Meet Vineet Agrawal, Wipro’s dreamcatcher, and the man who always delivered

1997, Mumbai

“Can I give it to Premji?”

It was an innocuous question lobbed by Dileep Ranjekar. But for Vineet Agrawal, it landed like a warning bell.

The letter had been written days earlier, in a moment of accumulated frustration. Now it sat with the HR head, ready to be passed on to Azim Premji. “We should hand it over to him,” Ranjekar said, with a confidence that only sharpened Agrawal’s unease.

Agrawal knew exactly why the letter was dangerous.

First, the timing. The effort to unify Wipro’s disparate businesses into a single corporate entity had stalled. Nearly a year of meetings had yielded little movement. Frustration had crept in and then spilled over.

Second, the content. The four-page letter was candid, unvarnished, and almost accusatory. Agrawal, who joined Wipro as a management trainee in 1985, had turned his anguish into words. “It is a waste of time,” he wrote bluntly. The task of bringing the organisation together, he argued, should have been led by Premji himself. This is not how the project should be run. He ended with a line that still makes him pause: Please give this project to somebody else and don’t waste my time.

Third, the fallout.

“I’ve written so many things against him,” Agrawal wondered, the thought tightening his chest. “If Mr Premji reads this, I’m definitely going to be fired,” he muttered.

The fear was real. Any other promoter, Agrawal knew, would have done exactly that.

As Ranjekar waited for Agrawal’s nod, an unwelcome realisation settled in with chilling clarity. This letter could end Agrawal’s career. For the first time since joining Wipro, a disturbing thought surfaced. “I should start looking for another job,” he mumbled. That evening, he hinted at the crisis at home. “There is a problem,” he told his wife.

But before we get to how Agrawal dealt with it, let’s zoom out to another crisis of a similar—if not bigger—magnitude.

A decade later, Agrawal found himself staring at another abyss. “I had invested ₹1,200 crore,” Agrawal pondered. “If this fails, this might be my last acquisition,” he dreaded.

Dream, nightmare and ‘what if’

The fear was not unfounded. By then, Agrawal had already pulled off three successful buyouts: Chandrika, Glucovita, and North-West. But this was different. Bigger. Riskier.

In July 2007, Wipro Consumer Care acquired Singapore-based FMCG company Unza for $296 million in an all-cash deal—the largest takeover in the company’s history, and one of the boldest in Indian FMCG. Unza was the third-biggest personal care and toiletries player in Malaysia and Indonesia. On paper, the move was transformative.

In reality, trouble surfaced almost immediately.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” recalls Agrawal. There were high chances of Unza employees quitting. Reason? Wide cultural gaps.

First, the geographies were distant. Wipro Consumer was mostly confined to India. Unza, in contrast, had a much wider global footprint: Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, South China, and Hong Kong.

Second, the categories were unfamiliar. While Wipro Consumer was selling soaps, Unza was dealing with body washes, roll-ons, deodorants, and mass perfumes.

Third, there was almost nil conviction around the acquisition. “It was not aspirational to be acquired by Indians,” says Agrawal. “They (employees) had no understanding of India,” he recalls. All of these were red flags.

Agrawal was on a sticky wicket. The organisation he had just bought seemed, unsettlingly, ready to unravel.

But what haunted him most was not the money. It was the trust. If Unza failed, it wouldn’t just be a ₹1,200-crore mistake. It would be the collapse of a bet Premji had backed without flinching.

An innocuous observation by Agrawal’s wife—how did Mr Premji give you the ₹1,200 crore to go and sign the deal—compounded his plight. “I don't know,” he told her. “If I were the promoter, I might not have had the guts to give it to an employee, and back him to the hilt,” he added.

The thought tormented Agrawal, who had now spent over two decades with Wipro. Quite unthinkable for a man who joined Wipro with a two-year horizon! “My father wanted me to join a government job,” recounts Agrawal, adding that he opted for Wipro because it was a private company. “In private jobs, you have flexibility. You can leave and join somewhere else. That’s why I joined Wipro,” he says.

So, he joined Wipro, and over two decades later, the Unza episode was unfolding. In 2007, it seemed that Agrawal’s long stint at Wipro had finally run out of gas. If Unza unravelled—as the odds increasingly suggested—it would almost certainly cost him his job.

We will return to how Unza unfolded. But first, let’s jump to the present.

