Team Leadership at

Wipro
Wipro's Co-CEO Model Are Two CEOs Better Than
One?

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

Case Title:
Leadership Re-organisation: Wipro's Co-CEO
Model
Abstract:
In April 2008, Wipro, India's third largest software services firm announced the appointment of Girish
Parajpe and Suresh Vaswani as co-CEOs for its IT business. Over the years, divergent personalities like
Ashok Soota and Vivek Paul brought in their style of management and moved the business ahead.
Wipro expects the appointment of co-CEOs would enable the company to take advantage of blending
complementary skills and experience, easing the strain of responsibility and workforce synergies to
help the company move up the value chain in the global software industry. However industry experts
are sceptical about the model, as such earlier global attempts have not been too successful. But in the
Indian scenario, specifically IT, companies have managed well with a collective style of leadership. Will
Wipro achieve what it set out to do by appointing joint CEOs or will it be pulled in different directions
by the two leaders?
Pedagogical Objectives:
To different leadership styles and challenges faced by leaders.
To leadership changes in Wipro and how it affected the business.
The rationale behind the decision to appoint joint CEOs.
The likely impact of the decision.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

About Wipro
Indias third-largest software services firm
Mumbai- and New York-listed company
Revenues grown to nearby $4 billion in 2008 from $1.35
billion in 2005

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

CEOS SINCE 1981

Ashok Narasimhan:Founding CEO & president of Wipro's IT
business Wipro InfoTech and Wipro Systems (software business)
Ashok Soota:Joined Wipro Infotech in 1984 as president and
then became CEO of Wipro Systems in 1991
Vivek Paul:Joined Wipro in 1999 after Ashok Soota left the
company to start Mindtree. Led the company for six years till 2005
Azim Premji:Chairman and CEO from 2005 to 2008
Girish Paranjpae & Suresh Vaswani:Took charge as joint CEOs
in 2008 and ran the company for almost three years
T K Kurien:Assumed the post of CEO in April 2011
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

Wipros organizational structure

Wipros organizational structure is complex and
sometimes puzzles outsiders.
1
2
1
8

Chairman,
Executive Director & Joint CEO, IT Business,
Executive Director & CFO.
independent non-executive directors

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

Wipros IT Business
The IT business has two organizations
Wipro Infotech (serves India, West Asia and
Asia Pacific.)
Wipro Technologies (handles the global
business)

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

Wipros Business Matrix

In functional terms, the company has a matrix structure
with 3 verticals and 2 horizontals.
WIPRO
Functions

3 X 2 Matrix

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

The Verticals
The three verticals are
$1.06 billion Technology Business (which is in the
product engineering and the telecom service
provider space)
$1.4 billion Enterprise Business (targeted at
manufacturing, healthcare, retail, etc.)
$799 million Financial Services Business.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

The Horizontals
The two horizontals are:
$1.1 billion Global Practices Business (testing,
package implementation and technology
infrastructure services)
$290 million Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
operation
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

Wipros Business Matrix

WIPRO
Functions

$1.06 billion
technology
business

$1.4 billion
enterprise
business

$799 million
financial
services
business

$1.1 billion global

practices business

$290 million BPO

3 X 2 Matrix

These verticals and horizontals are headed by

executives who were expected, after Pauls departure,
to function as CEOs.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

10

Wipro Timeline
Former CEO Vivek Paul left to join Texas Pacific Group(A
private equity firm)

Wipro has had no CEO since Pauls departure

Chairman Azim Premji owns more than 80% of Wipro
and took charge by combining the roles of both
chairman and CEO.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

11

Chairman and CEO

Premji got inevitably overburdened.
It pushed too much of the operating load on me and
was getting counter-productive, says Premji.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

12

Change
That situation changed when Wipro announced in midApril 2008 the appointed of not just one CEO but two:

Girish Paranjpe
Suresh Vaswani.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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Girish Paranjpe
University of Mumbai
Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com.),Economics,
Accounting 1974 1978
Daly College
XI,english maths 1964 1974
Paranjpe has been with Wipro since 1990
Most recently was president of the BFSI (banking, financial services
and insurance) vertical of Wipros global IT business.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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Competency of Girish Paranjpe

Start-ups, Pre-sales, Team Management,
Business Analysis, Cloud Computing, Finance
Operations Management, CRM, Business Intelligence
Solution Architecture, Product Management, SaaS
Integration, Strategic Planning, Consulting

Core Competency : Cost and Profit Orientation.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

15

Suresh Vaswani
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
PGDBM, 1983 1985

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

B.E., 1976 1981

Vaswani is a 23-year veteran at the company

Before his promotion, the president of Wipro Infotech.
In addition, he oversaw some areas of the global practices
of Wipro Technologies.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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Competency of Suresh Vaswani

Vendor Management, Outsourcing, Pre-sales, Managed Services,
Program Management, Business Development, Global Delivery,
Information Technology, Solution Architecture, CRM, Security,
Team Management, Infrastructure, Testing, Executive Management, Integration,
Project Management, Software Project., BPO, Cisco Technologies, Technical
Support
System Deployment, Business Analysis, Social Media, Solution Selling, SaaS,
Enterprise Architecture, IT Outsourcing, Telecommunications, Data Center,
Manufacturing, New Business Development

Core Competency : Action and Result Orientation.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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Confident with Change

