When East and West Collaborate

Duke Corporate Education's collaboration with the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad relies on two teaching scholars with deep roots in the cultures of both West and East: Shailendra Mehta and Bibek Banerjee.

Mehta, the Regional Managing Director for India, the Middle East and West Asia, was most recently a Purdue University professor of management. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.A. from Delhi University's Delhi School of Economics, an M.Phil from Oxford and a B.A. from St. Stephen’s College. 

Banerjee, an associate director at Duke CE, is also currently a professor of marketing at IIM-Ahmedabad. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in economics from Purdue University’s Krannert Graduate School of Management after obtaining his BSc (with Honors) from the University of Calcutta.

Duke CE Director of Marketing Paul Baerman sat down with the two to learn more about the intersections of East and West.

PB: If you had one piece of advice that you could give an Indian company that was growing and going global, what would it be?

SM: The single most important limitation in India is good managers. In this age of globalization, capital is rarely in short supply; India with its billion-plus people has no shortage of manpower. So the critical need for India is a supply of good middle and senior managers. That is the Number One issue. There aren’t enough of them. Somebody estimated that if you look at mid-size to large companies, in the next five years India will need about 5,000 CEOs. Five thousand. And if you multiply that by a factor of 10 for senior management, you can understand the size of the challenge that India faces.

 

BB: I would say be mindful of the entry cost of [the] global market. If you are to build a global brand, it is easier to manage the technical or engineering specifications of the products, or the internal specifications: it is easier to manage the back end. The major entry barrier is the mindset of a completely new entrant from somewhere like India building a brand globally. The kind of marketing dollars required, the kind of marketing effort, cost, and the marketing challenge in establishing an Indian brand or an Indian company as a brand in the minds of an American customer or a British customer is one of the biggest challenges.

PB:  Let me turn my question around:  if you were giving advice to a Western business going into India, what are some of the key things? Where do people often stumble?

SM: The first thing to remember about India is that India is different. Everything you learn elsewhere is partly applicable but partly not applicable, and it is figuring out what is applicable and what is not that is the real challenge. Really being sensitized to the social, economic, political and in many cases the religious contexts of how different issues are framed, how different issues get resolved, those are extremely important. India is a classic case of how managers need to be global in their orientation, sensitive to local cultures, aware of the rich historical context in which they will find themselves in India, and of course sensitive to the immensely complex political environment.

Being aware of that larger context so that you can manage it, so that you can be sensitive to it, so that you can be responsive to what are in many cases the very genuine concerns of opponents of globalization, that is the key challenge. And then of course there are regulatory issues that you ought to be aware of. There are local cultural practices, the general domain awareness that one needs to have in any new domain; that of course has to be in the forefront.

BB: [Assuming] that what’s true globally is going to be true in India is a huge question, because in my experience India is a market which is probably the most complex in the world. You would see extremely savvy customers, extremely well-developed customers with their tastes and preferences and their behavior – “gourmet” customers – and you would also see people on the other side of the spectrum altogether. You [should] expect that, in India, extremes in any dimension are going to coexist harmoniously.

For companies who have global operations or global clients – who have experience in transacting with clients who are not from their culture – there isn’t too much difference. A lot of Indian organizations or Asian organizations [have] similar processes and [a] similar culture of values and performance orientation. But there are some subtle differences. In the negotiation process, for instance, I tend to find that a lot of loosely defined time gets spent up front, from the Eastern culture, in understanding your would-be collaborator. There could be a lot happening which may seem unrelated to the immediate business transaction at hand, and it could be kind of frustrating from the [Western] point of view. Talking about your family or asking you relatively personal questions that you otherwise wouldn’t, like: “So how many kids do you have? What are they doing? Which school are they going to? Who are their friends?” You would typically find they get very personal very soon as opposed what we are used to here in the west. You could feel that these are really nosy questions, but that is very, very common.

That goes into this context of trying to get a more holistic picture of who you are, what you stand for, what your value is in life, which enables them to decide for themselves what kind of relationship they are going to build with you: is it going to be a one-off relationship or is it going to be a long-lasting relationship?

