Azim Premji
Azim Premji
Azim Hashim Premjiis an Indian business tycoon, investor and philanthropist, who is the chairman of Wipro Limited, informally known as the Czar of the Indian IT Industry. He was responsible for guiding Wipro through four decades of diversification and growth to finally emerge as one of the global leaders in the Software Industry. In 2010, he was voted among the 20 most powerful men in the world by Asiaweek. He has twice been listed among the 100 most influential people...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth24 July 1945
CountryIndia
You must get engaged with people who are far less privileged than you. I think you must devote your time if not your resources... Because it is very, very important from the point of view of the development of our country.
You have students in America, in Britain, who do not want to be engineers. Perhaps it is the workload, I studied engineering, and I know what a grind it is.
We run courses for government school teachers on Sundays. These teachers pay for their own food and stay; the kind of commitment you find in these people is remarkable.
There's a reasonable amount of traction in college education, particularly engineering, because quite a lot of that is privatized, so there is an incentive to set up new colleges of reasonably high quality.
There are three lessons in philanthropy - one, involve the family, especially the spouse. She can be a remarkable driver of your initiative. Two, you need to build an institution, and you need to scale it up. Choose a leader for philanthropy whom you trust. Three, philanthropy needs patience, tenacity and time.
The three ordinary things that we often don't pay enough attention to, but which I believe are the drivers of all success, are hard work, perseverance, and basic honesty.
Over these years, I have irrevocably transferred a significant part of the shareholding in Wipro, amounting to 39% of the shares of Wipro, to a trust.
Our experience is that it is not terribly difficult to do business in China. But the issue is, how much stability do you have in terms of what you negotiate up front and when you've got your feet and your investments on the ground.
If one has been blessed or have been fortunate enough to have got much more than normal wealth, it is but natural that one expects a certain fiduciary responsibility in terms of how that wealth is applied, used and leveraged for purposes of society.
I can't have my employees sitting in traffic when they should be in the office. Spending two-and-half hours in the car is a huge waste of productive time.
How can you contribute towards building the Indian society and the Indian nation? No better way than to upgrade the quality of young people in school, particularly the schools which are run by the state government in the villages.
You cannot mandate philanthropy. It has to come from within, and when it does, it is deeply satisfying.
You cannot have a society where you spend more than you earn. I mean, it's just fundamentally not viable in the long run.
We've always seen ourselves as Indian. We've never seen ourselves as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or Buddhists.