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to India on a reporting trip for BusinessWeek magazine. I spent a week in Bangalore doing research for two articles I was later to write for BusinessWeek’s special double issue, China and India: What You Need to Know Now, which was to be published in August of 2005. When I returned to my office from India that June, I had a phone mail message from an editor at McGraw-Hill Professional Books. She said they wanted to publish a book about the rise of the Indian tech industry. Would I be interested in authoring it?
The answer was a resounding “yes!” I had been covering the tech industry since I moved from Connecticut to Silicon Valley in 1989, and, after moving back to New York in 1999, I had started to cover tech services. In 2000 or so, I began to get visits from people I had never heard of before, from companies I had never heard of before - Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Vivek Paul of Wipro and others. They introduced me to the world of the Indian tech up-and-comers. By the time the McGraw-Hill editor asked me if I’d be interested in writing a book about the rise of Indian tech, I had already started to think about it as my topic.
We quickly agreed that I would write the book. The next issue was how to structure it. McGraw-Hill is generally in favor of telling a story through one person or company, and that seemed like a good approach here. We could tell the India tech story through the example of a single company. But which company would it be? Tata Consulting Services was the biggest of the Indian tech services companies. Infosys had the best profit margins. But I chose Wipro, the third largest company, for a variety of reasons. One of the main reasons was I thought the story of Azim Premji, Wipro’s chairman, was quite compelling. He had gone to study at Stanford University in the 1960s but had been called home to run his family business, a vegetable oil company, after his father died unexpectedly. Premji had known nothing of business, but he studied and learned quickly and, even when the company was small and struggling, he applied the latest in global management thinking to run it. He was also quick to pursue new opportunities. After IBM left India in the late 1970s, Premji quickly got into the computer business. And, when India opened its borders to foreign computer makers again in the early 1990s, Premji quickly shifted to pursue providing software services for the world’s multinational corporations. If the foreign tech companies could come into India, he figured he could go out to the world.
The Indian tech services outfits had gotten their big break in 2000, with the Y2k glitch. The world’s corporations needed thousands of programmers to help them modify their software programs to deal with the turn of the millennium. The Indians were ready, willing, and able to help out. At first, India was seen as a labor arbitrage play. Software programming could be delivered at about 20% of the labor cost in the United States. But, as I began researching my book, it became clear that while labor arbitrage was a necessary element, the Indian companies’ success depended on other capabilities as well. In order to succeed on the global stage, they had to be superior in some ways to their Western competitors. They aggressively developed their capabilities in programming processes, quality disciplines, HR techniques, customer satisfaction, and innovation. My book became an exercise in explaining how they do it.
But the book was more than that. I tried to do a bunch of things in Bangalore Tiger. It’s not only an explanation of how Wipro and the other Indian tech services outfits do what they do. It’s also a warning to Western companies and individuals that they had better wake up to some changes in the world. It’s a guidebook for corporations that are thinking about outsourcing programming tasks or back office processes. And it’s a guide for executives in emerging countries, laying out for them how to build global companies. I tell people who have read Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat that Bangalore Tiger is the book that goes deep on the business aspects of the themes that Friedman writes about. Friedman tries to wake up the West to a changed world. I tell Western business people what to do about it. The answer is they have to become just as efficient, just as relentless about quality and customer satisfaction, and just as global as the Indian tech giants. In this context, global means accessing talent anywhere in the world where it can be found.
Researching and writing Bangalore Tiger was an interesting process. I began researching in earnest in September of 2005. I would wake up every morning at 5:30 and walk into my home office (where I had left the PC on) and either make or receive a call with India. Most mornings I did a single interview; some I did two. Then I’d shower and dress and head off to my day job at BusinessWeek. I also interviewed executives from Wipro and other Indian firms when they came to New York. This routine continued until November 20, 2005, when I at last signed my book contract with McGraw-Hill and began writing. It took two weeks of vacation time at the end of 2005 and three weeks in early 2006 for writing, but I either wrote or reported for the book every day as well. In fact, between November 20 and the following April 7, when I finished the first draft, I didn’t have a single day off. That’s tough for an old guy like me.
But the effort was worth it. My book was published in October in the United States and in November in India. I spent a month in India from November 11 to December 8, 2006 – a combination of vacationing with my wife, working for BusinessWeek, and doing publicity events for Bangalore Tiger. I really enjoyed doing readings of the book in India, and the Q&A sessions afterwards. Indians are justifiably proud of their successful tech industry, and I’m happy to tell them how it really works.
On my travels, people ask me: “Are you going to write another book about India?” I don’t have any plans to do so. But India is going through a remarkable period of rapid change right now, and there might well be another book for me in it. So, stay tuned. In the meantime, if you want to engage in a group conversation about the themes raised in Bangalore Tiger, go to the BusinessWeek web site (www.businessweek.com) and check out my blog, Bangalore Tigers. It seems like there’s always a lively discussion going on.
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Steve Hamm is a senior writer in BusinessWeek's information technology section. Hamm first joined BusinessWeek in the Silicon Valley bureau and was then an associate editor in New York. Prior to BusinessWeek, Hamm was an editor and writer for PC Week, the San Jose Mercury News, the New Haven Register, and other publications. Hamm is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University.
Courtesy: www.businessweek.com
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Bangalore Tiger
by Steve Hamm
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Our Price Rs. 299.00
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*USD 6.75
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The World is Flat
by Thomas Friedman
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