The other sidebar would be that [Indian business executives] are also extremely flexible in accommodating a relationship and giving them space to develop. You will often find that your Indian partners would actually go way out of the way to really make you feel comfortable.

SM: The notion of personal space is very different, the notion of privacy is very different, the notion of a holiday – what constitutes a holiday or a vacation – is also very different.  For example it is perfectly okay to call Indian managers late at night. It is perfectly okay to call them on weekends. People have a very different orientation in that sense. There isn’t a clear demarcation between work and family life – they are intertwined a lot more. Obviously there are exceptions. This is not to suggest that nobody takes vacations where they turn off phones, but in general the norms are quite different. So I think part of this whole domain of doing business in India is being aware of and sensitive to these issues.

PB: I find those examples intriguing. A Western manager might hear that and say that’s unhealthy, that work-life balance isn’t being met. From a different frame, it is not only normal but in fact it is seen as a right way to be.

SM:  Right, but see the other interesting thing is that, that also brings along with it a very different demographic orientation. Female labor force participation is not as high in India as it is in the United States; in general, women don’t participate in the labor force in the same way as men do. India is probably 20-30 years behind the United States in terms of the number of working women in professional arenas, and even there, there are huge support structures. There are grandparents, uncles, aunts that people can rely upon, so that allows Indian managers to be available in a way that would be unthinkable [in Western culture]. 

To use my own example: My parents come and stay with us for long periods of time if they are not [living] in the same city—and of course if we were in the same city, it would be perfectly natural for them to live with us. That allows a very different kind of support that would be available to my son. If my wife wanted to work in the evenings, for example, or on the weekend, or indeed if I were to want to do that, that is the kind of support that would be practically non-existent in the Western context but would be totally normal and natural in the Indian context.

PB: Regarding the fundamental differences and ways of thinking between East and West, how can the business cultures learn from each other to become better global citizens?

BB: [In] western transactions, you want to sequentialize a set of steps in order to reach a goal or objective, and you want to have a finite time limit and so on, but with Eastern culture, there could be a lot of back and forth. There could be lot of time spent on seemingly tangential pursuits, [and] the structure of the negotiation may not seem as linear as it typically does in the Western context.

There is a tendency to look at all possible ramifications of a specific relationship, sometimes even at the expense of the finiteness of the time limit. It is different in that the way a contract is arrived at may actually involve many more iterations and back-and-forth across the cultures.

[In Eastern transactions], they would constantly change things or explore something unexplored before. Their attitude toward time is far more flexible, and the assumption on their part is that the same level of flexibility exists on the other side.  So one needs to be sensitive to this fact, [especially] in the case where we are trying to build long-term relationships.

Let us take our own example of Duke CE and IIM-A.  The whole process of understanding each other’s expectations went through a set of iterations which probably still hasn’t stopped, and new things will keep cropping up. A lot of care gets expended, and it is fairly participative – a lot of people at various levels [got] engaged in evaluating a possible partnership and collaboration.

PB:  Given the global business trends, what will look different a decade from now in the global business landscape?

SM:  The global business landscape will be altered very dramatically because of the rise of India and China, for sure, and the BRIC economies in general – Brazil, Russia, India and China. If I were to focus my attention on India at the moment, how would India look different? The infrastructure is going to be a lot better than what it is today – in terms of power, in terms of roads, in terms of water; also in terms of new cities which have been planned. People are dreaming really big dreams, essentially planning self-contained cities built by the private sector with infrastructural global standards, with housing and office space to something approaching global standards. This is happening very dramatically, in larger cities and some of the smaller cities as well.

At the same time, there is a segment of the population which is not mobile, which does not have fungible skills, which is not fluent in English, and that is the majority of the population. They are being left behind, and so there is a fierce conversation happening in India at the intersection of these two worlds. These communities – which have been left behind to some extent – are politically very powerful. One of the interesting things about India – the exact opposite of the trend in most of the rest of the world – is that the poor participate in the political process at a higher rate than the rich, so their voice is heard at election time. If they are unhappy about something, it gets reflected in the political process. That makes for a very interesting dialogue because they ultimately have to be taken along.