change

Building a Sustainable
Culture at Azim Premji
Foundation
Sudheesh Venkatesh
Chief People Officer, APF
Utkal Mohanty
Communication Consultant, APF
The Azim Premji Foundation was set up in 2001 as a not-for-profit
organization with a mission to ensure that quality education is
available to all, recognizing that this is crucial to the overall progress
of the country. The Foundation started with the realization that
for good education to be available to all, it is fundamental to have
a robust Public Education System and the only way sustainable
progress in education can be ensured is through systemic change.
It also meant that working on ‘quality’ and ‘equity’ in education
had to be done in an integrated manner with an institutionalized
framework. It was going to be a long haul as no short-term solution
was likely to have a sustainable impact.
that would evolve over time. In a sense, the organization’s culture
would be the fabric that holds its people together and would be
something each one at the Foundation would live every day.
The culture of any organization is a framework that is meant to
help the organization realize its vision, which in the case of Azim
Premji Foundation is to contribute towards building a just, equitable,
humane and sustainable society. So, what were the definite tenets of
the culture that would enable this?
Since the Foundation was a philanthropic initiative of Mr. Azim
Premji and was well-endowed from the start, the principal challenge
in building the organization was people. The organization needed
people whose heart was in social change and had the appropriate
competence to deliver on various fronts. There had to be an
organizational structure in place but it could not be as rigid as in
commercial corporate organizations. The organization also had to
grow rapidly in order to make an impact at the scale it intended
to. Though there was a central division for planning and enabling
functions, the heart of the Foundation was in the State and District
Institutes, some of them in the remotest and most backward regions
of the country. This is where the Foundation members interacted
with teachers of government schools and government education
functionaries. People joining the Foundation came from diverse
social and professional backgrounds. It was imperative therefore
to have shared values that made them all move in unison with a
single-minded purpose.
Azim Premji foundation defined its culture as this set of shared
beliefs, values and practices. While trying to convey the underlying
aspects of the Foundation’s culture it was felt that while there were
certain aspects of it that are non-negotiable, there were others
17 | LPS Quarterly