Acquisitions complicate these conclusions a bit, and companies are often not upfront about their organic growth numbers.
But, looking at the past revenues of Wipro’s two major acquisitions this year – Capco and Ampion – and Infosys also acquired over the past year, it’s safe to say that the dollar revenue organic growth rate of these two companies is 19-20%. Was. It is much better than TCS and HCL Technologies.
This is a remarkable change for Wipro Thierry Delaporte, the former Capgemini executive who took over in July last year.
After a decade or more of underperforming its competitors, during which Cognizant and HCL outperformed it in total revenue, the company has found a direction.
The stock prices also show that – Wipro’s stake has grown by 107% in the last one year, while Infosys has grown by 52%, HCL’s by 48% and TCS by 33%.
In a conversation with TOI on his first visit to India since taking over, Delaporte said he downplayed Wipro’s complex structure, reduced hierarchies, empowered employees, and made the culture one of the problem-taking orders. Changed to solver.
simple structure
That said, the structure was so complex that after two months, I wasn’t even clear about how it would work, even I thought I wouldn’t even try to understand how it worked, Because I’m going to break it. Otherwise too.”
There were seven regions, which were divided into 31 industries and nine geographical regions. Delaporte said that sectors and geographies are separated from each other. In addition, there were 12 business lines. Delaporte found it particularly difficult to understand that “there were 27 P&Ls (profit and loss units) reporting to me at my level.”
Each P&L becomes a silo. “Every time you create a different P&L, you are adding walls to an organization. Unlike working with the customer, people are spending more time interacting with each other, fighting about who will bear the cost and who will get the revenue credit,” he said.
Delaporte broke this entire structure into just two global business lines, and four strategic market units (geographies), and thus business units and market units had to work alongside each other. He reduced the reporting of P&Ls from 27 to just 4.
All of this reduced silos internally, he said, so that “dedicating their time to their markets is no longer an obstacle for employees.”
Another practice that Delaporte could not fathom was the number of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) used to assess officers and employees.
“We had over 800 KPIs. Can you imagine how many people we need just to create and track those KPIs! I have simple KPIs. If you’re not growing, you won’t be in this organization anyway. This is a simple KPI. And there are some others. So, simplicity, over perfection. The more KPIs you have, the more accurate you are, but it’s not going to work that way in an organization of 220,000 people,” he said.
The restructuring also included the establishment of a team that would focus solely on contracting and building several large $100 million deals.
“We were relying on our sales teams to sell big deals. It may not work because if you don’t define specific topics and specific profiles for that, no one will risk going after big deals,” Delaporte said. Large deals can take up to 18 months to close. A sales person whose performance is assessed on the basis of monthly and yearly signatures would prefer to go after smaller deals. Shaping, structuring, and negotiating large deals requires a very different mindset. “Now, not a single executive committee meeting starts with anything other than big deals. It’s an obsessive focus on deals,” Delaporte said.
Another element of the reorganization was to reduce the number of layers in the organization. A key part of this was to bring account executives — who have primary responsibility for an ongoing business relationship with a client — closer to the CEO.
“Before the reorganisation, we had executives at 6-7 levels below the CEO. I remember my first meetings with customers. There will be 4-5 people (from Wipro) in the meeting and the account executive was at the bottom. This is very silly. Now, they’re just three levels down. It matters a lot for speed and level of enhancement. And it’s about empowerment,” Delaporte said.
change employees
The other big change was around the people. About 30% of his time, Delaporte said, was devoted to building a great team. It focused on two issues – getting employees to work with each other, and working with customers to identify their pain points and suggest solutions, rather than telling the customer what to do.
“We’re not here to just sell what we have, that time is gone. Every company I talk to wants to know how to better engage with their customers, open new markets, or become more efficient.” So you need to actively come up with ideas, leveraging your expertise and technology,” he said.
Delaporte felt that many people in leadership did not have the personality and mindset they were looking for. “We replaced a third of the top 300. You didn’t hear any noise and bad press around it. I think we handled it very well,” he said.
Its second element was the culture change movement, which was led by its president Rishad Premji. “We had to mature the organization so that people can work together to understand what it means to be One Wipro. We need a culture of accountability, focus on result instead of focus on effort, which was Wipro’s culture earlier,” he said.
Premji devoted a lot of time to a program he calls “5 Habits”. These five were all around being respectful, being accountable, communicating, trusting, and showing stewardship.
“Many colleagues have told me that they are now attracting the talent they struggled to attract in the past. This is a recognition of the fact that we are a more confident and aggressive company,” Delaporte said. said.
It’s too early to say whether Delaporte’s first-year success will last. If it does, it will be a case study of how a new CEO transformed a massive company of 2.2 million employees in its first 15 months, sitting remotely in Paris, and the company’s headquarters and its largest base. But never went.
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