Fortune magazine has listed Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy among ‘The 12 Greatest Entrepreneurs of our time,” with Apple’s late chief executive Steve Jobs, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Jobs topped the list, with Fortune labelling him “our generation’s quintessential entrepreneur, visionary, inspiring and brilliant.”
Gates was ranked second for turning “concepts into companies and changing the face of business.”
“The outsourcer” Murthy, who has been ranked tenth, “proved that India could compete with the world by taking on the software development work that had long been the province of the West,” the US magazine said.
The “visionary founder of Infosys has built one of the largest companies in India, helping to transform that economy and put it on the world stage”, the magazine said, citing his lesson that an organisation starting from scratch must coalesce around a team of people with an enduring value system.
“As one of six co-founders of Infosys and its chief executive for 21 years, Murthy helped spark the outsourcing revolution that has brought billions of dollars in wealth into the Indian economy and transformed his country into the world’s back office,” Fortune said.
“It is all about sacrifice today, fulfilment tomorrow,” Murthy, 65, who is now chairman-emeritus, is quoted as saying.
“It is all about sacrifice, hard work, lots of frustration, being away from your family in the hope that someday you will get adequate returns from that,” he said.
