Speaking at the launch of the India Research Center of the
Harvard Business School, outgoing president of the university Larry Summers
compared the challenges of running corporations and universities in a very
unique manner. A CEO's job, he said, is to examine the union of all view
points in an organization and support the ones which create most excitement even
if it means going against the wishes of risk-averse nay sayers. A university
president, on the other hand has to take decisions at the intersection point of
many opposing views and choose the middle path. Such a path is not objectionable
to any.
This is an interesting argument. It focuses on the problems
that many of us today face-Getting bureaucracy ridden academic institutions
and government organizations to contribute their bit to the development of a
good ecosystem for IT and BPO in multiple cities of our country. The industry
has been struggling for the past many months to get a cynical academic community
to take advantage of industry's willingness to participate in curriculum
redesign, faculty development and the establishment of industry supported
technology development centers inside university campuses. But the pace of
change could have been faster if the participants had shown some interest.
Contrast this with China where the transformation of higher education is
progressing at a feverish pace. The Government realizes that only a willing and
capable workforce, in tune with the needs of the world can help fill the newly
minted Software Parks in every province of the country.
And the threat to India's dream of becoming world
software superpower comes not only from the East, but countries such as Poland
also can shake us all out of any remaining complacency. On a recent trip to
Warsaw, the quick awakening of a sleeping Eastern European country of 40 mn took
me by surprise. The Polish Investment Authority is as friendly as the Irish or
the Chinese development agencies. There are incentives ranging from land and
building subsidies to employment incentives. The various Special Economic Zones
in Krakow, Gdansk, Warsaw and Wooch are competing with each other to showcase
their friendliness and university partnership options. And with more and more
Eastern European countries readying to join the EU and offer Schengen visas, the
options for European and even American customers to choose Poland, Russia,
Hungary, Rumania or the Czech Republic for the outsourcing can become very
threatening to India.
Bureaucrats should be proactive in their resource and infrastructure efforts, rather than finding shortcuts |
A supportive ecosystem in India can and must be built. They
should be proactive in their resource and infrastructure efforts-rather than
finding some shortcuts they should look at complete solutions. Already the joke
in Pune is that while in UK they drive on the left of the road and in US on the
right of the road, people in the city drive on what's left of the road-a
cynical but true reflection of the sorry state of neglect of the infrastructure
in this and many other wannabe IT cities!
Government must take notice of, is the ease with which
Indian companies, can move to set up large centers in other countries! The poor
infrastructure coupled with the rapidly escalating costs of manpower and other
inputs may well make this a short term reality.
But if Poland and China seem to have what it takes to
become true competitors for India's share of the global outsourcing pie, we
can take some heart from what Strategy Professor Tarun Khanna said at the HBS
inauguration. Explaining that convergence is not really a possibility between
India and China, he reasoned that China has done whatever it takes on the
infrastructure side while India has tapped the entrepreneurial resource creation
side better-The first is a product of government focus and the second a result
of CEO's innovation and entrepreneurship. Neither of these can be built in a
day or even a few years, hence we could still be sitting pretty on top of the
services outsourcing heap at the end of this decade-but only just!