Quickstart Global featured in The Financial Times

I’m pleased to say that both “Born Global” and Quickstart Global were featured in the entrepreneurs section of The Financial Times today.  Couldn’t have put it better myself!

What Satyam really means to India’s IT industry

By now everyone will be aware of the Satyam situation.  Sure, the Indian government may step in and provide the working capital required to keep the company going but the reality is that Satyam are unlikely to ever win another new business contract, which in turn means that they are likely to be bought for next to nothing by another IT major.  The days of Satyam as a brand are limited.

The bigger problem is the damage to brand India.  India already has a reputation for being corrupt and despite amazing changes over the last few years that began to reverse that reputation, this episode will re-awake that belief.  Vietnam, Ukraine, Philippines and other alternative offshoring destinations will all be kicking their business development efforts into overdrive now to try and win clients that are currently offshoring in India.  And those countries do offer a credible alternative so some clients will be tempted to move in the hysteria.

But for clients to move away from an entire country in a knee jerk reaction would be a mistake.  The fundamentals of the country remain; a very high quality, highly scalable workforce with excellent English language skills.  Instead of questioning the country, clients should question their model of engagement.  Satyam has shown that outsourcer “black box” their engagements meaning clients have very little knowledge about how their outsourced business processes actually work.  For many Satyam customers, that is a scary proposition.  Many are in a situation where key business processes are being delivered by a company that may or may not be in place next week, with no roadmap of how to ensure business continuity if the company does actually fail.  If Satyam suddenly disappear, many Fortune 500 companies are going feel even more pain that the recession is already giving them!

The answer is for companies to move towards establishing captive or hybrid captive operations in India.  Companies need to take control of their offshored business functions.  The old story of captives being unable to hire or retain staff are gone.  Indian outsourcers are now all in a mature state with slow growth (Infosys 3.7% decline in revenues quarter on quarter).  Indian IT workers from this episode will grow to realise that greater job security lies in captive operations that deliver value.

Quickstart Global stands ready to support both the clients that may be having near term issues as well as IT workers looking for a stable career with smart, successful captive operations!

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.