 "We only take pride in the \"certificate of origin\": Subroto Bagchi")
When the announcement came that Microsoft would be headed not by Stephen Elsop or Alan Mulally but by Hyderabad-born, Manipal Institute-educated Satya Nadella, there was the expected jubilation in India. Newspaper headlines bordered on the jingoistic and comparisons with high-performing Indians in the US were made. But is India taking too much credit for something that was "an accident of birth"? Not entirely, says Mindtree Chairman Subroto Bagchi, who also speaks to Indulekha Aravind about why Indians seem to have had more success in services in the US than in manufacturing. Excerpts:
Using the current context of Nadella's appointment, do you think India tends to take too much credit for the success of Indians in the US?
No, I don't think so. As a culture, we have a history of letting go. We only take pride in the "certificate of origin"; we have humility to accept that way too many factors contribute to an individual's success in life. So, it is not about chest thumping; that would even be jingoistic. We feel happy that one among us has made it. It is an illustration of what we can achieve both individually and collectively, despite the state of the environment in the country.
I think there are so many examples of Indians who have crafted great success at a global level without being from an IIT or an IIM. Then again, we should think of people who have gone to the very top of their fields beyond just the corporate sector. Think of people in politics, art, and literature, cinema and, of course, let us not forget medicine. Achievement in these sectors are way more complex than becoming successful in setting up or running a business.
Why is it that Indians seem to have been able to make a mark in the services sector, and IT in particular, but not in manufacturing?
This has a historical basis. If the Swiss could preserve their precision design, crafting and manufacturing capability, so could we have. The British had no great love for manufacturing in India. If at all, they killed some of it. Post the British Raj, there were two dominant strains in the story of manufacturing. One was the PSU idea and the other was the abominable Licence Raj.
The benchmark for everything for the former became national in most cases. The latter was not thinking of generational knowledge creation as a national priority. So we lost manufacturing at roughly around the same time that the Japanese were "getting" it. In the last three decades, we could have reclaimed ground but by then the concept of manufacturing had become hugely more eco-systemic. Today, you cannot build anything great if you don't feel the connection between the idea of making to the idea of moving. In addition to this, sociologically, the manufacturing sector was largely opaque or variedly transparent. These factors did not augur well for us to throw up a surge of top talent that could globally scale.
Indians have earned a reputation for frugal engineering and management skills - do you think that might be a factor in their success?
I think the idea of frugal engineering is often overstated by us. This is a far more complex thing than we think and quite often, we trivialise the idea. So, I would not say that Indians bring the magic touch of frugal engineering as we would say the Japanese would bring TQM thinking. Speaking about management skills, I think there are a few things going for people with an Indian upbringing. One among them is greater comfort in ambiguity. This is useful in an increasingly complex world where it is no longer a matter of this or that, it could well be this and that. Then there is the aspect of the work ethic. Most people who have gone out of India work very hard. There may be many reasons for that but one of them is about peer approval. Many Indians in positions of significance deeply care about what fellow Indians in comparable positions think of them. And many actually care about what their friends and family back home say about them.
Will Nadella's appointment undo some of the damage done to the "Indian" image as a result of the Rajat Gupta affair?
Fortunately, Rajat Gupta does not define the idea of India in the minds of the people of the world. The ethnic mix in the rogues gallery, for the rich and the famous, is well distributed in the US; if at all, we have fewer global Indians in that gallery. And thank God for that! So, Nadella does not have to undo anything. He can focus on the job at hand at Microsoft.
Using the current context of Nadella's appointment, do you think India tends to take too much credit for the success of Indians in the US?
No, I don't think so. As a culture, we have a history of letting go. We only take pride in the "certificate of origin"; we have humility to accept that way too many factors contribute to an individual's success in life. So, it is not about chest thumping; that would even be jingoistic. We feel happy that one among us has made it. It is an illustration of what we can achieve both individually and collectively, despite the state of the environment in the country.
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Is there a pattern among those Indians who've managed to make it big in the US - for example, with the exception of Nadella, are they all from top-notch institutes like IITs and IIMs?
I think there are so many examples of Indians who have crafted great success at a global level without being from an IIT or an IIM. Then again, we should think of people who have gone to the very top of their fields beyond just the corporate sector. Think of people in politics, art, and literature, cinema and, of course, let us not forget medicine. Achievement in these sectors are way more complex than becoming successful in setting up or running a business.
Why is it that Indians seem to have been able to make a mark in the services sector, and IT in particular, but not in manufacturing?
This has a historical basis. If the Swiss could preserve their precision design, crafting and manufacturing capability, so could we have. The British had no great love for manufacturing in India. If at all, they killed some of it. Post the British Raj, there were two dominant strains in the story of manufacturing. One was the PSU idea and the other was the abominable Licence Raj.
The benchmark for everything for the former became national in most cases. The latter was not thinking of generational knowledge creation as a national priority. So we lost manufacturing at roughly around the same time that the Japanese were "getting" it. In the last three decades, we could have reclaimed ground but by then the concept of manufacturing had become hugely more eco-systemic. Today, you cannot build anything great if you don't feel the connection between the idea of making to the idea of moving. In addition to this, sociologically, the manufacturing sector was largely opaque or variedly transparent. These factors did not augur well for us to throw up a surge of top talent that could globally scale.
Indians have earned a reputation for frugal engineering and management skills - do you think that might be a factor in their success?
I think the idea of frugal engineering is often overstated by us. This is a far more complex thing than we think and quite often, we trivialise the idea. So, I would not say that Indians bring the magic touch of frugal engineering as we would say the Japanese would bring TQM thinking. Speaking about management skills, I think there are a few things going for people with an Indian upbringing. One among them is greater comfort in ambiguity. This is useful in an increasingly complex world where it is no longer a matter of this or that, it could well be this and that. Then there is the aspect of the work ethic. Most people who have gone out of India work very hard. There may be many reasons for that but one of them is about peer approval. Many Indians in positions of significance deeply care about what fellow Indians in comparable positions think of them. And many actually care about what their friends and family back home say about them.
Will Nadella's appointment undo some of the damage done to the "Indian" image as a result of the Rajat Gupta affair?
Fortunately, Rajat Gupta does not define the idea of India in the minds of the people of the world. The ethnic mix in the rogues gallery, for the rich and the famous, is well distributed in the US; if at all, we have fewer global Indians in that gallery. And thank God for that! So, Nadella does not have to undo anything. He can focus on the job at hand at Microsoft.