N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies Limited, was the 2007 Precommencement Speaker.

 >>Read his remarks

Bio

N. R. Narayana Murthy founded Infosys in 1981 along with six other software professionals and served as the CEO for 20 years before handing over the reins of the company to co-founder Nandan M. Nilekani in March 2002. Under his leadership Infosys was listed on NASDAQ in 1999. He served as the Executive Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor from 2002 to 2006.

Mr. Murthy is the chairman of the governing body of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Cornell University Board of Trustees, Singapore Management University Board of Trustees, INSEAD's Board of Directors and the Asian Institute of Management's Board of Governors. He is also a member of the Advisory Boards and Councils of various well-known universities – such as the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Corporate Governance initiative at the Harvard Business School, Yale University and the University of Tokyo’s President's Council.

Mr. Murthy has led key corporate governance initiatives in India. He was the Chairman of the committee on Corporate Governance appointed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in 2003.

Mr. Murthy serves as an independent director on the board of the DBS Bank, Singapore, the largest government-owned bank in Singapore. He is a member of the Asia Pacific Advisory Board of British Telecommunications plc., and a member of the Board of New Delhi Television Ltd. (NDTV), India. He serves as a member of the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the United Nations Foundation. He is an IT advisor to several Asian countries. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of TiE Inc. (Global), a worldwide network of entrepreneurs and professionals dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship.

Mr. Murthy is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. The Economist ranked him 8th among the top 15 most admired global leaders (2005). He was ranked 28th among the world's most-respected business leaders by the Financial Times (2005). He topped the Economic Times Corporate Dossier list of India's most powerful CEOs for two consecutive years – 2004 and 2005.

TIME magazine’s “Global Tech Influentials” list (August 2004) named Mr. Murthy as one of the ten leaders who are helping shape the future of technology. He was the first recipient of the Indo-French Forum Medal (2003), awarded by the Indo-French Forum in recognition of his role in promoting Indo-French ties. He was voted the World Entrepreneur of the Year – 2003 by Ernst and Young. He was one of two people named as Asia's Businessmen of the Year for 2003 by Fortune magazine. In 2001, he was named by TIME/CNN as one of the 25 most influential global executives, selected for their lasting influence in creating new industries and reshaping markets. He was awarded the Max Schmidheiny Liberty 2001 prize (Switzerland), in recognition of his promotion of individual responsibility and liberty. In 1999, BusinessWeek named him one of their nine Entrepreneurs of the Year, and he was featured in BusinessWeek's 'The Stars of Asia' for three successive years – 1998, 1999 and 2000.

Mr. Murthy was born on August 20, 1946. He holds a B.E. from the University of Mysore and a M. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He has also been conferred honorary doctorates by well-known universities in India and abroad.

Remarks

Learning from experience: Some lessons I have learned from my life and career

Dean Cooley, faculty, staff, distinguished guests, and, most importantly, the graduating class of 2007, it is a great privilege to speak at your commencement ceremonies. I thank Dean Cooley and Prof. Marti Subrahmanyam for their kind invitation.  I am exhilarated to be part of such a joyous occasion. Congratulations to you, the class of 2007, on completing an important milestone in your life journey.

After some thought, I have decided to share with you some of my life lessons. I learned these lessons in the context of my early career struggles, a life lived under the influence of sometimes unplanned events which were the crucibles that tempered my character and reshaped my future.

I would like first to share some of these key life events with you, in the hope that these may help you understand my struggles and how chance events and unplanned encounters with influential persons shaped my life and career.  Later, I will share the deeper life lessons that I have learned.   My sincere hope is that this sharing will help you see your own trials and tribulations for the hidden blessings they can be.

The first event occurred when I was a graduate student in Control Theory at IIT, Kanpur in India.   At breakfast on a bright Sunday morning in 1968, I had a chance encounter with a famous computer scientist on sabbatical from a well-known US university. He was discussing exciting new developments in the field of computer science with a large group of students and how such developments would alter our future.  He was articulate, passionate and quite convincing. I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library, read four or five papers he had suggested, and left the library determined to study computer science. Friends, when I look back today at that pivotal meeting, I marvel at how one role model can alter, for the better, the future of a young student.   This experience taught me that valuable advice can sometimes come from an unexpected source, and chance events can sometimes open new doors. 

The next event that left an indelible mark on me occurred in 1974. The location: Nis, a border town between former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, and Bulgaria. I was hitchhiking from Paris back to Mysore, India, my home town. By the time a kind driver dropped me at Nis railway station at 9pm on a Saturday night, the restaurant was closed. So was the bank the next morning, and I could not eat because I had no local money. I slept on the railway platform until 8.30 pm in the night when the Sofia Express pulled in.  The only passengers in my compartment were a girl and a boy. I struck a conversation in French with the young girl. She talked about the travails of living in an iron curtain country, until we were roughly interrupted by some policemen who, I later gathered, were summoned by the young man who thought we were criticizing the communist government of Bulgaria. The girl was led away; my backpack and sleeping bag were confiscated.  I was dragged along the platform into a small eight-by-eight-foot room with a cold stone floor and a hole in one corner by way of toilet facilities. I was held in that bitterly cold room without food or water for more than 72 hours. I had lost all hope of ever seeing the outside world again, when the door opened. I was again dragged out unceremoniously, locked up in the guard’s compartment on a departing freight train and told that I would be released 20 hours later upon reaching Istanbul.   The guard’s final words still ring in my ears – “You are from a friendly country called India and that is why we are letting you go!”

The journey to Istanbul was lonely, and I was starving. This long, lonely, cold journey forced me to deeply rethink my convictions about Communism. Early on a dark Thursday morning, after being hungry for 108 hours, I was purged of any last vestiges of affinity for the Left. I concluded that entrepreneurship, resulting in large scale job creation, was the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in societies.

