Elephant and ant

A LinkedIn post on Azim Premji by former Wipro executive Premchand Kurup, now founder of Paramount Computer Systems and a "catalyst and transformer" has gone viral. Premji recently completed 50 years at Wipro. Kurup recalled Premji's business acumen, when the latter questioned him about terminating the services of a reseller of Wipro's personal computers called Dynamic Marketing. Kurup had then replied with an elephant-and-ant story. "It is my belief that the relationship between a vendor and a reseller is like an elephant trying to dance with an ant," Kurup says. "The elephant will always want to dance in front and will sometimes step on your toes. A pragmatic appreciation of this is fundamental to a good vendor-reseller relationship. Dynamic Marketing wanted to dance in front of us and I would never allow that." In hindsight, Kurup acknowledged how wrong he was as Dynamic went on to grow into a "several hundred crores" revenue company. "He had both customer insight and market foresight , while I had none at that time. Yet he allowed me to go forward with a wrong decision," Kurup wrote in the post.