India Study Tour 2009

 I know I told everyone that I wouldn't have any group withdrawal, but that's not true. The first day, I kept looking around, waiting for someone I knew to appear, but it was just back to the same old daily grind.

I also got sick on the flight back. I am quite thankful I avoided any sort of colds, flu, serious stomach ailment, or fractured bones while in India (unlike some folks...), but now I get to pay for it.

I find myself feeling as though I understand India much more, and yet it's almost as opaque as it ever was. While I think I was one of the few people on the tour who know what the Gupta period was when our guide told us about it in the Elephanta Caves, Indian culture is still far more difficult for me to comprehend than European culture, for example, which I spent years studying, along with European languages. I feel almost at home in Europe, based on my knowledge of the culture, the history, the language, the wars, the customs. I honestly do not understand how someone could do business or live for any length of time in India without making the effort to learn at least some of that, but I'm sure many do.

I once read that a culture without history is an amnesiac culture. Thus, history and culture shape the way that a people describe and feel about themselves and their place in the world. If one doesn't know, understand or appreciate that history and culture, how could they possibly hope to interact with or do business from someone of that culture? I feel like this trip has helped me fill in the gaps to some extent, and has made me more respectful and appreciative of Indian culture and where Indians are coming from as people.

 
Last night, I completed the rest of my shopping and we had our Farewell to India! party. At which Indian food was served... I just can't win. I keep telling people that I don't hate red curry... red curry hates me.

All of us had to wear some Indian item that we had bought while in India. Most people just bought a simple long tunic or something pretty laid back, but a few of the ladies went all out and bought saris, and Sarah bought the most hilarious hat ever. I also find it highly amusing that Vikas, one of our resident Indians, had to rush out in a hurry to buy "something Indian" because he didn't have anything for the farewell party.

This morning is a lazy morning, as some of us are definitely slower after having fun the night before, and some of us elected to get henna, and some went shopping for one final time. I don't think anyone is looking forward to the 36+ hour trip back home, but it will be nice to get back onto a normal, crazy spice free diet.

 Today, we visited GE Healthcare, our last company visit here in India. During the presentation, I have to admit I was shocked at what was developed here in India, both in the complexity of the item being made, and the size and breadth of the GE campus in Bangalore. The office we were in was actually incomplete, the whole campus having been conceived under Jack Welch, which gives you an idea of how long this construction of the campus project has been going.

I really enjoyed the part of the lecture where we learned that items being developed and intended for rural India - which in general has no electricity or running water - are being snapped up like hotcakes by people in rural India and around the globe, because they run either on batteries, or using no running or electricity. For example, the water purification system runs on reverse osmosis, making it the most eco-friendly product possible. I am reminded of the Lowe Lintas presentation, in which the second presenter said that India is one of the greenest countries on earth per capita almost by accident, due to how many people are simply too poor to afford pesticides, use fossil fuels, or electricity. I am interested to see in the future if India can use this opportunity to simply leap frog the developmental pattern of the West and skip traditional forms of infrastructure and energy usage altogether.

According to the CIA, Indians make, per capita, $2900/year. Divide that out, that's $7.95/day on average. As some people make quite a lot of money, that would mean that there are a lot of people making less than that. US per capita income? $46,900, or $128.50. Of course, these are straight per capita numbers, meaning that the wealthiest people in both countries skew the results, but I think that sometimes our complaints seem a lot more trivial when compared to some of the people we've seen here.

One last item of note at the GE company visit - the preemie baby warmer sold in India and other parts of the world meet US regulations, but it isn't sold in the US. Rather, a much more expensive version with lots of bells and whistles is sold in the US - at a much higher cost, of course. And we wonder why our healthcare costs so much.

 Tonight, I met my colleague from Amazon here in Bangalore, Sangeetha. For the first time since I have been here, I paid a fair price for the items I wanted to buy. Juliet, my roommate also came with us. We went out for some dinner, and by the time we were ready to order, the smells of the Indian food at the table next to me had turned my stomach to the extent that I ordered a mushroom pizza.

When Sangeetha and Juliet got their dosa (a large fried crispy crepe style bread, stuffed in this case with potatoes and onions), Sangeetha gave me a small bite, saying that it wasn't at all spicy. It was SPICY. I think that Indians don't have a functional spice-o-meter, and everything that is made in India seriously has such a huge pile of spices that even smelling the food caused my poor stomach to start jumping from fear that I would eat anything.