January 2026. After 40 long years, the CEO of Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting and managing director of Wipro Enterprises is hanging up his boots  by the end of this month.

Four decades, unthinkable. “Who would have thought,” he says. “I joined in 1985, and here I am…40 years,” he smiles. “It has been a wonderful dream,” he reckons.

Indeed, it has been a wonderful dream—and run—for Agrawal. He grew Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting business from ₹300 crore in FY03 to ₹10,625 crore in FY25. Then he made Santoor the biggest soap brand in India. Add one more claim to fame: he stitched together 15 acquisitions, the most by any FMCG company in India.

Clearly, a disciplined acquisition engine has powered Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting’s transformation into a global consumer business. Over 22 years, revenues have grown more than 35 times, reaching ₹10,625 crore in FY25. The company has executed 15 acquisitions valued at over $1 billion across domestic and international markets. The payoff from years of global M&As is evident: Over half the company’s revenues—51%—now come from the international markets.

But M&A wasn’t the only lever at work. Alongside it, Agrawal also diversified the domestic portfolio, and entered foods through the acquisitions of Brahmins and Nirapara.

Agrawal, by all means, has lived his dream.

His crowning glory, however, doesn’t lie in stitching a string of glorious dreams. Agrawal was never the loudest dreamer in the room. “I was never the first one to dream,” he admits. He did not arrive with sweeping visions or dramatic declarations. In fact, many of the ideas that shaped the organisation were not born in his head.

Putting two and two together

His gift lay elsewhere. He listened. He observed. And when a credible dream passed by—someone else’s ambition, imagination or just serendipity—he had the judgement to recognise it and the courage to make it real. “I just put two and two together. That’s it,” he says with humility.

Meet the dreamcatcher. Every organisation has dreamers; few have those who catch and make them hold. For four decades at Wipro, Agrawal did exactly that: quietly, persistently, and without spectacle. Eschewing the spotlight, he mastered the craft of unglamorous work of leadership by catching ideas mid-air and forcing them into reality.

Here’s the first dream he chose to hold on to.

It was 2005. During a strategy offsite, Agrawal split his team into four groups and posed a deceptively simple question: What would be the newspaper headline you’d like to read a few years from now?

The answers ranged from cautious to fanciful. Then came one headline—just three words—that made Agrawal look up: Santoor beats Lux.

“Like… really?” he shot back, half amused, half incredulous. The scepticism was understandable. At the time, Santoor was barely the eighth player in the market, a ₹150-crore brand at best. Lux, on the other hand, was light years ahead and an undisputed leader.

The room broke into laughter. “Kabhi yeh ho sakta hai kya (Could this ever happen)?” everybody asked. Maybe, someone offered diplomatically, Santoor could one day crack the Top 3. But beating Lux? That wasn’t ambition. That was fantasy.

Agrawal didn’t laugh it off, though.

In 2017, Santoor pipped Lux. “It took us 13 years,” he says matter-of-factly. “But I wasn’t the one who dreamed it.” He pauses. “I just caught that idea and pushed the organisation to walk towards it.” Agrawal is careful not to claim authorship of the dream itself. He only takes credit for the discipline it took to chase it down.

It wouldn’t be the only ‘Santoor beats Lux’ moment he would catch. 

The next such moment arrived not as a vision, but as a message.

It was July 2006. A banker reached out to Agrawal with a simple question: Are you interested? The opportunity, he explained, was Unza.

Agrawal wasn’t. 

Unza was bigger than Wipro Consumer. Its markets were overseas. Its scale intimidating. Back home, the domestic business was firing on all cylinders. There was no urgency to look beyond India. No reason to fish in unfamiliar waters. The idea was acknowledged, and quietly parked.

Months later, during another strategy meet, the conversation drifted to growth beyond borders. Someone suggested exploring overseas markets. Maybe Dubai. Maybe the Middle East.

That’s when it clicked. Agrawal remembers the moment distinctly. The parked Unza file came rushing back. What had earlier felt unnecessary now felt obvious. Unza wasn’t an overreach anymore. Agrawal reopened the conversation. Revisited the numbers. Re-examined the risks.

A year later, Unza happened. In 2007, it was a ₹650-crore business. By 2026, it had scaled to nearly ₹4,000 crore.

