Leadership Lessons from My Life Journey | Narayana Murthy

Sure. Well, first of all, Sudir, thank you very much for this opportunity to share this conversation with you. I have heard a lot about you and it's a privilege to spend the next hour with you. I'm also very grateful to Shri Hasmukh Adhia. I have known him for a couple of decades now. In the early part from a distance, later on I did have opportunity to interact with him. He's one of the finest civil servants that our country has produced. So we're all very grateful to him. I'm also very grateful to the Vice Chancellor of this university to sit in this beautiful conference, beautiful hall, you know, it's really such a nice feeling, one of the finest halls that I have sat through. And most importantly, to be able to spend an hour with India's most important asset, which is our youth. That is a very valuable opportunity for me. I'm 80. So therefore I... Yeah. You know I would suggest you should put it here, maybe here. Yes. Is it okay? Yeah. Wherever, whatever. Yeah. So therefore to have this opportunity of spending this precious hour with India's most important asset, that's the youth, is a great privilege. Thank you for that. Now let me come to your question.

I came from a lower middle-class family. In some ways you could call it a poor family because my father for most of his career was a high school teacher. He taught physics, mathematics, and English in schools. We were eight children. Five sisters and three brothers. My grandmother was also there. My parents and my mother used to invite a child from a poorer family once a week. In other words, seven children on seven nights for dinner under an age-old practice called 'Vana' in Kannada. That means inviting a child once a week for dinner. So in other words, we were 12 mouths to feed on the salary of a high school teacher. So we were poor, but we were very happy. Our house was full of joy. We used to compete with each other in games, in studies and everything. And father was a strict disciplinarian. Mother was very compassionate, very understanding. And we went from one Mofussil taluka of Karnataka to another during our early days. So our life was in a very small insignificant world but it was full of joy. We were highly influenced by father's eloquent talk about Jawaharlal Nehru. At that point of time, Nehru was building atomic energy, steel plants, Bhakra Nal dam, IITs. In other words, every day he would talk about... we didn't have, we didn't subscribe to a newspaper at home because we couldn't afford. However, he would read it in the office and in the night he would tell us about all the wonderful things that were happening in India. So, it was a very educative environment but a very simpler life because there was no social media, no smartphone, no internet that time, no distractions, nothing of the kind.

Now, you know, when I was in my high school second year, which those days was the 10th grade, high school was 11 years, pre-university was one year, so I was in a high school called Sharada Vilas High School in the city of Mysore. And we had a headmaster, Sri K.V. Narayan, KVN we used to call him. He used to teach us chemistry. He was a strict disciplinarian and one day he was conducting an experiment and he was to use common salt or sodium chloride for that experiment. And he was to put a little bit of sodium chloride or common salt into a test tube. And he was being very careful about how much of common salt he put into the test tube. And a classmate of mine who was sitting in the front bench along with me, he burst out laughing. So KVN came to our bench and he asked him, 'Young man, what was it so funny about what I was doing? Why did you burst out laughing?' Children in general are more honest than elders. And therefore this young man of whatever 14 years, he said, 'Sir, you were so stingy with common salt which is so inexpensive. That's how, that's why I burst out laughing.' Then he said something which in some way shaped my career, my values with respect to the community, with respect to the public governance, et cetera of that. He said, 'Young man, remember that this common salt belongs to this community of Sharada Vilas High School. It belongs to you. It belongs to every student in the class that is 60 of you. It belongs to me. It belongs to every section of this high school. Belongs to every staff member, every peon, everybody. Therefore, this is community property. I have to treat this property with utmost care.' And he said, 'Look, at 5:00 the class is finishing.' That was the last period, 4 to 5. 'You please come with me to my house and I will give you a glass jar full of common salt free because that is my personal property. This is the community property. Therefore, I have to be very very careful. On the other hand, you come to my house and I will give you a glass jar full of common salt because that is my personal property and I can deal with my personal property in whatever I want. But when it is a question of community property, I have to be extremely careful.' That was the biggest lesson I learned. And that formed the basis for how we put in the best public governance, best corporate governance principles at Infosys. And that in essence was one of the most important lessons I learned and that is very important in India where we see lot of corruption in public life. Unfortunate.

