Value-based leadership

Azim Premji
13 September 2002

Panaji: It is a great pleasure to be with you this evening. Every time I visit Goa, its scenic beauty amazes me. Having grown up in Mumbai, I am extremely fond of the sea. To me, it represents a combination of awesome power and tranquillity.

One has seen in the last year or so a tremendous turbulence in the world that surrounds us. In the midst of all these changes and uncertainties, the key role of leadership is to provide an anchor that can offer some degree of stability. In my own experience, only a strong bedrock of values can provide us this support and stability. I will, therefore, speak on 'value-based leadership' today, because it is the most critical of all dimensions of leadership.

Meeting you today reminds me of the time I joined Wipro. Wipro was a small manufacturing unit in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra. When I look at where we have arrived, what gives me tremendous personal satisfaction is not so much the success, but the fact that we achieved this success without compromising on the values we defined for ourselves. The greatest legacy given to me by my father was the importance of values.

Many times, I hear people debating whether values come in the way of success. There is no merit in that debate. Values not only help in achieving success but also make success more enduring and lasting. Values can help establish business or career purpose. Values combined with a powerful vision can turbo-charge us to scale new heights and make us succeed beyond our wildest expectations.

Second, values can serve as a strong anchor in a turbulent sea of changes. Values will help us to weather those storms. Values give faith in a time when it seems we are surrounded by darkness, because they prompt right actions. They build resilience and keep us going.

Third, values provide us with courage to stand up to any distractions along the way. The strong desire to move ahead can at times tempt businesses to cut corners or bend the rules. This has a tendency to catch up, as we have seen in the recent months. Values provide the necessary brakes or limits to keep leadership from going astray. Values essentially provide us with an internal discipline.