Business Success
 

High-Growth Business Development:

Venture Management

Case Study:  Infosys

Success Story of the Leading Indian IT Company

By K. Dinesh, Board Member, Infosys, India

Five Keys To Building a Great Company

Adapted from interview with Narayna Murthy1, Founder of Infosys

  1. Leadership: First of all, you need good leadership. Great leaders raise the aspirations of their followers; they make people more confident, energetic and enthusiastic. Such leaders make people embrace the adage: a plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility.
    People, who are motivated by great leaders, dream big, make sacrifices and achieve miracles. It is not sufficient just to have great leaders. You need a mechanism to identify, train, empower and mentor successive generations of leaders. Such leadership training and mentoring has to become the responsibility of the current generation of leaders...     More

8 Best Practices of Successful Companies

 

10 Rules for Building a Great Business

Phase I: Getting a Foothold

Working with shackles:

  • Command and control economy

     

  • Import restrictions

  • Punitive taxes

  • Under-developed capital markets

  • Foreign exchange controls

  • Capital shortage for infrastructure investments

  • Poor telecom infrastructure

Strategy:

  • Onsite focus

  • Few large customers

  • Indirect sales

Phase II: The Run Up

Liberalization of the economy:

  • Abolishing of licenses

  • Rationalization of taxes

  • Export incentives

  • Rationalization of tariffs

  • Abolishing of wealth tax on productive assets

  • Foreign exchange reforms

  • Free pricing of issues and entry of FIIs

  • Employee stock option plans

Key Features of the New Economy

Strategy:

  • Global benchmarking

  • Global delivery model

    • Do work where it makes economic sense and reduce the total cost of ownership

    • Use two working shifts in the same calendar day to reduce time to market

    • Ramp up resources in multiple continents

  • Employee retention

  • Investment in sales and marketing

  • Becoming a company of choice for investors, customers and employees

The Tree of Business Success

Phase III: The Big Leap

Current environment:

  • Market trends

    • Globalization, deregulation & consolidation are changing business fundamentally

    • Financial markets have been transformed

    • Increasing competition from low cost economies

  • Technology trends

    • High speed ADSL and optical fiber are providing higher bandwidth

       

    • Wireless access and new technologies like WAP and Bluetooth are becoming popular

    • Web appliances are expected to proliferate and non-PC devices will outnumber connected PCs in the future

  • Outsourcing is increasing because of:

    • Time-to-market considerations

    • Internal resource shortage

    • Cost control

    • Complexity of IT

    • Improved vendor capabilities

    • Focus on core-competency

10 Rules for Building a Great Business

Infosys Today – a Role Model

3 Strategies of Market Leaders

International Recognition

  • Ranked No.1 in Business Today's "India's Best Employers" survey

  • Best Managed Company in India - Asiamoney poll 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999

  • Far Eastern Economic Review rated Infosys as India's No.1 company

  • Rated highest among companies in India expected to increase their future stature by ORG-MARG

  • Infosys figures in Forbes "20 for 2000"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

  1. "How To Build a Great Company", Interview with Narayna Murthy, Founder of Infosys, World Economic Forum

    2.