Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish Steve Jobs

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Upgrade ur Skills S Bagchi

Upgrade yourself from the world of codingHow does one build a successful technical career? SUBROTO BAGCHI gives you the nine key factors.
THE other day, I met a bright young engineer in MindTree and asked him what his ambition was. He was very clear. “I want to be an architect”. My next question to him was, what does he read? He looked surprised and then replied that he does not read much outside what appears on a computer screen. My next question to him was whom all does he admire in MindTree among the three best architects? He named the predictable three. Then I told him what the fundamental gap was between him and the best three. It was about the ability to make intelligent conversation about any subject under the sun — a capability borne out of serious reading habits.The next thing I asked him to do was to poll these three on what were the six books they had read last. The result was amazing. The three named eighteen books in all — of which at least six were common. Ninety percent of the books had nothing to do with information technology. The exercise proves a key point — to be a great nerd, one has to have interests outside writing code. However, many engineers think that the path to a great technical career is about technical skills alone.Long back, Bell Labs conducted an interesting study - closely watching the common characteristics among a group of technical professionals who rose to the top. The exercise revealed nine key factors outside just technical competence that differentiated brilliant technical folks from the masses. The study was conducted by Robert Kelly of Carnegie Mellon and Janet Caplan of Williams College. As I see the Indian industry today, I think the study done at Bell Labs remains relevant in every detail. The Bell Labs engineers who did extremely well for themselves - as they progressed in their career, showed the following qualities that differentiated them from their peers: taking initiative, cognitive ability, networking, leadership, teamwork, followership, perspective, organisation savvy and show-and-tell capability. Let us look at each of these and see what lies underneath.Taking initiativeThis is about accepting responsibility above and beyond your stated job. It is about volunteering for additional activities and promoting new ideas. None of these will jump out as apparent as a young engineer gets in to her first job. She will tend to think that her career progress is really dependent only on the ability to write code. The concept of initiative begins by looking for technical and other opportunities in the organisation and volunteering for them. The idea of volunteering is little understood — both by organisations and individuals. In the days to come, it will gain increasing prominence in our professional lives. Initiative is also about two other things — dealing constructively with criticism and planning for the future. The latter is a function of many things — a good starting point is to start mapping the environment, learning to understand how the future is unfolding and then stepping back to ask, how am I preparing myself?Cognitive abilitiesThe concept of cognitive development is about understanding the interplay of technology and trends in how they are getting deployed. It is also about recognising the business eco-system in which technology works. It is about situational understanding and consequence thinking. The importance of consequence thinking is very critical. It asks us to look beyond the immediate deliverable of a task and it is about asking who will be impacted by my work, what is the end state? People in our industry just think in terms of modules and seldom ask where is it going, who is my customer and more importantly - who is my customer’s customer? Cognition is a key faculty that determines how much we are able to read patterns, make sense of things. Refining cognitive skills helps us to go beyond stated needs of our customers to explore unstated needs.NetworkingWe tend to think of networking in a social sense. As one grows higher in life, we are often as powerful as is our network. Building a professional network requires us to step out of the comfort zone to look at whom can I learn from. Quite often, and more as one progresses in life, the learning has to come from unusual sources. At MindTree, we expose our people to social workers, architects, graphic designers, teachers, people who lead government organisations, leaders from client organisations. The interesting thing about benefiting from a network is that it works like a savings bank. I need to deposit in to it before I withdraw. We all have heard about how important internal and external knowledge communities are. Again, in MindTree, we encourage people to belong to 26 different knowledge communities that run on a non-project based agenda and are vehicles of learning. These create networking opportunities and open many doors.LeadershipNext to networking is development of leadership skills. Many technical people associate it with “management” and shy away from developing key leadership skills like communication, negotiation, influencing, inter-personal skills, business knowledge, building spokespersonship and so on. Take for instance negotiating as a skill. Imagine that you are an individual professional contributor. Why should you learn to negotiate? Tomorrow, your organisation becomes member of a standard body and you have to represent the organisation as a technical expert. You will find yourself needing to negotiate with powerful lobbies that represent a competing viewpoint or a rival standard. Unless you have honed your capability alongside your hacking skills, you will be at a complete loss. Yet, you do not discover your