No, no, no, not really. You know, right from my first day when I assembled six co-founders of mine, there were about 10, 11 years, Anger, Nandan, Kris and all these people. I assembled them in my house and I wanted them to tell me what their vision of Infosys was. Generally my style was not to say anything in the beginning because if I did that they would all accept my influence, they're very good people, very decent people, they would accept it. So I would allow them to say what they wanted and finally I would say. One fellow said we must become the company with the largest revenue. Second fellow said we must become the company with the largest profits. Third fellow said we must become the company with the highest market capitalization. Finally when they all finished, when it came to my turn, I said I want to be the most respected company in India. They said, how does it help us in terms of revenues, profits and all of that. I said, 'Look, if we want to seek respect from our customers, we must deliver what we promised on time, within budget, and exceeding the quality that they expected. If we did that, we would get more and more business from that customer. They will refer us to other prospects and therefore our revenue will grow easily.' Do you think revenue is a byproduct when your main aim is not money and revenue? Your main aim is the quality and to keep your word in the market. Revenue becomes a byproduct. Yeah. Well, and it comes automatically. Respect is the main objective. Respect should be the main purpose of any company because if you are respected, revenues will come. Then I said good employees will join you. They will stay with you long and they will also recommend other good employees to join your company and therefore you will become stronger and stronger. If you followed, if you sought respect, then you will not violate any laws of corporate governance. You will not create any related party transactions. Therefore, more and more long-term investors will stay. If you sought respect from vendor partners, they will help you in the time of your financial difficulty and they will extend the payment terms. If you sought respect from bureaucracy and political leadership, they will look at you with sympathy and appreciation and create policies that will help your industry grow. And finally I said if you seek respect from the society, all these stakeholders form part of the society and therefore you will go further. And therefore my belief was that if every corporation in the country were to seek respect as the most important objective, money will automatically come, profits will come, market capitalization will come, customers will come, good employees will come, good investors will come and then growth becomes easier. That is my belief.

Well, I think that is another very important question. It was in the early years of Infosys, 1995. We had been working with a very well-known Fortune 10 corporation from the US. Their style was to come once in five years and renegotiate prices down. There were four or five Indian companies of which Infosys was one of them who had been assembled in different rooms in Taj Residency in Bangalore. They would go from room to room and say they have reduced it by this much, you have to reduce further, etc. That was the standard technique. But when our term came again, I listened to all my youngsters. All my youngsters wanted us to continue at reduced prices. Those days there was no mobile. So I went out into the lobby. I used the landline, called my wife and said, 'Look, I know you're doing a great job of bringing up our children, but I'm going to take an important decision now, and I will most probably be spending 200 to 250 days in a year traveling in our markets, US and Europe. And you will have to take even greater responsibility for our children.' Of course, as always, she said no issue at all. So I came back and despite all my co-founders wanting to continue the relationship with that Fortune 10 company, I said very respectfully, I declined to continue because I told that customer that if I were to reduce the prices for you, actually you will suffer because we will not be able to invest enough in attracting good employees, in providing reasonable compensation to them, in providing good training to them, in creating good technology and physical infrastructure, in R&D, in quality and productivity etc. Therefore, by taking this short-term decision of reducing the price, you will actually suffer a lot more in the medium and long term. And as an honest person, I don't want to do that. And I'm telling you right now and therefore we, I very respectfully decline to agree to your terms and we will part with it. Please tell us to whom we should transition all the work that we are doing and we will do it. At that point of time this customer formed 25% of our revenue and we had gone public just two years before that and everybody told me that it was the most risky decision that I took. It was the most dangerous decision that I took. You know, and I should not have done it. But I took that decision. I worked very hard...

And I brought back our revenue. By 1998-1999 we went on NASDAQ and all of that. So in some way that was the toughest decision that I have taken. I took it because my wife supported me fully and the rest is history.

Yeah.

