The professor and strategist on making the world round again.
There are a couple of things you can’t miss when you meet Pankaj Ghemawat — professor, strategist and author of five books. One, he’s punctual. Two, at around six foot four, he’s very tall. Being at least a foot shorter, I’m literally forced to look up to him as we meet in the lobby of the ITC Parel hotel, writes Leslie D’monte. “What would you like to eat?” I ask quickly, keen to make the most of his time. “Indian. This is one cuisine I haven’t had during this stay,” he says without hesitation. As we walk towards “Kebabs & Kurries”, I tell him that I’ve just read his latest book World 3.0 that rubbishes the “flat” world concept popularised by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Good. Now I don’t have to repeat what’s in my book,” he quips. We ask the steward to decide on our behalf. No alcohol or pre-lunch drink for the professor, so we get down to the chat.
On his book, he says, “How you see the world depends on where you’re looking at it from.” His own peripatetic childhood and teen years would certainly have shaped his world view in novel ways. He was born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, but at age five moved to Indiana where his father, a botanist, was doing a doctoral thesis. “He must have confused Indiana with India,” he jokes. He moved back to India at age nine after his father completed his PhD. His mother has a background in chemistry. Ghemawat, however, chose Applied Mathematics at Harvard and later business economics for his PhD. Something of a prodigy, he began studying at Harvard University at age 16. He was on the faculty of Harvard Business School for 25 years, and in 1991, became the youngest person in the school’s history to be appointed a full professor. He currently is the Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School in Barcelona. “My daughter Ananya (16) often reminds me that I was a freshman at her age but I tell her that I wish I did have an additional year at Harvard,” he says. He had applied to Harvard when he was 15. They said he was too young and would have to wait for a year, so he spent a year at BITS Pilani and later three years at Harvard instead of four.
Sipping mineral water to my watermelon juice, he segues into the topic of B-schools, which is as close to his heart as is his book. “What’s remarkable is that the top B-schools talk about globalisation. But when you look at measures beyond exchange programmes, and international students, there’s very little. There’s a very small percentage (five per cent) of international component in articles in management journals. If all we do is to take interesting people from different parts of the world to interesting places, we (B-schools) are simply a specialised segment of the travel and hospitality business.” Not that he has given up on B-schools. The US-based accreditation body, AACSB, for B-schools, at his urging, set up a task force (along with 11 others who were all Deans) on the globalisation of management education.
What about Indian B-schools? “India – depends on who you’re talking to – has 1,500 to 2,500 university programmes that grant higher degrees in business. So although it’s all very well to talk of ISB [The Indian School of Business] and IIMs [Indian Institutes of Management], you’re basically talking about the top one per cent. They have the resources. But it might be interesting to look at lower-ranked B-schools that can’t attract foreign students or faculty. Besides they cannot afford to arrange for exchange programmes. My interest is to build enough material to cater to these schools,” he says, adding he’s in talks with a leading B-school (which he declines to identify) to organise a symposium a year from now in India.
Meanwhile, the kebab plate arrives. He skips the fish “due to the monsoons” but looks pleased with the chicken kebabs. I take the opportunity to talk about World 3.0 and its relevance to India. “The world is only 10 to 20 per cent globalised. India falls well short of this. We are developing a Global Connectedness Index for DHL. The initial findings (just a couple of weeks back) reveal that India still ranks in the bottom tier in terms of global integration measures. We’ve opened up in the historical sense, and it has had a positive impact, but this is not a very integrated economy,” he says with a tinge of sadness.
There’s social pressure to believe that the world is flat, “and I’ve experienced my fair share of that.” He recalls a TV anchor who treated him “as a creature who has been in a cage for the last 20,000 years”. “ ‘Professor,’ she asked, ‘why do you still think that the world is round?’ I’m seen as a globalisation sceptic but my point is simply that flat is misleading and downright dangerous. It’s globalony,” he reiterates.
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He agrees that academics and economists don’t need this book, “but despite the academic evidence, you still get the overwhelming population thinking the world is flat. Friedman did get back to Ghemawat, “and the most remarkable aspect of his response – of course, he did not agree with me – was that my data are narrow. Attack an academic like me for anything but poor data,” he asserts, wondering why people treat an almost 500-page book (by Friedman) as Gospel truth, “when it does not have a single figure, table, page of data to back its theories.”
Singapore “thinks it’s globalised," he continues, but nine out of its 10 trading partners are Asian, and most of its immigrants are Asian. “Overall, even for the Fortune Global 500, only 15 per cent of CEOs do not come from where the company’s headquarters are. Also, you move up the hierarchy quickly if you’re closer to the headquarters. Despite all the hoopla, multinational HR policies systematically make it an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ phenomenon. Less than 20 per cent of the top 200 managers of GE are from outside the US (despite 60 per cent of their sales, earnings from outside the US). Think of the average corporation if this is the case with GE,” he says.
Also look at Facebook, where 90 per cent of our friends are local, he says. “I did that exercise with myself. I lived in the US, India, Spain, Britain (working briefly with McKinsey) and France. A larger share of my contact list comes from these five countries. But it makes nonsense of the idea that when one travels a lot, one has instant connectivity. Don’t mistake connectivity with connectedness.”
He has been talking non-stop for the last one-and-a-half hour. It makes me feel guilty. I ask him if he enjoyed his meal. He says “yes” and opts for gulab jamun for dessert while I have kulfi. The indulgence appears out of sync with this lean physique. So I have to ask how he keeps in shape.
“I go six days a week to the gym and do 60 to 90 minutes of cardio.” And what about work-life balance? He tries not to take trips that are longer than two weeks to keep his family happy too. Incidentally, his daughter who is in the 11th grade, has written two pages in the last chapter of his book on what moving from Boston to Barcelona meant to her “since she objected to it thoroughly, but is now a convert”.
To round off the meal, he chooses espresso and elaborates on his global integration thesis. “I don’t see us arriving at either ‘zero’ integration or ‘complete’ integration. But the direction of movement matters a great deal,” he concludes. He also expresses concern over lack of job creation in the US, and its impact on the offshoring prospects of the Indian IT industry (his brother Sanjay Ghemawat is a Google Fellow who, along with his cubicle mate, did the programming for cloud). “Offshoring will remain but what concerns me is that US high-tech companies are much less willing to go to Capitol Hill to lobby for a loose visa regime. Protectionist surges are very strong. Things have the potential to get nasty,” he cautions.
It was time to end the long conversation. He had a seminar to attend before he boarded a flight that night to New York, where he planned to take some time out before heading east again to Barcelona. For him, the world is still very round.