“Now, if you ask me—did I dream of buying Unza ? No,” Agrawal says, almost dismissively. The idea, he insists, came from the team. “All I did,” he adds with a faint smile, “was remember a conversation we had parked”.

Switch it on and catch dreams

Agrawal shares another quiet act of dream-catching. 

It was 2006 again. A colleague floated an idea: Would you like to buy a switches business?
Agrawal didn’t hesitate. “Why would an FMCG company buy a switches business?” he shot back. “I don’t even know what switches are used in my own house.” Switches, he argued, were commodities. Low romance. Little differentiation. “Let’s not waste our time,” he said, and parked the idea. 

Weeks later, the parked thought resurfaced, almost accidentally.

Over lunch one afternoon, Agrawal struck up a casual conversation with a young colleague. He learnt the executive was part of Wipro’s lighting division. “So, what’s keeping you busy?” Agrawal asked.

The answer was unremarkable until it wasn’t. “I’ve been asked to explore what else we can do in lighting,” the junior said, before adding, almost in passing, “We should get into switches.”

This time, Agrawal didn’t brush it aside. The reasons were laid out. The adjacencies made sense. The old dismissal suddenly felt premature. Months later, Wipro acquired North-West Switches, a Delhi-based company. Two decades on, Wipro’s 2006 acquisition has paid off handsomely. The lighting and switches business now tops ₹1,100 crore.

“It (the acquisition) was a brilliant idea,” Agrawal says. “All I did was put two and two together.” He pauses. “I didn’t dream it. Somebody else did.” Like a quiet captain, he passes the credit back to the team.

The captain, though, is quick to puncture the myth of perfection. “These are the dreams I caught,” Agrawal says with a shrug. “But there must be many more that I missed.” He laughs, lightly, as if to move on.

It’s a fair admission. And yet, the record suggests something else. As a leader, Agrawal consistently punched above his weight. He waves that off too. The confidence, he insists, didn’t come from within. It came from watching others around him take audacious bets and win. “When you see people dreaming and achieving,” he says, “you draw courage from that.” Then he puts it simply: “Agar woh kar sakta hai, toh hum kyun nahi kar sakte (If they can do it, why can’t we).”

Across four decades, his career has been shaped by such moments of borrowed belief. Agrawal has never subscribed to the idea that organisations are built by brilliance alone. “Companies aren’t made by the brightest people,” he says, almost provocatively. They are built, he argues, by those willing to raise their hand, take risks, commit fully, and stay passionate through uncertainty. “Often,” he adds, “the brightest don’t make the best people managers.”

Which raises the obvious question. Doesn’t he see himself as an aberration? Four decades in one company feels almost heretical today. To a Gen Z workforce raised on optionality and rapid job switches, the idea of staying put for years—let alone decades—sounds jarring, even outdated.

Agrawal doesn’t romanticise it. Nor does he dress it up as loyalty. “It would be wrong to say I stayed for four decades out of loyalty,” he says flatly. “I stayed because I enjoyed the work.” Loyalty, he argues, is a poor yardstick to judge careers. “It’s a defensive concept,” he says. “If someone is staying only out of loyalty, then I don’t know what they’re really doing.”

For Agrawal, longevity was never a virtue by itself. Engagement was. As long as the work remained challenging and the stakes kept changing, staying on felt less like settling, and more like moving forward without changing address.

He may have stayed at one address for four decades, but Agrawal quietly added many more.

By the time he stepped away, Wipro Consumer had stitched together 15 acquisitions—domestic and overseas. In a country littered with deal-making misadventures, where ambitious buyouts often ended in hurried exits or distressed sales, the number stands out. The obvious question follows: how did he pull it off?

Agrawal shrugs off the mystique. Making acquisitions work, he insists, isn’t rocket science. It’s about discipline, and a few rules that are easy to say, harder to practise.

Learn before you lead

The first is humility of intent. “You are acquiring because you couldn’t create it yourself,” he says. Forget that, and the deal is already in trouble. “See the strength of the other side. Don’t walk in with an acquirer’s mindset. It’s dangerous.” His advice is blunt: learn before you lead.

The second rule is non-negotiable: people. “You can’t run a business if the management team on the other side is weak,” he says. One of Unza’s biggest assets, he recalls, wasn’t a brand or a balance sheet. It was its leadership. “We retained them.” Too many acquirers, he argues, think they’re buying brands. They’re not. “Acquisitions are about people. People matter more than brands.”

