India Inc cheers ET guest editors

NEW DELHI: On a day when the divestment dampener cast its shadow across government and the markets, ET’s Infosys edition stood out with its emphasis on the silver lining of the larger India story. That was the general reaction across corporate India to Friday’s The Economic Times issue, which saw the entire Infosys board merging into Team ET.


“I think lot of issues that are generally not put on Page One rightfully deserved their position on the Friday’s ET front page,” said Saroj Poddar, president, Ficci. Consumer electronics major Videocon’s Venugopal Dhoot didn’t chose to mince words: “It was simply superb.”

A very pertinent query that was voiced across India Inc was raised by Ashwin Deo, MD of Moet Hennessy India. “What sort of preparation would have these guys made for an effort like this? And from the pictures I saw, they were really enjoying it,” he said.

SH Oh, president & CEO, Samsung India, underscored the Infy suggestion of putting the positive stories upfront: “Today’s ET was an interesting exercise, with its thread of optimism and focus on positive achievement amidst all the political gloom that dominated other newspapers. Sections like ‘It’s my line’ and ‘Profiles’ strewn across different pages brought in an effect of synergy,” he said.

Dabur chairman VC Burman felt the paper gave an excellent insight into knowledge economy. “There was a welcome change in style and layout, with more depth in content and presentation,” he said. Surinder Kapoor of auto component major Sono Koyo felt that the edit page of the day put a lot of things in perspective while Gopal Srinivasan, TVS Electronics director hailed the decision to highlight positive news like Mittal’s. From Kolkata RPG Enterprises vice-chairman Sanjiv Goenka felt such experiments should be repeated more often. “Mr Murthy is great at whatever he does,” he said.

Alex Kuruvilla, former managing director, MTV Networks had this to say: “I think it was very inspiring to see how a team with a great company like Infosys works. Really liked the piece written by Narayana Murthy, where he talked about going ahead with our idea and not being concerned about the roadblocks because they will always be there.

The paper overall was well-structured in terms of having an editor for one section. It was interesting to see how they have used football as an analogy. It reflected their working style and culture in Infosys. The theme was simply great.” RD Grover, chairman and CEO, CMS Computers, “It is a good attempt by the Infosys team. Of course the paper had more editorial than advertisement for a change. I am glad that they took an unbiased view of the news, and treated even competition with fairness.”

Sudipta Sen, country head, SAS: “I have a lot of respect for Narayan Murthy who has won a lot of laurels for the country and who has put in place high standards of corporate governance in Infosys. But I think the job of a newspaper is to provide unbiased facts and reflect the truth. So news is best written by a person professionally committed to writing. In my opinion, I would like to hear Mr Murthy on topics like corporate governance rather than donning a hat of an editor.”