Sunday Posts

The Indian economy is at a crossroad. Its internal markets have sustained the economy through the global recession of 2008/9, but as it looks beyond the pandemic, that would clearly not be enough. Its own version of 'Great Leap Forward', hastily imposed neo-liberal reforms of the economic life, has stunted the domestic demand and ravaged the banking sector - and it must find new sources of growth. The government's hopes lie in the exports - the aspiration that India could be the new China, workshop of the world. Labelled somewhat misleadingly as Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India), a new set of initiatives has been rolled out in search of this illusive export success. In this quest, India's key strength - perhaps its only one - is its people: A large working-age population ready to work for relatively cheap wage! How we view India's demographic opportunity has undergone a subtle shift - its young population was earlier seen as an exciting market and only now, as...

Education will be transformed by technology, but not until the technologists have fully appreciated the Culture question. This is EdTech's blind spot. Culture is 'soft' - it is hard to capture in a spreadsheet - and yet Education is a 'cultural activity', deeply embedded in the society that surrounds the learner and constantly informed by its history. Tech, on the other hand, at least in its modern, global, incarnation, wants to be culture agnostic: Its quest for scale is intricately linked to its ability to operate culture blind. The EdTech businesses fail to account for culture for more reasons than just its inherent claim for scale. They also assume technology is used in an uniform way, despite all evidence on the contrary. The users almost always adapt technology to their own purpose, rather than changing their habits to suit what the technologists originally intended, but such ideas are not welcome in technology circles addicted to the idea of 'ha...

Wrong question, perhaps! Some of the times I asked the question, I got awkward pauses in return. This is a dinosaur question, so dated, reactions indicated: Going global means being on the Cloud, countries are totally irrelevant in this conversation. As I wrote in an earlier post, Global or Multinational , I think this is one of the big mistakes companies make. Their assumption of flat world is totally off the mark. One has to touch the ground as long as they involve people from different nations as customers. This idea of 'global market', borrowed mostly from the playbook of hedge funds who seem to move money from one place to another seamlessly, does not apply to most businesses dealing with customers. One has to be 'national', multi-national if you like, because markets are national. And, that claim of being on the cloud is based on complete innocence of how marketing and product development work in real life. Once I get past the mistaken assumption of ...

Maggi Noodles was a great success story in many ways. When it arrived in 1983, the Indian concept of snacks did not necessarily include Noodles. Its timing was great - just as television and cricket were conquering Indian homes and middle classes were looking beyond government jobs - and its communication was perfect, the 2-minute food! It combined global aspiration, motherly love and emancipation of women into one, the perfect combination for India. The traditional Indian snacks, all those Puri-Subji and Dosas, gave way - none of those could be made within a few minutes and without great skill and preparation. Maggi even tasted modern, always warm and alien to any taste one has grown up with. This was, in a way, one of the first stirrings of culinary globalisation! As it falls apart in the wake of the nationwide ban on Maggi this month, this makes a cautionary tale. One regional authority first discovered unusual amounts of Lead and MSG in Maggi, and then the panic spread nation...

I come up a lot against the issue of culture, given that I mostly do what one would call International Business, and do so in Education, an area which is so culturally specific that most people banish both International and Business from vocabulary when dealing with it. So, in my day-to-day interactions, I both come across the Not-invented-here syndrome, that anything from a different culture should be rejected out of hand, and its inverted form, that culture does not matter. Indeed, I have a view, and I shall claim to be qualified to have one in this case. This, not just because I migrated mid-life and settled in another country, but because I escaped the entrapment of my native culture by deliberately trying to see it from outside. This, I believe, worked better for me than just reading about culture, which I had to do for professional reasons, and indeed, doing so made me think about the limitations of engaging with culture as a technical thing, a system of acting in a certain wa...

