Reviews for India's Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking On the World

The average rating for India's Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking On the World based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-25 00:00:00 Michael Perlman India Inc. on Global Acquisition Spree : As late as 2001, Indian outward investment was less than $1 billion. Instead, India, like all developing countries, was actively courting foreign investment into the country. By 2006, India had reached the tipping point. For the first time, Indian outward investment of $10 billion had outstripped foreign investment into India. At one point in time it was unimaginable that any Indian Company would pull off a multi-billion dollar acquisition of a company in the developed world or acquire a prestigious brand. Much of the recent world attention on India has focused on lower cost, high quality and large quantity of skilled Indian workforce. Through the outsourcing lens, India is seen as the world's back office. The debate has unfortunately been about outsourcing jobs from the developed nation to India, and has ignored how the Indian workforce is enhancing the competitiveness of global multinational companies. Observing the success of Indian outsourcing firms in exploiting the skilled worker advantage, foreign companies rushed to make India a critical part of their own value chain. Technology companies have been rather aggressive on this front in the hope of matching operating margins and cost structures that Indian outsourcing firms enjoy. When hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf coast in 2005, among the first outsiders to have an inkling of the extent of the disaster were a group of computer engineers from IBM Bangalore. They were assailed by thousands of alerts on their giant screens in the "command centre" as the storm wiped out systems half a world away. It is important to see India's evolving competitive advantage as more than simply low costs and a steady supply of call centre employees. Google, in 2004, chose Bangalore as the site for its first R&D centre outside the U.S. Joining hands with many other companies including Flextronics, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments and Yahoo! It is a historical inflection point. The transformation of Indian companies from domestic to global players went through three phases. In the pre reform phase, prior to 1991, Indian business was under shackles first from British colonialism and later, post independence, from socialist policies. In the second phase, post 1991 economic reforms necessitated a decade long corporate restructuring to make companies globally competitive. Now in the third phase, Indian companies are increasingly going global. Of course these time periods do not describe any particular company but rather the general thrust of Indian business. The corporate restructuring brought confidence to Indian business which helped transform them from domestic to global players. For an Indian company to go global requires, at some level, a leap of faith into the unknown. In the face of skepticism, the entrepreneur or owner made the decision to go for it despite what to unbiased observers may have seemed like long odds. Anand Mahindra, while perusing his MBA at Havard Business School, was disappointed that there were no case studies of Indian global brands. It fired his ambition and led him to decide that when he took over the family business, Mahindra would be a global brand. " we decided that we were not going to be in any business that wasn't global ... You're not safe if you're only at home. You can't compete in a small pool anymore" Indian companies are no longer the traditional low price bidders for foreign assets and companies, slow to appoint international advisors. Instead, they have become self assured and savvy investors, financing large deals and paying global prices. ArcelorMittal : Consolidating the globally fragmented Steel Industry " Today every Indian Businessman has the same opportunities as me. India is open. Indian business can go global, whether they live in India or not. It's a small world now" Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, Chairman and CEO, ArcelorMittal. " Our industry has been global from day one because when we all began in the IT industry, there was no Indian IT industry and thus there was no competition. But we knew we had a huge human capital advantage and that the fulfilment of that advantage had to be global. For people like us going global was not a choice" Nandan Nilekani, Cochairman and cofounder, Infosys Technologies Limited. " We have a business model that's completely counterintuitive. The concept and design come from Netherlands, the engineering from Germany, the commercialisation from Denmark. And the large scale application from India." Tulsi Tanti, Chairman and Managing Director, Suzlon Energy Limited. "In a free enterprise the community is not just another stakeholder in the business, but intact the very reason for its existence". Jamsetjee Tata, founder of the Tata group. " One hundred years from now, l expect Tata to be much bigger than it is now. More importantly, I hope the group comes to be regarded as being the best in India - best in the manner in which we operate, best in the products we deliver, and best in the value systems and ethics. Having said that, I hope that a hundred years from now we will spread our wings far beyond India." Ratan N. Tata, Chairman, Tata Group. " India today is in the mainstream of global consciousness. There is a new found sense of self-assuredness. The entrepreneurship and dynamism it's corporate houses have shown over the last five years has been and will continue to be remarkable. However, while the age of the Indian Multinational is undoubtedly here, we in India Inc. have a long way to go." Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group. Companies are a product of their environments, and India's global powerhouses must therefore grapple with both the advantages and the disadvantages of operating out of India. The Global Mind-set : one of the fundamental competencies needed in managers is a global view, and finding managers with a mindset like that is tough in India. For a truly global powerhouse, Indian talent will have to be more team oriented, process oriented and learning oriented. It is natural for most Indians growing up in a country of limited opportunities to be competitive. To score and not pass the ball. In global corporations, there is little that any individual can achieve without building teams. Teams, especially cross-national and cross-functional groups, are where most of the important work in multinational firms is done today. The intense competition for resources in India also teaches them that following the process may result in being stuck at the back of the line. As a result, even children find their parents constantly reinforce the ability to short-circuit processes and jump the queue. Successful Indians have learnt to be "entrepreneurial" However, to build large global organisations requires world class processes, be they for important functions, such as annual planning and budgeting, or more mundane operations, like travel. Experience indicates that it is a challenge to get employees in India to follow a process because everyone believes that they personally should be exempt from it. " I say it is a mindset more than anything else. I realised you come to a point of being a multinational when your reflexes, your thought processes, and the processes in your company are global - when your process reflexivity is global" Anand Mahindra. " "Cost arbitrage is one entry point but the continued growth of the sector will have to be based on quality " Azim Premji. " The need to work constantly to open the organisation's Windows to the wind of new ideas and a multiethnic workforce...It is relatively simple to address cross border issues pertaining to technology, finance, markets and products, but extremely difficult to cope with challenges relating to the human dimension. Being a true-blue multinational is only partly about geographical spread. It is more about a mindset that wants to leverage resources seamlessly, across geographical boundaries. It is a mindset that is eager to build unique capabilities to transcend the barriers of language and cultures to create value. It's about being global in attitudes without letting go of your roots" Kumar Mangalam Birla.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-17 00:00:00 Zsigmond Zsolt Muy interesante libro sobre algunas de las grandes empresas de India y su internacionalización. Se habla de empresas como Tata, Infosys o Mahindra.