Mr. Narayan Murthy, have you not heard of the story “Emperor’s Clothes” ?

The latest song that my friend is singing is a slight variant of “Papa don’t preach” and it sounds more like “Murthy don’t preach”.

I was not sure of the last word and couldn’t suppress my curiosity. Finally my friend confirmed that the last word that I heard was right.

Although Mr Murthy has achieved fame and recognition, he can’t wish away the fact that Infosys was mainly a body shopping entity. Infosys can hardly boast of a dozen “products” during all these years of its existence. All its revenues came from “services” and was achieved by hiring tons and tons of graduates from all institutes including the IITs

Now suddenly he seems to look at quality of students joining from IITs. The very business model of Infosys was based on hourly rates and by logic the company wanted employees who can be paid lower salaries so that the margins are still achieved in the dog eat dog IT industry. Obviously, you couldn’t have got brilliant minds with lower salaries despite Employee stock options.

Over the years, other companies perfected this art better and no wonder Infosys is today lagging. Now the company has realized that just body shopping will not help. But, you can’t overnight replace thousands of employees with brilliant ones. 

Rather than admitting this strategic mistake, Mr. Murthy has now started complaining about quality of IIT students. But he seems to ignore the fact that TCS and Wipro are doing just fine with the same set of IIT students.

Mr. Murthy, you need to be careful with your utterances. Chetan Bhagat might just become “that child” which called the emperor naked.