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An example of stoicism described in my book “Born Global”
If you’ve read my book, you know that I describe a vision for Britain as a hub for the globalized economy. I go on to describe some reasons why that is the case and the unique assets that Britain has that justifies my view one of which a great sense of British stoicism. Then on 13th Feb, there was a bomb blast in Pune, India, the same city as where Quickstart Global has an office. We verified that clients and staff in Pune at the time were safe and then sent out an email to our clients that have operations with us in Pune notifying them.
What came back in response from one of our clients describes that stoicism perfectly and he has given me permission to publish his email here.
“I have caught up with Brigadier Harinder and have let him know that my main concern was for all the staff here, certainly not for myself. As agreed with the team when I first arrived these attacks aim to create fear, and I am glad to say that this doesn’t seem to be the mood anywhere here in Pune. Other than the airports being extra vigilant I have had a very pleasant journey here and am very glad to be united with the team.
This is quite typical of an Appleby visit to any location! So please don’t worry I and the team are very well.”
No need to add anything from my side, I thought he summed up what I wrote perfectly!
Happy Diwali
Interesting event this week occurred as a UK accounting company with British founders sent me a Happy Diwali greeting. Further proof that the world is indeed changing. Can you imagine that happening 10 years ago? Far from being worried about cultural differences, smart companies are beginning to realise that the differences are small, they just need to be slightly more aware to stand out from the crowd.
Come on people, read “The World Is Flat”!
I presented at a Microsoft conference yesterday. The audience was about a hundred UK based systems integrators. During the presentation, I asked for a show of hands to indicate how many people had read “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. To my amazement, only 3 or 4 people said they had. As this is pretty much the bible of the new globalized world that we live in, it seems to me that everyone with any interest in what’s going on in the world around them and how things might personally affect them, should really read this book. Links to purchase below:
Get your head out of the sand people, this stuff affects almost all white collar professionals. You need to understand it if you are going to take control of your own destiny.
Email – the big enemy of a global company
Sorry for the long delay in posting. I’m now back from my summer vacation feeling refreshed and ready to start posting. I’ve been talking about this internally for a while and feel strongly enough to publish!
I cannot stress how strongly I feel about email as a communication medium amongst geographically distributed teams. Email has become the easy way out; a fire and forget, backside covered, quick and easy method of getting your point across, issuing an instruction or complaining about something. After all, it’s far easier to send an email than try and talk to someone with a different accent to your own, in a different time zone and who may not be available to talk when you need to anyway. The reality is that email is one of the biggest trust and relationship destroying tools available within a global company, especially an SME. Emails are often misinterpreted, misunderstood or just plain badly written. Adding to which, more and more people are drawn into the discussion as issues escalate and others are copied in. More often than not, a point requiring simple clarification has escalated into a time wasting non-issue, that could have been nipped in the bud had the two original parties simply had a conversation with each other from the outset. Most things can wait until a convenient time to talk has been identified. A word of advice to any leader of a globally distributed company is to mandate voice or video communications wherever possible with email as a last resort or a follow up.
Cultural differences or trust?
Often issues when working with an offshore operation are put down to cultural differences. But I wonder how much of the issue is simply one of trust between co-workers? When you work side by side with someone and have lots of regular face to face interaction, it’s easy to build up trust. With trust comes the ability to give someone the benefit of the doubt. If a deadline is missed but isn’t usually, the natural inclination is to assume something out of the ordinary must have happened.
Add distance and a different country to the equation and only occasional face to face time, and suddenly doubt enters the equation. The temptation is to assume the worst and be pleasantly surprised when things go to plan and deadlines are met. Fundamentally, trust goes out of the window.
Yes cultural differences will mean that people go about things in different ways but if you are able to build trust and assume your co-workers are fundamentally good at their job and have their heart in the right place, then actually everything should be fine
I’m not saying that you naively assume everything is ok from the very beginning. Trust has to be earned, but once it is, you are better off assuming that fundamentally you’ve got good people who do their best to do a good job more often than not. On the other side, remote team members should realize that trust should not be lost of easily given away and everything possible should be done to maintain it once it’s earned.
This then becomes self fulfilling and the foundation of a high performing remote team.
What gives India its edge?
I’ve just arrived in India this afternoon and was thinking about a comment I heard yesterday from my barber of all people!
He spent his early years living and working across various southern African countries and has spent the last 20+ years living in the UK. When I got my haircut yesterday, he said he had just come back from a short one week trip in India, the first time he had visited the country. His comment that struck me was “everyone is so industrious and hard working.” In particular, he thought this was very different from most other countries he had lived in. “Even the poorest are prepared to work hard and not just hold their hand out and expect to be given something”, he continued.
