Quotes from Azim Premji

Excellence can be as strong a uniting force as solid vision.

We believe that two people who have worked together for more than 10 years and been in the company for more than 15 years would be able to work very well as a team.

I can speak English. I can speak Hindi. I can understand one or two other languages.

We've always seen ourselves as Indian. We've never seen ourselves as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or Buddhists.

I was studying at Stanford University with two quarters left to go before receiving an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. Then, I got the telephone call from my mother. I had no choice. I went home, and I jumped into the company feet first, right from day one. There was no time to grieve my father.

I inherited the company from my father after he died very unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1966. He was just 51 years old, and I was 21.

Excellence is a great starting point for any new organisation but also an unending journey.

When you are under pressure, you make the bold steps faster; you don't make the bold steps slower.

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.

What we are doing is we are putting in significant training into the people we have currently to upgrade their skill resources, upgrade the presentation resources, and upgrade what we expect from them in terms of not business as usual.

You cannot underestimate the value of luck in success in life. And I've really learned to appreciate that.

You have got the right strategy, the right geography; you have got the right customers. You need to prioritise them better; we need to grow them better, mind them better. We need to give more value to them, and we need to execute a lot of areas in the organisation where we are not executing.

To have strongly integrated managers who have a deep understanding of technology is a rare and difficult combination to build. You have to invest a lot in selecting and training these people.

Customers are now driven by trying to optimize value.

Interestingly, many Indian companies where there's a father-and-son combination are being run as joint CEO organizations because the father has not given up running the company and the son is actively involved in running the company, and there is division of responsibilities.

We get first-rate faculty members from the leading engineering and science institutes to train our people.

Wipro Arabia is a joint venture company with Dar Al Riyadh, a well-diversified group in Saudi Arabia.

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.

Private sector cannot substitute the role of the government in primary education.

You cannot get into business for the fashion of it.

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.

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 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.

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.