Azim Premji

Entrepreneur

1945-07-24

Azim Premji is an Indian business leader and philanthropist who led Wipro through its transformation into a major global technology company. He is widely recognized for large-scale philanthropic giving through the Azim Premji Foundation.

Quotes by Azim Premji

I feel that business leaders with their ability to create businesses, with their ability to scale, need to play an important role in social service.
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Excellence is a great starting point for any new organisation but also an unending journey.
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When you are under pressure, you make the bold steps faster; you don't make the bold steps slower.
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Excellence endures and sustains. It goes beyond motivation into the realms of inspiration.
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There are three lessons in philanthropy - one, involve the family, especially the spouse. She can be a remarkable driver of your initiative. Two, you need to build an institution, and you need to scale it up. Choose a leader for philanthropy whom you trust. Three, philanthropy needs patience, tenacity and time.
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The old boys' club of closed tennis court relationships is on the way out.
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What is excellence? It is about going a little beyond what we expect from ourselves. Part of the need for excellence is imposed on us externally by our customers. Our competition keeps us on our toes, especially when it is global in nature.
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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.
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Over these years, I have irrevocably transferred a significant part of the shareholding in Wipro, amounting to 39% of the shares of Wipro, to a trust.
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You cannot underestimate the value of luck in success in life. And I've really learned to appreciate that.
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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.
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How can you contribute towards building the Indian society and the Indian nation? No better way than to upgrade the quality of young people in school, particularly the schools which are run by the state government in the villages.
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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.
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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.
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The public/private partnerships are taking various forms in India. It is individuals who are socially oriented are setting up schools. They're setting up colleges. They're setting up universities. They're setting up primary-education schools in the villages, particularly the villages their original families came from.
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The Western world loves liberalisation, provided it doesn't affect them.
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