Kris Gopalkrishnan, CEO, Infosys, Delivers Power Talk to Great Lakes' Students

Kris Gopalkrishnan, CEO, Infosys, Delivers Power Talk to Great Lakes' Students

Delivering a "Power Talk" to the Management Students of Great Lakes Institute of Management on the 16th of February at the IIT Madras campus, Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO & MD of Infosys, pointed out how the Global Economic Crisis was case study for all management students to learn and emerge much stronger.

In his talk, Mr. Gopalakrishnan said, "There are tremendous opportunities in the current crisis. The unusual nature of this downturn is its global nature with major developed countries like US and Japan being affected. The recovery will start but the question is how long will it take and it may happen sometime in 2010. The window we need to look at is 2 to 4 years. As a student of management, this is an opportunity to learn and grow stronger. The students are living through a case study and are witnessing something of the scale of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the current crisis has historical significance. India is still growing at 7% and we are affected. We should look at what we need to do to prepare ourselves to come out of this downturn. The worst-case scenario is that there would be a change in the world financial order. I am optimistic in the combined efforts of the various governments and they are pumping tremendous amount of liquidity into the system."

He drew an analogy with the Grand Prix where drivers are speeding at 200 miles per hour and so accidents are bound to happen. The question is how do the drivers react and recover. He also spoke about Climate Change and what businesses and companies need to do; creating services that allow companies to figure out how to manage, how to reduce the impact on the environment. Today, we have RFIDs that make it possible to track the location of manufacture of the product. This presents an opportunity for India to be the driver of change.

He ventured, "In the telecom revolution, we moved from landline to mobiles and expanding the market. We can do something similar with climate change. When you look at democracies today, everyone has access to Internet, cell-phones. Every individual can vote every single issue. Every single issue can be discussed and debated. We can create knowledge banks like Wikipedia. It is possible to think about a full participative form of government today. It requires lots of changes at the local level in terms of increased participation. Corporations are just 100 to 150 years old and it is a recent concept. How product development happens, how employees are viewed. In Japan, the number of temporary employees has exceeded the number of permanent employees. The relationship between the corporation and the employee comes to question. P&G are able to launch products through ideas sourced from the Internet. How to do we leverage networks, collaborate and develop products and services, the concept of social networking is going to change corporations. No corporation has fully leveraged these concepts. The concept of corporation and the concept of the government will change. What worked before will not work in the future. We have started feeling that technology can change everything but we are yet to leverage the full potential. India is one of the few countries where the GDP from services is higher than the GDP from agriculture."

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* Contributed by -
Ranjit Shankar (Campus Associate),
Class of 2009,
Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.

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