It was May 2004, when I was dreaming on a sleepy Bangalorean Sunday, one of my friends (I really don’t remember who) called me and said – “Dude, Lucent is hiring off-campus. Come and write the test”, I really wanted to get through it because of the legacy it was associated with.
I was 6 I guess, when I watched a play at school and wanted to do theater sometime in my life. As I grew up, I watched theater, performed in a couple of my own and while being groomed into an engineer (then, we were not yet a commodity), we left behind a little legacy for our juniors to take pride in.
But now, when I look around me in 2010, there doesn’t seem to be a desire to create something new anymore. How many of us hear business ideas that don’t have a “low cost” formula which is dipped in a viscous mixture of obviousness & mundaneness? The great ‘NRN strategy’ of reducing the cost of operations, has, if you ask me, no deficiency/ weakness, as long as it is executed well. Put a few well bred – fed, educated, styled executives over it and we have the Accentures and IBMs of the world, not to forget, the latter are already as Indian as they can get. The ones that will get eliminated (taken over, organic death) are the ones in-between; ones that offer no more value than the Indian firms and that originate from structurally inefficient parts of the world (a.k.a Europe). That’s why I had my own reasons of disappointment when Lucent got sold off (they called it ‘merger of equals’ though) to Alcatel in 2006.
But, don’t we all have jobs? Don’t we have great new companies built in Bangalore – which are incredible achievements by determined engineers. Yes we do. But, one of the earlier selling points of sourcing work from ‘cheaper’ locations in India (lets not deny this for heaven’s sake), was “Mr. American CIO, you can return the saved money to the CFO, who will in-turn give you the bonus you need. The CFO will then use it to grow the top-line of the American company”.
The worry is, this great selling point are speed breakers to the momentum needed for innovation; maybe not very visibly so. But, isn’t sourcing work from cheaper countries an easier way to increase earnings of corporations than growing top-line via creative destruction? Imagine you have been a CEO/ CFO of a corporation post the 1995s. Don’t you always have the cushion to source work from outside the USA. And why would you want to earn money (investors are happy aren’t they?)the hard way? If we agree with the previous few lines, would you be as big a visionary (assuming such swear by creativity) as your predecessors were? Well, I am in the process of seeing if data suggests whether this guesswork has any sense.
But, what is far more threatening is in India. Potentially creative Indians are now happy being straitjacketed into Gen Y servants of the world. Its far more easier to be a dedicated servant than be a master who can show a new path. The master’s life is built on risks, creativity, failures and an unfailing spirit to manage the future better. There are a few exceptions, but a few of us are fighting to become one ourselves. It would be a lot more easier if there were more who did want to be exceptions.
When we climbed mountains in the Western Ghats in Karnataka, we did it for the happiness in seeing what others could only “see by clicking on the Internet”. The early morning mist, the monsoon rain, the green that touches one’s heart, the fresh air filling the lungs, the campfires which when doused – one would learn that ‘starlight’ is not just a mere poetic word. Din’t we love it when we explored?
Naren
July 2, 2010
CEOs need to revisit Porter’s Best Paper Ever – What is Strategy?
His basic point is Operational Effectiveness is NOT strategy. Strategy rests on making choices & trade-offs and trying to differentiate oneself. But, today, most organizations pride themselves as being unrecognizable from competition!
Krishna
July 7, 2010
Super point.
Take a look at this. Someone written something similar on July 2nd.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/opinion/06smith.html
Naren
July 9, 2010
Awesome article. Myopia of Quarterly Profits!
From my personal experience, I can say that sales is given more prominence than strategy because of quarterly targets!
krishnachaitanyaraghav
July 10, 2010
Sales are to be given more prominence. I have a problem with giving prominence to cost savings.
Vinay
October 13, 2010
Creativity is dead nowadays … All people talk about is numbers, cost saves and topline growth … Sometimes ppl need to take a risk … It may bomb but yes, it’s a learning … And from the view of IT sector what I have from the discussions with my friends, trust me … We are going no where in creativity on that side. The only bit I see of it is Ad Media, which is also dying by the day … Hard to create an “Apple” which brings out something revolutionary and market changing …
KC – Agree on sales to be given prominence, but the only thing at the risk of being commoditized (like how you’ve mentioned Engineers to have become now
) ?
krishnachaitanyaraghav
October 14, 2010
Its slightly deeper than that. A reasonable way to measure the success of business is by numbers. So one cannot get away from it. My point in the post is more to do with how one arrives at those numbers. What those numbers mean.
What is not creativity is how several companies use the same low cost model to grow revenues in India and cut costs in the rest of the world; how every engineer in an IT company writes substandard code to fix a problem; how people like me write substandard blogs;
Its about the complete disregard to being creative in how one lives his/her life – at every moment. Dullness and the ordinary is the norm we have gotten used to being associated with.