In today’s blog I will share some up-to-the-minute information I learned yesterday at the Emerging India Summit held at Emory University. Although the focus was India, discussions also included other emerging markets and the results grabbed my attention. Read on to find out ten things you might not know about developing markets.
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m about to shut down my office, but I wanted to end the week by sharing some brief thoughts that enhanced my perspective on emerging markets. Now keep in mind that statistics often draw suspicion because people wonder how accurate the numbers are and what the agenda is behind them. What I’m sharing here I do not claim to be the “truth,” but rather the perspectives of highly respected academics, researchers, and business people.
1.) According to Dr. Jagdish Sheth, respected author and Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, the generation gap in India is only about eight years, which means that not only do the worldviews of parents and children diverge, but also those of older sister and younger sister!
2.) Dr. Sheth also shared that India’s biggest asset is entrepreneurship, which is not limited by gender, religion, or even literacy. In fact, many billionaires in India are college dropouts. India’s true power of innovation comes from entrepreneurs.
3.) According to Kumar Kantheti, Director of Market Research for Shiongi Pharma, India has the 2nd most FDA-approved pharmaceutical plants in the world.
4.) According to researcher Vivek Wadhwa (check out his very provocative website here), the perception of a shortage of engineers in the USA is a myth. In 2004, his research states, the USA graduated more engineers than India. China is graduating far more than either country.
5.) Mr. Wadwha also states that 52.4% of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants.
6.) Chile has started an innovation project where they are importing 1000 entrepreneurs from all over the world to just come spend time together, no strings attached – innovation and sharing is the only thing on the agenda.
7.) According to Meera Shankar, Ambassador to the USA from India, the number of cell phone subscribers in India has almost reached 800 million.
8.) Many developing countries have skipped the PC and gone straight to the cell phone. Ambassador Shankar told a story about the man she buys vegetables from in India. He sits out on the street selling his wares. One day he said to her “If you ever need vegetables delivered to your home you can call my office.” He pointed to his cell phone. That was his office.
9.) Brazil’s GDP is the size of Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina combined.
10.) I’ll end with a great quote from Dr. Jagdish Sheth about the Internet revolution: “If I want to know what I did yesterday I just Google myself!”
Stay tuned to our blog as we explore cultural differences between Germany and the USA, and much more.
In today’s blog we will use the movie Jerry Maguire to explore how cultures outside of our own decrease our struggles and enhance our strengths. The result of working abroad or on mixed-culture teams is a more “complete” you, a you that’s ready to thrive into today’s market of global collaboration.
For those who haven’t seen the movie, Jerry Maguire is the story of a sports agent searching for more meaning in his work. Along this journey he develops a complex romantic relationship with his assistant, Dorothy and a deep friendship with his main client, an outspoken football player named Rod. Throughout the movie, Jerry struggles with his fear of getting close to those he loves and therefore stays stuck in his shortcomings. His friends must force him to confront those fears and find the deeper meaning he is looking for.
In the scene shown above, as Jerry rides the elevator with Dorothy a couple begins to speak to each other in sign language. When Jerry wonders aloud what they are saying, Dorothy interprets for him. The man had said, “You complete me.”
I recently returned from a twenty-one day trip to India when a colleague from England called to see how my journey went. Aside from the stomach bug and the nineteen-hour flight home, I told him, it was sublime! Then he asked me the question that I’ve heard many times before.
“Vicki, why do you go to India? I know it’s a fascinating country, but why do you keep going back over and over?”
I’ve always struggled to answer this question before but suddenly I saw Jerry Maguire’s face in my head. For the first time in my life I knew what to say.
“This is going to sound corny,” I said to my colleague, “but I go because India completes me.”
Everyone has strengths that can double as struggles. Psychologist Carl Jung wrote about this duality, saying that your gifts, if not given the proper outlets, can also become your shadows. For example, I tend to strive hard for perfection, especially within myself. This is a gift in that I pay close attention to detail and my clients get the benefit of my desire to do things right. Perfectionism becomes a shadow, however, when you experience deep disappointment in yourself for not achieving something that is in fact impossible. Let’s face it, a perfect human does not exist.