negotiating capability one fine morning. You need to work on it from an early stage. Negotiating for internal resources is becoming another critical need. You can choose to remain an individual professional contributor but from time to time, you have to create mind share in the organisation where resources are limited and claimants are many. Establishing thought leadership is another key requirement of growth and independent of whether I want to be a technical person or grow to be a manager, I need to develop as a leader who can influence others.TeamworkOur educational system does not teach us teamwork. If you ever tried to solve your test paper “collaboratively” - it was called copying. You and I spent all our school and college life fiercely competing to get the engineering school and seat of our choice. Then comes the workplace and you suddenly realise that it is not individual brilliance but collective competence that determines excellence. Collaboration is the most important part of our work life. Along with collaboration come issues of forming, norming, storming, performing stages of team life. Capability to create interdependencies, capability to encourage dialogue and dissension, knowledge sharing become critical to professional existence. All this is anti-thesis of what we learn in the formative years of life. Add to it, our social upbringing - our resource-starved system tells us to find ways and means to ensure self-preservation ahead of teamwork. In Japan, the country comes first, the company (read team) comes next and I come last. In India, it is the other way round.FollowershipThe best leaders are also great followers. We can be great leaders if we learn and imbibe the values of followership. Everywhere you go - there are courses that teach leadership.Nowhere you will find a business school teaching you followership. Yet, when solving complex problems in life, we have to embrace what is called “situational leadership”. I have to be comfortable being led by others, I must learn to trust leadership. Many people have issues reporting to a test lead as a developer, or being led by a business analyst or a user interface designer. In different parts of a project life cycle, people of varied competence must lead. I must be comfortable when some one else is under the strobe light. I must have the greatness to be led by people younger than I, people with a different background or a point of view. That is how I learn. PerspectiveThis is the hardest to explain. It begins with appreciating why I am doing what I am doing. Quite often, I find people having a very narrow view of their tasks; many do not see the criticality of their task vis-à-vis a larger goal. So, a tester in a project sees his job as testing code or a module designer's worldview begins and ends with the module. He does not appreciate the importance of writing meaningful documentation because he thinks it is not his job or does not realise that five years from now, another person will have to maintain it.I always tell people about the story of two people who were laying bricks. A passer by asked the first one as to what he was doing. He replied, “I am laying bricks”. He asked the second one. He replied, “I am building a temple”. This story explains what perspective is and how the resultant attitude and approach to work can be vastly different. Organisational savvyAs technical people grow up, they often feel unconnected to the larger organisation. Some people develop a knack of exploring it, finding spots of influence, tracking changes, creating networks and in the process they learn how to make the organization work for them. The organisation is not outside of me. If I know it well, I can get it to work for me when I want. Think of the difference between one project manager and another or one technical lead from another. One person always gets the resources she needs - the other one struggles. One person knows who is getting freed from which client engagement and ahead of time blocks the person. One person reacts to an organisational change and finds himself allocated to a new project as a fait accompli - another person is able to be there ahead of the opportunity. Larger the organisation, higher is the need to develop organisation savvy. It begins with questioning ones knowledge about the larger business dynamic, knowing who does what, tracking the work of other groups, knowing leaders outside of my own sphere and a host of other things. Importantly, it is also about tracking what the competitors of the organization are doing and keeping abreast of directional changes.Show and tellThis is the bane of most Indian software engineers. We all come from a mindset that says; if you know how to write code, why bother about honing communication skills? Recently, we asked a cross section of international clients on what they think is the number one area of improvement for Indian engineers? They replied in unison, it is communication. Show and tell is about oral and written communication. Some engineers look down upon the need for communication skills and associate it with people who make up for poor programming prowess. It is the greatest misconception. Think of the best chief technology officers of companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM Global Services or Sun. Their number one job is evangelizing.If they cannot forcefully present their technologies, nothing else will matter. So, every engineer must pay attention to improving the ability to present in front of people, develop the ability to ask questions and handle objections. In a sense, if you cannot sell the technology you create, it has no value. So, building salespersonship is a key requirement for technical excellence.The foregoing points are not relevant if you have already filed your first patent at the age of eighteen. Everyone else, please take note.

