BANGALORE: Wipro Chief Executive TK Kurien is poachingstar performers from rival firms as he approaches the final stages of a mass cull of middle and senior management staff in a sweeping reorganisation meant to infuse urgency and purpose into a laidback work culture.
Kurien has been handpicking hard-charging specialists from IT services market leader Tata Consultancy Services and revenue growth leader Cognizant and paying them top dollar, choosing lean and mean replacements to fill the space vacated by the departing executives.
Over the past nine months, about 60 managers, some of them long-termers in the 31-year-old company, have been asked to leave. The evaluation was based on how they were rated by customers directly or indirectly served by them.
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Company insiders and others familiar with the plan said by the end of financial year 2012, a similar number would have been ejected, meaning Wipro would have shed half its middle and senior management staff.
The new crop of Kurien’s executives will include Satish Dorai, a former TCS employee who has been hired as senior vice-president to help Wipro tweak its project delivery models and establish a new business transformation practice focussed on high-value projects.
Ritesh Pathak, an old Cognizant hand who worked at HP-owned MphasiS, also joined Wipro last month as a vice-president to help the company hunt for fresh business – an area where it has been lagging TCS, Infosys and Cognizant.
Omkar Nisal, the head of TCS’ core banking software division Bancs, joined this month to help Wipro transform its sales function. “There are no pink slips, there are no slips at all; just an email about measuring up to the new benchmarks,” said a manager who left Wipro in December.