One of today\u2019s speakers described India as \u201cislands of excellence in a sea of chaos,\u201d and that certainly applies to our site visits on Thursday.\u00a0\u00a0We went to two IT companies, which is I think what the world pictures when you mention Bangalore, the \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d of India.<\/p>\n
The first was Infosys, one of the largest of the IT providers.\u00a0\u00a0It sits in a \u201ccampus\u201d (which is euphemism for a service \u2018factory\u2019).\u00a0 \u00a0Service factories rather resemble campuses, and in the IT environment, which I saw 2 years ago in Hangzhou, China, at Alibaba, are frequently populated with employees scarcely removed from the college campuses.\u00a0\u00a0The average age is probably 24, with a standard deviation of +1.\u00a0\u00a0The staffing of these companies keeps the average low\u2014and the costs accordingly down.\u00a0\u00a0Even hiring 38,000 people a year, Infosys loses about 20% of its staff due to attrition.\u00a0\u00a0The entry salary for a college graduate (mostly engineer and business students\u2014the quantitative skills are a requisite) is $500 a month.\u00a0\u00a0Compare that with starting salaries in the U.S., and you\u2019ll understand why much of the Business Processing operations (customer service, computer operations, systems) has gravitated to these companies.<\/p>\n
The company is a classic case in successful entrepreneurship.\u00a0 Seven young college grads pooled $250 each in the late 70s to start it up; revenues this year were over $6 billion.\u00a0\u00a0Two of the founders didn\u2019t like the business model and left before the company started; I wonder what they are doing.\u00a0\u00a0Part of the reason the company is so well known is that one of the founders, who was president of the company for a long time, was friends with Tom Friedman of the NY Times.\u00a0\u00a0In the CEO\u2019s office, he and Friedman discussed the idea of The World is Flat, a story documented in the first chapter of the book\u2014as an \u201cAha!\u201d moment.\u00a0\u00a0I can well understand it.\u00a0\u00a0The campus is modern, with 50 acres, lakes, a gym, seven restaurants (we had lunch at one, and Sodexo might well study the model), great classrooms (President Wilson might have the IWU architects visit), an island in a sea of chaos. To get to this island of excellence, we had to travel on a road system that makes most American cities look progressive (and explains some of the problems of the Indian economy\u2014especially distribution.\u00a0\u00a0Half of the crops never make it to market; they rot first).<\/p>\n
Infosys is big on training.\u00a0\u00a0One of its strengths is a \u201cfoundations\u201d course, that gives six months of training in Mysore to 10,000 recruits at a time; ironically, Infosys\u00a0 probably hires a big chunk of the graduates from the best Indian universities (and the top ones are really good; the Indian Institute of Technology–I think there are several campuses–takes the top 2,000 of the 200,000 students who sit for the college boards); as I understand it, the colleges take students based either on their scores on the one day exam\u2014with no reference to Eagle Scout, football captain (though they might make an exception for cricket)\u2014or a certain number based on a reverse discrimination.\u00a0\u00a0To combat the effects of the caste system, which rendered people permanently in a caste, the government requires hiring the former untouchables in the civil service and reserves a number of seats at the universities.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s not at all uncommon in the Asian societies to emphasize education as the ticket out of poverty and\/or caste, not unlike the United States, but someone told us that Indians spend up to 60% of their income on education.\u00a0\u00a0Where this paragraph was going, though, was to note the irony of spending 6 months on training the graduates of those good schools in the skills they need to do the job Infosys hired them to do!<\/p>\n
Like most businesses, the Indian IT industry is mature,\u00a0\u00a0which is to say, the companies have a hard time differentiating themselves since they provide pretty much the same service.\u00a0\u00a0Infosys gave us one indication of the direction it is moving\u2014consulting. One of the leaders of the consulting group gave us an example of the kind of workshop he will lead with a company (Infosys customers are mainly but not entirely Fortune 500 companies). It rather resembled the professional bureaucracy I talk about in my strategy classes\u2014the application of 21 dimensions (for the 21st Century), such as the digital customer, whose demands include self service, meeting one\u2019s own needs, and the cocreation of value.\u00a0\u00a0We discussed what the application of these 21 dimensions might mean to a university.<\/p>\n
We then drove across town to a second IT company, Mphasis, which gave a nice case study of a small business (only 1b$, but up triple from when it was purchased by EDS and then Hewlett Packard three or four years ago; HP has a majority share, but the Indian government would not let a foreign country buy 100% of an Indian company until recently). It started in California as the dream of Jerry Rao, who then moved it back to India.\u00a0\u00a0His return is symbolic of something that is happening more frequently, as the Indian government and many companies looking for talent have encouraged Non Resident Indians (NRI) to return home to work and live.<\/p>\n
We had one speaker, in charge of the mergers and acquisitions of a cash- rich company (which he said was rather typical of the IT firms), who was an NRI who told us about the Mphasis effort to put emphasis (had to say that) on developing niches (I thought it was interesting that the company, which does consulting, itself used an American consulting firm McKinsey and Company to help identify the strategy). Mphasis went geographical\u2014India, western Europe, and the United States\u2014and narrowed its industries to primarily Banking and Insurance (probably does something with State Farm, though I didn\u2019t ask). Like every business, especially service businesses, they told us, \u201cThe race for talent is becoming bloodier.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0They hired 15,000 new employees last year, some to man divisions in the United States, because for Indians, a posting in the United States is no longer as desirable as it once was; our speaker said that his son was acclimated in 2 weeks, having joined the football (i.e., soccer) and cricket teams (sponsors are paying more than superbowl rates for advertising during the match going on between India and Australia).\u00a0\u00a0In addition, the Economic Times<\/em> today featured an article reporting a decline in the issuing of work visas for Indian nationals hoping to emigrate to the United States.<\/p>\n One of the most interesting features of the talk was from the Corporate Responsibility\u00a0\u00a0Officer, who indicated that there is a real gap between the islands and the sea of chaos.\u00a0\u00a0Like Infosys, and, indeed, most companies today, Mphasis has social goals as part of its culture.\u00a0\u00a0It has chosen to put money into education, start up entrepreneurship,\u00a0 and the disadvantaged.\u00a0\u00a0For example, after serious flooding last year, the company decided to support the building of toilets in three villages that had no toilets.\u00a0\u00a0It paid for fifty of them, and that prodded the government to put up money for another hundred.<\/p>\n No more than a hundred miles from our \u201cIslands of Excellence\u201d are villages which until now, never had bathrooms.\u00a0\u00a0The officer also told us about the campaigns necessary to change behavior so that the villagers would USE the toilets, which included a pledge to do so.<\/p>\n I was reminded of my visit years ago to Korea. When I met with a Scout group, they asked me what my troop did for a good turn.\u00a0\u00a0I replied proudly that we had just assisted the Methodist women in their big fundraiser\u2014an attic sale.\u00a0\u00a0I was startled when they told me they worked at a leper colony.<\/p>\n I\u2019m thankful that we don\u2019t need to do a good turn for lepers or to build toilets for villages that never had them in the sea of chaos.<\/p>\n Have a Namaste<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of today\u2019s speakers described India as \u201cislands of excellence in a sea of chaos,\u201d and that certainly applies to our site visits on Thursday.\u00a0\u00a0We went to two IT companies, which is I think what the world pictures when you mention Bangalore, the \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d of India. The first was Infosys, one of the largest … Continue reading “Islands of Excellence in a Sea of Chaos”<\/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-753","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\/753","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=753"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7234,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions\/7234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}