Aishwarya Dubey tries to figure out what the question means. "I am not sure I understand it but I will answer it anyway," he says. Dubey is a recent hire from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. "At IITs we have people who really think they have achieved it all after they graduate and that they are all going to be millionaires. Soon they figure out that isn't the way it will happen and that you have to work. So then you have to find work that is really interesting and challenging. That's exactly what you get here," says Dubey.

"Here" is the Texas Instruments (India) Development Centre. Dubey works in the wireless business of Texas Instruments (India). It is the fastest growing business for Texas Instruments (TI) worldwide and people like Dubey are working on the leading edge of technology. "It is a big responsibility and a motivating factor to know that if we fail, it would really set the company back," says Dubey, summing up his reply to BW's question on what makes his company a great place to work. The thing that turns on the motorheads is that they really don't do peripheral work. This fact comes out quite clearly in the patent data. Over the last 16 years, TI's India centre has filed 225 patents out of India. That's more than two-and-a-half times the next company on the list, IBM, which has 85 patents filed from India in 10 years.

Interesting and challenging work doesn't materialise out of thin air. "The centre has constantly increased its skills and kept itself ready for the parent to ship more high quality work to India," says M. Chandramouli, head of the wireless business and also Dubey's boss. One potent tool that it uses to do this tells people that it doesn't matter even if they want to remain technical gurus all their lives. They would still be rewarded on par with people who move into management. The tool is the 'technical ladder'. It is a parallel career path to the management ladder. The entire TI development centre is still basking in the glory of Mahesh Mehendale, director (system-on-chip design), who was elected a TI Fellow, one of the highest steps on the technical ladder. A TI Fellow is like being a Don at Oxford. Only 0.6% of the TI population are fellows. These are the chaps who are the 'brains' - people who help TI meet its most difficult technical challenges. Becoming a fellow is difficult. "Your peers and seniors evaluate your work to see if you have been innovative in your thinking right through," says Mehendale. Staying there is even harder. "You are re-assessed every year. If you fall behind you can lose your fellowship as the total number cannot be more than 1% at any given time," says Mehendale.

This deep commitment to developing such high level of expertise has made the centre navigate three distinct phases of growing up. At the start it was a centre like any other, developing small pieces of the final chip that its parent in the US would develop. "That was till 1991," says Biswadeep Mitra, managing director, TI (India). "Then we did Ankoor. It was a full-scale digital signal microprocessor (a DSP) and sort of established India as a force to reckon with," says Mitra. (A DSP chip is a chip that is very good at doing calculation intensive tasks. It is to TI what a soap is to Hindustan Lever - its bread-and-butter.) Ankoor didn't come to India. The team actually requested the main office the US to let it develop the DSP even though another development centre was already working on it. The India centre was able to do it faster, cheaper, and its design was accepted. And the third phase has been on for the last two years when the centre has developed top-of-the-line chips for high performance audio, video, broadband and mobile handset markets. All these chips are system-on-chips (what were distinct chips are now put on one small piece of silicon). As of now, there is hardly any business globally that TI's India centre does not contribute to. "This gives employees enormous mobility and growth opportunities sitting right here in India. From DSP software to silicon level design and from DSP processors to latest wireless technologies - an employee can choose to work in any of these areas," says V. Kartikeyan, director (HR).

CEOSPEAK Biswadeep Mitra How did you create such an innovative firm? We said right in the beginning that we would not ship people and that we would give world class work opportunity to people sitting in India. We - the 16 of us who started (TI) - also decided we would do high-end product development. How do you keep employees thinking differently? You've got to be open to learning new stuff. We insist that if it ain't broke, break it! The engineers are expected to keep their passport in the pocket and travel to understand customer needs. People who innovate... are rewarded hugely. For low performers there is a... separation plan. How do you get young IIT engineers, who have multiple options today? Apart from the great work we do here, we also keep our word. A year ago when we went to the campuses we made 150 offers. Then the downturn happened. There was pressure from the US office to prune this list but we... convinced them. We hired all 150. It meant some cost implications, but we looked at the long term. We are not a knee-jerk company. How do make sure your 900-plus employees all share the same belief? By walking around.... If I need something quickly, I can directly access a junior employee. His boss will not mind.... So information flows freely....

It may appear that technical skills are all what you need for a company in such a complex business. Actually, customer understanding is more critical. Talk to a person working in an MNC's India development centre and the crib will be "We don't get to interact with the customers". Not at TI. Here you are in the firing line very soon. "We allow our engineers to connect directly to our customers. These guys do three to six conference calls a week and you can see from their face when they come off the call whether their work was appreciated or not," says Chandramouli. Sometimes it isn't.

With all their smarts the guys still make mistakes. "That's when we step in and tell them that it really isn't end of the world. A lot of us have been here right since 1985. We know what it feels like. At the same time we make it clear. The chap who made the design has to fix it. This is well internalised," says Chandramouli. It is not unusual to find people putting in 16-17 hour workdays when a project is approaching a deadline. Because customers of TI are companies like Nokia which operate in extremely volatile markets (a new model every 16 month, variants every six months), if you work at TI you have to make sure these companies meet their deadlines.

Once the deadlines are met, it is relaxation time. People take off for a week to 10 days to recharge themselves. "We don't even ask," says Chandramouli. They can even play badminton, swim, play basketball or strum guitars, if that's what they want. The employees have formed a cooperative council, called Texins, that takes care of all such things. Employees themselves run the council. "We provide a budget for the council. They debate among themselves and figure out how to spend it," says Mitra.

So meritocracy, global quality work and facilities for a great quality of life are what make employees fierce TI loyalists. And there's one more factor. As Aishwarya Dubey's says: "I am unafraid to sleep in the workplace." Once he finishes his work.