For those who know Raman Roy well, his resignation last Monday as the CEO of Wipro Solution (formerly Spectramind) did not come as a surprise. That he would move out was on the cards even as he decided three years ago to bring his BPO baby into the Wipro fold , on which the shadow of Azim Premji looms large.
The giveaway is the placard displayed in his office for years which says, "A ship is safe in a harbour but that's not what ships are built for," a sure sign of Roy straining at the proverbial leash.
Roy has made a career out of breaking moulds, and not merely the one he began with, that of a regular chartered accountant. He has attempted, and made a success of, ventures that were once called outlandish, and in the process got to be acknowledged as a BPO evangelist.
The mind boggles to think that it all happened by accident. When Roy was in charge of the accounting division of American Express in India in the early 1990s, his US-based boss John McDonald came down to lecture on how to keep books.
It was after a three hour session that McDonald realised that the books were correct, that the entire operation was indeed being run at the ridiculously low cost that the books showed. Amex lost little time in deciding to transfer more back-end operations to India and even less in deciding that Roy was the one who should head it.
Soon after, he was poached by GE Capital whose brass, after a guided tour of India by current Wipro managing director Vivek Paul who was then with GE, had decided to bet big time on the Indian BPO industry.
Roy says he has already done more than he had set out to do with Spectramind, where he is spending his last few days as the CEO. "We have grown from zero to 16,000 employees in five years. When we started, we thought 5,000 in five years would be nice."
That is Roy for you, focusing more on employees and less on numbers (ICAI please take note). It's only in passing that he points out how Wipro Solutions (formerly Spectramind) now contributes 11 per cent to Wipro's turnover compared with 0.5 per cent at the time that the deal was struck. The figure becomes more remarkable when viewed against the rapid pace at which Wipro's turnover has been rising.
It is an attitude that he exudes all the time. When Business Standard correspondents visited his office, they were kept waiting due to an unscheduled visit by the owner of the building that houses Wipro Solution's office in Delhi's bustling Okhla area. The gentleman had heard of Roy's exit and come to thank him for raising the rentals in the area by choosing to house his office there.
When Roy visited the CNBC TV18 office last week to talk about his resignation, he was greeted by the gentleman who takes care of food for the entire office.
Twenty years ago, this gentleman worked as an office boy for Roy, serving tea and coffee. He was encouraged to attempt bigger things by Roy, who thought the man was meticulous and innovative even in the little things that he did.
One of the daily tasks Roy has now is of clearing a large number of emails from employees, current and former, who say their lives had been transformed in some way by some decision that Roy took. Such as one by a lady in Singapore who had been granted leave by Roy when not entitled to any.
Roy counts this ability to reach out to people among his biggest assets and this feedback as his biggest reward. He doesn't tire of relating how fulfilled he had felt when an employee wrote to him a few years ago saying that Spectramind was a place where donkeys were treated like horses and made to run like horses.
Circa June 2005, life has come full circle for Roy in his late 40s. After starting Shri Ram Fibre Finance as its founder-director nearly 20 years ago, he is once again on to something new.
He says he is talking to eight-nine entities now, a list that will be whittled down to two-three in a month. Whatever it is eventually, it will be in the BPO space. But can we expect him to break fresh ground once again? "I will not disappoint you," he promises.
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