India’s own JIT — Jugaad-in-time

The 2010 Asian Games in China at Guangzhou will begin on November 12. On September 1, the town that houses the sports venues and the accommodation was formally handed over to the games organising committee. We have two weeks to go for our Commonwealth Games. The “soft” launch of the games village happened on September 16, but most things look half-finished. 

Critics will blame India’s perennial state of underpreparedness on our lack of systems. This is an insult to the thousands of years of Indian systems craft. If Japan has its famous JIT, short for just-in-time, India has the patent on the original JIT — jugaad in time. Indian JIT predates the Japanese one by centuries. Perhaps by a few thousand years. All over the world, each society comes up with ways to get things done on time and in line with its cultural and environmental attributes.

The minimalist discipline of monolithic culture works for the Japanese form of JIT. The west loves Toyota and Honda (okay, they also love Hyundai, but the Japanese are the real deal). They have also had monolithic cultures for most of their histories. That’s why Japan’s JIT dominates the world — from California to China.

In pluralistic, argumentative, multi-everything India, what works best is jugaad — an improvised approach to problem-solving that may or may not solve anything for the long term. But it works very well in the short-term. In the jugaad system of thinking, forecasting, planning, strategy, project management, compliance, and due diligence are wasteful. Our business, political, and social elite have been convinced since time immemorial that these are to be shunned.

In the Indian jugaad system, human resources are considered a given. It is human resourcefulness that matters most. Unlike just-in-time, jugaad in time thrives on delays. The years and months leading to a deadline are spent building the jugaad network of friends, cronies, relations, fixers, and takers. It takes special skill and ruthlessness to master it all.

The actual work begins only at the nth hour. That’s when the super-efficient jugaad network swings into crisis coordination mode. Lo and behold, all that was at a standstill for years and months gets done in a matter of days!

In jugaad, therefore, we trust. That’s why we don’t plan ahead. We don’t allocate resources, time and efforts to our projects. The result is mostly quick success or fast failure; seldom sustainable success. A friend, G Ramachandran, once wrote about why Sachin Tendulkar is continuously successful, while other contemporaries failed or faded away. Building sustainable success requires systems and methodologies that can be institutionalised.

Our divisive social structures are perhaps the reason why we are not able to build institutions or organisations. An institution is founded on teamwork, and teams can only work with a shared purpose and targets.

In India, the only organisations that still command respect are those that were founded on institutional principles and values. Unfortunately, in spite of the globally acclaimed successes of a Tata or an Infosys, it’s the rule of jugaad that runs deep in defence, mining, real estate, healthcare, education, and even cricket.

We have learnt to run things, earn money, create capital, leverage it well, but we have not learnt how to manage and institutionalise it for the long term. We do not couple people and processes in a manner that is sustainable. Even well-run project-driven firms are dependent on individuals — that they are mostly senior citizens speaks poorly about us — at the top to drive them.

Japan’s JIT focuses on the institution, which is a long-term abstraction. Use of such systems makes both individuals and society richer. The jugaad system, however, focuses on the individual. That’s why it benefits some individuals, not society. That’s why the Commonwealth Games will make a few individuals and companies very rich, and leave India much the poorer.