Deep in my heart, I always thank the Bulgarian guards for transforming me from a confused leftist into a determined, compassionate capitalist! Inevitably, this sequence of events led to the eventual founding of Infosys in 1981.

While these first two events were rather fortuitous, the next two, both concerning the Infosys journey, were more planned and profoundly influenced my career trajectory.

On a chilly Saturday morning in winter 1990, five of the seven founders of Infosys met in our small office in a leafy Bangalore suburb.   The decision at hand was the possible sale of Infosys for the enticing sum of $1 million. After nine years of toil in the then business-unfriendly India, we were quite happy at the prospect of seeing at least some money. I let my younger colleagues talk about their future plans. Discussions about the travails of our journey thus far and our future challenges went on for about four hours. I had not yet spoken a word.

Finally, it was my turn. I spoke about our journey from a small Mumbai apartment in 1981 that had been beset with many challenges, but also of how I believed we were at the darkest hour before the dawn. I then took an audacious step. If they were all bent upon selling the company, I said, I would buy out all my colleagues, though I did not have a cent in my pocket. There was a stunned silence in the room. My colleagues wondered aloud about my foolhardiness. But I remained silent. However, after an hour of my arguments, my colleagues changed their minds to my way of thinking. I urged them that if we wanted to create a great company, we should be optimistic and confident. They have more than lived up to their promise of that day. In the seventeen years since that day, Infosys has grown to revenues in excess of $3 billion, a net income of more than $800 million and a market capitalization of more than $28 billion, 28,000 times richer than the offer of $1 million on that day. In the process, Infosys has created more than 70,000 well-paying jobs, 2000-plus dollar millionaires and 20,000-plus Rupee millionaires.  

A final story: On a hot summer morning in 1995, a Fortune-10 corporation had sequestered all their Indian software vendors including Infosys in different rooms at the Taj Residency hotel in Bangalore so that the vendors could not communicate with one another. This customer’s propensity for tough negotiations was well-known. Our team was very nervous. First of all, with revenues of only around $5 million, we were minnows compared to the customer. Second, this customer contributed fully 25 percent of our revenues. The loss of this business would potentially devastate our recently-listed company. Third, the customer’s negotiation style was very aggressive. The customer team would go from room to room, get the best terms out of each vendor and then pit one vendor against the other. This went on for several rounds. Our various arguments why a fair price – one that allowed us to invest in good people, R and D, infrastructure, technology and training - was actually in their interest failed to cut any ice with the customer.   By 5 pm on the last day, we had to make a decision right on the spot whether to accept the customer’s terms or to walk out.

All eyes were on me as I mulled over the decision. I closed my eyes, and reflected upon our journey until then. Through many a tough call, we had always thought about the long-term interests of Infosys. I communicated clearly to the customer team that we could not accept their terms, since it could well lead us to letting them down later. But I promised a smooth, professional transition to a vendor of the customer’s choice. This was a turning point for Infosys.

Subsequently, we created a Risk Mitigation Council which ensured that we would never again depend too much on any one client, technology, country, application area or key employee. The crisis was a blessing in disguise. Today, Infosys has a sound de-risking strategy that has stabilized its revenues and profits.

I want to share with you, next, the life lessons these events have taught me. I will begin with the importance of learning from experience. It is less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how and what you learn.  If the quality of the learning is high, the development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself in a previously unattainable place. I believe the Infosys story is living proof of this.

Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.

A second theme concerns the power of chance events. As I think across a wide variety of settings in my life, I am struck by the incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events that is crucial.

Of course, the mindset one works with is also quite critical. As recent work by the psychologist, Carol Dweck, has shown, it matters greatly whether one believes in ability as inherent or that it can be developed. Put simply, the former view, a fixed mind set, creates a tendency to avoid challenges, to ignore useful negative feedback and leads such people to plateau early and not achieve their full potential. The latter view, a growth mind set, leads to a tendency to embrace challenges, to learn from criticism and such people reach ever higher levels of achievement (Krakovsky, 2007: page 48).

The fourth theme is a cornerstone of the Indian spiritual tradition: self-knowledge.  Indeed, the highest form of knowledge, it is said, is self-knowledge. I believe this greater awareness and knowledge of oneself is what ultimately helps develop a more grounded belief in oneself, courage, determination, and, above all, humility, all qualities which enable one to wear one’s success with dignity and grace.

Based on my life experiences, I can assert that it is this belief in learning from experience, a growth mind-set, the power of chance events, and self-reflection that have helped me grow to the present. Back in the 1960’s, the odds of my being in front of you today would have been zero. Yet here I stand before you! With every successive step, the odds kept changing in my favor, and it is these life lessons that made all the difference.

My young friends, I would like to end with some words of advice.    Do you believe that your future is pre-ordained, and is already set? Or, do you believe that your future is yet to be written and that it will depend upon the sometimes fortuitous events? Do you believe that these events can provide turning points to which you will respond with your energy and enthusiasm? Do you believe that you will learn from these events and that you will reflect on your setbacks? Do you believe that you will examine your successes with even greater care? I hope you believe that the future will be shaped by several turning points with great learning opportunities.   In fact, this is the path I have walked to much advantage.

A final word: when, one day, you have made your mark on the world, remember that, in the ultimate analysis, we are all mere temporary custodians of the wealth we generate, whether it be financial, intellectual, or emotional. The best use of all your wealth is to share it with those less fortunate.

I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant.  In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will shoulder in time.

Thank you for your patience. Go forth and embrace your future with open arms, and pursue enthusiastically your own life journey of discovery!