The New Face of Global Competition

In 1999, Wipro hired Vivek Paul to run its small technology subsidiary. Paul, an executive with Bollywood-movie idol looks, is Indian by birth. But he made his mark in the United States, graduating from business school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and thriving at GE Medical Systems. Among other things, he negotiated one of GE's earliest IT outsourcing joint ventures in India -- with Wipro.

Paul headquartered Wipro Technologies not in India but in Santa Clara, California. He saw "a great opportunity to be a player at a company that had a shot at being global." But he also saw a workforce in need of a spark. "The whole ethos was rooted in execution," he says. Indian workers had been raised and schooled to respect authority. They did what they were told to do very well. What they didn't do as well was tell clients what needed doing.

There is a slangy Hindi word, jugaad, that describes what Paul was looking for. It implies the ability to think assertively, and work creatively around unexpected problems. "How does one move from being a good pharmacist to being a good doctor?" asks Ranjan Acharya, Wipro's vice president for human-resource development. "A pharmacist cannot add value to a prescription. He can impress with his service but not with a decision."

Wipro needed more doctors. Some of them, it could hire. In fact, it had to. To compete with the big firms, it had to offer expertise in specific industries. If you want to solve a commercial bank's technology problems, you should understand how the banking business works. So Wipro lured Ramesh Subramanian, a McKinsey & Co. veteran who had focused on financial-services clients. It found Aswatha Amarnath, an energy-finance specialist with high-level relationships at big U.S. utilities.

But such high-profile hires still left 15,000 engineers and managers who were thinking like pharmacists. For them, Acharya rolled out a wide-ranging training strategy called Power Consulting. In the United States, a corporate initiative by that name might well be laughed out of the company cafeteria -- especially since some elements seem almost insultingly basic. Engineers who are to meet customers, for example, prepare by dressing for a formal lunch and learning to use silverware properly.

But at Wipro, employees accept the training as competitive weaponry. They learn to "understand the context of the relationship," as Acharya says, and to home in on customers' problems. In small groups, engineers practice asking pointed questions about clients' companies, their businesses, and their people. "Our people are accustomed to speaking from Wipro's view," says Acharya. "They must learn to speak from the customer's view."

Employees are taught to analyze situations and to define the scale and scope of a problem. They learn to "prewire" a presentation, talking to everyone involved ahead of time to prevent nasty surprises. And they are instructed in the fine arts of negotiating and closing a deal. Every new engineer -- and Wipro hired 2,200 engineers in a six-month period last year -- has some consulting perspective built into his 45-day indoctrination.

Where does all of this lead? Up the food chain. Teach engineers to think like consultants, make them experts in their clients' industries, and you forge a workforce that will keep pushing the business forward. Wipro expects that strategy consulting will ultimately account for just 10% of its technology revenue. But those slivers, such as current consulting gigs at General Motors and Nationwide Insurance, will drive long-term relationships with clients, producing steady streams of outsourcing revenue.

Wipro hopes to win more high-level contracts like the one from Storage Technology Corp., which this year agreed to outsource the design and engineering of a line of tape-storage devices. By 2004, Wipro employees will take responsibility for the products' development, supplanting Storage Technology workers in Minneapolis. And in September, Wipro took over a whole R&D facility for Ericsson. Beyond accepting the financial risk, the 120-person Wipro team will manage the research process.

Here, then, is Wipro's challenge. New business will come, because in a global downturn, everyone is looking to slash costs. For Wipro, Power Consulting is all about turning that opportunity into an inflection point. It's about restructuring straightforward commodity work into high-value partnerships. It's about selling something that no one in the world can replicate.

The Boss: Outsourcing as a way of life

Some 8,300 miles from Bangalore, Wipro chairman and managing director Azim H. Premji slides into the front seat of a Lincoln Town Car for the journey into Manhattan. He is a courtly man, silver haired and impeccably dressed. This morning, he is pitching some of Wipro's biggest clients and prospects. He has run late with Verizon Wireless, and he worries now about making an important appointment at J.P. Morgan Chase.