How This Tiger Got Its Roar

IT WAS THE KIND OF CALL THAT makes a young man grow up fast. On Aug. 11, 1966, Azim H. Premji was a senior at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., studying for finals after summer school. When the phone rang, his mother was on the line from India with devastating news: His father, M.H. Premji, had died of a heart attack at the age of 51. The younger Premji quickly booked a flight and left for the funeral, expecting to be back at Stanford in time for the fall semester. Instead, his father's death marked a fateful change of direction for the 21-year-old. Rather than pursuing his dream of bringing aid to the developing world as a policymaker at the World Bank, he found himself thrust into the nitty-gritty details of saving a failing company in a backwater economy.Fortunately, entrepreneurship runs in his blood. Premji's grandfather was founder of one of the largest rice-trading companies in India. Then, in 1945, M.H. Premji launched a cooking oil company called Western India Vegetable Products. But when the young Azim Premji arrived home he found the operation in shambles. And to his dismay, he discovered that his father had selected him to run it, a duty he felt he couldn't shirk. "It's like being thrown into a swimming pool," says Premji, who finally got his Stanford degree six years ago. "To avoid drowning, you learn to swim quickly."Since his plunge into the deep end of commerce, Premji built the company, later renamed Wipro Ltd. (WIT ), into one of India's tech services powerhouses. Today the business provides software programming, engineering design, and back-office services for more than 500 of the world's largest corporations. One of the keys to Wipro's early success was its ability to tap into India's vast pool of young technology graduates willing to work for wages as much as 80% lower than those in the West. But labor arbitrage is only part of the story. Wipro and other leading Indian tech outfits have learned to deliver first-quality work, top-notch customer service, super-efficient human resources, and, increasingly, technology innovation. Once considered unschooled upstarts, Wipro and its Indian counterparts have become innovators in doing business in a networked world.When Premji took over his father's business it was anything but global. It had about 350 employees, mostly in and around Bombay, and just $3 million in revenues. The company was publicly traded, and not long after Premji assumed control he faced shareholders for the first time at the annual meeting. Premji, who was self-conscious about his age, had grown a mustache in an effort to add some gravitas. But restless investors weren't impressed. One stood up to complain about the stock's lousy performance and demanded that Premji sell the company. "'There's no way a twit like you can run it,"' Premji recalls him saying. "More than anything else, that made me determined to prove him wrong," says Premji.It was time for a crash course in capitalism. Premji had never taken a business class, nor had his father taught him anything about running the company. So he visited a professor at a leading management school in Bombay and asked him to recommend some textbooks. He bought a pile of them, and over the next year he stayed up late into the night reading every one. From his readings he learned business basics and systematically built a company based on modern principles and practices. Those early years taught him the necessity of continuous improvement. "You were constantly questing for excellence," he says.The company's mainstay was buying peanuts from farmers and crushing them to produce shortening and edible cakes. The key employees were the buyers, who would evaluate a farmer's harvest by tasting the peanuts to make an estimate of the oil they contained and then set a price. Premji improved that system by asking farmers to send in samples that the company could dry and weigh to calculate the oil content. He transformed what had been an art into a precise business process, and he established Wipro's practice of routinely measuring every aspect of its business.PREMJI ALSO took an uncompromising stand on ethics. In the late 1960s and early '70s corruption was rampant in India, with government officials demanding handouts, customers asking for kickbacks, and farmers bribing clerks to tamper with weighing machines. Premji decided that his company had to be held to a higher standard, which he believed would ultimately enhance its stature with customers and employees.Once the cooking oil business was back on track, Premji broadened his horizons. He had no grand vision of what Wipro could become, but he saw opportunities and didn't want to miss out on them. He diversified, first into soaps and beauty products, then venturing even farther afield by manufacturing hydraulic components for construction equipment. The next step: computers. After the Indian government passed new rules in the late 1970s that required foreign companies to operate through Indian-owned affiliates, IBM (IBM ) pulled the plug on its operations. "When IBM left, it created a vacuum," says Premji. "So we decided to zero in on info tech. "Premji and his lieutenants knew nothing about computers, but that didn't stop them from trying to make them. They rented a 4,000-square-foot office in Bangalore, home to several of India's top technical and management colleges, and decided to build a minicomputer that would sell for far less than an IBM mainframe but do similar work. Within a year, Wipro shipped its first one. It later got into the PC business and quickly became the leading computer company in India.But the good times weren't to last. In the early 1990s, India liberalized its economy. With rules relaxed, including the local-partner requirement, the world's top tech companies flooded into the country. Wipro faced a crisis. Premji believed there was no way the outfit could beat Compaq, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), and IBM in the PC business. The big brands had huge sales and vast research and development budgets, allowing them to underprice and outengineer Wipro and the other home-grown Indian PC outfits.What Wipro did next set the stage for its emergence as a tech services powerhouse. The rescue plan was to sell engineering expertise to the world's top technology companies. "We saw that while the door was open for others to come into India, it was also open for us to go out. So we decided to become a global company," says Sridhar Mitta, Wipro's longtime chief technology officer, who later left to found e4e Inc., a rival tech services company. The first aim was designing software for telecom gear, but Wipro quickly followed with hardware and chip design. Its leaders saw they could set up similar operations and sell their services to a wide range of Western corporations -- not