It is no news that Narayana Murthy’s views about work culture in general are very strict. While some would call it “exploitative”, others would call it “regressive” or “toxic”. The man who built Infosys strongly believes that working from home is no good, that employees should not engage in ‘moonlighting’ or that a 3-day work-week will not help the country to move forward.
In a conversation with former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai, Narayana Murthy further stressed that youngsters should work 70 hours a week. He argued that India’s productivity is one of the lowest in the world and that in order to match up to China, we need to put in more hours of work, reported Moneycontrol.
“India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world. Unless we improve our work productivity, unless we reduce corruption in the government at some level, because we have been reading I don’t know the truth of it, unless we reduce the delays in our bureaucracy in taking this decision, we will not be able to compete with those countries that have made tremendous progress,” he said.
He went on to add, “So therefore, my request is that our youngsters must say, ‘This is my country. I’d like to work 70 hours a week.’”
Apparently, this is what Japan and Germany did after the Second World War for a couple of years.
Do you agree with Narayana Murthy?