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The great Napoleon Bonaparte believed in the maxim that its better to have one mediocre general than two brilliant ones. The late management guru Peter Drucker endorsed the absolute opposite. In The Practice of Management, Drucker wrote, 90% of the trouble we have with the chief executives job is rooted in our superstition of the one-man chief. Wipro sided with Peter Drucker a year back when it implemented the Power of Two strategy whereby Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani were appointed joint CEOs. The fact that a year hence Wipro grew the maximum among all the five groups, was an endorsement of the success of the Power of Two; surely in todays corporate world Drucker is a much safer bet than Napoleons totalitarian philosophy.

The corporate world though is replete with stories of both successes and failures of the joint CEO model. SAP (Leo Apotheker and Henning Kagermann) and Research in Motion, the makers of Blackberry phones (Jim Balsillie and Mike Laziridis) tasted success; Google is a super-duper success of the triumvirate of Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. On the other hand, Citigroup (John Reed and Sandy Weill), Unilver and Sapient were high-profile failures of this model.

The two CEOs, Paranjpe and Vaswani, were responsible for jointly shaping the strategy for the group, endorsing branding initiatives, ensuring people motivation and most importantly, maintaining a healthy bottomline. That Wipro group managed to perform so creditably even in a tough year like FY 09 not just proved that Paranjpe and Vaswani did their jobs well, but also vindicated Azim Premjis bold decision to toe the Drucker line of thought. The joint CEOs gave the group twice the leverage to seize opportunities in IT services, R&D and BPO. Instead of looking at it as 1+1, the power of two gave Wipro greater depth and breadth to leverage all opportunities.

RANK 2 - Wipro group
(Revenue in Rs crore) CyberMedia Research                                                                                                 DQ Estimates
	With the products revenue too coming from mainly the domestic market, Wipro group managed a better balance between its exports and domestic businesses; the joint CEO strategy helped improve the mutual synergy between Wipro Technologies (largely exports) and Wipro Infotech (largely domestic)
Azim Premji, chairman

Wipro followed the matrix structure with a straight-line (primary) and a dotted-line (secondary) reporting structure to the joint CEOs. For instance, all heads of geographies reported to the global head of sales and operations who in turn reported straight-line to Vaswani and dotted-line to Paranjpe; Wipro BPO head Asutosh Vaidya also reported straight-line to Vaswani though as part of the overall group strategy, verticals like BFSI (across IT services and BPO) reported to Paranjpe. A few senior management personnel like CFO Suresh Senapaty or head-HR Prateek Kumar reported to both CEOs.

While the fact was that Vaswani and Paranjpe have worked together for more than fifteen years and are said to have a complementary style of functioning, this new game plan also offered the group more bandwidth to address newer segments like aerospace and healthcare and more importantly, streamline operations better. In fact, FY 09 was a year of operational excellence for Wipro. There was increasing synergy between Wipro Tech and Wipro Infotech: Infotech learnt from Techs expertise in handling total outsourcing deals (as it bagged projects like the one from Unitech Wireless), while Technologies gained from the domestic arms experience with the government.

This synergy was visible even in most of the mega and gamma deals Wipro executed (in terms of partners, customers and accounts) throughout the year. Many of these deals involved both IT services and BPO componentsthe interesting and revealing aspect was that Wipro as a group not only had a common structure for delivering both, it also developed common delivery centers governed by a unified program. Take for example the Origin Energy deal in Australia or the AmBev deal in Latin America.

The leit motif of the power of two strategy did not end with defining reporting structures or synergizing delivery options only, but also extended to creating consolidation in the ranks to introduce cohesiveness in order to address the changing nature of client relationships. For example, Wipro consolidated its 1,500-odd technology and business consultants across domains and verticals under a single headthe consulting practice directly reported to Paranjpe and increased its contribution to the overall pie from 2% to 4%.

Wipro took a long look at its existing verticals and re-classified the business units based on broader industry classifications that allowed logical leverage and provided each unit with the benefit of scale and scope to grow rapidly. It reorganized product engineering services (PES) as a service line to realize its true potential and also addressed the embedded, real-time very large scale integration. Result: product engineering contributed 6% to the overall revenues in FY 09. The new structure also catered more effectively to the system software needs of business units like manufacturing, healthcare, energy, utilities, retail, transport, services, communication technology, media and technology.

Wipros stupendous success with the joint CEO model should not hide its resilience to offset losses of key senior peoplein fact, it seemed to thrive on the fact that it provides maximum CEOs to the IT industry. After a relative calm of a few years, FY 09 saw significant top management churnveterans Sudip Banerjee, Sudip Nandy and PR Chandrasekhar leaving to take over the reins at L&T Infotech, Aricent and Hexaware respectively. Even the departure of PK Gopalakrishnan, the head of government and defense did not prove too detrimental. However, this is just continuing on an old tradition of being the breeding ground for CEOsthe likes of Ashok Soota, Sridhar Mitta, Revathi Kasturi or Krishnakumar Natarajan bore ample testimony to this.

The mutual synergy between Technologies and Infotech also bore successful strategic culmination on improving systems integration capabilities, especially in areas like cloud computing. Wipro, as a group, focused on building up transformational SI capabilities and accordingly made proactive investments. Deals like the Unitech Wireless (about $500 mn), the Origin deal (about $300 mn) are the future shape of things to come. Wipro anyway did well on BPO operations, large scale applications, managed services and so on in FY 09.

Rajneesh De
rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in

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