Well, I think that is another very good question. See, I may be able to run 100 meters in 15 seconds, whatever it is, but for me to do it in 13 seconds is almost impossible. But Carl Lewis, you know, the famous sprinter, he did it in 9.9 seconds. So it all depends upon how you train your mind, how much of work you can do. You see, when I say hard work, it does not mean go and sit and sleep in the office. That's not what I'm saying. Hard work means using that time productively. Now India, whether we like it or not, India is a poor country. Our per capita GDP is $2,818. Of that, about 850 million Indians require support from the government and the government very rightly gives them free ration. In addition, in Karnataka I know they give free electricity, free buses, everything. The other day at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, I'd come out of my house and there was a lady with a vegetable cart and there was a three-month-old child lying at one part of the vegetable cart. So I asked her in Kannada what is this, you know why is this poor child? She says sir what can I do? My husband has left and this is a three-month-old child. I can't leave it at home. Therefore, I bring the child in whether it's hot sun, cold weather, whatever it is. So, the reality of India is that there are a lot of people who are suffering. However, this country has made huge sacrifice to give all of you education. You know I got scholarship every year from my university. I got fourth rank for the state in SSLC. At that time there were four scholarships in Karnataka for four national scholarship students and I was the fourth one. I got scholarship in Poona University every year of engineering, masters, everything. And this country, there are politicians who have sacrificed so much. I mean our prime minister has sacrificed so much to take this country forward. There are people, there are factory workers or people who are working so hard to make both ends meet. So as a person who has received so much from our government, the least I can do is I have to give back a little bit more than that poor lady who was pushing the vegetable cart or that poor factory worker who works 8 hours a day then commutes for 2 hours for a paltry sum. This is what family is all about, right? What did our parents do or what does any parent do? If there is a bright boy or girl in the family, the entire family will make adjustment, make sacrifice so that that boy or girl comes up. And if that boy or girl does not show gratitude, what kind of a human being are we? Therefore, in my own lexicon, as my parents have taught me, as my teachers have taught me, as my bosses have taught me, I have no hesitation in saying that those of us who have received so much from our government, so much from our public governance system, we owe it to the country to work harder than the less fortunate ones.

Well, you know there is a very simple way to solve these problems. We have to define productivity standards in every sector of our economy. For example, productivity standards in a factory that's well known. If a factory worker can achieve in 4 and a half days what he or she would take 5 days to do and if he or she were to agree to increase the work productivity by 5%, 8% every year I have no objection because everything has to be a positive sum game. The employees should benefit but at the same time the company should also benefit because otherwise we won't be able to pay taxes. If we don't pay taxes, who will build our roads? Who will build our public health system? Who will improve our primary education system? So therefore when you look at it from that perspective, as long as outcomes are important rather than the time you spend I have no objection.

Well, you know, I am extremely friendly outside the office whether it is a peon, whether it is the next person outside the office, I'm the friendliest person. For example, just recently we built apartments three blocks from our house, three houses from our house for our cooks and drivers. It is exactly the same as my house. There is no difference between my house in terms of flooring, in terms of lighting, in terms of dining table, in terms of furniture, sofa, absolutely no difference. Refrigerator, microwave, oven, everything is provided. But so in other words outside the office I practice compassionate capitalism very much but in the office I have to do my job, my colleague has to do his or her job. If they don't do their job, I have to sit with them in private because I follow the principle: praise in public, criticize in private. That is the best philosophy. And we came out with a program called what is called PCP whatever that is. If an employee fell below minus sigma on this side of the normal distribution curve, we would put him or her into what is called PIP, performance improvement program for 6 months. We would of course counsel him or her. We would put him in performance improvement program. There would be special attention paid to him or her and all help will be given for him or her to improve. If that person did not put in extra work to make sure he or she improved at the end of 6 months...

So hard decisions have to be taken because at the end of the day the community is more important than the individual. The community of Infosys, its interests will have to be guarded first before I guard my interest or your interest or his interest. So in my lexicon it is very clear: Infosys comes first and then I come. So we have but we will do it very nicely, all of that we won't use bad words, none of that, very courteous but he or she will be shown the door after giving an opportunity to improve. That's the way we have handled it.

