By IANS,
New Delhi : Wipro chairman Azim Premji, at the helm of the iconic group for 43 years now, says he is in no hurry to hang up his shoes and that practising the values he espouses will remain his main driving force.
“This lifetime achievement award doesn’t mean the end of my innings at Wipro,” Premji said Thursday evening as he accepted the honour conferred on him by Dataquest magazine at the Taj Palace Hotel here.
“Build your organisation that is grounded on values and practise these values on a ‘no exception’ basis,” he said as his advice to young entrepreneurs and professionals who had gathered for the event organised by Dataquest’s publishers, CyberMedia.
“Integrity is the biggest value,” said the 64-year-old industrialist, instrumental in converting a small edible oil company he inherited from his father in 1966 into one of India’s largest and best-known information technology group firms.
According to him, one either espouses the values set by oneself or the company he or she works for or one doesn’t. “Let there be no shades of grey while following your values.”
The Wipro chairman was quick to add that he considered neither himself nor people like N.R. Narayan Murthy, the co-founder of another iconic company Infosys Technologies, as the real role models for schoolchildren.
Premji, whose philanthropic foundation undertakes a lot of work in India in the area of primary education, said the real role models must be teachers. “There is a real gap and concern in primary education.”
He was earlier conferred the award for his vision that helped sculpt India’s IT industry over the past few decades, his role in the creating a wave for the outsourcing business and his foundation’s devotion to primary education projects in India.
Taking over from where Premji left, technocrat Kiran Karnik, chairman of the government-appointed board of scam-tainted Satyam Computer Services, said there were still several skeletons lurking in the cupboards of Indian companies.
He, nevertheless, felt the fraud on the scale perpetrated by Satyam’s previous founder B. Ramalinga Raju may not surface in the foreseeable future, even as that did not obviate the need for stricter regulation and better corporate governance.
Karnik, who received the IT Person of the Year Award as chairman of the state-appointed board of Satyam, also called for the rotation of statutory auditors and appointment of truly independent directors to protect the interests of small shareholders.
He decried the practice of statutory auditors shrugging off their responsibility through a simple disclaimer in balance sheets or to the regulators. “This must stop forthwith. ”