nuance intelligence

India, land of opportunity. Obscene wealth, abject squalor, and everything in between.

I got to spend a week in Pune and Mumbai on business a couple of months ago. It was such a refreshing change from America, where everyone is miserable because they can’t find a job. I talked to a couple of sharp young twenty-somethings who told me they change jobs (on purpose!) a couple of times a year just to meet new girls. It’s no problem finding new jobs – there are tons, and companies give out raises and bonuses every year just to try and keep workers from jumping ship too frequently.

So does this sound familiar to you?

Me neither.

It was fun thinking about how I’d deal with that novel situation – high attrition due to high demand for skilled workers and a relative shortage of those workers. If you’re going to outsource to India, how do you handle the HR/communications challenges?

Well, you could try to create a workplace that’s too cool to leave. My ideas:

1) Have the nicest office around. Plenty of American and European companies open offices in Mumbai or Hyderabad or Pune and, in an effort to make the most out of what’s probably a cost-saving effort in the first place, choose dank cinder block rooms and furnish them with crappy old furniture and computers. Wouldn’t you rather work someplace nice? The people I met who had been in their jobs for a year or more mostly worked in nice offices with windows, clean new desks and modern computers.

2) Offer a career path without a glass ceiling. If you shipped in a white guy from the States to be the local boss, and you don’t have a reasonable, visible plan in place to put a local in that job eventually, why should anyone ambitious stick around? Make sure there are advancement opportunities, including the training that’s needed to set Indians up for success in those higher-up jobs.

3) Make your workplace a community. It’s easy to leave a workplace behind when it’s a place that you go five times a week to earn your paycheck. It’s hard to leave a place where you know and like the people around you, and you are doing fun, important things with them that make your life better and richer. Set up get-togethers for everyone in the office and make sure they can bring their families to some events, and that there’s good food to eat. Coordinate community service efforts that are meaningful to your team – and ask them to define ‘meaningful’ and ‘service’.

4) Make your company a good place to work. I know, I’m coming back to Daniel Pink AGAIN but he makes such an important point: people aren’t only motivated by money. Your employees in India, like their colleagues in America or Europe, want to do interesting work with people who they like, and they want some ability to self-direct and choose what they do. It’s not all about the money for them, either (although money might be a bigger motivating factor than we’re used to in the States…see #5.)

5) Ask. What does an American consultant really know about any of this, anyway? You can find out what you need to know about how to get your Indian employees to stick around…by asking them. Don’t let your employee research stop at the ‘engagement survey.’ You might get some data that shows your Indian employees are less engaged than those at the home office, but was that a surprise? Do some qualitative research in India and take the time to find out about what really matters to your workforce, before they all leave for better dating opportunities elsewhere.

C.K. Prahalad is a respected author and professor at Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He and co-author M.S. Krishnan are promoting their new book, The Age of Innovation, in several ways, including a speaking tour and a blog in partnership with Information Week.

Their central thesis is “n=1, r=g.”  N=1 means that you’ve got to build products that each customer can customize to their use.  R=g means that resources are global, and you’ve got to have a ultra-flexible supply chain for your business.

What’s the nuance? Prahalad is the author of many influential strategy and management books, including The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, which recognized the economic opportunity among the poorest billion people.

Unfortunately for us (or at least our focus on entrepreneurs), most of his work is focused on multi-national corporations.  This review at Next Billion asks how to tie these new lessons into the global entrepreneurial market.

At the meta-level, it’s interesting to see Prahalad partnering with IW in a blog to kick this off.  I fear these guys will only blog the book into a profitable position on corporate best-seller lists, and then move on to the next idea.  But maybe they’ll learn from Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, who are still blogging strong on the Freakonomics / New York Times blog, which launched to great fanfare in 2004.

Shift Happens is a YouTube video highlighting the changes in the world, with a focus on the speed of the impact of globalization and digitization. Shift Happens has been viewed 4.5 million times on YouTube.

Watch Did You Know 2.0 (embedded here), is a refined version with some slightly different facts and emphasis. It’s only got 1.5 million YouTube views. The project was begun right here in Colorado, as part of a review of curriculum for 21st Century students.

There is a big gulf in America, and too few of us appreciate the speed and impact of these trends. The US graduates 1.3 million college students this year, while India graduates 3.1 million, all of whom speak English. China is poised to become the largest English-speaking nation in the world, and if we exported ALL of our jobs to China, they would still have an idle labor force.

If we think that the rules from 10 years ago, 5 years ago, even two years ago fully apply to our world today, then we are going to miss some critical changes that have a much more profound impact than the US election or Wall Street crash. But mainstream media still covers trivial, incremental changes in our culture. Who is telling you about the IT explosion in India? Who is documenting the carbon savings strategies in China? Not the Wall St. Journal or CNN.

Watch the video. Think about how the ‘exponential age’ is going to change your life, your business, your children. And then take two pills and call me on Monday.