Vivek Paul: The man behind Wipro’s prominence
Vivek Paul, born 1958, would turn 50 this year. Vivek was an alumni of the famous and prestigious Bits Pilani, Rajasthan.
He worked in GE (Jack Welsh personally recruited him) for 10 years and rose to the top. Then, he was offered a challenge by Azim Premji, to raise a 150 million $ software company to a billion dollar company. Vivek accepted the challenge and set up a goal of achieving 4 billion us dollars by 2004. So, in Ju ly 1999 Vivek joined Wipro. He introduced a completely out of the box business model. His previous experience with GE convinced him that he needed to first change the attitude of the employees more than anything else. He started a revolution in the Wipro company. He made sure that there was no “government job” kind of lethargy in the work environ. He made sure that business was ticking all round the year with less people on the “bench”. Because of his ingenuity, he was able to pick up the pace of the rev enue quickly. By 2004, though he was not able to meet the original target of 4 billion US dollars, he nevertheless took the company in the right direction.
In spite of senior managers from Wipro trying to convince him not to quit, he called it a day. Insiders feel that the actual reason for him to quit was the growing lack of challenge in building up the company further. Another reason could also be that he wanted to spend more time with his family based in the US, given his busy schedule so far. Whatever might be the actual reason, fact remains that Vivek Paul has moved on with his life. He is into venture capitalism. He joined TPG(Texas Pacific Group) a power house private equity firm and to seek new challenges to overcome.
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February 27th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Whoa!!!
This fella is a brain. I have read a lot of stuff about this guy.
And also as a matter of fact: even to this day its said that no one else at Wipro is able to fill his position like he did. Before he joined, Wipro was not such a main player as it is today. What made the difference was the right combo:
A brain(this fella), the negotiator(Premji) and Wipro’s cashbox.
And with the above 3, the third(cashbox) went booming like no man’s wallet.
I also heard that there was a small problem between Premji and Paul. *Maybe*. Thats what I read in the newspapers.