{"id":750,"date":"2012-01-04T13:43:54","date_gmt":"2012-01-04T19:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/?p=750"},"modified":"2025-03-02T12:10:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T18:10:38","slug":"more-from-bangalore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/2012\/01\/04\/more-from-bangalore\/","title":{"rendered":"More from Bangalore"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Professional Development in International Business, hosted in Bangalore and Bombay by Florida International University, formally began \"\"<\/a>this morning as the faculty participants\u2014from around the world (most from the US, but there is a management professor from Budapest here, and two faculty from the University of the Virgin Islands)\u2014arrived yesterday.\u00a0\u00a0I knew two of them from previous FDIB trips, so it wasn\u2019t like everyone in Bangalore was a foreigner to me!<\/p>\n

A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal<\/em> ran a series on India under the heading \u201cFlawed Miracle.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The theme it explored\u2014the contrast between the highly developed, highly literate, and wealthy Indians, and the persistence of poverty and illiteracy– became graphically clear in our two site visits today.<\/p>\n

The first was with the VP for Human Resources at IBM India, a very articulate Ph.D. in Economics (I think, continuing the British connection I mentioned yesterday, from a school in the UK).\u00a0\u00a0He was quite learned, and confessed to us that he would probably have enjoyed teaching had the pay even remotely resembled the remuneration in the business world.\u00a0\u00a0He talked about his own business background, which began before 1990, the period of the license raj, when the Indian government, bereft of most resources, including its ability to feed the then 600 million Indians, regulated most of the economy\u00a0\u00a0to husband its development, employing a socialism in the economy to complement its democracy in the hope as well of providing a \u201cthird way\u201d between communism and capitalism that almost outlasted the Cold War that gave it birth\u2014not to mention its usefulness!<\/p>\n

At IBM India he manages to hire, train, and retain a world-class engineering group despite the challenges of the Indian market.\u00a0\u00a0He described the high attrition because of a shortage of educated folks (not college graduates, but college graduates with marketable skills; he estimates only about 25% of the engineers who graduated college know enough to use those skills, complaining that too many know only theory).\u00a0\u00a0The challenges he outlined\u2014attrition is 15% in manufacturing, 25% in IT, and 50% in back room operations.\u00a0\u00a0In hiring, he says the younger generation is interested in 4 things\u2014compensation (for a few hundred rupees, he said, people will change jobs\u2014though the Economic Times<\/em> warned yesterday that Business School graduates were being warned to downsize their expectations, especially at second-tier institutions), career growth and opportunities, and \u201ccare\u201d–the social dimension, which he says is more important in India than in most other countries because of the close family ties.\u00a0\u00a0Parenthetically, he mentioned that his daughter called her mom\u2014from LA, to get recipe information as she was cooking!<\/p>\n

Two elements he thought distinctive to India were that employees are frequently \u201cno shows\u201d\u2014that is, they don\u2019t show up to begin work despite a commitment to join a company, and sometimes just \u201cabscond,\u201d leave without notice, sometimes taking computers as a souvenir.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He said the big companies are now requiring letters from a previous employer (though in critically short areas, they poach talent from one another).\u00a0\u00a0In a company like IBM, which values uniformity in procedures, he says that he will emphasize career growth and opportunity and compensation at the expense of \u201ccare\u201d (no group cricket matches, for example).\u00a0\u00a0We\u2019re going to Infosys tomorrow and he suggested we\u2019d see quite a different approach, but Infosys is an information company that is locally-based, not a western multinational.<\/p>\n

He spoke as well about Indian labor in general, and in particular the 2% of the population that has benefited from the miracle\u2014especially the IT sector.<\/p>\n

Our second business visit highlighted that \u201cother\u201d India, a nongovernment operation that was providing the social services government can\u2019t entirely afford to do.\u00a0\u00a0It was an organization set up by a Hari Krishna Hindu (yes, the Krishna movement survived the 1960s in San Francisco) who sought to do the good works that will earn him Nirvana.\u00a0\u00a0He started a business, partnering with business sponsors and government, to provide hot meals to many of India\u2019s needy school children.\u00a0\u00a0In the miracle city of Bangalore, the company feeds over 200,000 Bangalore children\u2014of the nearly 800,000 who would\u00a0\u00a0go to school or have a meal without the program (variable government programs supply the rest). The organization feeds 1.5 million students around the country and would like to have enough money to feed nearly 5 million.\u00a0\u00a0We saw the cauldrons which are big enough to make enough rice to feed 1,000\u00a0\u00a0or make 10,000 chapati, to go on the trucks that deliver lunches\u2026.one can only wonder what about the families of the children getting the meals\u2026.Quite a distribution operation.<\/p>\n

Speaking about food, we were hard pressed to squeeze in a lunch, so we sandwiched (ha) in a lunch visit to McDonalds, which despite its emphasis on operational efficiency and standardization, is a great case study in globalocalization; the Oakbrook chain, which has centralized its manual into an 800 page \u201cthou shalt\u201d, faced a situation in India where the Hindu majority (60 percent or more) eats no beef, and the Muslim minority eats no pork. That being the case, I had to eat at a McDonalds to see what the company\u00a0\u00a0would serve.\u00a0\u00a0Not surprisingly, the choices were either fish or chicken\u2014with a few Indian dishes.\u00a0\u00a0I chose an interesting (to me, anyway) spicy paneer wrap, not available in the U.S., with a Thumbs Up cola (a local brand Coke purchased).\u00a0\u00a0The wrap was tasty, consisting of chicken, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, and a crunchy batter\u2014nothing moved, so I think it was ok\u2014every ingredient was wholesome, which makes me wonder what the nutritional information was\u2026. I atoned for my food gaffe by our welcome visit to a north Indian restaurant that featured naan\u2014the bread– and tandoor dishes.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned many times in my blog, food is indeed cultural, and I really ought to have an international food fair for my international business class.\u00a0\u00a0I wonder who else would welcome chicken feet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Professional Development in International Business, hosted in Bangalore and Bombay by Florida International University, formally began this morning as the faculty participants\u2014from around the world (most from the US, but there is a management professor from Budapest here, and two faculty from the University of the Virgin Islands)\u2014arrived yesterday.\u00a0\u00a0I knew two of them from … Continue reading “More from Bangalore”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-india-2012"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8467,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions\/8467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}