Leaving Infosys my biggest regret: Narayana Murthy

BENGALURU: Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy in an interview to a business news channel on Monday said his biggest regret in life was leaving Infosys in 2014.

“A lot of my founder colleagues told me not to leave Infosys in 2014. Stay a few years. Generally, I find that I am a very emotional person. A lot of my decisions are based on idealism and probably I should have listened to them,” he told the channel when asked what his biggest regret was, across his personal and professional lives.

Murthy did not elaborate on the point, but he has been at the forefront of a revolt by a section of the co-founders who see the current board as having compromised the values of the company. Murthy and some of the other co-founders had objected to the steep compensation hikes granted to CEO Vishal Sikka and COO U B Pravin Rao, and the unusually high severance pay to former CFO Rajiv Bansal.

Murthy has long espoused the philosophy of compassionate capitalism, arguing for limits to the difference between top executive compensation and median salaries.

Notwithstanding his regret, when Murthy was asked by the channel whether he missed Infosys and missed being on the campus daily, he said, “No I do not miss that.”

Asked about layoffs in the industry today, he said he did not know anything specific about what’s happening in any company, but noted at length that during his tenure, HR departments would give a long rope to poorly performing employees, would provide them with all possible training opportunity to improve themselves, for six months, and would ask employees to go only if there was no improvement after that. Even then, they would be provided an additional three months to look for external opportunities.

Murthy also noted an occasion in the early 2000s when the company was facing a downturn, where the top executives of the company decided to take a salary cut to ensure that they would not have to withdraw employment offers made to some 1,500 engineering students.