IT Leaders and their icons

"I met Murthy at a very impressionable age, when I was in my early twenties. Over the past 3 decades, he has been my role model, friend, colleague, and mentor. He is a visionary leader, intellectual, compassionate, kind, fair, and has a strong sense of personal integrity. For the founding team of Infosys, each of whom had mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive skills, Murthy had the ability to build consensus. This came out of the deep respect and admiration that each of us had for him."

-SD Shibulal
chief executive officer and managing director, Infosys

"The leader who has inspired me is Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE. I had a clear vision of an enterprise where in I should be a market leader, within 3rd position, or it should be sold off. Or else I should be able to fix it with passion and relentlessly drive it with my leadership. Plus, to become an entrepreneur, one needs to have a 360 degree approach which must focus on all aspects of business such as quality, execution, and implementation. Many people would appreciate your decisions at times, but there will be certain situations when the same people may not appreciate your decision. This is when you will need to rise and adhere to your decision with conviction and passion and make things happen"

-Atul Hemani
managing director & CEO, Omnitech

"During my 32 years of professional life, I have had the opportunity to work in 4 major organizations and with 5 leaders. Out of this, the past 20 years have been with Redington. It is thus axiomatic that R Srinivasan, founder of Redington, or Srini, as he is known in the Indian IT industry, is the individual who has been my foremost mentor.
A few key values that I have learnt from him are:The absolute primacy of personal and professional integrity, respect for others' and your time, there are no free lunches. Reward without performance has no value and transparency"

-PS Neogi
president, Redington India

 

My Dad

-Sameer Garde
president, Dell India

 

"There are many thought leaders who have shaped my thinking. These include Phillip Crosby (quality), CK Prahalad (strategy), De Bono (innovation), and more recently Ron Kaufman (uplifting service).

CK Prahalad has been the most influential. My interaction with him in the mid nineties at the Michigan Business School where I spent two weeks in an executive program led by him was mesmerizing.

Over dinner at his sprawling estate in Ann Arbour, he played gracious host with his wife Gayatri exclusively to all the Indians in his program. He spoke of how the country had the potential of being an economic super power"

-Arvind thankur
CEO,NIIT Technologies

 

"Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has harnessed the energy of millions of people and successfully deployed it into socially productive works across the world. For us in the education sector, this is a mantra for finding a perfect balance between social and corporate responsibility"

 

-Shantanu Prakash
CMD, Educomp

 "Ratan Tata was one of the leaders who inspired me with the way he brought together a fragmented group of companies into one integrated business house, the way he made the TATA Group one of the premier global enterprises with his bold decisions and acquisitions, and doing all of this while being routed to the core value of trust, integrity, and giving back to society"

-Harsh Chitale
CEO and whole time director, HCL Infosystems

 

"Some say that leadership is an acquired trait, but here are some for whom ‘leadership' is absolutely natural. They have cast their indelible mark on my mind and I shall continue to get inspired by those imprints. It is very difficult to map each of them to available traits (some are common), but if I were to sum them up with simple analogies, my comments would be as follows (and in no particular order)-Anand Mahindra for his strategic thinking, vision, philanthropy, and belief in his colleagues, especially how he bestowed faith in me; Arjun Malhotra for his ability to solve situations with calm and composure; and Shiv Nadar for his risk appetite, entrepreneurship, and genius; Vineet Nayyar for frugality and above all, humility. I am indeed fortunate to learn (and unlearn) from these stalwarts"

-CP Gurani, CEO
Mahindra Satyam

 
"In the initial years of the Polaris growth journey, I was an unabashed admirer of Shri JRD Tata. I was humbled and inspired by his vision of building an institution. This led me to focus not just on the financial capital, but equally on the customer capital, human capital, execution capital, intellectual property capital, and the brand capital.

With Polaris' foray into products for banking & insurance, Steve Jobs has been a great inspiration and role model. The financial technology world is a very complex one, given the volume and value of the transactions and the fact that it impacts the entire flow of money in the global ecosystem"

- Arun Jain
chairman and CEO, Polaris Financial Technology