Narayana Murthy's Insights May Help Prime Minister Sunak
(Photo: Rishi Sunak campaigning in Britain.)
June 29, 2024
By Alby Anand Kurian*
As Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces a tough parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom, to be held on July 4, perhaps he does not need to look far from home for guidance on marketing himself and his Conservative Party. There is a role model close: his father-in-law, N.R. Narayana Murthy. The legendary co-founder of Infosys, the Bangalore-based information technology company with a market value of $78 billion, Murthy’s net worth is estimated to be $4.6 billion by Forbes.
Murthy’s room at Infosys’s head office in Bangalore, India, - where I met him in 2011 for this interview when he was still Chairman of the company - does not resemble the office of any senior executive at a major company that I have seen. It looks more like a modest library with books of every kind, stacked on metal and glass racks. There is a TV, one of the old, bulky models, not a flat-screen one. Then Murthy enters the room and I forget everything else. He is a small man, I would put him at five feet six inches, but he is trim, the result of a lifetime of spartan living. He wears his belt high above his waist, in the style that was fashionable in the sixties; he is dressed in a shirt and trousers that seem to have become shiny with age.
Anand Kurian: There was something about the Infosys story that caught the public imagination – you are at the heart of it all. Can you see why Infosys acquired its place in the public mind?
Narayana Murthy: When we had our Strategy and Action Plan conference in 1992, we had commissioned a survey on unaided mind recall of Infosys, amongst prospective employees i.e. students from the engineering and management colleges. We asked them “Which company would you want to join?” And zero percent of the people said Infosys! (Smiles.)
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