I feel like, on this penultimate full day in India, that I have not only learned a lot about India on this trip, but also about myself and my preconceptions of outsourcing. Everyone I've met here has been optimistic, hopeful about the future, hardworking - some to a fault. If I were to use only two words to describe Indians, I would use hard-working and optimistic. From the slum SGH women, to the Christ U MBA students, to the workers at Hero Honda, the young man at Expeditor's with the two hours each way commute, and the managers at Hewitt - Indians seem to have no problem with working hard, and what's more - they seem to have a hunger for the future.

I honestly don't think many Americans do. I think Americans realize quite well that for the average American, this current generation will not be as well off as the previous one, and that continued upward mobility - the American Dream - which was always rather a pipe dream, is even more out of the reach of ordinary Americans than it was before. I remember teaching undergraduate history courses at the UofO, how many of my students had been out partying most of the week and weren't prepared, and how the Christ U MBA students put in hours of preparatory work and competed for the opportunity to have a joint class with us. Indians want it more. So I don't feel like many Americans can honestly complain, when I don't think that as many Americans have put in the kind of effort I am seeing people putting in here.

I think I am also beginning to understand how to approach certain issues with training and culture that I otherwise wouldn't have known how to address. I will certainly be able to address them with more knowledge and cultural sensitivity. I still think that Indian IT workers are replaceable, if someone more shiny and interesting and cheaper comes along, like the cheap bangle bracelets we bought. All that's important is that it is a circular bracelet and it's shiny and cheap; the quality of construction is irrelevant, and I have no concerns over the welfare of those producing it. So one thing I do think is that while India is seeing the benefits of global outsourcing now, I feel like they'll be in our position in a decade or two (or less, in certain fields which are already being outsourced to the Philippines instead), and lamenting the loss of those jobs.

The most interesting and valuable insight this trip has given me is that economic prosperity almost forces gender equality. Many of our speakers were women in significant posts in the organization, and women are dominant in call center work. The women in the slums gained greater value in their homes because of the value of the micro-lending program in their daily life. When the women are empowered, child birth rates go down, education and health spending goes up, and society in general benefits. I read an article that in rural India, only 12-18 months after seeing shows where women had greater equality and value in the household, women in rural India were demanding the same for themselves. Certainly there have been losers in the recession and during globalization in recent years - but I would venture to say that the biggest winners in the past two decades of globalization since the fall of communism and end of the Cold War are women, especially poor women who basically started at the very bottom. And I don't see that as a bad thing at all.

 I finally learned at Boeing how it works when an American company wants to sell/do major business in India. Boeing, if it gets certain contracts, incurs contractual counter trade obligations. So, if they get, for example, a contract to make fighter jets, a certain percentage of the jet (or increasing numbers of parts of the jet, or all of it) will be made in India.

Some interesting points of note:
- In 2008, India's airways sustained a loss of $2billion (compared with $9billion worldwide)
- The air freight market is so tough to get into that the big players essentially have it sewn up in India, and trains are considered good enough. This reminds me of the difficulties that air freight is having in the US - people have decided that the boring old Postal Service can get their packages delivered just fine, even if more slowly
- The India center is an R&D center - thus, if something is developed entirely there, then it falls under Indian regulatory laws, not US law about exporting certain sensitive information
- The Boeing representative who spoke to us was very positive about the future of air travel in India, although I doubt that it is as rosy a picture as he would like it to be. Right now, because of the recession, demand is down in the US and Europe for fossil fuels, leaving more room for growth in India and China. As soon as demand goes back up, so will price, which makes alternatives to air travel more attractive

The Boeing 787 is an example of global outsourcing. The floor beams are made by Tata in India, which are then shipped to Romania to be put into the body, which is then flown to the States to be assembled along with all the other parts from all over the world. I think that this is an interesting case study (as is the A-380) why outsourcing everything is probably not the most effective and efficient solution to a problem. I thought it was funny when one of my colleagues asked about the quality of items arriving to be used in the airplane, and the speaker said, "Oh, you mean how many parts get "dropped in the ocean" on the way over?" I can understand the desire for a very lucrative deal, but it seems like there is a lot of cost incurred when you're paying for the same part multiple times because your outsourcer messed it up. It would also seem to me that you would have greater difficulty monitoring the quality controls if you have to travel to a plant to check up on them, as I've heard that this gives them time to prepare the "visitor" version of the plant and materials. I'm sure that outsourcing the initial production would save money. I can't imagine building something twice saves anyone money.

