Today’s Economic Times – Corporate Dossier supplement carried an interesting piece. It was about “When hard decisions need to be taken, Corporate India has one solution – fly in an expatriate”.
There are two possible impressions you may feel after reading the article. First one may be that “Why should we need foreigners to tell us what to do, Indian Managers and CEOs are equally capable”, but if you read the article carefully it says “one solution is to have expatriates”, it doesn’t say it is the only way. Second which I thought was that “expatriates don’t have the cultural baggage (not always bad in my opinion) Indian Managers will have to carry with an Indian team, because the team expects CEO to relate and understand them closer. This is not expected from an expatriate, as the news an expatriate is being appointed as a CEO itself signals (certainly wrong impression to carry) tough decisions are in coming. In India there seems to be too much personal emotions attached in everyday workplace – our work life balance is not always maintained distinctly”.
On the same issue, we need to remember that India Inc. cannot be different than what other market and countries are doing worldwide. Remember, we are in a Globalized (flat) world. You don’t need to compromise your core values and ethos, but at the same you will need to be smart and sensitive with prevailing conditions or get killed. And death happens faster in today’s corporate world than ever before.
As far as the above quote concerned is concerned, as a CEO myself I couldn’t have said it any better. You face it everyday with your team members not speaking up opennly, they are unnecessarily courteous and shy for all the wrong reasons.
On a more general note all these issues are not new, but for India – it is, because in living memory India hasn’t seen the consistent growth rate that is seeing for the last few years. We have to pay some price for this economic boom market. The other countries including Asian Tigers have gone through this before, but India is going through it now.
Please leave your thoughts in the comments below – do you agree with the above or not?