Parents realize their wealth should be used for social good rather than children's good.
— Azim Premji
You cannot mandate philanthropy. It has to come from within, and when it does, it is deeply satisfying.
You must get engaged with people who are far less privileged than you. I think you must devote your time if not your resources... Because it is very, very important from the point of view of the development of our country.
Even if a media of a TV is not available in a home, there's this concept of community homes, where a reasonably well-off villager will have a TV - and a nice TV - and he'll keep it outside the house in the evenings.
The U.S. is a complex country. It has a high predominance of immigrants who have been eminently successful.
Talent is in short supply everywhere. At Wipro, we are training nonengineers to be engineers.
All our hiring staff are trained to interview in English. They're trained to look for Westernized segments because we deal with global customers.
I think the most important reason for our success is that very early in our quest into globalisation, we invested in people - and we have done that consistently and particularly in the service business.
Frankly, I don't know how many companies there are, globally, which are truly global.
The concept of the strong linkage to the family is breaking down in Western nations.
People have to take control of their own lives. Education is key because it also raises other social indicators like healthcare.
The test of our social commitment and humanity is how we treat the most powerless of our fellow citizens, the respect we accord to our fellow human beings. That is what reveals our true culture.
The important thing about outsourcing or global sourcing is that it becomes a very powerful tool to leverage talent, improve productivity and reduce work cycles.
People are the key to success or extraordinary success.
The Indian community in Canada has integrated much better than the Indian community in United States. They've become really Canadian at the same time as keeping all their Indian characters and customs and social groups.
Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.
Even if I was to give my children a small part of my wealth, it would be more than they can digest in many lifetimes.
There are three lessons in philanthropy - one, involve the family, especially the spouse. She can be a remarkable driver of your initiative. Two, you need to build an institution, and you need to scale it up. Choose a leader for philanthropy whom you trust. Three, philanthropy needs patience, tenacity and time.
The three ordinary things that we often don't pay enough attention to, but which I believe are the drivers of all success, are hard work, perseverance, and basic honesty.
I can speak English. I can speak Hindi. I can understand one or two other languages.
Our experience is that it is not terribly difficult to do business in China. But the issue is, how much stability do you have in terms of what you negotiate up front and when you've got your feet and your investments on the ground.
I.B.M. was not really bringing their best technologies to India. They were dumping old machines in the country that had been thrown away in the rest of the world 10 years before.
We've always seen ourselves as Indian. We've never seen ourselves as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or Buddhists.
We entered the global market only in the end-'80s, and that was because imports became more liberal.
You cannot have a society where you spend more than you earn. I mean, it's just fundamentally not viable in the long run.
If one has been blessed or have been fortunate enough to have got much more than normal wealth, it is but natural that one expects a certain fiduciary responsibility in terms of how that wealth is applied, used and leveraged for purposes of society.
You have students in America, in Britain, who do not want to be engineers. Perhaps it is the workload, I studied engineering, and I know what a grind it is.
Over these years, I have irrevocably transferred a significant part of the shareholding in Wipro, amounting to 39% of the shares of Wipro, to a trust.
If the United States wants access to Chinese, Indian or Vietnamese markets, we must get access to theirs. U.S. protectionism is very subtle but it is very much there.
With the attention I got on my wealth, I thought I would have become a source of resentment, but it is just the other way around - it just generates that much more ambition in many people.
You cannot get into business for the fashion of it.
We run courses for government school teachers on Sundays. These teachers pay for their own food and stay; the kind of commitment you find in these people is remarkable.
The responsibility of philanthropy rests with us. The wealthier we are, the more powerful we get. We cannot put the entire onus on the government.
The public/private partnerships are taking various forms in India. It is individuals who are socially oriented are setting up schools. They're setting up colleges. They're setting up universities. They're setting up primary-education schools in the villages, particularly the villages their original families came from.
You cannot underestimate the value of luck in success in life. And I've really learned to appreciate that.
There's a reasonable amount of traction in college education, particularly engineering, because quite a lot of that is privatized, so there is an incentive to set up new colleges of reasonably high quality.
Being in the consumer business helps us groom talent in areas like marketing, finance and logistics. We can benchmark our outsourcing business to our consumer business and its best practices.
How can you contribute towards building the Indian society and the Indian nation? No better way than to upgrade the quality of young people in school, particularly the schools which are run by the state government in the villages.
Certain product lines are more suited to be manufactured in proximity with the customer, while others are more suitable to be manufactured in India.
There are 600 districts in India. Every district in India has a teacher-training institute.
I can't have my employees sitting in traffic when they should be in the office. Spending two-and-half hours in the car is a huge waste of productive time.
Colleges produce more sports therapists than engineers. Perhaps because America is a sporty country: a lot of outdoors.
A girl child who is even a little bit educated is more conscious of family planning, health care and, in turn, her children's own education.
The Western world loves liberalisation, provided it doesn't affect them.
I think that any wealth creates a sense of trusteeship... it is characteristic of the new generation which has created wealth to have some amount of responsibility for it.
I think the advantage of democracy is that it makes us less dependent on a group of leaders.
