Discussion With Director (DWD) is a series of freewheeling discussions with corporate honchos and eminent personalities, who have taken an unconventional path and created success stories. It is an initiative of IIMB’s Director, Dr. Sushil Vachani, and the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Cell to give students an opportunity to interact with them in an informal setting and try to understand and learn what it takes to reach that level.

DWD’s first session was held on 23rd September, 2014 with Mr. S. D. Shibulal– the co-founder, ex member of the Board, CEO and MD of Infosys. The one hour long conversation focused on 4 major pointers viz. path breaking decisions which shaped up Mr. Shibulal’s career, his rationale behind taking calculated risks, different strategies adopted by Infosys in its different stages of growth and how to strike the right chord between family and profession at various circumstances with his real life examples.

“I believed in the team more than in the idea” said Mr. Shibulal for the question asked by the director on how he made up his mind to leave a safe job in PCS to venture into a start up.  A team of 8 people which include the likes of Mr. Narayanamurthy, Mr. Nandhan Nilakeni resigned from PCS to form Infosys. Mr. Shibulal was the youngest of the lot and recalls that he was approached by these senior people as they got acquainted well in no matter of time. Unlike the stories of common entrepreneurs that start with some novel idea, this Infosys story rewrites that it’s the belief in team which drove them to create a history.

Even today leaving a government job is considered irrational. Mr. Shibulal left his job in 1980s. When asked about how he managed to convince his family, he sarcastically replied the family lost hope on him long back. The underlying truth is that everyone believed in him and more importantly he believed in himself- Self belief – Key pointer for every budding entrepreneur. He also added that the belief was not baseless and it lied mainly on the fact that the new team had clarity in their vision with proper short and long term goals.

“Infosys is a marathon. Not a sprint. We waited so long as we knew the stakes were high.” Said Mr. Shibulal when asked about why the growth was significantly low in its initial 10 years as compared to the present. To help you with statistics, Infosys reached 1 Bn. US $ market cap after 22 years, but added another billion in less than 3 years. He classifies Infosys into 3 versions. Infosys1.0 mainly focused on building up competencies. They were not ready to compete in the market. During this time they worked backend for a single client. This gave them a security of a constant market which helped them cover their costs in the teething period. By late 1990s they started front end operations. – Infosys 2.0. This is the time when they believed that they can compete and capture market. Infosys 3.0, the strategy that would propel Infosys into its next phase of evolution. This was the time when he took charge as CEO of Infosys.  As the CEO, Shibulal focused on strengthening strategic partnerships with clients, increasing client relevance and evolving the company’s business model towards achieving Infosys’ aspirations of becoming the next generation global consulting and IT services corporation.

The discussion continued more on various other strategic decisions and nuances in them. Of all suggested, one interesting strategy was on how to identify and exploit opportunities. During Y2k problem, when a lot of services were outsourced all Indian companies including Infosys benefitted a lot. But, this is not the end of the story. In this process, Indian software companies became indispensible which opened up the market. He claims, identifying the right opportunity and utilizing them properly with future prospects in mind decides the life of any firm.

“It was not the quantity of time allocated which matters, it was the quality time” said Mr. Shibulal when asked about how he managed his family amidst his busy career. He did give a lot of credit to his wife who was a home maker and took a lot of load out of him.

The audience was rapt the entire time as Mr. Shibulal narrated his experience with a touch of humour. The session was followed by many questions from the inspired audience which included students from PGP and EPGP batches. The upcoming sessions of DWD promise to offer students similar opportunities to interact with many such top executives, so do look out for them!


- Somasundaram K S       
Co-Author
PGP 2014-16

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