 This morning, I woke up itching like crazy due to the many bug bites that appear to have been multiplying on my legs in the past couple of days. As I am one of those who elected against taking nasty malaria pills, I can only hope that I do not get the still nastier reason for taking those pills, malaria.

Today, we have Accenture in the morning and Boeing in the afternoon. Never say we didn't get to visit some significant places of business while here in India - when I signed up for the tour, I didn't even realize how much we would be doing and seeing.

There were two significant parts of the Accenture visit - the first was the talk given by the Managing Director of Accenture India, Sandeep Arora, and the second was meeting the mid-level managers and speaking with them.

Sandeep's message was that the growth of India means good things for overall economic growth in the world, and that thinking with an attitude of scarcity is a negative course of action whenever it is chosen. However, I think that this attitude is quite understandable, given what I've seen here in India. At Hewitt, Indian managers were discussing how best to move the non-entry level positions to India after having moved nearly all entry level positions - other than governmental support positions which couldn't be moved - from North America. At Accenture India, Sandeep took over a group of 15,000 employees in 2006, and in 2009, Accenture India employs 40,000 people. As an American, one who is working in a department where more than half of the operations staff are in India, how am I supposed to look at this as an opportunity? This is a time of opportunity for Indians and for upper level American managers; I do not see this as a time of opportunity for the average American wanting to get an entry level job in HR - because those jobs don't really exist anymore in the United States.

However, I noticed the same problem with the person who spoke before Sandeep that I noticed with the Christ U MBA students. One of our group asked a big picture question, and the speaker went off on a tangent filled with interesting data tidbits that really had nothing to do with answering the question. I was honestly surprised to see this tendency with someone who had so much experience at what is, after all, a global company. My colleague asked his question three different times, with different phrasing each time, and still got the same non-response. I also found it interesting that this speaker was so convinced that India will continue to be a low cost leader. It would seem from what we've learned on the trip, that cost of living and wages in India are rising at exponential rates. In light of this, it would seem odd to suggest that the cost of doing business in India will remain the same without some sort of significant change in the status quo. One final question which was asked was regarding intellectual property laws. India has great intellectual property laws on paper, but truly lax enforcement of those laws, which places the onus of protection of IP upon the business itself.

It actually seems as though this is a common story in the Indian businesses we visited - they were all very independent in their development - choosing generators and their own developmental structures over reliance on existing infrastructure (because the existing infrastructure wouldn't be able to handle the need), and treating it as simply a by product of having to do business in India. While that is obvious, it begs the question - can a business which must act like a self-contained capsule actually be a cost-savings model for the future? Or are the cost savings achieved by outsourcing to India merely a short term window of opportunity which will be over within the decade before companies move on to cheaper and cheaper destinations?

We did get some great book recommendations from Sandeep, however: Innovator's Dilemma, Driven and Tipping Point.

The meeting with the mid-level manager was also very interesting. She was surprised to see all the notes that Kyle and I had taken during the lectures, and said that while her team used to be all entirely in the US, now there's a whole team in India, and one contact point person in the US who continues to lead and direct the team at the wishes of the client. If India is ever to break the mould of just being the "go-to" person for cheap, intelligent English speaking labor, it would seem to be necessary that the leadership on these projects move to India, otherwise, the entire Indian team is just as replaceable as the entire US team was before it. Again, as an American seeing a massive recession in the US that isn't likely to recover soon due to a lack of jobs, I don't find any of this particularly comforting, in spite of being told that an attitude of scarcity isn't helpful.

 When I arrived at the Taj hotel in Bangalore, I went with some of the other students to the small cafe which also had books, magazines and Western goodies. One of the magazines had Hrithik Roshan on the cover... and I finally understood who my colleagues had been stalking in Goa. Had I realized who they were stalking, I might have joined in.

This morning, we went to Christ University to spend the morning learning about CSA (Center for Social Action), visit a slum, have lunch, then spend the afternoon in a joint session with the MBA students at Christ University.

The first thing I think we all noticed about the university is that there weren't any western style toilets. This is fine, generally, just not entirely expected at a university campus.