When I go to India, this shadow is tempered. A large part of the population of India believes in reincarnation, a philosophy that does not lend itself to perfectionism. The belief that death is a comma rather than a period fosters tolerance, accommodation, and a sense that if something isn’t perfect this time, another chance will come around. Those who do not share a belief in reincarnation are also influenced by India’s cyclical culture; even the roads are laid out in roundabouts and twists. In addition, India is an emerging economy, so logistics don’t always function perfectly. Roads might close at a moment’s notice and power may not be available during your big presentation.
In India, I take my focus away from perfection and place it more firmly on relationships, improvisation, diversity of thought, and acceptance. I feel less stressed when I let India take the burden of where I fall short. In other words, India completes me.
When we travel or work with members of a multicultural team right here at home, we open ourselves to this wholeness. Let me provide some other examples from around the world.
From Germany I learned to take very direct feedback on my documentation without being offended. Because the style of communication tends to be more explicit than the southern USA where I live, when I worked in Germany I got to improve my writing and software skills in ways that may not have happened here.
From China I experienced what it feels like to be in a language minority. I remember how scary it was to leave the hotel, wondering if you knew enough Chinese to get you back once you wandered off. I needed to know what that felt like in order to encourage my clients to be patient with non-native speakers of their language.
From Nepal I learned that you do not have to have a long list of business achievements to be worthy as a human being. I had always struggled with the “Am I doing enough?” question that plagues the American psyche. Nepalese culture places a high value on relationships, especially family, and I spent many evenings there on a porch drinking tea and sitting in silence with my host family. This was a unique kind of happiness.
From California, my home town which I’ve lived away from for sixteen years, I learned to be informal in my style and put people at ease, a skill I use a lot with anxious clients.
The list goes on, and you don’t have to travel to get similar benefits. The people working in your office from other cultures can provide many options for navigating business and life. Recent studies show that if we can leverage these differences and augment our strengths we can significantly improve our global collaboration and business growth potential. Most importantly, however, on a personal level we can let the world complete us. India, you had me at namaskar!
In today’s blog: I return to the Howrah Station in Kolkata, India, scene of the infamous Calcutta Railway Riot, for the first time in thirteen years. There’s even a video! We explore how the city has changed, and important lessons to be learned from India.
Even the name of the city has changed. I could hardly believe when I landed in Kolkata last week, a place I knew thirteen years ago as Calcutta, and the first city in India I ever visited. For those not familiar with the story of the Calcutta Railway Riot, click here to read: Calcutta Railway Riot. I returned here last month to work with the Indian counterpart of one of my U.S. based clients, and from the moment I landed in the airport I could feel the change, not just in Kolkata but in myself. The city and I were like mirrors of each other, and I wanted to see my relationship with India through her lens.
So much in India revolves around the circular, from the roundabouts to the wheel of kalachakra (meaning the wheel of time) to reincarnation. In 1998 when I arrived in the city I was alone. The airport looked like a small convenience store, with the same man unloading my luggage and checking my passport. I got a taxi that sunny October day and rode into town, seeing India for the first time. My mouth hung to the ground as we weaved through farmer’s fields, cows decorated for Durga Puja festival (Hindu festival celebrating the goddess Durga), ox carts spilling vegetables and nearly causing a twelve car collision, women in red and green saris begging for milk with grins on their faces, crowds so thick I could barely distinguish one set of limbs from another, oily pastries being cooked over open flames on the side of the road, and so much more. All I could do back then was think in images, not words, because words failed me. That was the beginning of my marriage to India, and it was about to come full circle.
Last month when I once again got off the plane in Kolkata and collected my luggage, this time from a carousel rather than a gritty man with a hat, I thought about India’s circles. Here I was about to meet my client to help build bridges between their U.S. and India offshore partnership, in the very city where I caused a riot. I could not wait.
