Item:
I have encountered gracious hosts before, but none like these. As I enter the main building of Amity Business School in Delhi, I immediately come upon a just-polished floor, and a spectacle. Art students have meticulously arranged thousands of flower petals to spell out a welcome to me, against a eight-foot by eight-foot floral background. Surrounding that message, they have created perfect facsimiles of the covers of my books.
During my two-hour visit, they present me a bouquet of 24 flowers; an Amity tie, cap and polo shirt,; and a six-inch-tall jade model of the Taj Mahal in a velvet-lined wooden carrying case.
The students -- none wearing earphones, as none require translation -- laugh at the same remarks that evoke laughter from Americans, and at precisely the same millisecond. Not even nuance is lost in translation.
Item:
The IRS reports that 100,000 tax returns filed by Americans in 2004 were done in India.
"May you live in interesting times," a Chinese proverb wishes the lucky person, and India is making our times just that. With the help of a PR firm, the Indian government has declared "India Rising," and with good reason. As item one suggests, India's young are fluent in English, smart and uniquely gracious. This makes them ideally suited to perform millions of service jobs currently handled by Americans, for one-fifth of what Americans charge.
But as item two suggests, these services go beyond call centers, which if outsourced from America entirely would -- as at least one benefit -- eliminate one of our country's most disliked and worst-paying jobs ("cubicle hell" as a typical short-termer describes it). And they reach beyond engineering, where India boasts some of the most talented minds anywhere.
Consider accounting, as item two encourages you to. For a routine client filing that may comprise 20 percent of that firm's business, can a CPA firm not outsource that job to Bangalore, effectively pay 75 to 80 percent less for that subcontractor's services than it would pay an employee, and thereby reduce its total cost of doing business at least 15 percent? Can it afford not to factor in outsourcing on every bid, knowing that the other firms will, too?
Consider legal services. With law firm clients screaming "Charge us less!" -- how can the firm resist using Indian law graduates, trained in American law, to perform legal research and draft routine motions and legal documents?
Consider market research -- indeed, all research (phone surveying, news reporting, etc.). How much of the information currently provided by Reuters, Thomson Financial and D&B can be provided by a team of researchers working in a suburb of Mumbai?
Consider, as I must, graphic design. Can I charge clients $1,500 for the somewhat routine but necessary design detail on a new name and corporate logo, when the same work might be performed in India and express-mailed to me for $300? (Please, don't call right now to ask.)
Only a year ago during my visit there, the world appeared different. The Hindus Business Line reported I "caused quite a stir" with my "unconventional style and ideas." The biggest stir came when I told the audience of 75 top Mumbai-based executives that outsourcing services might prove to be another American business fad, the trend du jour. Services are predicated on relationships, my reasoning went, and the 11,000-mile gap between Mumbai and Boston ultimately would drive Americans back home.
That hasn't happened, and it won't -- and shouldn't. The Indians are bright, ambitious, gracious and productive; they allow all of my clients the opportunity to work better, charge less and earn more.
Which suggests an irony: preventing American firms from outsourcing these services looks un-American. We are free, and the tenets of market capitalism exhort us to work more productively and economically. This isn't simply sound business practice; it's morally preferable to the alternative, which is sticking our clients with inferior products because some legislators insist that we must.
Will this phenomenon grow? Will India, with China, surge ahead of us as an economic power and traumatize us -- given how accustomed we are to thinking of ourselves as Number One?
It's easy to reach that conclusion by succumbing to Straight Line Fallacy -- seeing an upward trend and projecting that the line won't flatten. At this point, however, the upward line is a product of Americans relying on the "best of the best" among Indian workers. The more we outsource down the bell-shaped curve in that population, the less productive our results will be, and the more inclined we'll be to stick close to home.
And it's easy to subscribe to a belief in Revolutions of Rising Expectations, which suggests that as Indians earn more, they will want more, and the wage advantages of outsourcing will diminish. India's government also is an impediment to India Rising; it is corrupt -- and because of it, mistrusted by outsiders and citizens alike. And India's infrastructure feels like it was made from toothpicks. A visiting salesman can barely make two appointments per day in Mumbai because the street -- just one street links one end with the central city of almost 15 million people -- is clogged with cars and cows. (Being sacred, cows roam wherever they wish, including the middle of intersections.)
Regardless of whether India rises more or stalls soon, will some Americans suffer? To answer that, it seems worth looking around an Indian business meeting. They are serving Coca-Cola to men who, when they leave the room, take out their Ray-Bans to block the Mumbai sun. Men and women take their new wealth and buy Dell Computers with Microsoft software, Donna Karan slacks and jackets, and Norah Jones and Seal CDs. And consider this: if every American drinks one Coke today, Coca-Cola sells 250 million units. If that happens in India, multiply that by six.
India is rising. But if we look carefully at our own businesses, we may find ourselves rising with them.
Notable Quote
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
-- Dr. Maya Angelou
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Harry Beckwith is the best-selling author of Selling
the Invisible, which has been named one of the top
ten business books of all time, with over 675,000
copies sold in 14 translations. He is also author of
The Invisible Touch and What Clients Love, which
have sold over 275,000 copies in 13 translations. He has been a keynote speaker for 14 Fortune 200 annual sales meetings and the National |
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Speakers' Association convention, and has made presentations in Europe, South America and Asia. He is
cited regularly in national media including CNN,
The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Entrepreneur,
Crain's New York Business and numerous
American, European and Asian newspapers. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Harry resides in Minneapolis and is the father of six. |
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