Chat with NRN

At a time the world grunts under the strain of an economic slowdown brought on by the lack of “empowered umpires” in the capitalist world, comes a book that offers a prescription for the pain. And if the book is about India and written by the man awarded India’s second highest civilian award, conferred with France’s highest civilian honour and voted the 7th most admired CEO in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit -- among a slew of other accolades -- you have a bestseller in your hands.
N R Narayan Murthy’s ode to hard work, integrity and the value system is cast in the crucible of his trials and tribulations as he built Infosys from scratch and made it one of the most respectable companies in the world.
“Our biggest challenge is,” he says, pointing at the girl on the cover of his book “A better India: A Better World”, “that every child should become confident like her. Not just in elitist schools but also in the remotest part of rural India.”
That might be a big challenge -- considering that even after 60 years of independence, India’s progress in higher education and in science and technology has not taken 350 million Indians out of illiteracy – but accepting challenges seems to be N R Narayana Murthy’s middle name. In 1995, with revenues of $5 million, Infosys was a paler shadow of itself today, and yet it walked out of a lucrative deal with General Electric because of its “unreasonable conditions”. That GE contributed to 25 per cent of their revenue and 8 per cent of their profits did weigh heavily on the minds of the Infosys team as it was sequestered into a room at Taj Residency, Bangalore, for negotiations but NRN was on way to building a “courageous and principled organization”. The rest, as they say, is history.
A compilation of 38 lectures delivered at institutes across the world, the book talks of the future of India and the world and also touches upon issues concerning leadership, inequality, corporate governance, values and globalization. Along the way, it offers useful insight into how a young man who graduated from the University of Mysore in 1967 went on to become the founder director of the company that has “revenues in excess of $3 billion… and has created more than 70,000 well-paying jobs, 2,000-plus dollar millionaires and 20,000-plus rupee millionaires (from NRN’s pre-commencement lecture at Stern School of Business, New York University on May 9, 2007).
Like that night in 1974 at the railway station in Nis, a border town between the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. NRN was hitchhiking from Paris to Mysore and he struck up a conversation with a girl in the compartment of Sofia Express about the travails of living behind the Iron Curtain. The only other occupant of the compartment, a young boy, informed the local police and NRN was dragged “along the platform into a 8X8 ft room with a cold stone floor and a small hole in a corner by way of toilet facilities”. After spending over 72 hours without food or water, he was packed off into a freight train to Istanbul because he was “from a friendly country called India”. That day marked a turning point in NRN – and India’s – history as he was “purged” of his “affinity” for the Left and decided that entrepreneurship and job-creation was the only way out of poverty.
And yes, NRN idolizes Mahatma Gandhi. “He is the greatest leader India ever had. He walked the talk; he practiced the precept; whatever was good for others was good for him too,” he says, sitting in the sprawling Infosys campus at Electronic City in Bangalore.
The dichotomy in Indian society is also at the heart of NRN’s book. A society that has one set of rules for the elite and the powerful and another set for the masses cannot succeed, he says. Mention Mulayam Singh Yadav’s manifesto promising a crackdown on computers and English, and you can almost hear him get agitated. “Somebody should ask him where he sent his son? This is just the kind of argument used in the 50s by unions and shown to be silly. If you want quality, if you want accelerated growth, there is no way you can achieve it without technology.”
At the launch of an online bookstore in Bangalore recently, NRN had said that he was “too old for politics”. So is that decision final? “Yes, yes,” he says, even before the question is asked. “I am trying to change the system in my own way… I have demonstrated that it is possible to run a business ethically. It is possible to bring in innovation and earn respect of our customers. We have raised the confidence of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs. It is not necessary to bring about a change only by joining politics,” he says.
So what does the Infosys story mean to him after all these years? “If you are willing to work hard, if you have high aspirations, if you want to benchmark with the world’s best, it is possible to do it in India,” says the chief mentor of Infosys Technologies.
Murthy’s book delves into the current economic scenario as well. “A section of managers, not entrepreneurs, overcome by greed and vanity have brought things to such a state,” he says. Capitalism will survive, he says, because it is all about entrepreneurship, and honesty -- and these values still hold a lot of currency.
And what lesson does the economic downturn hold for the youth? “Humility,” he says. “Somehow youngsters thought they were entitled to high salaries, large increments, a certain lifestyle. The only entitlement you have is your intellect, your value system, and the ability to leverage them for creating better opportunities. Youngsters should understand that they are not omnipotent. We have to work hard and be innovative.”
For anybody on the threshold of starting his or her career, or anybody looking inward after the economic gloom, this book offers just the right kind of lessons – and a lot of inspiration.