Then comes restraint. “Don’t overpay, and don’t over-project,” Agrawal says. A deal, he believes, doesn’t give the licence to a fantasy. Unrealistic targets and inflated expectations can suffocate a business long before markets do.

But the most important lesson, he adds, isn’t taught in any management school. It’s behavioural. “Go with humility,” he says. “Respect the other guy.” For Agrawal, that wasn’t a slogan. It was a survival strategy.

If there is a survival strategy for a generation forever negotiating work-life balance, Agrawal doesn’t overcomplicate it. “Enjoy what you’re doing,” he says. “If you don’t enjoy the work, then stress and imbalance are inevitable.” For him, balance was never something to be managed. It was a by-product of engagement.

And after 40 years at Wipro, is he anxious about life beyond it?

Agrawal doesn’t sound worried. “I can manage,” he says lightly. “My wife is the one who’s worried.” He smiles. There is no rush to fill the silence. He is speaking to private equity funds, staying in touch with academic institutions. Teaching, guest lectures are possibilities but not plans. “Nothing is decided yet,” he says. For now, his attention is fixed on the handover.

That, too, gives him comfort. He isn’t just stepping away. He is leaving behind a team he trusts. “I’m sure he’ll do very well,” Agrawal says of his successor, without qualifiers or caveats.

But back in 1997, there was a caveat. A big—and unnerving—one. What if Ranjekar handed the letter to Premji? What if Premji fired Agrawal?

The moment of reckoning came in a review meeting. Premji pulled out the letter and went through it, point by point. Agrawal laid out his concerns. Premji listened. Then he drew the line. “This is your job,” he said, evenly. “You can’t walk away from it,” he added. Of the hundred issues that Agrawal might have raised, most, Premji insisted, were his to resolve. That clarity changed everything.

“Premji understood the real problem, made the necessary changes, and the project was back on track,” recounts Agrawal. Six to eight months later, it was launched. And Agrawal survived in his job.

But if the crisis of 1997 was averted, a far bigger one awaited him a decade later. Remember Unza? Once again, Agrawal’s job was on the line.

This time, there was no Premji stepping in to douse the fire. The heavy lifting was Agrawal’s. He crafted a multi-pronged strategy anchored in a simple but powerful idea: first build trust, then showcase India, then Wipro, and only then talk about Wipro Consumer Care.

Here’s how Agrawal saved Unza, and himself.

The first move was familiarity, not finance. Agrawal organised a carefully curated visit for Unza’s leadership team. A small group was flown to India. They toured factories and facilities, saw the market up close, went shopping, and eventually met Premji. There was no business agenda, Agrawal recalls. No reviews. No targets. Nothing.

The second decision was just as deliberate: don’t Indianise the organisation. Even today, he says, there are just three Indians in Malaysia, two each in Indonesia and Vietnam, none in China or Taiwan, one in Hong Kong, and two in Singapore.

The third principle was continuity, not disruption. “I told them nothing would change,” Agrawal says. Their email identities remained intact—no Wipro addresses. Their privileges stayed untouched. We travelled economy class, he recalls, but they were allowed to fly business.

Finally, Agrawal gave them skin in the game. Select leaders were offered Wipro stock options, aligning incentives and signalling long-term commitment.

“We did whatever it took to show that we valued and cared for them,” he says. No wonder, Unza is now around ₹4,000 crore.

Close, but not close enough

That raises the inevitable question: after more than four decades at Wipro, how many marks would Agrawal give himself out of 10?

The answer comes after a pause. Seven or eight. Not 10. Not even nine. Though success hasn’t made him indulgent with himself, a flicker of regret crosses his face.

He rewinds to 2022. Santoor was a ₹2,400-crore brand then. He knew his retirement was four years away. Quietly, he set himself one last personal marker. The dreamcatcher wanted to see Santoor touch ₹3,000 crore before he hung up his boots.

It didn’t happen.

“My only regret,” he says, almost apologetically, “is that Santoor is still a ₹2,850-crore brand.”

For a man who spent four decades catching other people’s dreams and turning them into institutions, the one dream that slipped through his fingers wasn’t spectacular or disruptive. It was a number.

And perhaps that’s the most honest ending of all. The dreamcatcher leaves not chasing applause but carrying the weight of a dream that came close, but not close enough.