just technology companies but also banks, manufacturers, and retailers.Were the giants of Western capitalism ready to hire a tiny, no-name Indian outfit to perform important brainwork? Not very quickly. So Premji decided Wipro needed to do something to boost its credibility. The solution: Focus on quality. In 1995, Wipro received certification from the International Organization for Standardization for manufacturing quality. Then it adopted the programming standards of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. In later years, Wipro was quick to implement Motorola Inc.'s (MOT ) Six Sigma quality program. And today it's busy applying Toyota Motor Corp.'s (TM ) lean manufacturing techniques to its software programming and business-process outsourcing operations worldwide.Practically every move Wipro made turned into an uphill battle. Subroto Bagchi, the longtime Wipro executive who is now chief operating officer at MindTree Consulting, remembers what it was like to gain a foothold in Silicon Valley. He moved his wife and two daughters to a two-bedroom apartment in Cupertino and set up an office in the dining room. He bought a PC and a fax machine at Price Club using a friend's credit card and immediately began churning out proposals as quickly as his fingers could type. His children would be watching cartoons in the next room, but when they heard the phone ring, they knew to put the TV volume on mute so Dad could pick up the telephone receiver and say: "Wipro Technologies."As the company's first salespeople spread out across the U.S. in search of customers, they were like nomads. They got leads from technical people -- often other Indians -- who they knew in companies such as Intel, Seagate, and Sun Microsystems (SUNW ). Arriving in a new city, they'd camp out in a cheap motel and thumb through the telephone book looking for potential customers. "Nobody had heard of us," says Sudip Banerjee, president of Wipro's Enterprise Solutions business unit. "We'd make dozens of phone calls. Nobody would return them."Wipro's big breakthrough came with General Electric Co. (GE ) In 1990 the two companies had set up a joint venture, Wipro GE Medical Systems, to make and sell medical equipment in India. So GE was familiar with Wipro when it decided to shift some of its software development to the country. The entire Wipro management team, including Premji, pitched in to woo the Americans. "It was a large piece of business and gave us credibility," says Banerjee.Twice in a little more than a decade, Wipro spotted fundamental shifts in the business environment and then scrambled to create new businesses. Today the company is doubling down on its bet on engineering services, which already represent 35% of its $2.4 billion in revenues. In the past 12 months it has spent $100 million to purchase three engineering design firms in the U.S. and Europe. "We're able to evaluate opportunities at the right time and put together an act to make a commercial success of it," says Premji.One of Premji's most important accomplishments has been creating a sinewy management culture that thrives even under intense competitive pressure. He established two core principles that are instrumental in building the character of his leadership team. The first is rare among India's family-controlled companies: The chairman is not king. While Premji owns a controlling stake in Wipro, he shares authority and responsibility with his subordinates. The second key principle: Premji believes in a zero-politics culture. At Wipro, backstabbing, playing favorites, and kissing up to the boss -- tactics that sap much of American executives' energy -- simply don't work. Open and honest disagreements are not only tolerated, but also required -- of everyone.THE CHAIRMAN'S STYLE ISN'T just to encourage his lieutenants to debate one another: Premji insists that they debate him as well -- or even take him to task for his decisions or actions. "The man takes frontal criticism, and it's celebrated. You can openly disagree with him," says Bagchi, the former Wipro executive who launched Wipro's U.S. business from his dining room table. He recalls a time in the early 1990s when he was in charge of the company's quality initiatives and Premji had asked him to also handle office-building projects. When Bagchi was slow to get something done, Premji called him at home one afternoon as he was having tea with his mother. Bagchi resented Premji piling more on his plate. "'What do I have to do with real estate?' I told him: 'Don't expect me to do your clerical jobs for you!' I actually screamed at him over the phone," Bagchi recalls. Bagchi's mother was appalled at the outburst and, after the call ended, lectured him about showing proper respect to the boss.The maternal tongue-lashing made Bagchi worry that he might have crossed the line. Would Premji be furious with him? Yet back in the office a couple of hours later, he ran into Premji in the hallway, and the chairman didn't even mention the episode. By Premji's rules of conduct, Bagchi's reaction had been just fine. Bagchi was supposed to let him know exactly what he felt. "He would tell us: 'My job is to push you. When you reach your limit you need to push back,"' recalls Bagchi.For Premji, openness is more than a personal style. It's a strategy. "I find that people excel when they're provided a fair, free, and apolitical environment," he says. "At Wipro we strive to provide an open culture that encourages diversity of opinions. An organizational ability to encourage and harness diversity of thought is a significant competitive advantage."Playing the game of business according to Premji's rules has worked well for Wipro. It's expanding revenues consistently at some 30% annually, while the overall tech services industry is expanding at about 5% per year. Meanwhile, operating margins in its tech business top 20% -- more than twice the level of large Western services outfits.Think of Wipro's success as a wake-up call for Americans who are complacent about the future of their companies or their job security. With its work ethic and intense drive to win, Wipro is a reminder of the America of 100 years ago. "Are we hungry enough?" asks Nicholas M. Donofrio, executive vice-president for innovation and technology at IBM. Donofrio's father was an Italian immigrant who worked three jobs to support his family in the gritty factory town of Beacon, N.Y. Now, Donofrio questions whether Americans still possess that kind of drive. "If we amble along and take our time, the Indians and Chinese will close the gap and perhaps even surpass us. You can see the passion in their eyes. They're people on a mission."The challenge is the same for American individuals and companies: If they mean to succeed in a world of borderless commerce, they will learn to be as relentlessly self-improving as Premji and Wipro.