Breaking Language and Culture Barriers

December 2004 saw me struggling in the Tokyo airport to navigate a screen

that kept throwing junk at me in Japanese and there I was, trusting Microsoft

standards and my own reflexes, to hit the Reply All key and respond to mails.

January 2005, in a quaint café opposite Istanbul's famous Topkapi palace, my

experience was similar-though the indecipherable symbols were Persian this

time, not Japanese. And as one talks about the demolition of time and space

barriers by the Internet, one wonders when a uniform language for communication

and screen designs will actually make 'a global network of technologists' a

reality.

Speaking at a recent ASEAN conference on the development and support of

innovative enterprises, I realized again that the aspirations and approaches of

industry associations and government enablers-be it NASSCOM and TIFAC in India

or their counterparts in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Myanmar or Brunei-are

very much the same, that of building an innovation ecosystem that will enable

big and small companies to collaborate between themselves and with the academic

institutions, capital providers and government agencies. But, here again, the

wonderful opportunity to build a Asia wide symbiotic network, will have to face

and overcome the challenge of communications.

As an organisation, Zensar has been breaking new ground by taking many

innovations developed in the US or in India, to markets like China, Japan and

Mexico-demonstrating time and again that the Pacific Rim and NAFTA countries

have the same needs and abilities to absorb technology as the seemingly more

aware markets in the US and UK. But it has taken some doing: a tentative

experiment in Japan with one Japanese sales manager has blossomed into

significant success only with a fully Japanese team of salespersons and pre

sales specialists bridging the gap between local client managers and the

enthusiastic, but culturally unaware, project leaders in India. In China, it

took one false start and then a full fledged JV with a Chinese firm and the

excellent support of a very willing Mayor's office in Shenzhen, to start

tapping the local market effectively and in Mexico, an army of technology

specialists could not prove as effective as one Juan Pablo who knows what needs

to be done to get analysis documents accepted by the client.

Why bother, did you say? The traditional US-UK opportunity still exists.

English is still adequate for many markets so why break one's head over lesser

opportunities in smaller markets? Quite simply because these are large and

significant markets, and unlike the UK, where there would be over a hundred

offices of Indian, Hungarian, Russian and Chilean software firms, the

opportunities for winning and executing significant full life cycle contracts

are significant. And, on a less commercial note, the pleasure of being able to

deal across cultures is itself a great motivation for putting in that extra

effort.

How does one build a new cadre of culturally savvy ambassadors for the Indian

IT industry—many of us CEOs are too old and too much a victim of our own

previous successes to make the big leap. I have written in this column earlier

of young twenty some youngsters in my organization, who are fluent in Japanese

and this capability to quickly learn and master new languages and assimilate new

cultures at an early age should be supported and nurtured by HR Chiefs and heads

of academic institutions.

The author is deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies

and chairman of Nasscom's SME Forum for Western India Ganesh

Natarajan