N.R. Narayana Murthy Infosys | India
N.R. Narayana Murthy used to think of himself as a committed socialist, but three days in a Yugoslav lockup changed his mind. Back in the early 1970s, while traveling through Europe by train, Murthy was seized by the police at Nis, a town near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. He'd been chatting up a fellow passenger in French, and he thinks her boyfriend complained to a cop. Murthy was kept in a room in the train station for 72 hours and shipped out on a freight car. "There was no going back to communism after that," he says.
Today, sitting in the chairman's office of Infosys, a Bangalore-based software and services company, Murthy's capitalist transformation is complete. The former socialist is one of the people who turned outsourcing into a multibillion-dollar business that has rejuvenated American and European companies by slashing their tech spending. But he has also helped to put the fear of God into software engineers by raising the specter that their jobs could migrate to India, making outsourcing a hot political topic. Murthy and six friends founded Infosys in 1981 with $250 in start-up capital. The company's early years were arduous. In the 1980s, Murthy recalls, it took a year to get a telephone line and a dozen trips to New Delhi to get permission to import a single computer. But the firm quickly established a reputation as a reliable partner for American and European businesses looking to contract out software-programming work. That first-mover advantage has paid off. Infosys earned $1.06 billion in revenue last year, and expects that figure to rise by up to 31% this year.
Although he stepped down as CEO in 2002, Murthy, 57, is still immersed in Infosys as chairman and an adviser to the company's senior management. His biggest challenge: making sure outsourcing continues to thrive in a volatile political environment. As more and more American and European firms send work overseas, some politicians, labor unions and software professionals are demanding that the practice be curtailed. But Murthy thinks he can overcome the anti-outsourcing sentiment. "We can't get angry and shout slogans," Murthy says. "If we focus on delivering value to our clients, ultimately we will win." After building Infosys into an outsourcing behemoth, Murthy is now trying to protect the company from its own success.—By Aravind Adiga/Bangalore
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