Wartime Travels and Travails

Ashort ten-day trip of Europe and the US offered some humorous and some
cynical views of life in a very nervous world. Walking into a Denny’s
restaurant near San Jose airport for a late lunch after a client meeting, two of
my colleagues and I were bemused when the manager came to our table and
sheepishly asked us to leave. The reason–a flight coming in from Singapore an
hour ago had been quarantined because seven of the passengers were coughing and
it was suspected that a few of the passengers had got off the flight and were
now carrying SARS to the world. Naturally, three Indians walking in for lunch
were immediate suspects!

From Frankfurt to London to San Jose to Chicago, the many views of the world,
and particularly the Iraq conflict and its historical necessity as well as
future fallouts, were as different as the difference in treatment received by
Private Jessica Lynch, rescued by American commandos, and millions of teenagers
whose lives and families have been shattered in Iraq. While hours and hours of
expensive American prime time were spent interviewing the hapless Jessica’s
grandmother and schoolteacher, the horrendous looting and chaos that followed
the symbolic pulling down of the great dictator’s statue in Baghdad received
the rapt attention of European and Asian audiences!

But dining at a Professor’s house at the Harvard Business School, one got
an opportunity to appreciate the American point of view with the need to
eliminate a traitor who had come from the early days of American protection to
completely turn against his former masters and become a threat. Possibly, the
world would have been less aggrieved if Colin Powell’s act of turning back
after ousting the Iraqis from Kuwait had not been so sudden and the armies had
been allowed another week to finish off Saddam for good.

Will the combination of SARS and the Iraqi conflict put further pressure on
an already squeezed software budget? In the near future, it doesn’t seem that
the war itself will compound any of the agony, and if SARS is contained soon,
the insignificant contribution of the South-East Asian region to the software
exporters’ revenue will ensure that there’s no impact on industry
bottomlines. What does continue to be worrying, however is the continuing
weakness in global economies, particularly in the US, UK and continental Europe–which
has already led Infosys and Mastek with their early results to send stock
markets cartwheeling with concerns on rate pressures and shrinking IT budgets.

And Larry Ellison’s recent statements that the halcyon days will never
return for IT and the next wave would be biotech can’t provide much
reassurance to industry-watchers. It is now up to Indian CEOs to show that we
can ride the outsourcing bandwagon to blaze new trains of growth and success.

Speaking at a seminar on entrepreneurship organized by students at the
Harvard Business School, the old question popped up again–should India
continue to rely on services or has the time come to move to products? Well, the
successes of i-Flex as well as the fact that more products are now being
developed or at least reengineered and supported from India, has shown that the
capability exists, but whether one should consciously focus on branded products
instead of high quality services–well, the jury is still out on that one.

As panel chairman, veteran CEO and author Gurcharan Das remarked, India has
shown that it can attain world leadership in IT services. This is the time to
scale up and build scores of multi-billion-dollar services corporations that can
cater to the global market.

Finally, a thought for all sane minds to consider–when one considers that
Basra is close to the historic city of Ur, the seat of learning and culture in
the Mesopotamian era, and arguably the cradle of civilization, the wheel seems
to have turned full circle! Can we go back to being civilized again?

Ganesh Natarajan

The author is the global CEO of Zensar Technologies