BT Survey of the "Hottest Young Executives"

Business Today (June 20, 2004)
Special Issue on Hottest Young Executives

[Prateek Kumar is an XLRI Alumnus of 88PMIR batch]

PRATIK KUMAR
39/Corporate Vice President, HR, Wipro
Strength In Numbers

As unflattering as this may be to the subject of this piece, it was only when Wipro became the first company in the world to be assessed at Level 5 of the People Capability Maturity Model (it is a model developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and it really is a big deal, a very big deal) that people sat up and noticed Wipro's hr, and the man behind it, Pratik Kumar. If things had worked out differently, Kumar, who hails from a family of doctors and engineers, would have been just another successful example of the great Bihari dream, making it to the Indian Administrative Service. While majoring in economics from Delhi University he saw "people mindlessly cramming to become another nameless, faceless bureaucrat". He hated it. Gradually, he drifted to hr and ended up at XLRI, Jamshedpur for a two-year diploma. When he graduated, he had the option of choosing between working for a multinational he doesn't wish to name and HMT. He chose the latter. He spent a year there and insists he learnt all about managing scale (HMT then employed around 40,000). He spent the next two years at TVS Electronics. The job was great, but it was based in Tumkur, a three-hour commute from Bangalore. So, in 1992, when Wipro approached him, commuting-weary Kumar had no hesitation in signing on. From 200 employees (Wipro Systems) then, Kumar now oversees a workforce of 35,000 spanning 22 nationalities. ''Cross-cultural issues are something we work on continuously," says Kumar. ''Excellence is a moving target and we want to be the best.'' The man considers it ''a honour'' a run the hr function in an organisation that employs 35,000, but wants to find out whether he has it in him to do other things as well. "I would love to have cross-functional expertise," he says.