India's Tech King

At 4:30 a.m., a light switches on in Azim H. Premji's spacious stone bungalow in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. The 57-year-old chairman of software-services provider Wipro Ltd. (WIT ) is awake, fueling up on coffee and bombarding company managers on four continents with e-mails about everything from geopolitics to contract details. At 7, Premji walks the 250 meters to his office on Wipro's five-hectare campus. There, he has breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast with visiting customers or government officials. That's followed by meetings where he focuses on the minutiae of the business -- the cost of airline tickets or whether frequent-traveling Wipro salespeople should have permanent cubicles. Before the sun is overhead at noon, Premji has already worked seven hours, with another seven to go. Frequently, Premji ends his day on a commercial flight -- there is no corporate jet -- to Bombay, San Francisco, London -- anywhere his sales team needs a boost.

An exhausting routine, followed day after day, year after year. And Premji doesn't need to do a bit of it. He owns 84% of Wipro, giving him a net worth of $5.3 billion. That makes him the richest person in India -- and one of the wealthiest on the planet. But he's not even thinking of buying a jet, or even a new car. True, Wipro, with its blue-chip roster of customers such as Microsoft (MSFT ), Sony (SNE ), and Nokia (NOK ), is one of India's top companies. The fastidiously frugal chairman, however, figures those accounts must be zealously guarded, every minute. With competition heating up as never before, top managers have to "get off their asses and get into the field," says Premji.