I walked outside into Kolkata’s thick air, a mixture of haze and humidity that nearly blots out the sun, and my client’s representative in charge of me was waiting, a lively woman named Anindita who I now call my friend. She welcomed me to Kolkata and we made our way to the hotel in the outskirts of the city. Gone were the farmer’s fields and most of the ox carts, at least in that area; they had been replaced by massive construction of malls, hotels, and tech centers. I would not have recognized the city if I didn’t know where I was, and Anindita talked about the explosion of change. She had always lived in Kolkata and had a fondness for it that I admired. We agreed to take a tour together the next day and she would show me her beloved city from a soulful perspective, one where she herself would discover new things.
The next morning I went and visited my client at the office and we had an interesting discussion. He told me that in Kolkata, many people have a mentality of challenging themselves. They can do a repetitive task or job for awhile but then restlessness sets in and they want something more. This made sense to me, as many of the country’s great minds come from Kolkata, including Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. We sat lost in the exchange of thought and time flew by until Anindita came to pick me up for our roam around Kolkata.
From that moment on, I felt like Kolkata was a giant swimming pool of color and adventure and that I had just dived in. We spent the whole day and evening zig-zagging through the city by car, winding through small neighborhood streets with people on the edge of the curb cooking, women with dark skin against bright saris sitting on blankets, bus drivers and pedestrians shouting at each other, and cars coming within millimeters of us at the intersections. Unlike yesterday, I felt as though I recognized every street from thirteen years ago, and it seemed that very little had changed. Kolkata was as lively and gritty as ever, and I couldn’t stop thinking about who I was here back in 1998. How much had I really changed?
Our first stop was Belur Math, a place paying homage to Guru Ramakrishna Paramhansa who preached unity of all religions. No photographs were allowed here so I cannot share images with you, but I can tell you that this was an impeccably clean, peaceful place with white and yellow flowers everywhere. We removed our shoes and walked inside, filing past Ramakrishna’s statue as people prayed and security guards waved them on after a brief rest in front of the altar. The temple overlooked the Hooghly River and small steamer boats with recycled tires hanging off the sides chugged by carrying people to the other side.
Our faithful driver was waiting when we came out of Belur Math and we began to worm our way back into the snarled traffic. As we were talking about our next stop, Anindita suddenly looked up and her eyes got big.
“That’s the Howrah Bridge!” she cried. “We’re not far from the train station!”
I could hardly believe my ears. I had shared with her my dream of returning to the scene of the “crime” and the place where I first woke up to the fact that I had a lot to learn about India. My hotel and the client office, however, were miles away and I had been told the journey could take close to three hours in traffic. But in our random wandering around the city, we had gotten there the circular way. Of course.
The driver let us off and I held my breath, wondering if I would recognize the station and the riot site. Within seconds, I did. Howrah station had hardly changed at all. Just like thirteen years ago, groups of rural workers from the state of Bihar sat together waiting for their trains. Men carrying giant baskets and other loads walked in all directions, and passengers ran to make their departure times. The trains were more colorful than I remember, but I could almost see my friend Anke and I attempting to calm the crowd of yelling, brawling rioters.
Anindita got caught up in the excitement and we walked around in awe of just being there. I spotted the area where I believe the riot occurred and charged Anindita with taking a short video of me on my iPhone. Just as I was talking, a policeman came over to us and said, “Hey, don’t do that!” I put the camera down and we cracked up in laughter. This is why the video got cut off! Apparently I can’t come to Howrah station without getting into trouble.
What struck me the most was who I had become in those thirteen years and how much I still loved India. That circle had come around, from riot to cross-cultural consultant. One could argue that the consultant role would never have come without the riot. The police might disagree.
After much reflection Anindita and I continued on to the New Market. By now it was dark and the market was leaping to life with vendors selling snacks, brooms, toys, and everything else you can imagine. We bought some clothes and walked around, then talked about our day over coffee. Anindita, like me, was a true adventurer. She always saw Kolkata with new eyes. Sometimes she would take “blind tours” of the city, just getting on a random bus and not knowing where she would end up. We were global soul mates.
What I learned from my eye-opening time in Kolkata was that the city’s real soul lies underneath the surface, and that sometimes you have to go in a circle just to get where you are. I will always be grateful to the city for being my gateway to India, and to a whole new life.
