NRN on Infy’s Past and Future

Yale Global’s Nayan Chanda interviews N R Narayanamurthy for the Online edition of Yale Global. NRN talks about some of the initial roadblocks during the license raj. He also explains some of the current issues like the challenges in managing a massive global workforce and in managing diversity.

Chanda: The rapid growth of outsourcing is very good news for a country like India or China. But one sees an increasing concern in Europe and the US about white-collar jobs leaving the country and going outside. Do you see that this could be a drag on your business?

Murthy: You know my view is that people in glass houses should not throw stones at others. After all, what we are doing is what we were preached to do by the rest of the nations. My European friends, my American friends, told me umpteen times in the 1980s how India should become more and more open, how India should open up its borders, how India should reduce its tariffs, how India should allow competition from multinationals, etc. I agreed with all of them. All we’ve been doing is implementing the ideas that they have been propounding. So, at this point in time, just because the shoe pinches a little bit, I don’t think we should go back on those principles.

So my view is, at the end of that day is that we’re making corporations in the US, in Europe, in Japan, in other countries, more competitive, not just for selling in their own countries, but in other countries. So just as we accepted liberalization, just as we opened up our borders, I believe that western nations, too, would gain from such open access.

The above reply by NRN is very much similar to Tom Friedman's response to the anti-outsourcing lobby in The World is Flat.