Wipro Vice Chairman T K Kurien to quit

T K Kurien, the Vice Chairman of Wipro, has decided to quit after nearly two decades of handling different roles in the company. Kurien will be leaving ahead of the end of his current tenure, which ends in March and the announcement is expected to be made at the company's third-quarter results.

Kurien was to continue also as member of the board until March 31. It is still not clear what his plans are, after he leaves the company. He has invested in a few startups in the artificial intelligence (AI) space and in mobile payments startup ToneTag.

Everyone around him called him a hardworker but despite the hard work and despite being the hard taskmaster that everybody in Wipro said he was, Kurien struggled to make the company grow. Revenue growth was way short of those of its peers. He could never achieve his desire to demonstrate at least four successive quarters of 4%-4.5% sequential growth.

"Previous Wipro CEOs had come up through the system, whereas TK had come up in other companies and was viewed as an outsider. One of the big challenges which TK inherited was that the other industry leaders had already made the changes to focus on industry, and TK was constantly playing catch up, having lost the first mover advantage that TCS and Cognizant gained. His focus on moving quickly, and impatience to catch up created a backlash in the Wipro culture which he had to constantly deal with," Peter-Bendor Samuel, CEO of outsourcing research firm Everest Group, told ET.

A chartered account by training, Kurien's penchant for numbers, cleaning up balance sheets, and bringing the GE-approach to operational efficiency was evident during his time with Wipro. This and his aggressiveness would have been what made chairman Azim Premji pick Kurien for the CEO's job but for all that, Wipro under Kurien failed to catch up with its peers. Even its closest rival, Infosys, surged ahead under CEO Vishal Sikka