Trip to India - Entry 21 - Accenture

This morning, I woke up itching like crazy due to the many bug bites that appear to have been multiplying on my legs in the past couple of days. As I am one of those who elected against taking nasty malaria pills, I can only hope that I do not get the still nastier reason for taking those pills, malaria.

Today, we have Accenture in the morning and Boeing in the afternoon. Never say we didn't get to visit some significant places of business while here in India - when I signed up for the tour, I didn't even realize how much we would be doing and seeing.

There were two significant parts of the Accenture visit - the first was the talk given by the Managing Director of Accenture India, Sandeep Arora, and the second was meeting the mid-level managers and speaking with them.

Sandeep's message was that the growth of India means good things for overall economic growth in the world, and that thinking with an attitude of scarcity is a negative course of action whenever it is chosen. However, I think that this attitude is quite understandable, given what I've seen here in India. At Hewitt, Indian managers were discussing how best to move the non-entry level positions to India after having moved nearly all entry level positions - other than governmental support positions which couldn't be moved - from North America. At Accenture India, Sandeep took over a group of 15,000 employees in 2006, and in 2009, Accenture India employs 40,000 people. As an American, one who is working in a department where more than half of the operations staff are in India, how am I supposed to look at this as an opportunity? This is a time of opportunity for Indians and for upper level American managers; I do not see this as a time of opportunity for the average American wanting to get an entry level job in HR - because those jobs don't really exist anymore in the United States.

However, I noticed the same problem with the person who spoke before Sandeep that I noticed with the Christ U MBA students. One of our group asked a big picture question, and the speaker went off on a tangent filled with interesting data tidbits that really had nothing to do with answering the question. I was honestly surprised to see this tendency with someone who had so much experience at what is, after all, a global company. My colleague asked his question three different times, with different phrasing each time, and still got the same non-response. I also found it interesting that this speaker was so convinced that India will continue to be a low cost leader. It would seem from what we've learned on the trip, that cost of living and wages in India are rising at exponential rates. In light of this, it would seem odd to suggest that the cost of doing business in India will remain the same without some sort of significant change in the status quo. One final question which was asked was regarding intellectual property laws. India has great intellectual property laws on paper, but truly lax enforcement of those laws, which places the onus of protection of IP upon the business itself.

It actually seems as though this is a common story in the Indian businesses we visited - they were all very independent in their development - choosing generators and their own developmental structures over reliance on existing infrastructure (because the existing infrastructure wouldn't be able to handle the need), and treating it as simply a by product of having to do business in India. While that is obvious, it begs the question - can a business which must act like a self-contained capsule actually be a cost-savings model for the future? Or are the cost savings achieved by outsourcing to India merely a short term window of opportunity which will be over within the decade before companies move on to cheaper and cheaper destinations?

We did get some great book recommendations from Sandeep, however: Innovator's Dilemma, Driven and Tipping Point.

The meeting with the mid-level manager was also very interesting. She was surprised to see all the notes that Kyle and I had taken during the lectures, and said that while her team used to be all entirely in the US, now there's a whole team in India, and one contact point person in the US who continues to lead and direct the team at the wishes of the client. If India is ever to break the mould of just being the "go-to" person for cheap, intelligent English speaking labor, it would seem to be necessary that the leadership on these projects move to India, otherwise, the entire Indian team is just as replaceable as the entire US team was before it. Again, as an American seeing a massive recession in the US that isn't likely to recover soon due to a lack of jobs, I don't find any of this particularly comforting, in spite of being told that an attitude of scarcity isn't helpful.