B - School Events

 

Annual Leadership Summit 2004
At ISB Hyderabad
Excerpts from Panel Discussions
December 10, 2004

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Mr. Clayton Locke, Vice President and Managing Director, Sapient Corporation (India). talked about the challenges facing the Indian IT outsourcing industry. Mr. Clayton said, "It takes more than programmers to solve business problems that lead to sustainable competitive advantage." Also, Mr. Clayton stressed on the fact that the various quality processes like CMM restrict creativity for the Indian companies. Also, there are cultural and language barriers which make the task challenging. He said that most of the IT projects fail due to reasons like lack of executive support, lack of user involvement, lack of experienced project management, lack of clear business objectives and poor scope management. "Typical approach to off shoring does not address these reasons for failure. In fact, off shoring can make these materially worse."

The second speaker was Mr. Pramod Bhasin, President & CEO, GECIS Global. He said, "The objective of GECIS is to tap into core competency of each and every country we tap into." He stressed that most of the companies fail when it comes to managing across borders mostly due to soft issues. As per Mr. Pramod, "The fact is that the most important reason behind failure of the global initiative in terms of managing across borders is soft issues." These are important issues which are not taught either in business schools or companies we work for. Pramod also talked about the culture, people, business frameworks and practices and global perspective that an organization requires to successfully manage across borders.

The third speaker was Mr. G. V. Prasad, Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd. He said,"To build a global company, you need a strong customer value proposition and that cannot be just cost. This value proposition can be values that your customers could not extract from your competitors."

Mr. Prasad said that access to capital, strong and enabling work culture and talent management are some important ingredients that go into making a good international organization. Right organizational structure and organizational learning are key success factors of a multinational organization.

The last speaker of the panel discussion was Mr. Alan Rosling, Executive Director, Tata Sons Limited. "India has enormous cross cultural diversity. Indians do superbly well when they go overseas but mostly in entrepreneurial businesses. Now we have to learn how to manage grown up businesses. And I am sure we will go out and win."

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Contributed by -
Ms. Bhuvana Ramalingam,
Director - Communications,
Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.