The visit to the slum was both heartening and disheartening, simultaneously. I think I left with more positive feelings than when I arrived, however, and noted the sheer amount of dirt and filth all over the roads, with children running around in bare feet in the same mud the cows and chickens and goats and dogs were running around. It also looked as though many of the older people squatting on the side of the road wearing cheap sandals had eye damage and ringworm in their toenails and feet. We were visiting the slums to see a waste reclamation project. As I understood it, women were paid to gather waste, it was treated, then used for compost. This not only created something useful, but it prevented the waste from polluting the slum (in which children ran around barefoot, and ringworm appeared to be ubiquitous).

While we were waiting with the students who came with us outside the project building, we were taking pictures of the kids. They were so joyful, even in their incredible surroundings that you couldn't help but smile when you looked at them. We ended up taking a lot of pictures and showing them in the viewfinder what the picture looked like. I think my favorite was a little boy wearing a pink Minnie Mouse sweatshirt (yes, sweatshirt) in the heat of the day.


I think by this time, I was thoroughly depressed at the thought of how many children there were, and the conditions in which they were living. It is do-able to help one child; even a dozen; even one hundred children. But there had to be a few dozen just in the part of the street where we were. I wasn't particularly excited about whatever was coming next, because the part that we'd already gone through was such a harsh dose of reality.

We went to the St. Sara's School to speak with a SHG (Self Help Group) that the CSA had helped to set up and finance. These are micro-lending groups - but the unique thing is that they are not for the wealth of a bank or individual, but the interest on the loans goes back to the group so that it can make more and bigger loans. The Q&A with these women showed me how to help all those kids - empower their mothers. It was absolutely amazing, the stories they had to tell. One used a loan to help her husband open a welding shop. One of them used it to open a shop, and now her husband helps the kids get ready for school in the morning, something really unusual for a lower-class, conservative male in India to do. Another used a loan to lease a house instead of renting, so now she basically pays rent, with interest, to the group, rather than to a landlord. The way they spoke, and the animation and hope and optimism in their faces and smiles made me realize that this - not the fancy glass buildings we'd seen plenty of - is the future of India. More than that, it *has* to be the future of India, or India has no future at all.


They also brought their little children, and this little girl was just the sweetest, cutest little one I saw the whole trip.

We had Indian food for lunch... I and a few others I noticed (I won't name names), picked through anything with color and mostly chomped on rice and naan. Such is the state of my poor stomach.

Our afternoon session was a very interesting experience, and I think helped me to understand where some of my Indian colleagues are coming from. All of the Christ University MBA students arrived with multiple pages of notes in hand, completely prepared and well thought-out, and some even had charts and other articles to reference (our topics of discussion were Shopper's Stop Group and Tata Consultancy Services). However, while one of the guys in my group had well organized notes, my colleagues reported that some of the members in other groups had a pile of information, but poorly organized notes, and they couldn't track down their information quickly, or quote it off the top of their head. The group I was in was also unusual in that we moved to big picture questions fairly quickly (I am convinced this is actually due to a lack of preparation on the part of some people in our team), while other groups reported being bogged down by the numbers.

The members of our group (Seattle U students) who weren't as well prepared actually asked the most salient big picture questions, while the highly prepared Christ U MBA students had the data to support the eventual conclusions we reached. I found this difference in styles - immediate movement to big picture thinking vs. taking refuge in the hard data - actually resulted in a very interesting and useful discussion which would have been either missing significant hard data were it just the American students and missing a generalized, big picture viewpoint were it just the Indian students. I think this was my most useful takeaway from the discussion with these students, and it shows the weaknesses in both systems of education on their own. Americans often feel very comfortable making choices and decisions with little data and gut feeling, which can sometimes have disastrous results; while getting bogged down in the data can end up paralyzing people in other cultures who are more data-centric.

After we finished the scholastic portion of our day, we were treated to a truly amazing display put on for us by the university.There was traditional dancing and a band played for us, and achoir that sang the introductory song - they were all really good, too. Christ U also provided us dinner... more spicy Indian food. However, there was this amazing dry fried chicken that was SO YUMMY, but other than that, I stuck with the rice and naan.

In the evening, we went out to hang out with the Christ U students somewhere along MG Road, and much fun was had by all. Maybe it's just me... but we're packing a lot into two weeks.