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last word: Vishal Sikka
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Coveted job is his, now to get the fit right The Infosys CEO-designate Vishal Sikka faces many challenges, among them the foremost is to prove he can run a software services company just as well. By Shubhadeep Choudhury
Having
been reportedly driven out from the German software giant SAP by its anti-American lobby, Vishal Sikka’s struggle against fighting the outsider tag is not over with him being named the CEO and MD of the Indian IT company Infosys. Not only will he be the first non-founder CEO of Infosys, but also he is not even a part of the homegrown “Infoscion” for he has never been a part of the company till the time he was chosen for heading it.
The heartburn
The announcement of his name as CEO of Infosys was preceded by the exit of about a dozen senior executives of the company in a short span of time. Some of them left after they were given to understand that they were not in the reckoning for the top job of the company. Infosys employees who had linked their aspirations with those executives who quit may have trouble reconciling themselves to the new leader of the company. Former ICICI Bank boss KV Kamath, the lead independent director on the Board of Infosys, was chairman of the nominations committee for shortlisting people for the CEO’s job. He refused to divulge even the number of “internal” candidates considered for heading the company. Sikka will also be the first non-South Indian CEO of a company founded and run largely by South Indians. Hopefully, the founder NR Narayana Murthy’s professed commitment to meritocracy being the sole criterion for judging the performance of an “Infoscion” would hold Sikka in good stead in this respect. Last but not the least, is the issue of the mismatch between Sikka’s experience and the profile of the company, of which he will become the CEO and MD on August 1. Sikka calls himself a computer scientist and has his background in the development of software products. Infosys, on the other hand, is a software services company. The only worthwhile software developed by it to date is “Finnacle”, a banking services solution. The Indian media loves to call Infosys and its peers software companies. But the nomenclature is wrong. The Indian IT industry mainly offers services with the low labour cost of its professionals lying at the core of its success. How will Sikka then fit into a company as CEO that has services as its main portfolio?
Transition on cards
It is believed in some quarters that Sikka will gradually steer Infosys toward technological innovations and increase its focus on the development of products. While the US continues to remain the main revenue generating area for the Indian IT industry, the Obama administration has taken several steps to make it difficult for Indian companies to operate in the US market. In this context, it is becoming imperative for Indian IT companies to switch to product development. Sikka is expected to spearhead this transition for Infosys to help it become a product-based company from being a services company. Sikka himself, however, has not indicated any such role being expected of him. “The distinction between product and services are increasingly getting blurred,” was his response when asked how a software product developer like him could lead a services company.
Out of SAP
Born to Punjabi parents in Madhya Pradesh, Sikka grew up in Gujarat and became a US citizen after migrating to the US. Before joining Infosys, he was with SAP for 12 years. He left it on May 4, 2014, for “personal reasons”. Sikka was a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and was heading all products and innovations of the exalted German software giant. He also played a key role in the development of HANA, an in-memory database technology that brought SAP spectacular success and huge revenue. Sikka, it is believed, had to leave SAP because the German employees of the company were unhappy with the rising clout of Americans in SAP, including Sikka. An article published in the German magazine “E-3” first brought this issue in public. When Sikka criticised the report in his blog, Peter Farbinger, the Editor-in-Chief of “E-3”, responded: “There is nothing wrong with Vishal Sikka but SAP is a German-based company. All innovation is coming out of ‘old Europe’ — even HANA was invented in Europe: originally SanssouciDB in Potsdam at the HassoPlattnerInstitut (HPI). Every part of the article is based on the opinion within the German-speaking SAP community.” Hopefully, the association with Infosys will be a true “homecoming” for the 47-year-old Sikka who, despite his US citizenship and his decision to retain his base in California and visit India only on business, remains an Indian at heart, like so many other first generation NRIs like him.
Scholarly tilt
German writer Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel “Siddhartha” is a favourite read with the Infosys CEO-designate. It is rather odd that a senior corporate leader would like a book that is essentially against materialism. Evidently, Sikka possesses a scholarly bent of mind and NR Narayana Murthy, the iconic founder of the company, admired him for that. “My father was a schoolteacher. In our family, the highest respect is reserved for scholars,” Murthy said while introducing Sikka to people at the company’s sprawling campus. Murthy repeatedly cited the PhD awarded to Sikka by Stanford University of the US as proof of his scholarly credentials. Sikka’s initial contract with Infosys is for a period of five years. Murthy and two other co-founders, S Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal, as well as Murthy’s son Rohan have stepped down to give Sikka a free hand in the running of the company. Sikka has to steer the iconic Indian IT company at a time when it is no more a stock market darling and is facing fierce competition from its peers. The high attrition rate at Infosys is also an area that the new CEO will have to pay attention to.
