The best always retire

For it is not every day that the successful retire in this country. Take any field, from cinema and the civil services to politics and promoters, how many individuals can you count who have hung their boots in their prime, without grovelling, manipulating government and company policies to suit their ageing aspirations? Worse, they don’t even bother to reinvent themselves to a broader role. Their concerns remain petty — a portfolio here, a directorship there, a regulatory or commission membership here, a permanent executive chairmanship there. More than anything else, the retiring of N.R. Narayana Murthy as chairman and chief mentor shows an institutionalisation of success, a thinking that goes beyond individuals into the realm of stakeholders.

It is not as if Murthy’s comrades in capitalism, Nandan M. Nilekani, S.S. Gopalakrishnan or T.V. Mohandas Pai, were lagging behind. It’s just that for the past quarter of a century, Murthy was the chosen leader, and hence the face of the company. The values-led organisation that has grown to $2.3 billion in revenues and $24.3 billion in market capitalisation in the interim has seen the story of Murthy told in acres of newsprint. I remember carrying a story on how he cleaned his own toilets, lived on Rs 7,000 a month, travelled economy class. Essentially, a contradiction of immense wealth and simplicity. Some readers protested, saying we were deluded, that Murthy was merely a marketing man, trying to get cheap publicity.

All this while the company kept growing. Microsoft was a five-year-old toddler when Infosys began operations in 1981. Twelve years later, in February 1993, the company hit the markets. Nobody would have invested in this company then — technology as a sector was too new, the track record of Murthy and Co was too short, a premium of Rs 85 looked too steep. The risk of the unknown surrounded this company. Predictably, the issue devolved. And with the advantage of perfect 6/6 hindsight, those who took this risk have seen their money race ahead at 80 per cent per annum. Rs 10,000 invested then is worth Rs 2.2 crore now. Of course, if very few bought this share then, fewer still stayed with it.

Having navigated the company from a bit operation to the giga-dollar software juggernaut it is today, Murthy represents the new, liberalised spirit of Indian enterprise. Starting out with very little, including the rather filmy drama of his wife’s jewels, wading through bankers who would not lend for services, negotiating a stock market that refused to see wealth potential and then the meteoric rise on the cutting edge of high-finance, is something that the services-led entrepreneurs of the past decade have had to cope with. And coped they have — the new entrepreneurs of today building and managing airports, roads, ports have all passed through this phase. But I believe for Murthy and his team the incline was slightly steeper. Today, the India growth story stands strong on every money manager’s portfolio. Institutional enabling mechanisms in the form of angel financing, venture funding, private equity, and of course, the stock markets, have made the process of entrepreneurship a little simpler and the money is not so difficult to organise.

But if it was a financial incline for Murthy, his successor Nilekani faces the incline of scale. Having achieved a size that few do in one generation, maintaining the growth momentum is the new challenge for this company that has morphed from its entrepreneurial beginnings into a mature, institutionalised organisation where much of its wealth resides between the ears of a 58,000-strong workforce. It is this change that Infosys now has to negotiate. It needs a different leader now and Nilekani is different. Beginning with his mouthful of a designation (chief executive officer, president and managing director) to his more aggressive working and communicating style, how this new face of the company keeps it going will be watched by many more stakeholders than in Murthy’s time.

Murthy’s Infosys has been able to deliver value to the three biggest stakeholders in any enterprise. Investors have made serious money. Customers have bought products that are notably cheaper and saved money. But most of all, employees, often an ignored ‘dispensable’ lot, have benefited tremendously from the sharing of wealth as Murthy turned them into partners, giving them a stake in the company that went beyond salaries or bonuses. His multi-millionaire driver’s story has been repeated once too often. But running the numbers on Murthy’s last annual report, I studied the 135 highest-paid employees in the company. Murthy stood 20th. In an age where nine-digit salaries are being taken by top owner-executives of large corporations, Murthy’s salary, at Rs 41,59,556 per annum, is two digits lower. Leave alone people in their 40s and 50s, there are two 39-year-olds who make more than him. When Murthy talks about narrowing the highest to lowest wage differential, he walks the talk.

For a man who has led and has indeed ‘become’ the company he managed for 25 years, it may not be easy to hang up his executive boots. Will he, like his counterpart Bill Gates has done across the globe, reboot — and emerge as a social entrepreneur?