Having worked in International Setting most of career, and having lived in four different countries and engaging in business in at least half a dozen others, one of most attractive conversation topic for me is - what makes an organisation effective globally? In my work, I come across educational institutions which want to recruit students from all over the world, or businesses which want to trade, and indeed do, globally. I hear conference speeches and business presentations proclaiming global ambitions. I meet people dreaming of scale, globally. Yet, at the same time, I see the track record of global engagement to be one full of failures and disappointments, over-expectations and under-achievements.  I believe the essential problem of constructing a really global organisation comes from the essential tension between trust versus difference. Any organisation wants to impose an uniform culture - and indeed, doing so is essential. Only by promoting an uniform culture can an...

The mantra of the new Prime Minister of India is 'Make in India'. His economic policy hinges on getting Indian manufacturing going, to get to the double-digit growth figures that he would need to deliver his promise of 'development'. And, indeed, this is what it should be: India will need to create 10 million non-farm jobs every year at least through the next decade, to absorb the new people entering the workforce productively. Service industries, for all their glamour, do not employ as many people as manufacturing does (at least in theory) and therefore, Mr Modi must steal some of China's thunder and try to make India world's next manufacturing base. In many ways, this new economic policy is modelled on China. The focus is on investment in infrastructure, reform of labour laws (which means deregulation and reduction of power of the organised labour), making land acquisitions easier for industrial development etc., all the things that China has done with g...

The Global Innovation Index, produced by INSEAD and others, is built around seven factors - Institutions, Human capital and research, Infrastructure, Market sophistication, Business sophistication, Knowledge and technology outputs and Creative outputs - and measures an economy's ability to innovate. India has continually slipped in the rankings, from 62nd in 2011 to 64th in 2012, to 66th in 2013 and now at 76th in 2014. Indeed, it is useful to contrast India with China, acknowledging the coveted hyphenation that many Indians desire: China has remained on the 29th position during this time, losing and recovering the lost ground during the in-between years (though China includes the territory of Hong Kong, which is treated separately and is a top 10 territory in these rankings). Not that rankings matter much, but they are useful reminders of where one is going. India's decline tells a story in the context of the rest of the world. In the past rankings, India was ranked 2nd...

Vivek Wadhwa is pessimistic about the future of Indian IT because of its inability to change (See here ). He makes the point that the CEOs see that the ground realities are changing but are unwilling to do anything about it, with the daily imperative of closing Outsourcing orders dominating their agenda. In short, the sector has become a prisoner of its own success and there is a lack of strategic thinking. While I share Professor Wadhwa's sense of foreboding (that Indian IT industry isn't changing with time) and his prognosis (the lack of strategic culture), I would think that it is more of a case of an industry that can't change itself rather than industry leaders not wanting to change. Indeed, this makes things worse: Global IT services is an extremely competitive industry, and one thing that works for Indian companies here is the ability to scale, to line up thousands of workers which companies from other competitive countries can't easily do (with the excepti...

India seems indecipherable. It is an exciting market, just that it never materialises. I have used one expression - borrowed somewhat from James Kynge's book on China - that while India looks like a huge multiplier effect for businesses from outside, the moment you set foot in the country, the endless game of divisions begins. Also, India is like El Dorado - everyone wants to go there, but no one knows how. After repeated failed efforts, excitements in the world markets, the sentiments are now cooling: The India play is treated with caution, often avoided in favour of more exciting regions, like Brazil, or Indonesia, and now even Burma or Mongolia. However, it is hard to ignore India. Apart from the fact that it has so many of the new consumers, it is a potential breeding ground for competition in other markets. Leave India to local companies for far too long and a competitor will certainly emerge, who will better the game in prized markets that you wanted to keep your eggs in...

I am writing a course on International Management and that allows me to research and reflect on who a global manager is (and, indeed, how to prepare one). I think many people embark on global assignments with little preparation, which happened to me in the past, and only learn as they go along. Reflecting on my own experience, I think companies can get a lot more out of their staff if they prepare them ahead for such assignments: The problem indeed remains that this is still a fuzzy field and it is hard to agree what one needs to prepare on. The most usual preparation is indeed to talk to someone who had a similar posting before. So, if you are being posted to China, you talk to an old China hand, soaking up as much as you can. This is useful, but if this is the only thing you do, which often is the case, such preparation can be counter-productive. Usually, this means that the presumptions of that mentor gets passed on to you, and unless you are lucky to have a mentor who learnt a...

