCs in Infosys. You don’t normally find large companies embrace change this way.

Part of it comes from our education, which is at the heart of Infosys. Our Mysore training campus is so awesome. We can train on such a massive scale 16,000 trainees at a time for 23 weeks. Mr Murthy used to call it learnability. Education is in the mindset of employees, they are keen to learn.

What do you see as your big challenges?

One is that the company processes have not kept pace with its massive growth. Another is that we have to improve the confidence of the youngsters.
cheap Michael Kors handbags outlet This is true for all Indian IT companies. The consistent feedback from customers is that though Infosys is without comparison in quality and delivery and we follow orders dutifully, we don’t speak up, we are not proactive. As an innovator, this made me very sad. We are trained to solve problems, not trained to find problems. This is totally counter to the Western mindset. We serve Western companies, and they expect us to speak up. John McCarthy, father of artificial intelligence and who was in my examination committee, once told me this unforgettable thing: Finding and articulating the problem is half the solution. The other half is to solve it.

Many of the solutions to yesterday’s problems will be automated. But no matter how intelligent robots become, they will not tell us what the big problems are, they don’t have the imagination of human beings. That’s why I’m moving the company in that direction.

Do you think this will result in some confusion?

The results of the change will take a while. But the mindset change will happen instantaneously. The industry has been in a downward spiral,
cheap Michael Kors handbags outlet even the big western guys. They are hiring cheaper and cheaper, jamming people into projects faster and faster, hiring from more and more mediocre places. That is the wrong direction. That spiral goes to zero. We want to create an upward spiral, create more and more value. Turbo props were excellent planes, but they lost the battle to jet engines. There’s a certain inevitability about going up the value chain.

Where do you see Infosys five years from now?

I see it as a next generation services company that offers all kinds of amazing and innovative software solutions to the world’s best companies. The world needs software right now, the world is being dramatically reshaped by software. I want Infosys to be not only the leading IT services company, but the leading IT company. It should continue to be
Michael kors handbags outlet driven by the humanity of our people, but it should embrace technology to create a much more amplified human effect. Prof Mashelkar (R A Mashelkar, former head of CSIR) used to have this beautiful line: "Do more with less for more". I want a much more productive, innovative Infosys, a company that customers think of when they think of their next generation problems. Not just for staff augmentation that’s such a horrible idea.

How much of your US stint has shaped your thinking?

I don’t know. I have now lived 27 years in the US, and 20 years in India. So a lot of that influence is there.

Do you think it’s possible to have a startup culture in a big company with 165,000 people?

I think Infosys is a 165,000 people startup. We genuinely believe that. You have to have the mindset that the world can be significantly better than it is. You must have the imagination of what it could be like, the knowledge of how that could be made to happen. It is a borderline irrational conviction that you can do it.

But how do you encourage entrepreneurship in a company that is so big? It is a legacy company.

I did two startups and doing a startup is an incredibly noble thing. It is one of the greatest experiences in life. And those people who can do it based on their life situation, must try doing a startup. But entrepreneurship is not the domain only of startups. It can be done anywhere.

In SAP, when I was trying to do Hana (the in memory database), people said these guys have lost their minds, they must be on drugs, they said SAP will never build a database, let alone a next generation database. But we did. My team had that culture. We are doing the same thing in Infosys.

A team in Pune is working on AI (artificial intelligence), creating a natural language understanding system that automatically mines lots of text to find leads for the insurance industry. If there is a hurricane somewhere, or if a child is born, the system recognizes it as a lead for an insurance company, and provides the information to an agent. This kid came to me wanting to do something in digital agriculture because five generations of his family have been in agriculture. My wish is to see that we have 165,000 such entrepreneurs. We have a building in Hyderabad, it is water cooled innovated by our own people. It consumes 30% of the energy that normal buildings do. Google sent people there to see how it works. We’ll soon have 20 LEED Platinum rated buildings. We are probably the world’s No. 1 company in sustainable buildings. Our Mysore campus pays for itself. All this because the infrastructure team has entrepreneurial thinking.

You opened up Twitter and
Cheap Michael Kors handbags Facebook to employees. Is it part of the initiative to give more freedom to employees? It has been the norm in the IT services industry to
cheap Michael kors handbags outlet restrict such activities because of customer concerns.

When I was in Stanford, one of the things that shaped my thinking was what is called the Honour Code. Examiners don’t sit in the examination hall during exams. Students sign the Honour Code. Violation of the code is inexcusable. The assumption is we trust what you do if you break the trust, there are unforgiveable consequences. And we empower the people to do the right thing.

We do not violate the things we commit to
cheap Michael Kors clients. We go to great lengths to ensure the freedom we give is not at odds with the commitments we give to clients the number of hours worked, the conditions of the work, the security of the work. Not everything applies to everyone at the same time. If a client has certain requirements, those cannot be violated. But others who are not under that do not have to follow those requirements. So we now have this team to simplify things. They are looking at simplifying HR policies, maternity leave, and many other policies, without violating client commitments.

Someone told us recently that for the first time he was seeing world class software coming out of India. Do you agree with that?

Absolutely. All major planes we fly on have some major component in it that was designed by Infosys. Same thing is true for India. We are the best software nation. My advice to the Prime Minister is that when we think of ‘Make in India’, we have to think in terms of software. Software is changing everything. It’s a software defined world. High tech manufacturing
Michael Kors handbags outlet has become so sophisticated, you can’t do it in physical infrastructure anymore. Even the simulations of next generation machines are in software. We design drills for oil companies, those drills now have sensors. When the drill goes into production, it produces tonnes of data, and then we map that data into digital oilfields.Articles Connexes：

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