Kurien has been handpicking hard-charging specialists from IT services market leader Tata Consultancy Services and revenue growth leader Cognizant and paying them top dollar, choosing lean and mean replacements to fill the space vacated by the departing executives.
"Somebody has to look beyond popularity index and start questioning the inertia," a Wipro executive said justifying the large-scale revamp. "Wipro cannot keep watching others run past. The company has to pick the lessons very carefully and execute them now, dispassionately."
Over the past nine months, about 60 managers, some of them long-termers in the 31-year-old company, have been asked to leave. The evaluation was based on how they were rated by customers directly or indirectly served by them.
Company insiders and others familiar with the plan said by the end of financial year 2012, a similar number would have been ejected, meaning Wipro would have shed half its middle and senior management staff.
The new crop of Kurien's executives will include Satish Dorai, a former TCS employee who has been hired as senior vice-president to help Wipro tweak its project delivery models and establish a new business transformation practice focussed on high-value projects.
Ritesh Pathak, an old Cognizant hand who worked at HP-owned MphasiS, also joined Wipro last month as a vice-president to help the company hunt for fresh business - an area where it has been lagging TCS, Infosys and Cognizant.
Omkar Nisal, the head of TCS' core banking software division Bancs, joined this month to help Wipro transform its sales function. "There are no pink slips, there are no slips at all; just an email about measuring up to the new benchmarks," said a manager who left Wipro in December.
Customer satisfaction main benchmark for Wipro staff
The most important benchmark is customer satisfaction. So this means that bonuses and pay hikes are linked to customer satisfaction levels and not just revenue or profit growth. A quarter of incentives for every staff now depend on satisfaction levels among Wipro's clients, which include Johnson & Johnson and Citibank.
Over the next few weeks, Wipro will evaluate its managers on parameters such as ability to work across teams and functions as well as leadership attributes that inspire other team members to perform better. "There is a method to this madness, which is focussed on creating a completely different organisation with momentum," said Partha Iyengar, vice-president and research director at Gartner India.
"What Kurien is doing is partly shaking up the existing system and partly bringing new talent to infuse energy," he added. Kurien replaced joint CEOs Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe early last year and was tasked with turning around a company that not only lagged peers in revenue and profit growth but also allowed rivals such as Cognizant to overtake it and claim the number three position in India's over $70-billion IT sector.
Soon after he took charge, Kurien collapsed overlapping business units, service lines and geographic operations into fewer divisions headed by 'mini CEO-like' leaders with complete authority to take important decisions. This came along with strategic investments such as the acquisition of SAIC's IT unit.
The first signs that his approach is working came in the July-September quarter, when Wipro beat Street revenue expectations for the first time in two years. The company announces its third-quarter results on January 20. "Traditionally, Wipro has been top-heavy.
Now we are investing heavily in building internal systems to empower decision-making down the chain to the level of project manager," said a senior company executive. The drastic changes have also caused heartburn among those who have been asked to leave while creating uncertainty among some of those who remain.
"Just when you think it's over, it starts all over again," a former employee said referring to the reorganisation. "Isn't the company equally responsible for not developing these managers or communicating better with them?" But Ganesh Shermon, country head for KPMG Advisory Services' people & change practice, said such reorganisation is "part of the game" in companies. "Even for employees, movement is a part of life. They will not be too worried if a person two levels above them is moving on."
(Source- http://economictimes.indiatimes.com)
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