'I am disappointed': Vishal Sikka's open letter to Infosys employees

Infosys’ feeble performance during the first quarter this year came as a shock. The company which fascinated investors and analysts in the past witnessed a decline in the stocks. Company’s year on year growth dropped down to 10.5-12%, from the 11.5-13.5% it gave in April.

CEO Vishal Sikka, believes execution failure in few areas of the business as the reason for the decline. He says the company is taking measures to fix those issues.

In an email to the Infosys employees, the CEO admits to be disappointed with company’s performance. Here’s the letter Vishal Sikka conveyed to the workers of the company.

Friends,

The first quarter of our new financial year was a revelation in many ways. I view the reaction by the markets and the media as a clear sign of the high standards our company is held to, the expectations we carry, even though everyone understands that a 90 day cycle means little on a long journey. I am disappointed. Disappointed that our revenue performance was not what we could have delivered, but even more so, that this overshadowed the many strong strides we made on executing our strategy.

Our revenue growth of 2.2% to $2501M, included a shortfall in consulting revenue, some declines in package implementations, and small declines in our India business and Finacle. But at the same time, we made great progress in both, renewing our core, AND in the new areas of our business, as well as in our culture of enabling this continual renew-new improvement. Our core business, delivery, under Ravi's great leadership, grew by 3.4%, improved its utilization, lowered its dependence on subcontractors, delivered ever higher benefits from automation, and derived tangible gains from both Zero Distance and Zero Bench.

Equally importantly, if not even more so, our New business grew extremely well, under Sandeep's stewardship. Gains in our newly introduced Mana, as well as in Skava, EDGE, design services and other new areas, accounted for more than a fifth of our growth! On Mohit's watch, large deal wins crossed the $800M mark in TCV, our top 5, top 10 and top 25 clients, all grew faster than the company, the number of our $100M clients grew by 3 to 17, and we added 95 new clients.

Ranga and his amazing finance team, helped improve the overall health of our company's profitability and financials. We are close to 100k Infoscions having been exposed to design-thinking, the number of ZD ideas crossed 11k, and more than 5k of these have been discussed with clients, and the first ones already monetized, thanks to a simple new process Ravi and Ranga have enabled, and ZB now has more than 20k jobs, and, in a year since its launch, this initiative got us to the point that more than 99.5% of the bench colleagues have been engaged, thus helping them deliver value and break the cycle of being on the bench not helping them get the experience they need to get off the bench. And there were many others.

Reflecting on this on my trip back home, mainly I learnt this: those areas which receive "the flame of our attention" in Jiddu Krishnamurti's words, show progress. And when running an operation as large and complex as ours, we must attend to each cog, every piece of our spectrum, to prevent a few negatives from overshadowing the many great positives. We cannot take our eyes off any important aspect of our business, each area of our large and diverse portfolio of services, products and platforms. In Q2, and beyond, we must accelerate our work in all the key strategic aspects of our work, AND we must address the weaknesses of Q1.

Our stock incentive rewards program, back after 13 years, is a great celebration of our people, our potential, and our commitment to recognize performance, and to have us participate in our collective work, and its outcomes, for Infosys is no more and no less than us, each one of us, and all of us. To help us lead from the front, Pravin and I are making some changes to the team. In Consulting, we had already announced that Rajesh Murthy would take over going forward.

Reporting to Rajesh, Michael Pesch will continue to run Europe, LATAM and APAC, and Kenneth Toombs, who recently joined Infosys, will run North America and India. Sanjay Purohit will join Pravin to work on strategic initiatives in bringing Design Thinking to our clients at scale. Ritika Suri will take over our large deals work, including SGS, from Anup Uppadhayay. Anup has decided to leave Infosys, and I would like to thank him for his tremendous loyalty and service to Infosys over the last 23 years. I have been privileged to work with Anup since I started my journey almost two years ago, and we wish him all the best.

Ritika brings a strong background in sales, particularly in driving large deals for products and platforms, and this is exactly the kind of experience we need to help transform our large client engagements with a focus in our renew-new strategy. M&A will move to Deepak Padaki, while Ritika continues to lead the Innovation Fund and our work with startups. She will continue to report to Ranga and Mohit will continue to sponsor our large deals work. In CIS, we will focus on renewing the existing business and bringing Mana to every aspect of it.

This will be led by Narry (Narsimha Rao) who will take over from Samson David. Narry has been with Infosys for 15 years, and has been running IVS for the last 1.3 years with great success and excellence. Narry and the entire delivery team under Ravi's leadership, will work closely with Navin Budhiraja on the Mana platform. I am very happy that Sudhir Jha has joined us from Google to help with product management and product marketing for Mana and for bringing a product discipline to all our work.

We thank Sam for his great work in growing the infrastructure business over the last few quarters, and his great contributions to Infosys for more than two decades, and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. Our success will be the result of our endeavor. The work of our people. The amazing individuals I meet every single day. I learnt that a million folks wanted to join the Infosys family last year! Our people focus will continue, and will be at the core of all that we do.

My belief in each one of us was redoubled last week, when I spoke to a few PMs at Bangalore. One Infoscion from Chandigarh, with her zeal and her team's proactive ZD ideas for banking, represented the vision of unleashing the innovator within each of us, more than any words can express. But it will take the very best of the very best in us. At a time when the world around us seems ever more influenced by the baser instincts and tendencies, we must bring the best of our intentions, and the best of our imagination, our knowledge and our conviction, to all that we do.

When Krishnamurti spoke of the flame of attention, he spoke of a compassionate attention, to what matters, to the long-term, purposeful, vision, to a fun, rewarding journey along the way. Over the weekend, a friend of mine wrote to me, asking me to "stay healthy, stay in the moment, focused on your actions, even as you work hard to let your achievements outshine your aspirations...".

Here's to a strong Q2, and a strong remainder of the year, one that not only exceeds the high standards we are held to, but does so purposefully, in moving forward on the long haul, one that shows what we as Infoscions are capable of. Here's to our actions, our flames of attention, outshining our aspirations and others' expectations. Let's do it!