Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s speech read-out in absentia at a rally in Chamoli, Uttarakhand said that corruption cannot be fought only by speeches. The attempt is obviously to take-on social activist Anna Hazare. Well! Corruption cannot be fought only by speeches, agreed, but it also cannot be fought by ‘in-action’ which most of our political parties have done ‘actively’ over the years, as well. Being fair to Anna, atleast someone is raising the voice and loud enough to vibrate the ear-drums and the ground beneath of our political ‘Kumbhakarans’, having some chance of changing intent and shaping better action.
Goal achievement needs voice, intent and action and in the same order. Anyone one element plucked from the string shall stall or abort goal accomplishment. The intent or the mindset is mainly driven by culture and environment. If the culture and environment are not conducive then the intent can never be right. The voices then remain as plain hollow rhetoric and hardly translate into concrete action.
Wipro’s SVP India, Africa and Middle-east Anand S Ankaran expressed his ambition to beat IBM India and be the number one IT services company in India and be among the top three in the Middle East. Ankaran thinks IBM India has been lucky to get deals of Bharti, Idea and Vodafone in India and Wipro’s hasn’t been aggressive enough. Well I do not what stopped them from being aggressive in the first place. Additionally I do not agree with Sankaran’s comment that for IBM the Indian operations are only a ‘tactical substitute for the slowdown in western markets’.
Only time shall tell whether Wipro’s SVP claim has all three ingredients for success i.e. voice, intent (driven by culture) and action. To negate IBM’s 100 year-old legacy and the excellent engagement culture that prevails in the company shall not be easy to take-on for Wipro which is very differently focused. The culture of autonomy, real empowerment, work-life balance (read my earlier story ‘Space, not Place’) and resulting engagement shall be tough to beat. It shall take a bullet for a bullet to hit the ‘Big Blue’, a company that holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company and has nine research laboratories worldwide. Its employees have garnered five Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, nine National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science. Famous inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the Universal Product Code (UPC), the financial swap, SABRE airline reservation system, DRAM, and Watson artificial intelligence.
Just one more time, the culture shapes the intent and drives the action. Else, words remain as plain rhetoric. Hopefully Wipro can match words with intent and action.
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