I can’t comment on his experiences of Africa and I am sure he is generalizing. There are bound to be plenty of hardworking, industrious people in African countries as well as a fair number of people in India that do not work hard. But, overall, I agree with his observation. India’s hard work attitude, it’s culture of education and the young age and size of it’s population will mean that most other countries will find it hard to compete.
PS. I have just seen a news report from the G20 conference. This probably won’t get reported in the western media but Manmohan Singh (Indian Prime Minister) view of the conference is that this is the first time the views of emerging countries were taken into account and he felt that power was beginning to shift to the larger emerging economies including a stronger say in the running of the IMF. I wonder if this financial crisis is not just cyclical but the beginning of a permanent structural change in the balance of power?
Will India stumble?
It’s clear to almost everyone that the long term view of India is of growth for several decades and the creation of a true global superpower. However, I have doubts over whether this will be smooth ride, I think it will be a period of quite wild swings but with the long term trend being upwards. I predict some downward swings as the market corrects some of the excesses that are taking place in such a bull market, and I think one of those downward swings will take place within the next 12-24 months. At that point, it will be interesting to see how the ITES/BPO professionals, who have only ever seen a boom market, will react. Let me share some observations:
1. Basic contractual respect has not yet reached this market, there seems to be no speedy legal recourse through the court system and minimal respect for contracts. For example, we regularly find new potential employees who would like to join our organization in India are simply not relieved by their existing employer in time to join, despite the employee serving out their contractually commited 30 days notice period. Such behaviour would not be tolerated by any employee in the west. Once you’ve given your notice, you work out your notice period and then you leave. It would be outrageous to think that an employer could hold you back simply by refusing to hand over standard documents but this is going on every day in India and most worryingly, employees seem to be falling for it! Companies and employees need to professionalize their approach.
2. If a great project manager earns $40k a year in India and works for an outsourcer, that outsourcer has to charge him or her out at around $120k a year to make a reasonable profit (standard professional services 3 times salary). That just about works at the moment, but if the project manager salary reaches $50k-60k or more, I can see many companies questioning the validity of using an Indian based outsourcing company. (By the way, this is where captive operations win out). If you combine a US downturn with this scenario, I can see demand for Indian based resources falling away quite quickly. We’re already seeing the start of this with TCS reducing some salaries during last week.
3. Tier 1 city real estate prices are through the roof in India. Right now, prime real estate in Mumbai costs the same as prime real estate in the best parts of New York or London. Currently, there are significant restrictions on how much money Indians can legitimately move outside of the country. When such restrictions lift, I can see an exodus of money towards the best homes in the best locations. As fantastic as Mumbai is, its overall quality of life does not compare with other great cities of the world. If the money can go anywhere, I can see real estate prices in these tier 1 cities falling. Combine that with a hiccup in the ITES/BPO sector and you have a recipe for genuine market panic.
4. While the trend is for more professionals being educated and coming available on the jobs market, particularly in the medium term (3-5 years), right now there is a definite shortage in certain areas. Time will tell what impact a US downturn will have, maybe actually this will correct itself quite quickly if TCS, Wipro etc stumble.
5. IPO mania is taking place in India. During my visit last week, billboards were advertising IPOs to retail investors. Experience tells us that markets crash just as small, private retail investors driven to a frenzy by over subscribed IPOs enter the market.
Here’s my prediction. US economy falters, Indian outsourcers, particularly small to mid sized ones struggle significantly and larger ones see flat revenues, wage inflation stops, rapid career progression stops, Indian stock market with growth built into valuations crashes, retail investors loose money, property prices fall and all this happens sometime in 2009 or 2010. Then recovery is quick because of the macros and the upward trend will continue. Let’s see if I’m right! Personally, I think this will be a healthy thing is it will give some perspective to many people who are going around India today thinking the world owes them something, I think such people, who may well be mortgaged to the hilt will have a rude awakening.
Cultural Differences – how to succeed in India
There are so many rules that I can think of for maximizing your chances of success when you run an operation in India. This week, one of the rules that really came to mind was the idea that you can never take what seems to be a no brainer situation at face value.
This weeks situation was one where we were to move into our new office in Pune. Everything was set for the move, scheduled on January 31st. In the western sense, every eventuality was covered. However when I arrived in Pune on the 30th, I began to wonder about what could go wrong at this late stage. My instinct told me that we needed an alternative plan. I asked my team to come up with a plan B. During the day we worked on the alternative plan and guess what, it became apparent through the day on the 30th that we would have to invoke that plan. The unthinkable looked like it was going to happen and eventually it did!
