Don’t chase success, let success follow you. Do your job with sincerity and passion, success will follow you, said R. Chandrasekaran, Group CEO, Technology and Operations, Cognizant Technology Solutions.
Delivering the valedictory address at the 12th All India Management Students Convention on the theme Winning Strategies, Chandrasekaran urged students not to always be obsessed with success. “Just focus on your company, and not on how much money you are going to make,”, he said.
Quoting Apple Founder Steve Jobs, he said, “If you keep an eye on the profits, you are going to skimp on the product. If you focus on making really good products, then profits will follow.”
Chandrasekaran said, “We need lot more winners. We just don’t need ordinary performers. While ordinary performance is important, we need many among us to be winners to take a company and the whole nation to the next level. This is very important,” he said.
There is no prescribed textbook to be a winner. You have to be very bold, take risk and be innovative. Find something that others are not doing and add value to customers, peers and stakeholders.
For instance, Google is pursuing things like a driverless car or wearable computing, which a few years ago somebody would have thought impossible.
Every company is thinking Google as a competitor. That is the level of success Google has seen in its evolution, he said.
“In Chennai, I am perplexed at the success of Zoho Corporation,” he said. Many in the IT industry have heard the success of Salesforce.com offering Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions for companies globally. But Sridhar Vembu, an entrepreneur from Chennai who founded Zoho, had a different idea.
He developed CRM solution for small and medium size companies and offered it as a service.
Vembu had a unique business model and target segment with an innovative solution.
“The success has been because somebody had the guts to try a different market segment and come with a unique solution,” he said.
Chandrasekaran advised students to follow some of the traits that made people successful.
“Follow you heart, do your job with sincerity, preserve your values and ethics, you will make winning a habit,” he said