Naryan Murthy Talk

Today the chief mentor of the company, Mr. Murthi, came to talk to the trainees. He is one of the original seven founders of the company and was the company's first CEO for about 20 years. He's pretty well known in the business world obviously for Infosys. I was hoping I'd get to meet him at least once during my stay here and I got to today.

He first addressed all the trainees at the multiplex. He gave a talk on the corporate values at Infosys and how important they are. WAY better than the talk on the corporate values we had during the beginning of training. When he speaks you can tell it's from the heart. Also, infosys is his brain child, so when he talks about the company there's a much greater feeling of care and obligation for the company.

After the talk with all the trainees, he wanted to meet just the US batch. He wanted to talk to us about our role in the company and making sure we're safe and comfortable during our stay here among other things. He told us Infosys plans to really step up the recruits from the US starting next year and wanted to talk to us to get some feedback as the program for hiring US trainees started just a year ago.

One of the guys in our class asked him how we should respond when someone asks us why we work for an outsourcing company, since a lot of people in the states might see us as traitors of some sorts because we're working for a company that might have been responsible for the loss of American jobs through outsourcing. He told us that basically when a company outsources to infosys they usually get a better competitive edge in whatever their domain of business is. So once those companies that outsource grow as a result of being the best competitors, they usually hire more people as a result of the growth so the jobs are back in America anyways. There were a lot of other responses he had for outsourcing and they all made sense, he's very passionate about the work Infosys does.

He talked about a lot of other things with us, I took a video of the whole talk he had with just the US batch, but it's too big to put online. Sadly I couldn't get his autograph like my mom had asked me to but I got a lot of great pictures haha.

One cool thing he did was get rid of this stupid rule that HR placed on the US batch. We had to take a bus that left at regular intervals from the campus into the city. It was for our safety so we wouldn't take rickshaws and get mugged or something like that. It wasn't such a great idea though, there would be a bus that could seat 50 people and only two people would be using it. Also, we'd have to plan our timings around when the bus left campus. One of the guys in our batch, Jeff, brought it to Mr. Murthy's attention. After that Mr. Murthy talked to the HR guy that was present and said to get rid of that rule because it's a waste of resources. Instead we now have taxis we can book from the travel desk that will take us into town and stay with us until we're ready to go back. It was pretty funny, Mr. Murthy was like "yeah, just take care of that by this evening, call up the taxi companies we know and get it done" and the HR guy just said "yes sir" and it was pretty much done. It's the fastest I've ever seen anything get done here! It was good though, at least he's level headed, and he was nice about it too so kudos for that.