You know I have always believed and I continue to believe like my friend Stephen Wolfram. Stephen Wolfram as you know is the person who invented Mathematica. Remarkable individual. He did his PhD at Caltech in physics at 18 and a brilliant person and he invented Mathematica that is a tool to solve differential equations, integration, all of that. Anyway, I believe like him that there is nothing more supreme than the human mind. While AI as a productive tool will help us to automate certain kinds of work, what it does is it pushes us to go to do a higher level of work and that is where preparation, proper training, reskilling, different mindset, different way of thinking become very important to all of us. Yes, autonomous cars will come and I'm very happy if autonomous cars come to India because our people honk unnecessarily. It's a headache sitting in a car in India because a minor slowdown of traffic people start honking. Fortunately if you use autonomous drivers then it won't happen. So there are similarly remote surgery that'll be fantastic, precision manufacturing AI will be very useful and certain aspects of software development will automatically be taken over. For example, simple code generation will be automatically done. But the biggest problem in software development, software services industry is requirement definition. What is that? That is defining the problem and putting it in a format that computers or AI can actually understand and then automate the downstream. But that is where more and more of us will have to be trained to learn those techniques and to do a better and better and better job. So I don't think the power of human mind will be diminished. Human mind will continue to be the boss and human mind will invent new things, new activities and do those activities better and better and this is an opportunity for us. The fact that AI has come is to me a blessing not a pain. I think AI will do lower level automatable tasks but higher level human thinking kind of jobs will definitely continue to be done by human beings and there will never be a day when the ability of human beings to think creatively will be stopped. That's my view.

Yeah, you know, it's not fair for me to go into the details because I retired from Infosys in 2014. In the best traditions of public governance system, we at Infosys too, we said once you retire, you don't go, you don't interfere, you don't participate. Only when they invite you, you go there. So therefore I go to Infosys only when they invite me otherwise I don't participate. Having said that I think the key to all these things is to remember one thing: change is constant. Our technology changes rapidly. Business models change rapidly. New industries come up. Therefore, the most important thing is for our youngsters to improve their learnability. What is learnability? Learnability is the ability to extract generic inferences out of specific instances and use them in new unstructured situations to solve new problems. So our focus at Infosys has always been right from the time we founded it is to teach our youngsters learnability, that is how do you learn a new technology? How do you learn new domains? How do you learn new customer practices? So my own belief is that a company like Infosys which has had a strong foundation on learnability rather than knowledge. We never taught a certain language. We didn't teach C or Python or whatever it is. What we taught them was what are the kinds of algorithms that we use? What are the attributes of each class of algorithms? What are the kinds of problems that these algorithms can solve? What are the dos and don'ts of those algorithms? So in an environment where the focus is on learnability, our youngsters I do believe will be trained pretty well to handle change and they will not become redundant. As long as they're willing to work hard, as long as they're willing to learn new things, as long as they're able to exercise their mind.

Yeah. No problem. Only I have only one request. It should be a girl first and then a boy alternately.

Oh, thank you. I think it's a good question. You know, whatever beliefs we embraced were the product of our culture. That is what our parents believed in, what our grandparents believed in, what our siblings believed in, what our early teachers taught us, what our early bosses taught us. By and large, that's how your belief system gets built. And right from the beginning, my father was a person who believed in constant improvement. For example, when I got the fourth rank in SSLC in 1960 or so, I went to him. He didn't congratulate me. He didn't smile. He said, 'What happened to the other three ranks?' And he went away. And I was completely upset. I went to my mother. I said, 'What is this? I have got fourth rank out of two lakh students and this man didn't even congratulate me.' She said no no that is his way of encouraging, that's what she told me.

So then as I got third rank in Poona at that time I didn't go to him but the point is father taught constant improvement so I think the belief, our belief was you can do it if you use your mind, if you work hard, if you have good values. That was our belief. That's what my parents and my teachers taught me.

