In this interview, Indian business magnate Azim Premji shares his personal "top 10 rules" for success. He begins by urging people to find a personal, self‑satisfying purpose and to stay constant in pursuing excellence, while not being overly concerned with others’ opinions. Premji stresses that creative failure is inevitable; good ideas require many bad ones, and the fastest way to progress is to "fail fast" and learn from those failures. He illustrates the importance of focusing on strengths rather than fixing weaknesses with the story of a rabbit that excels at hopping but is forced to learn swimming, ultimately losing its natural talent. Persistence is highlighted as a critical factor—success often arrives just before one gives up. Premji advocates listening deeply to customers, noting that they can reveal unspoken needs that become powerful ideas. He shares a anecdote about an 8‑year‑old girl who values a ready‑to‑cook breakfast more because she prepared it herself, underscoring the satisfaction of earned rewards over easy gains. Openly bringing disagreements to the table is presented as essential for healthy decision‑making, even if consensus isn’t reached. He describes ethics, integrity, leadership, and innovation as practices that must be repeatedly reinforced, citing Tata Sons and Wipro as exemplars. Finally, Premji offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: start small, have a clear and passionate focus, be prepared for major sacrifices (especially financial), stay adaptable to market demand, and maintain relentless persistence.
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And don't get too worried about what other people think of you all the time. We must allow for creative failure when it comes to generating ideas. It is inevitable. That is because it is only on our strengths that can give us the energy to correct our weaknesses. I think the simplest thing in dealing with disagreements is get them onto the table. Businesses are good at getting better but poor at getting different.
He's an Indian business tycoon, investor, and philanthropist. He's informally known as the czar of the Indian IT industry. He has an estimated net worth of $16.5 billion. He's Azim Premji, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Number 1 is my personal favorite, and I'm curious to figure out which one you guys like the best.
You're asking is what should really motivate you? Yeah, you know, I think it's a very personal question of what should really motivate you. I think the longest sustaining thing which should really motivate you Is that something in which you're trying to quest for something to satisfy yourself and feel good about yourself? And decide what that is and be constant to that purpose and try to work for excellence in that area. And don't get too worried about what other people think of you all the time. We must allow for creative failure when it comes to generating ideas. It is inevitable. No one likes failure, particularly business leaders, but unfortunately all evidence suggests that it is impossible to generate few good ideas without a lot of bad ideas. And bad ideas are expensive, but they have to be tolerated. As the physics Nobel Prize winner Feynman said, "I try to fail as fast as I can." That is the best way to move forward on a new idea. Fail as fast as you can. Failure should be forgiven and forgotten as long as the lessons are remembered and recycled. You must begin life and you must approach life with your strengths. It's absolutely essential. Everyone in schooling very often keeps on pushing one to focus on what is wrong with us. Or tells us what is wrong with us. And there is a very interesting imaginary story of a rabbit, and you must hear this one. The rabbit was enrolled in a rabbit school, and like all rabbits, it could hop very well but could not swim. At the end of the year, the rabbit got high marks in hopping but failed in swimming. The parents were concerned, the relations were concerned, the friends were concerned, the elder friends particularly. They said, forget about hopping, you are anyway good at it, you don't have to keep practicing it, concentrate on your swimming. And they sent the rabbit for tuitions and coaching in swimming. And guess what happened? The rabbit forgot how to hop. As for swimming, have you ever seen a rabbit swim? While it is important for us to know what we are not good at, We must cherish what is good in us. It's very fundamental to life. That is because it is only on our strengths that can give us the energy to correct our weaknesses. To make changes in any organization, you have to have a measure of very high persistency. You've got to go on and on and on and on. We don't have that persistency. Very often you fall off just when success is around the corner. The customer is a great source for ideas. The customer can actually participate in his getting better satisfaction, provided we can listen to the customer and what he or she has to say. And I think this is the most important thing in terms of customer visits, in terms of customer research, is how do you get the customer to say things or indicate things or give nuances of things which are really unsaid. And very often the customer himself or herself does not know about it. But that is the source of truly very, very interesting ideas. My friend was sharing with me a story of his 8-year-old niece. She would always complain about the quality of the breakfast and about the quality of the food she would get in the house. She came from a family where there was a cook, and they tried just about everything to please her. Finally, my friend took the child to a supermarket and bought her one of these ready-to-cook breakfasts. The child had to cut the packet and pour water in the dish. After that, it took 2 minutes in the microwave to be ready. The child found the food to be absolutely delicious. The difference was that she had cooked it with her own, with her own hands. She had put work and effort into it. I have found that nothing gives as much satisfaction as earning our rewards. A rupee earned is much more valuable than 5 rupees found. I think the simplest thing in dealing with disagreements is get them onto the table. I think nothing, nothing breeds more discomfort and frustration and anger with people if you bottle them up. That's very fundamental. And you don't always win when you get them onto the table, but at least you come to certain points of understanding which makes for people to move forward. And you know, we— to run large leadership positions successfully, you can debate issues, you can get issues onto a table, but what you would expect is that when a decision is made, people fall in line going forward. And if they have strong conviction against the decision made, it's best that they get out of the system. And don't frustrate themselves and frustrate other members of their colleagues with their frustration. As Gary Hamel puts it, businesses are good at getting better but poor at getting different. It is very difficult for successful organizations to develop disruptive innovations that would threaten the basis of their success. Often they are put out of business when some similar company or smaller company develops a radically new technology which employees working in a booming telecom company in the 1990s would have suggested that free voice-over-internet telephony would be something that they could develop. It took a startup, Skype, to make a success of this radical idea. Whenever you talk about ethics and integrity in the Indian context, the two companies that come to mind, one is the Tata Sons and the other is Wipro. What is so special about these two companies that has been imbibed in these organizations? How is it done? It's very simple. It's done by practice. There's no other way you imbibe things in an organization. It is practice. Integrity is practice. Leadership is practice. Innovation is practice. It's all practice. You've got to figure out what you want your company to be and what you consider as non-compromisable, not negotiable, and then set those out and keep them as simple as possible and keep them as as few as possible, and practice them, and practice them every day, every hour, every minute, and have zero exception to them. What would be my advice to students who want to start an organization like Wipro?
Yes, sir.
You know, the reality is you'll have to start small, like we started small. And you must have a very clear understanding of why you want to do it and what focus you want to build. and the focus you want to build in terms of starting an organization is something which must be deeply passionate inside you because you're going to go through ups and downs. In many cases, you're going to fail. Certainly, in parts of your journey, you're going to have major failures. So unless you have a very clear commitment to the focus which you build in terms of what you want to build successfully and have the flexibility to change that focus because you've not judged the market properly, Markets don't run after you, you know, you have to run after what the market demand is or the market demand you can create. But you have to be persistent and you have to be prepared to make sacrifices because you will have to make sacrifices in the early stages and some very major sacrifices and most of them will be financial sacrifices because you won't get cash flows the way you hope to get cash flows unless you have a brilliant genius idea. Then you'll get cash flows.
Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because PRNV asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the top 10 rules had the biggest impact on you and why. Leave in the comments and I will join in discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and I'll see you soon.
