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The Conference Board Review® Article
The Indians Are Coming
How management thinkers from India are changing the face of American business.
By Des Dearlove , Stuart Crainer
Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove are the founders of Suntop Media and the recently launched London Business Press. Their most recent article in Across the Board was "Is U.S. Business Losing Europe?", the May/June cover story.
The rarified world of business thinking has been largely American terrain over the last hundred years. From Frederick Taylor with his stopwatch to the modern generation of gurus, Americans have monopolized business wisdom. Even the brief love affair with Japanese business practices in the early 1980s was intellectually colonized by U.S. thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming and Richard Pascale.
But change is in the air, blowing from a direction unforeseen a few years ago -- from the Indian subcontinent, where a new cohort of thinkers and ideas is emerging. Superstars include strategy guru C.K. Prahalad, itinerant executive coach Ram Charan, Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and Vijay Govindarajan of Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. London Business School's Sumantra Ghoshal, who died unexpectedly last year, would have placed high on anyone's list of key business figures.
While no one can predict the Indian thinkers' long-term impact on American business, there's no question that they are bringing a refreshing diversity to boardrooms and MBA programs. Just as the skills of Indian software programmers have rescued Silicon Valley firms desperate for workers, the fresh perspectives and unfamiliar backgrounds of Indian authors and executives may change the way that tomorrow's corporations run.
"The thinkers are often first-generation immigrants to the West. Almost all have had firsthand experience working in typically chaotic Indian businesses," says Gita Piramal, founder and managing editor of the Indian management magazine The Smart Manager. "Some, like Sumantra Ghoshal, worked in the public sector. C.K.'s first job was at Union Carbide's battery factory in Chennai, and he also worked in a company making pistons. Ram Charan was born and brought up as part of an extended family of thirteen that ran a shoe shop. All pulled themselves out of India, and many have a Harvard link."
Just below the established luminaries is a group of up-and-coming stars. The faculty rolls of the world's most prestigious B-schools contain an increasing number of academics with Indian roots. They include Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria, and Krishna Palepu at Harvard Business School; Jagdish Bhagwati at Columbia; Deepak Jain and Mohanbir Sawhney at Northwestern's Kellogg School; and Raj Reddy at Carnegie Mellon.
Considering the rising Indian enrollment in the world's MBA programs, more will undoubtedly follow. And this is not just an American phenomenon: This year, for the first time, INSEAD's biggest national contingent is Indian, and the Swiss school IMD has seen the number of Indian MBA students more than double since 2001. At the Barcelona B-school ESADE, Indian enrollment has quadrupled in the last four years.
"God does not discriminate across countries on intelligence. So if you say that 20 percent of people are smart, that means two hundred million smart Indians, and that's a lot of human capital," notes Tuck's Vijay Govindarajan. "At the same time, there is no doubt that Indians have had a disproportionate influence on management thinking and practice. As a percentage of the U.S. population, they are miniscule -- less than a single percent -- but then look at their representation in business schools. When I got my job at Tuck twenty years ago, I was the first Indian faculty member. Now it's not unusual to see 20 percent of faculty with Indian roots and connections. This year alone, we welcomed forty Indians into our MBA program."
And it's not just the next generation of executives -- Indians already occupy corner offices at many of the world's top corporations. Consider Arun Sarin at Vodafone; PepsiCo president and CFO Indra Nooyi; and the influence of Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley -- Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and now a leading venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Gururaj Deshpande, founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks; Kanwal Rekhi, entrepreneur and the main force behind TiE, a Silicon Valley network that promotes entrepreneurship among young people; and serial entrepreneur Romesh Wadhwani, founder and managing partner of the Symphony Technology Group. Other highly placed Indians include Rajat Gupta, McKinsey & Co. senior partner worldwide, and IMF economic counselor Raghuram Rajan.
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Return to the July/August 2005 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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