No, simple, simple. Work harder, work more. If the deadline is there and you think that you won't be able to finish, work 2 hours extra. Make sure that you as the leader lead by example. If you did it, your colleagues will also do and you will complete it. But there is no need to compromise on respect. Where does that come in? All that is needed is to work harder. You know, I'll tell you in China there is a very famous saying now it's called 996. What it means is 9 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. 6 days a week. And you know, China has become world's number one exporter. 3.6 trillion dollar of export. And China for the first time in the history of this planet created a trade surplus of 1.2 trillion. No country, no America, no Germany, no UK, nobody did. Now, how did they do that? Because they had smart people, they had smart leaders, they had smart corporate leaders, they are smart employees. They realized that yes, we are smart, but we need to work harder. You know, I'll give you another example. My brother-in-law, my wife's younger brother is a very famous professor of astrophysics at Caltech. Caltech as you know is number one in physics in the world and he has produced 77 papers in Nature. If somebody produces two or three papers in Nature, he or she is considered big. This fellow has produced 77. Once I asked him, Shrinivas, what is the secret behind this kind of achievement? He said it's very simple. People around me are all as smart as I am. Therefore, I have to work slightly harder. So, I work hard and I am able to succeed better. So, that's all there is to it. Nothing more. So work hard, harder and don't compromise on deadline. Last question we can take now.

You see this is the indiscipline of Indians. I right in the beginning I explained I thought people understood basic English but once again the fellow is trying to violate that, break the line.

No, I don't know that there's anything uncomfortable about leadership.

No, you know my belief is that Mahatma Gandhi taught us an extremely important secret of leadership particularly when you're surrounded by people who can think and that is leadership by example. Walk the talk, practice the precept. So for example, at Infosys I realized pretty early that instead of giving big lectures on why people should come on time and all of that, I said if I came before all others then I don't have to give lectures. So I used to leave home at 6. At 6:20 I was in the office throughout my career of 33 years and everybody was watching me. Everybody watches a leader and they want to learn good things from them. Even those that don't like that leader. So if you lead by example, it is somewhat uncomfortable because you had to get up at 5:00 in the morning but you know I used to get telephone calls from the US at even 1:00 in the morning but then I had to get up at 5, leave for office at 6. It was uncomfortable. Nothing worthwhile in the world can be achieved without discomfort and hard work. Please keep that in mind.

More than that I think because I used to be in the office at 6:20. I left office at 8:30 and reach home around 9:15 and by then the children would have finished their studies thanks to my wife and then you know we would have dinner together, we would spend quality time discussing how their school went and all of that and three times a week I used to take them to restaurants because I wanted to in some way incentivize them.

No, I would say 14-14 into 6. I used to work six days a week and Sundays I used to work half a day. So 84 plus about 4 to 5, 80 to 90 hours a week I used to work.

But you know that's a very good takeaway from today's session. No but you know I am 80 years of age now. Do I look like I'm dying or falling down? No. So hard work never killed anybody. Please understand this. And number two there are lots of youngsters here. Boys and girls, let me also tell you that quantity is not as important as quality. Therefore, you don't have to spend lots of time with your life partner, with your children, with your parents. What is important is make whatever time you can spend with them quality time. Bring happiness, pleasure, pride to them. That is the secret of saying I want to spend more time with my children, with my parents, with my wife, with my husband. So on the other end, if you were to come home early and sit, someday your spouse may say, 'What the hell? Why don't you go to the office?'

You know, before I answer that, let me tell you it's some kind of apocryphal story. I believe once somebody went to Winston Churchill and said you know look at how humble he is. And Winston said he has a lot to be humble about. So I think the reality is that at the end of the day all these brand glory, applause, encomiums, they all stay on your face for a short period. It's like a revolving light. That light is revolving for a short period it will fall on your face and then it'll go away. So the most important lesson for a leader is to remember that all these encomiums, appreciation, slogans, great words, all of that, that's all transitory. Therefore, when that light falls on your face, it is very important for you to be humble, to be courteous and to be grounded. That's the way, that's the belief that I have learned from my parents and from my teachers and from my bosses both in India and abroad. And I have seen them extraordinarily humble, very courteous, unaffected by any of their extraordinary achievements and in my own small way I'm trying to follow them.

I have one question.

Yes.

Whatever. Whatever.