Bangalore Tiger: How Indian Tech Upstart Wipro is Rewriting the Rules of Global Competition (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: global tech business, product engineering solutions, global technology business, Six Sigma, United States, Centers of Excellence (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

One of the most significant effects of the Internet has been the outsourcing of technology jobs. Nowhere has the effect been as great as in India, where the minds of millions of highly skilled workers have been made available to Western businesses. Although plenty of Indian "tech tigers" have experienced explosive growth, the number-three player stands out from the pack. Business Week senior writer Hamm, who has focused on the emergence of India and China as global economic powers, chose to profile Wipro to tell the story of India's rising technology industry. Founder Azim Premji built the company from a failing vegetable oil company into a high-tech engineering lab serving clients such as Aviva and Texas Instruments. Premji (who has been called the Bill Gates of India) pioneered the "Wipro Way," which, much like the famed HP Way, emphasizes ethical values, process excellence, and a central focus on customer relations. On track to become the Wal-Mart of IT services, Wipro is already a fierce global competitor and will be a company to keep an eye on. David Siegfried
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Product Description

Of all the tech tigers in India, Wipro is one of a handful that stands out from the pack. In the past five years, it has become one of the most accomplished tech services providers in the world, delivering business value through a combination of process excellence, quality frameworks, and service delivery innovation. Totally dedicated to customer satisfaction, Wipro is known to go above and beyond to make customers happy. It’s a move that’s paid off handsomely, with a 24 percent operating profit in its tech services division—more than twice the industry average.

Bangalore Tiger is the story of Wipro’s transformation and its impact on the tech services industry and the rules of global competition. BusinessWeek senior writer Steve Hamm takes you inside the halls of this transnational phenomenon to reveal the true secrets of Wipro’s superior business: its people, principles, and core competencies.

From Wipro’s triumphs to its missteps, Hamm mines a treasure of business lessons, explaining how and, more important, why it is necessary to:

• Expand quickly without stumbling
• Follow the new rules for outsourcers
• Innovate every day—or else
• Be obsessive about customers
• Motivate employees the Wipro way
• Plan three years ahead to prepare for rapid growth

Hamm also gives you a rare glimpse into the mind of Wipro’s charismatic chairman and thought leader, Azim Premji. Guiding Wipro’s growth every step of the way, Premji was one of the first business leaders in India to decree that his company would not pay bribes. You’ll see how his adoption of world-class business processes helped Wipro thrive—and how Wipro is helping to fulfill his dream of a better educated, more prosperous India. Removing the shroud of secrecy around Indian management principles, Hamm provides a real-world blueprint for operating a successful transnational organization, as viewed through the eye of the Bangalore Tiger.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071474781
• ISBN-13: 978-0071474788
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #348,850 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great wake-up call to American business leaders... it's all about process innovation, October 15, 2006

By	A Reader from Chicago (Windy City) - See all my reviews

As the book description says, Hamm gives you a rare glimpse into the mind of Wipro's charismatic chairman and thought leader, Azim Premji. Premji's adoption of world-class business processes helped Wipro thrive. Indeed, the Wipro Way will soon be a baseline for management, as was The Toyota Way in years past.

It's all about "Extreme Competition," as described in Business Process Management guru, Peter Fingar's book by that title. Here's what Premji wrote on the back cover of "Extreme Competition, "In an interconnected world, the services sector has seen varied levels innovation, often inspired by historical breakthroughs in manufacturing. At Wipro we are pioneering the use of Lean manufacturing techniques in the digitization of business processes. This innovation is our key to surviving and thriving in the world of Extreme Competition. --Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Ltd., Chennai, India

Taken together, "Bangalor Tiger" and "Extreme Competition" will arm you with the knowledge you need to get ready for total global competition. And you'd better be ready, for globalization is the greatest reorganization of the business world since the Industrial Revolution.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than Offshoring, October 13, 2006

By	Wil Marshman "Computer Pioneer" (Sunnyvale, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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While the book focuses on WIPRO (an Indian high tech company), it really is an insightful description of a major global economic shift. While the book focuses on a particular Indian company, it carries significant messages for North American companies - not only what we need to learn to be competitive, but also how we need to adjust to take advantage of the things that "WIPRO" brings to our businesses. I discovered that these Indian companies provide much more than low-cost labor for things like programming or phone services. They are building a whole new infrastructure to engage in the full gamut of development and innovation in high tech.
Thoroughly readable and comprehensive, Bangalore Tiger is a must read for those of us who care about staying competitive as this economic shift evolves.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Indian outsourcers are now where the Japanese automotive companues were in 1969 - huge changes are coming, February 18, 2007

By	Steven Forth (Cambridge MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Steve Hamm has given us a useful book about an important company. The emergence of the big Indian outsourcers is one of the most promising developments of the past decade and is every bit as important as the rise of Toyota, Honda and the rest of the Japanese automotive industry. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL, NIIT (a smaller player, but important in learning and as an enabler) and of course Wipro are redefining the world of software services, and in all likelihood we are just at the beginning of the transformation that this will catalyze.

In Bangalore Tiger the story of the rise of Wipro from a small Mumbai food-oil company to a multi-billion dollar information services and business process outsourcer is well told. The discipline and vision of its management, led by Azim Premji, comes across clearly, as does the culture of efficiency, innovation, and customer service that he and his team have created. Extremely important for those of us who collaborate and compete with the Indian tigers is the way they have adopted and then transformed key management tools. The Indian tigers have shown true leadership in implementing CMM (the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model), making rigorous use of techniques such as UML (something Hamm misses in his book), ISO standards and even Six Sigma. Wipro's application of Toyota's lean production system to software and business services is an important development and one worthy of much more attention. The Deming is to Toyota as SEI CMM is to Wipro analogy works for me. And then to bring this full circle by applying the Toyota way to software is a lovely development.

So why only four stars? Part of this is a response to Hamm's irritating comments on US companies, which often seem to be poorly informed. In fact, people in Western services business work every bit as hard as those at Wipro, at least the ones I work with, and are as open and aggressive about applying new methodologies. The book also suffers from the occasional technical errors (I suppose his editors should have caught these). In order to get a fuller view of the rise of the Indian IT and business process outsourcers one must read much more widely on the overall structure of Indian business (the role of Indian generic drug manufacturers for example), understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Indian educational system, and put this in context of the emerging competitive partnership with China.

But read the book. I know Wipro reasonably well, have visited Indian companies in India, and try to keep current in the area, and I learned a great deal.