Across The Cultural Chasm

At a recently organized seminar of Morgan Chambers for CIOs in Brussels, five

companies were invited to discuss and tell CIOs why their company should be

chosen for any significant outsourcing contract. These were Atos Origin, Cap

Gemini, Satyam, Zensar and Accenture. While each of us explained our points of

view and what we perceived were our differentiated value propositions, the

Accenture representative made a telling point: we have two reasons, one that we

can match the price offered by any Indian offshore company and two, we are still

Accenture! To my mind this statement reflected a true inflection point in the

new potential of India that majors like IBM, Accenture, HP, EDS, Cap Gemini and

even smaller players like Valltech of France are discovering every day.

The slow but sure success of these companies, particularly IBM and Accenture,

has been in their ability to behave like Indian companies in every respect and

crafting recruitment and retention policies that are fine-tuned to the

aspirations of professionals in each of their key markets. And while many of our

young HR managers in “Born in India” companies may still wax eloquent about

the personal cultural touch that only CEOs resident in India can provide, the

multinationals have shown that they can hire the best leadership in our country

as well and make that cultural affiliation happen.

That is unfortunately more than one can say about the rather tentative

attempts of Indian companies in key markets abroad as we go about making the

transition from being mere multinational companies to truly global ones. If the

vision is to have at least 10% of the global workforce come from the country of

origin, a handful of American, European and Japanese sales people and a few

hundred local hires in Eastern Europe or China does not come anywhere near

achieving this objective. Our own experiments in Japan prove this.  As we

completely localized our sales and support team in that market, it showed that

this is a desirable move. Not just with employees but customers also accept this

as our willingness to be long-term players in that market.

Beyond the recruiting imperative, of course, lies the cultural integration

plan. Speaking to Derick Schaeffer, Zensar's country sales manager in Dallas,

it was interesting to hear how much effort he puts in to explain to his Texan

wife why Indian delivery managers have a nasty habit of calling at 6 am on a

Saturday to ask for some trivial project related information, and that does not

reflect on the professionalism of the organization itself. But the global hires

should be gently introduced to a culture, which goes beyond the forty hour work

week (did somebody say thirty hours in France?), there is value in making a

little effort to respect family time a little more that we currently do, or is

that asking too much of a still young industry with even younger professionals?

The good news is that with a little give and take on both sides, interesting

long-term relationships are developing both in sales and pre-sales, overseas,

and in many cases even in delivery centers around the world. But there are miles

to go in the cultural integration process in most companies. The success stories

of the larger companies will surely be followed by the smaller ones, and also by

global wannabe companies in the manufacturing and pharmaceutical sector.

Finally, in another interesting seminar in London there was a discussion on

offshore strategies, hosted by the London British Computer Society. The

sponsoring Indian company, answering the moderator's query on the rather low

brand recognition enjoyed by that company in the UK told the audience that every

Indian is now talking about SWITCH companies-a clever addition to the original

WITS that now includes HCL and Cognizant! Now if only we could be as good in

cross cultural integration as we are in the play of words and the creation of

new acronyms, our country's leadership in IT sector could be taken as truly

secure!