Joshua Cooper Ramo somewhat spills the beans in his latest article in Fortune ( read here ) and says a thing that everyone knew but was afraid of saying: That, to quote Ramo, "globalisation has a reverse gear". Citing arguments that would be familiar to those who followed Pankaj Ghemawat's work ( see his TED presentation here ), Ramo makes the case for the "inside economy", one made of local consumers and producers, that is fast filling the gap left by the receding global trade. The point is - we know this already. India, as I have argued before, rode through the tides of global recession looking inward: While its outwardly-orientated industries, IT and Aviation for example, took a beating, the ones serving domestic demand, manufacturing, retail and financial services delivered steady growth and jobs. China turned its economy slowly from an export-driven one to one aligned to local consumption - the slowing of Chinese growth, in my view, is an indicator of ...

Europe is the new sick man. It is crisis after crisis, Greece followed by Ireland followed by Portugal followed by Italy followed by Spain followed by Cyprus followed by, possibly, France, into abyss. The Euro-sceptics feel vindicated: Suddenly the issue of a referendum whether to stay in Europe is back on the agenda in Britain. The European dream, not just the Euro (which Britain was never part of anyway), seems to be over. However, only a few years ago, Europe seemed like a model, in environmental activism, foreign affairs and in balancing the strife of a capitalist society with the need to protect and nurture the vulnerable. It is a few years of clueless leadership, combined with global economic crisis, that stole Europe's leadership credentials. However, I shall argue that it is too early to write off the European model, and indeed, if this implodes, we are back into some serious trouble. One has to remember that all the gloom and doom about Europe comes from the insta...

I say, on my Linkedin profile, that I wish to work to build a great organization ready for Globalization 3.0. Indeed, there is some justification in the labeling - I saw the resolution (seemingly) of Capitalism/ Socialism debate and the globalization of technologies (Internet) as the first wave and the globalization of skills and people, mainly through cheap air travel and cheap phone calls, as the Second. Indeed, there are other people who would think that this is quite a narrow generalization, globalization was indeed a process that started with Italian merchants; and there are others who would say that globalization was always there - in fact, it was nations which are a later invention. This is a truly many-sided debate. The most high-pitched battles are indeed fought between the 'World is Flat' people, who believe that the global corporations are making national boundaries irrelevant, and the 'Shock Doctrine' people, who believe in exactly the same thing, but think...

Higher Education in Britain is currently in the middle of what can be called - after Karl Poliyani - a Great Transformation, where a historically developed, social (and not socialist necessarily) education system being replaced by a system of open markets. I am indeed enjoying being an involved observer, not just as I study the phenomena, but also at work - as I explore, progressively, building a market-led college to offer courses and collaborate with universities in transition. A conscious exposition of this work, I concluded, should be at the core of my 100 day agenda, and therefore, I have started writing about it. In Higher Education, this is an 'All Change' time. The universities are in serious disarray, and it indeed seems that the government is also indecisive about what they are going to do. The hidden Tory agenda has finally come up in the open and is now head to head with the Lib-Dem muddle, and suddenly, the university administrators across Britain are left in an u...

The Economist [April 15 th , European Print Edition] produced a Special Report titled ' The New Masters of Management ', on the subject of innovation and new management paradigm coming out of emerging economies. Most of the staff is well known. We have read about this in the writings of Nirmalya Kumar , Tarun Khanna and C K Prahalad . The emerging economy companies approach M&A, as Dr Kumar has pointed out, with not so much cost savings in mind as they want to acquire brand, know-how and market access. This makes M&As like the acquisition of Corus by Tatas , of Axon by HCL , of Volvo by Geely , fundamentally different from the other M&A activities carried out by Western companies mainly on account of synergy and cost savings [of Cadbury by Kraft, for example]. Dr Prahalad has written extensively about the Bottom of the Pyramid approach, where companies innovate to bring products and services to consumers who live in rural areas and have very low income in dol...