Trip to India - Entry 8 - Full day in Delhi

Yesterday was a less early morning than the morning before, with a wake up call at 6:30 rather than 2am. That’s always good.

In the morning, we went to Hewitt, an HRO – Human Resources Outsourcing – company. I found their optimism and can-do attitude particularly worthy of note. All of us found a great deal of negativity in the readings we had about India for our papers before arriving. For example, comments about the infrastructure, which is to our minds quite terrible, or about a lack of potential qualified workers for the BPO industry. And yet, the speakers mentioned oh yeah – we do have to have our own generators and we do need to provide a shuttle service for our employees, or yes, it takes four years to fully train someone on our system, so it’s a really big deal if someone is lost due to attrition – which would all appear to be huge issues, but the attitude was that it was no biggie. If I were in the position of deciding where to open a new call center, I believe that the additional cost of running my own generators and shuttling my employees around would be a factor – it makes me wonder how long India can maintain cost leadership when wages keep rising and infrastructure is still such a huge issue for new ventures.

Another aspect of the company visit I found to be very interesting were the people we got to talk to. One of our speakers, Akshay, is head of global talent acquisition – not just Indian talent, but ALL talent acquisition globally. That guy is pretty high up, and he showed up and was like hey… what’s up? It’s really quite amazing, the kind of people we’ve been given access to here in India.

One of the items I found very interesting from the Learning & Development manager who spoke was the training program they have for new associates. This reminds me of the training that is necessary for associates in my department in Amazon. American associates can get by on minimal training and reliance on “tribal knowledge” – and while I personally feel that this is not ideal, most associates will do fine on this model. I have yet to meet a German or Indian associate who can manage without significant written material and clearly drawn out SOPs. I find this cultural difference in terms of training and individual expectations regarding self-sufficiency to be fascinating. Indian associates at Hewitt also have their career progressions mapped out for them by their managers. Those of us speaking about this at our lunch table agreed that one of the primary factors in our career development was our own engagement in the process, and willingness to both manage up and manage down in an effort to make our own career progression happen. It is interesting to me to speculate on the value of engendering such intense self-driven attitudes in one’s American employees, while other locations worldwide are far more paternalistic in nature.

Our second visit of the day was to the Gurgaon manufacturing plant of Hero Honda, a joint venture between the Indian Hero group and the Japanese company, Honda. Their sales of 100cc two wheel motorbikes in the past decade have been astounding, and the growth has simply been exponential since the effects of 1991’s liberalization policies began to have an effect on the disposable incomes of Indian workers. The ability of even relatively poor people to purchase these items now was my personal major takeaway from this presentation – it took Hero Honda 20 years to sell 10 million bikes (they began their venture in 1984). They sold another 10 million from 2004 to 2007, and sold 5 million from 2007 to 2009. That kind of growth is simply mind boggling.

The visit to the manufacturing floor was amazingly impressive, as there are three production lines producing a bike every eighteen seconds, thus the plant produces one bike every six seconds – there are three plants doing this, and thus Hero Honda produces a motorbike every two seconds. It was incredibly noisy, busy and fascinating – and I couldn’t hear a word our guide was saying. One item upon which nearly all the females in the group agreed – the guy at the engine room assembly line putting on the green squares was definitely hot.

Since our company visits took so much time, we didn’t have much time for shopping as planned, but instead went to the Cottage Industries Emporium to check out some of the items there. There was some pretty amazing stuff there, but what in the world I would ever do with a life size wooden carved statue of the Buddha, I have no idea.

We then went traipsing through Delhi on our empty stomachs to get to our restaurant. It is amazingly dirty. The smells, the general state of disrepair throughout much of the city actually reminds me quite a lot of Yangon, Myanmar. The major difference is that this is ALL that Yangon is, while Delhi is also high rises, Mercedes, and Hero Honda. You would never see such an incredibly complex and high quality manufacturing venture in Myanmar. Also, I think the attitude is a major difference – most Burmese people I met had a very laissez-faire attitude and didn’t think twice about toilets not functioning, or the fact that half the sidewalk had been torn up months before and nothing had been done about it – in India, the toilets sometimes don’t work and the sidewalks are torn up – but I get the impression that when asked, someone will attempt to fix the toilet, and the sidewalk will eventually get repaired.

The food, once we finally arrived… was quite good. I really love the naan and the sauces – those seem quite safe and delicious to me. The meats, I’m very leery of, and am unable to eat more than a few bites before caution takes over. I feel the same way about any dairy or water. I have only two weeks here – the last thing I need is to be puking and or on the toilet for a significant part of it.

We finally made it to India Gate – a tomb of the unknown soldier sort of affair – around 10pm. The hawkers there weren’t quite as insistent as the ones at the Taj Mahal, and generally responded well to a firmly spoken NO. They laugh if you say Nahin, in case anyone tries to get you to use that if you ever visit India. A firmly spoken NO will get you much farther than a polite Nahin. Anyway, it was a lovely monument, and a fitting end to a very long day. I think most of us passed out pretty quickly last night – at least, I know I did.

This morning, shopping is planned, as well as checking out and flying to Mumbai. Our airline is on strike, so we might be having to travel on another airline. Apparently, this is also a frequent issue in India – lot of strikes. A lot of Indian culture reminds me of southern Europe…. And striking at the drop of a hat reminds of nothing so much as Italian train employees.

But for now… getting ready for a new day, and giving thanks for a healthy stomach, clear head, and healthy nasal passages…. And we all want to keep it that way.

p.s. The internet here.... really, really really REALLY is lame. I have no idea how people deal with this.