Yoga for peak performance

When I first landed in U.S. a few years ago, one word that I heard everywhere was stress management. Why would anybody want to manage their stress? I can understand if you want to manage your money, your business, your family, your property. But why would anybody want to manage their stress? It is because you have established a whole culture of believing that stress is a part of your life.

Stress is not a part of your life. It is not the nature of work that you are doing which is causing the stress,it is just that you have no control over your systems.You don’t know how to function smoothly within yourself. That is why you are stressful. Have you seen, in many situations, one person would be very stressed out and another person would go through it effortlessly? So stress is not coming because of the situation.Stress is coming because of your inability to manage your inner situation. If your mind, your body and your energies could take instructions from you, and behave the way you want them to behave, would you make yourself stressful, no matter what is happening around you?

You are making yourself stressful because you have not kept control over your fundamental faculties within you. If you could experiment, if you keep your palms facing down and breathe deeply you will see breath will happen one way. If you turn them around, face them up and breathe you will notice your breath will happen in a different way. If your palms are facing down the maximum expansion and contraction will be in your diaphragm. If you turn them over it will be higher up, in the chest. So just turning your palm over, the very way you breathe is changing. This is not just about your breath, the very way your energies function in the body is changing.

Don’t live by accident

Your body, your mind, your emotion,and your energies - these are the vehicles through which you are traveling through your life. Without any understanding about it, without any control about it, without any subjective experience about it you are trying to live your life; it is an accidental existence.

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How Wipro applies its thought to innovation

Can you give me glimpses of Wipro’s innovation journey through the years?

It’s important to know that we started as a vegetable oil company. Wipro’s name stands for Western India Vegetable Products. Right from here, Wipro has been continuously innovating. That’s how Wipro was able to apply its capabilities to transform itself from a vegetable oil to a consumer care company. It shows that our innovation journey started even before we got into IT.

In the 1980s, when IBM moved out of India, Wipro saw an opportunity. Very few know that Wipro started with its own operating system called W-Dos and it created its own PCs, servers, emailing systems and PCs to suit Indian conditions. We came into IT as a ‘Product Company for India.’ We were a strong R&D group.

Did that seeding take us somewhere? The unique strength gained during that time was very useful. It took us into the new phase of application development and into
a new phase of innovation.

1983 onwards we got into networking solutions, IPs around that and into the area of software development and software services. That is when global expansion started. We were selling out IPs to product companies. With internet boom we innovated further, created an organization called 0-1 – a purely internet business. It was looking at providing internet channel to procurement related businesses. We adapted to create a new business here, something like e-choupal now. That strength of this IP is now built into our consulting business.

Has the R& D focus given you the edge?

The whole R&D focus, since we started, has made us the world’s largest third party R & D services provider today. This strength led us to provide IPs by product equipment vendors worldwide to get speed to the market.

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World’s first zero carbon city

It’s indeed an irony of sorts – an oil-rich state setting up the world’s first zero-carbon city.Abu Dhabi recently broke ground on Masdar City, the world’s first zero-carbon,zero-waste, car-free city.Masdar also announced aUS $22 billion development budget for the city.

The global milestone event was marked by the laying of a virtual corner stone by General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan,Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander
of the UAE Armed Forces, and a visually stunning production depicting life in the city.

An essential driver for the development of the city is carbon finance. Carbon emissions reduced by Masdar City will be monetized under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism.

In addition to full-time residents, Masdar City will seek to attract and encourage collaboration between experts in sustainable transportation, waste management,water and waste water conservation; green construction, buildings and industrial materials, recycling, biodiversity;, climate change, renewable energy and green financial institutions. Masdar will maximize the benefits of sustainable technologies, such as photovoltaic cells and concentrated solar power, through an integrated planning and design approach.

By implementing these technologies, Masdar City will save the equivalent of more than US $2 Billion in oil over the next 25 years, based on today’s energy prices. The city will also create more than 70,000 jobs and will add more than two percent to Abu Dhabi’s annual GDP.

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The CEO’s CEO

Academicians are not normally credited with great managerial skills. But there are a few exceptions and Dr. M Rammohan Rao is one of them.

What Dr. Rao did as Former Directorat IIM Bangalore till a few years ago, didnot get the press it deserved although the institute has been neck-and-neck with IIM Ahmedabad for the number one slot.Dr. Rao’s transformation of the Indian School of Business, popularly known as ISB, has taken the world by surprise.The Financial Times’ ranked ISB 20th among the world’s best business schools in January 2008 even ahead of the prestigious Kellogg School of Management.

What Dr. Rao did during his three year tenure since 2004 shows his leadership skills and more importantly, focusing on what B-Schools should really be doing– solid research. Within two months of joining, Dr. Rao started the Centre of Analytical Finance (CAF) and no prizes for guessing what his specialization is.In a recent message, Dr. Rao said:“While the world accepts the ISB’s status,we silently reinforce our commitment of being the cornerstone for research-oriented learning. Combine that with a strong focus on becoming one of the world’s top ranked business schools, and we’ve defined our role and our challenge for the years ahead.”


Dr. Rao could not have achieved this acclaim without insisting on a good number of permanent faculty, since ISB’s initial model was largely dependent on visiting faculty from world’s top institutions such as Wharton, Kellogg and London Business School. Even today, ISB gets over 100 visiting faculty. Yet, the 25 permanent faculty today seems a great stabilizing factor.

His bigger achievement perhaps is making ISB financially sound. Before Dr. Rao joined, there were doubts about ISB’s viability, since it was designed as a world class institute with whopping investment in infrastructure and near five-star boarding facilities. Reports suggest that with the phenomenal growth in intake of students

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