In the end, the move went ahead as planned with the usual teething issues. But there was a sting in the tail. Just as the move was happening, it became apparent that the submarine cable linking Asia to Europe and East Coast US had been cut causing a major Internet outage across India and the rest of Asia as well as the Middle East. The result, a shiny new office location, fitted out on time, designed to provide services to western based clients but with no network connectivity at all. As I write this, the team are working furiously to try and rectify the situation.
It just goes to prove, in India you need to think of the worst case scenario, and then double it and think what else could possibly go wrong! With that attitude in mind, you just might succeed in India!
Working in India – Cultural Differences
When I first started working with Quickstart Global, I remember reading an article on cultural differences. The article clearly stated that you should not try and change the hierarchical nature of business in India. It said that any attempt to do so would end in frustration. At the time, I remember looking at it thinking that’s wrong. India must have changed, all those IT professionals, a bold shining New India with 9% GDP growth, surely they would not want this. Surely an empowered, flat structure with no hierarchy would work. My Chairman, who had worked in India for years also urged caution with my approach. His instinct said I was wrong but he was also prepared to believe that maybe things had changed, maybe there really was a new India.
Two years down the line and I have to say, the article and my Chairman were right. To succeed in India as a successful manager from the west, you almost have to hit the reset button on everything that you’ve ever learnt about management frameworks and style. The western instinct is to empower people to make their own decisions within a given scope, to allow them to learn for themselves the best way to get the job done, to provide an inclusive environment where everyone is striving for the same bigger picture. You get the gist.
To succeed in India though, I now believe you really need to define roles in detail, define processes of what you want people to do, define clearly how an individual will be measured giving clear KPIs, define the organizational hierarchy with many layers showing clear career progression and don’t undermine the hierarchy, define the role of checking to make sure the processes are being followed. That is why quality accreditations such as CMM or ISO are so sought after in India compared to the west. I believe this is the root cause of where companies that struggle in India actually go wrong. You cannot bypass hundreds of years of culture in a single generation. After all, on one side, companies like Infosys, TCS, Wipro etc are all incredibly successful yet on the other hand western companies entering India somtimes struggle.
Ultimately, I think a middle ground will emerge however my advice to anyone starting out in India is to start in a very process oriented and hierarchical way initially and then gradually let other management influences in as you become successful and are hitting your original goals.
I told a good few people that the opposite was true. To any of those reading this, I apologize, I’m happy to revisit to impart my experiences over the last couple of years if you want! I strongly believe now that if you follow a simple set of rules, you can definitely succeed and establishing in India can be a very positive experience delivering business value even beyond your initial expectations.
Cultural differences – organizing interviews
So it’s been a while since I last updated my blog. December was a write off and I am pleased to say January has gotten off to a flying start so it’s been manic. I’ll try not to leave such big gaps in the future.
Today we are interviewing for two account managers for our UK operation. The job ad was placed online before Christmas and to date we have had 17 responses from some pretty good candidates with wide and varied backgrounds. We took the responses we had received up until December 28th and decided to offer interviews to those that seemed to fit the bill, 7 altogether giving us just under 4 possible candidates for each position. We decided January 10th would be interview day. We called each of the candidates at least 10 days ago to confirm their availability. We then emailed the schedule along with the job description and a few days ago re-confirmed the interviews. I do not believe we could have been any more organized.
As I sit here with my whole day allocated to interviewing, as of 3.15pm, I have had a total of 3 interviews so far. The 8.30 interviewee turned up 10 minutes late, the second didn’t show up, the third was 20 minutes late, the fourth was on time. The fifth was due to turn up at 2pm but still isn’t and the 6th looks like they will not show up either. Assuming the 7th turns up, we will have had a 43% drop out rate of confirmed interview to the candidate actually showing up.
The point here relates to cultural differences between India and the west. Since starting this company, our clients always express concern that they get drop outs at interview stage in India. We see drop out rates ranging from 10% to occasionally as high as 40% with no logic as to why it happens. They say it must be cultural differences between India and the west and they sometimes get frustrated that this is the case. We are constantly looking at our processes and our documentation to see what can be improved. Having not done any volume recruitment in the UK for a while, I never expected to see exactly the same situation arise. The reality is that as far as interviewing is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any difference at all, in fact, I know in India we do far better than this
Diary of a globalization champion 