Premji is confident that the new arrangement will work.
He said, We believe that two people who have worked
together for more than 10 years and been in the
company for more than 15 years would be able to work
very well as a team. The fact that 75% of our revenues
come from global markets, the fact that we are growing
at 30% a year in a service, highly people-intensive
industry, we figured that a two-man team at the top
would be stronger than one man at the top. I continue
to be executive chairman, but they are the joint CEOs of
our IT business.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

- In an interview
with India Knowledge@Wharton,18

The Hot Seats

The two men occupying the hot seat
in this case, seats
are equally enthusiastic and eager.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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The Gung-ho
Vaswani:
Given the size of our business and the ambitions that we
have for our business, two is certainly better than one.
We do believe that the power of two will help us so far as
we are concerned, given our environment.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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The Gung-ho
Paranjpe:
Given the enormity of the opportunity and the task at
hand, we felt it was worthwhile to have two of us trying
to drive this rather than leave it to one individual to try
and do [everything]. And from a personal perspective, it
can get very lonely at the top. So, having two people
helps.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

21

My view
The business environment in India gives a stimulus
to this model of collegial and collective leadership,
Wipros business in the country is associated with both face of
India
Indian premium
Indian penalty
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

22

Indian Premiums & Penalties

The premium aspect for companies doing business in
India is the combination of access to a highly skilled
labour pool and attractive wage levels,
The penalties are the uncertainties in the business
environment with respect to infrastructure, power
availability, urban transportation and stability in policy
regimes.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

23

Need of two CEO

Companies like Wipro need two CEOs because of the complexity of
doing business in India
On the one hand, you have to manage offshore client
relationships and business development by staying really closely
tuned to what is happening in international markets.
On the other, you have to be embedded in India to manage the
country-specific challenges.
Sometimes these two faces of complexity are quite dissociated from
each other, it may be difficult for the same CEO to handle both ends.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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Collegial Leadership Model

Such a collegial leadership model works in some
Indian companies is because what they call

The Founder Effect.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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The Founder effect

The founders of companies such as Wipro, Infosys Technologies
and HCL Technologies
are entrepreneurs in some senses,
are more principals than employees,
they have very strong shared values and
they have seen their companies grow over the years.
Conflicts between CEOs often occur because of vastly divergent
visions and different skills, but thats not the problem with
founders.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

26

View of Ravi Aron

Ravi Aron, senior fellow at Whartons Mack Center for
Technology Innovation
Aron has closely studied Wipros strategies for the past
14 years.
Aron believes the twin-CEO model should work well at
Wipro based on his personal knowledge of the
relationship between Vaswani and Paranjpe.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

27

Whats Aron believes

Suresh and Girish are very compatible personalities, he says.
Both are hands-on, have a great deal of discipline, never miss
the details, and have a strong sense of not going after
expensive, blue-sky ideas until they can be validated by
research. he adds
There could be tactical differences, but those can be resolved.
In addition, Premji will be involved in all key management
decisions, and has always been part of the analytic filter that
all decisions must pass through, says Aron.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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View of Peter Cappelli

Peter Cappelli is a Wharton management professorand
sounds a cautionary note, he points out that he hasnt
seen the twin-CEO model work effectively in Western
corporations.
Generally, in the world of governance,
this is a situation to avoid, he says.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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View of Peter Cappelli

My guess is that what ultimately happens is the co-CEOs
confront the possibility of a stalemate, but there is also
the possibility of them continuing to disagree, and so
they may end up negotiating settlements all the time. In
principle, that is not bad if they actually have the
interpersonal skills to negotiate conflicts as opposed to
just stalemates.

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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View of Peter Cappelli

Cappelli also doesnt recommend shared power at the
CEO level by carving out two autonomous business
units as a way to retain top management talent.
You are basically structuring a whole corporation around
these two individuals with the goal of trying to keep two
people, he says,
Adding that he doesnt approve of
Team Leadership at
Wiproits
- By Saurabh
Sao just to make that
turning the organization
on
head

03-10-2015

31

In View of Sudhir Sethi,

Sudhir Sethi, chairman and managing director of IDG Ventures
India, part of a global network of local venture funds.

Wipro may adopt this approach for two to three years. Wipros
adoption of a joint-CEO structure is a step indicating to internal
senior management the potential of rising to the top, he says.
To the other stakeholders, this move signifies depth of its
management cadre in the IT business. The IT business is large
enough to need two CEOs.
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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Other side of the coin

The other side of the coin, of course, is the notion that
this is the easy way out.
Wipro has lost some senior people recently.
Appointing an outsider as CEO or promoting just one
person could have led to further departures

03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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View of Nandita Gurjar

Nandita Gurjar, Group Head of Human Resources at
Infosys Technologies.
A decision to opt for a joint-CEO structure sometimes
also
implies that the two may have co-skills and that
there is no frontrunner, says Nandita
She makes it clear, however, that she is not talking
03-10-2015
Team Leadership
at Wipro
- By Saurabh Sao
about the Wipro duo,
but in
general
terms.

34

Conclusion
The leadership style shown by the team Wipro
& the team of Azim Premji, Suresh Vaswani and Girish
Paranjpe is :
Collegial Collective style of leadership
Decentralized Leadership
Team Leadership
Paternalistic leadership by Azim Premji
Democratic Leadership by Joint CEOs
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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Thankyou
for listening
03-10-2015

Team Leadership at Wipro - By Saurabh Sao

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