Can Thierry Delaporte deliver at Wipro?

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Editor's note: Late last week, Thierry Delaporte was named CEO of Wipro Ltd.  The company had spent four months searching, entrusting Egon Zehnder, the famed Swiss headhunting firm, to help them find the successor to outgoing chief Abidali Neemuchwala.   Egon—which had in 2017 helped Wipro’s larger rival Infosys Ltd bring in its current CEO, Salil—submitted a long list of candidates to the Wipro board by mid-February, which was whittled down to three. The three executives then had a meeting with the eight-member board, including executive chairman Rishad Premji, and another meeting with founder-chairman Azim Premji over a weekend in March at Wipro’s headquarters in Sarjapur, Bengaluru. On 24 March, the Indian government enforced a national lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus. One immediate fallout was that the board could not meet any of the executives again, and so the board continued its discussions with the candidates over video calls. “Nobody then had anticipated that the lockdown would continue for this long,” said a Wipro executive who was part of the search process, asking not to be named. “This did not …