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When Renault India’s head of marketing, Gerald Porcario, completed his three-year stint in India a couple of weeks ago, he did not get the usual posting back to Paris or some Euro-zone market. Instead, he’s headed for another non-European developing country on the specific understanding that he leverages the learnings from the “super-complexities” of the Indian market in his new bailiwick.
Over 2004 and 2005, Pune-based Bharat Forge, one of the India’s largest producers and exporters of automobile components, acquired companies in such bastions of sophisticated engineering as Germany, Sweden, and the United States. It might have been expected that the Indian unit would draw on manufacturing knowhow from the overseas companies it acquired and not vice versa. In Bharat Forge’s case, however, it was a maintenance management practice developed in India that was implemented in its overseas units.
Till recently, the flow of management and strategy knowhow was one-way; it was India that absorbed business models, technology and management systems from foreign corporations and institutions. As India Inc raced to globalise and global companies sought to exploit the country’s low-cost talent pool, such industrialised-economy concepts as Kaizen, The Toyota Way, Six Sigma and so on gained currency.
Today, India is no longer just a destination for manufacturing, services and research in which corporations lever lower cost into a competitive advantage — it is also gaining traction as a source of best practices in management and strategy.
Ironically, this strength flows from the complexities of doing business in India, both in terms of the regulatory environment and scarce resources. “The market in India is very fast-moving and not particularly stable; so you need a fast and flexible approach to management, and Indians are used to dealing with ambiguities,” says Arindam Bhattacharya, managing director, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and co-author of the book Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything.
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