What went wrong The genesis of Wipro's performance woes was with the onset of the economic recession of 2008. Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe had just taken over as joint CEOs a couple of months earlier. As the financial crisis imploded, the CEOs' priority was to focus on cost reduction and productivity improvement. So, Wipro's bench was downsized, expenses — including sales and marketing spend — were cut back, campus hiring was halted. As a result, the company was able to protect its margins from the impact of the crisis, even though employee morale dipped. But what caught the company on the wrong foot was the timing of the recovery and the change in customer behaviour. The company expected the recession to last 18-24 months but things didn't quite go according to the plan. Not only did they miss the revival in the market but also the transformation in the way customers worked.