Why Bangalore worries Silicon Valley

NEW YORK: US journalist Steve Hamm has written a book which is sure to give the heebie-jeebies to corporate America because he warns multinationals that the shining stars of India’s Silicon Valley are shaking up the global business establishment.

Bangalore Tiger, published by McGraw Hill, will be released in the US on October 25. In the book, he chronicles India’s tech industry, “through the microcosm of one company, Wipro”.

Hamm, a BusinessWeek writer, has chronicled the industry since 1989. He told DNA that while the US, Western Europe and Japan still possess the lion’s share of the world’s financial capital, Indians have a wealth in intellectual capital and they know how to use it.

“In the beginning what was so attractive to American corporations was the low price of Indian talent. That was the thing that got them into the game, but as time has gone on the thing that keeps them in the game is the quality of Indian talent,” said Hamm.

“I wouldn’t say that all of India is one quality level. I would say the top companies deliver a very consistent high quality.   Indian companies are not only providing cheap technologies, but very good technologies.”

Hamm’s book spells out the basic Indian tech formula: Internet + Brains - High Costs = Huge Business Opportunity. But he astutely points out that supplying low cost brains over the Internet is just the beginning of what tech service outfits do for their clients.

He said Wipro and other Indian info-tech companies were boosting efficiency in the tech world by emulating Japanese carmakers.

“Think of how the Japanese auto manufacturers took on and are besting General Motors and Ford, based primarily on superior engineering, quality and efficiency. That’s what the Indian tech service outfits are doing to the old ways of processing data and running basic business functions in the West,” Hamm writes.

He said Wipro had taken a page from Toyota’s playbook and succeeded in making business processes as “simple, smooth, and replicable” as the way Corollas slipp off the Bangalore assembly line every 5.3 minutes.

“Think of Wipro as a wake-up call for complacent Americans. With its intensity to win and its hard work ethic, it’s a reminder of the America of 100 years ago,” says Hamm’s book which picks up the thread from where New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman had left it in The World is Flat.

Friedman’s bestseller had laid out the case for a world is flat after all, because new technology makes it possible for anyone with the smarts, a computer and an Internet connection to collaborate in a global network of knowledge.

“For people who read Tom’s book and found it to be useful I would say that my book is the book that drills down and shows — here is how the Indians do it,” said Hamm.

“It focuses on low cost, but more than that it is about quality, constant improvement and enlightened policies towards employees and brilliant management of large numbers of people.” He said India showed brio in picking up the best management policies in the world and adapting them to Indian culture.

He added that for Western managers, it may seem strange — even off-putting — to think that they have a lot to learn from Indian upstarts, but he reminds them that many US businesses grew up in times of plenty.

“They weren’t built from the ground up like the Indians to thrive in harsh conditions. Who better to learn lessons from than the companies that have become potent global players against all the odds?”