Inside Rishad Premji's mission to make a high-performing society at Wipro

The chief administrator of the worldwide innovation administration organization Wipro needs to advance social change at the 77-year-old association by regulating five propensities in the working environment.

The executive chairman of global technology services company Wipro wants to promote cultural change at the 77-year-old organization by institutionalizing five habits in the workplace. Cultural change is a prominent agenda item for most CEOs. It is also one of the most challenging aspects of an organizational transformation to execute—and sustain. 

In 2020, the Indian software giant Wipro took on the task of reshaping the culture of the company, which has more than 220,000 employees across six continents. After becoming Wipro’s executive chairman, in July 2019, Rishad Premji felt that the company’s performance did not reflect its true potential. Premji strongly believes that people and culture determine a company’s success and failure as much as strategy, if not more.

He is on a journey to make Wipro “a high-performing organization that still has a soul, that is empathetic, vulnerable, collaborative, and decent.” Instead of using complicated messaging to communicate—and implement—an elusive concept like culture, Premji has chosen five simple, commonplace habits to promote this change.

JR [Jaleel Rawther] sat down with Premji at Wipro’s Bangalore office to dig deeper into these habits and Wipro’s cultural-transformation program, Premji’s motives for committing his own time and energy to this initiative, and whether it is even possible to measure the impact of such cultural changes.

Rishad Premji: I’ve always been a big believer that people don’t experience your values; they experience your behaviors. When I took over, in July 2019, I realized that while we had developed strong ingredients that help a company become successful—things like strategy, people, investments, and purpose–they were not producing a decent dish, which is our performance.

I discovered in those conversations that the challenge was our own selves to some extent—our ways of working, how we collaborated, the silos in the organization, the trust factor, and the willingness to work across the aisles.

JR: The architecture of Wipro’s cultural-transformation program places a big emphasis on cultivating five core habits.

These teams spent an enormous amount of time among themselves, meeting alumni, and people across the organization, and, in some cases, talking to customers to figure out what we needed to do to improve our performance. In an organization where 100,000 new people have joined in the past two and a half years, the element of trusting people before you know them is incredibly important to getting things done in a collaborative manner.

JR: Culture change is a major leadership challenge.

Rishad Premji: Culture is one of the most important elements of an organization. So, I tell people to think of the journey of the five habits as if they were stopping at a traffic light. We are on a journey of building a high-performance culture, which is driven by objectives and outcomes.

JR: So the question is how can you build this strong high-performance organization?

Rishad Premji: I am a big believer that you can build a high-performing organization that still has a soul, that is empathetic, vulnerable, collaborative, and decent. These habits provide a very strong foundation for what is necessary to build a high-performing organization.

JR: How do you know these cultural-change efforts are working?

Rishad Premji: I’ve struggled a lot with this, and we have had a lot of discussions inside the organization. We have a culture officer in the organization now—a senior vice president who spends 60 percent of her time leading this effort. For a technology company that is getting disrupted and disrupted continuously, it is difficult to think of how the world will look 25 years from now. These are things we have to take seriously and find ways to help as an organization.

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