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Vijay
Seshadri is the fifth person of Indian origin to have won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. For nearly a quarter of a century, the US has been familiar with Seshadri’s “alchemist brand of poetic magic”. Recently, he won the Pulitzer for his third book of poems, “3 Sections”. The Pulitzer committee called it “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turn witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless”. Born in India in 1954, Seshadri left for the US with his family when he was five. He has vivid memories of Bangalore, the city of his birth, from the time he was barely two till he left for the US. He says: “I have written some of the memories in prose in the past and plan to use them in the future. My parents were, when I was growing up, middle-class intellectual of the independence period. My parents were scientists who respected the religious traditions they came from but did not practice it much.” For scientific intellectual in that era, science was not just a vocation. It was an ideology, a way of looking at the world, a powerful force for change, and in some way a religion in its own way, he says, adding: “The longer my mother spent in the US, the more she longed for the ritual of her youth, so my parents were probably much closer to them now than they were when I was growing up.” He can converse in Kannada, his mother tongue. He learnt Persian and Urdu as an adult and enrolled in a PhD programme at Columbia University. That time he lived in Lahore and studied Urdu there. Seshadri’s essays (“My Pirate Boyhood” in particular) offer a glimpse of his loneliness and his “ambiguous social status”, an Asian migrant. He currently teaches poetry and non-fictional writing at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. At 18, Seshadri hitchhiked to the San Francisco Bay Area, worked as a bicycle messenger, started a floor-finishing business and then moved north to Newport, Oregon, where he worked as a logger, trucker, and a commercial fisherman while trying to write a novel. He published his first poem in “The Three Penny Review” in 1985 and developed enough traction in New York City thanks to his mentor, the poet Richard Howard. He took up a job as a copy editor at “The New Yorker”, and published his first book of poems in 1996. His poem “Disappearance”, published weeks after 9/11, crested his reputation as a poet. He continues to write firmly and admirably at 60. He has been a significant voice in American poetry for nearly two decades. “The New Yorker” lavished praise on him for his work, calling him “a son of Frost by way of
Ashbery”.
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Most
of us have guided a lost wayfarer at some point in time. But Bhikku Sanghsena Mahathera discovered his own path in doing so. A German once knocked at his door, looking for an address in Ladakh. While giving directions he realised she was visually challenged. This made him offer his assistance to walk her through. She declined, assuring him that she had found her way that far on her own and could do so further. Bhikku had seen women being chaperoned by men, moving from one town to another, within Ladakh. He wondered what made this woman travel on her own despite her handicap. Bhikku was born in a traditional Buddhist family at Tingmosgang in Zangskar valley, which remains inaccessible for seven months in a year. At 17, he joined the Army, but left it at 21 to follow his spiritual calling. In 1977, he became a disciple of Acharya Buddharakkhita Mahathera, abbot of the Mahabodhi Society Vihara, Bangalore. The trigger
Living the life of a yogi was fine, but there was much suffering around him. Life in Ladakh was hard. He returned to his roots in 1986, realising that meditating in a cave for nirvana was a selfish pursuit. His calling was to lessen the suffering of the people who brave the harshest weather conditions with the least facilities. And so the Mahabodhi International Meditation Centre (MIMC) was founded. For the poor and the sick, education and medical facilities alone could bring about a change, not meditation and philosophy, he says. With limited resources, a residential school was established in 1991 with less than 20 underprivileged girl students. Today, each one of them is a torchbearer of the unique philosophy of living that is pragmatic and based on compassion. One of them, Tsewang Dolma, is the principal of Mahabodhi Residential School, Leh, where she was a pupil in the first batch. The school has 510 students now, apart from 300 more in branches at Bodhkharbu and Tingmosgang. Stanzin, another former student, teaches at a village school in Nubra valley, her hometown. Each one of them returns to society what they have received, in a way they choose to do it. But realising dreams has not been a cakewalk. Once the girls cleared senior secondary, they reached a dead-end in Ladakh. Bhikku did not like the standard of education elsewhere in the state. So, the girls were sent to Bangalore to pursue higher education. Within a couple of years, the expense of the biannual trips back home by air made a hole in the pockets of the organisation. Resources are always limited and the endeavour is to make the benefits of education reach a larger community, he says. This calls for economising resources at all levels. Chandigarh was the second option. But the real estate prices made it impossible to build a hostel in the city. Finally, a building was rented, 20 km away from Chandigarh at Ramgarh, for the first MIMC Girls Hostel in 2008. A new wing was added in 2010. About 45 girls stay in the hostel. A few are pursuing professional courses like engineering while two have gone to Malaysia for degree courses in hotel management. The MIMC bears all their expenses. For boys, a hostel has been constructed in Jammu. Green delight
The 200-acre desert land of the MIMC in Leh has been turned into an oasis with the help of volunteers over the years. It has a modern hospital, an old-age home, a school for the visually challenged and hostels for girls and boys. The lush green area in the middle of a desert surprises visitors. Central and state ministers send experts to study the model to replicate it. Bhikku created the MIMC out of nothing. He began with compassion and people joined him, without an invitation or a call. A German environmentalist introduced drip irrigation for farming and a Korean engineer brought water to the site with solar heating to provide hot water. Vegetables and fruits are grown in-house. The effort is to make the venture self-sustaining. Ladakhis are Buddhists, and traditionally, a boy from a family becomes a Lama and girls become nuns. The nunnery educates them in all modern subjects, apart from the teachings of “dhamma”. Regular students are imparted an hour of “dhamma” teaching and meditation everyday. Students from all faiths study here. This integrated living helps them empathise with other sections of society. Initially, Bhikku would go to the remotest areas of Ladakh in search of students. Now, he says his toughest moments arrive at the time of admissions, when many students have to be turned away due to limited facilities at Mahabodhi. But ask the girls at Ramgarh, they chorus that the education received at Mahabodhi removed all the limitations of their mind and gave their life a direction.
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