The Hindu Business Line : Game-changing developments in China and India

The growing impact of China and India in the IT (information technology) industry is clear to anyone following the money of global trade, write James M. Popkin and Partha Iyengar of Gartner in ‘IT and the East’ ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). “More and more, traditional Western high-tech firms are sourcing not just the assembly of their products from India and China but also the innovation that drives these produ cts.”

Divided into three parts, the book talks about the game-changing developments. Such as, how “by 2008 it is highly likely that China will generate IP (intellectual property) at a rate comparable to developed countries and, in the same year, actually surpass the US as the population with the largest English-language capacity.”

However, there are two critical uncertainties in China, according to the authors. One, government involvement. “Consider the high-profile case of Huawei, the dominant brand within China for routers and other telecommunications equipment and an icon of China’s private sector achievement and ambition.”

The company, expected soon to upend Cisco Systems as the lead supplier overall in China, has nearly 1,000 patents in hand, and 8,000 patent applications pending ‘on devices such as wireless terminals, fibre-optic switches, and data-routing systems’. It employs 17,000 engineers, spends nearly a tenth of its revenues on R&D (research and development), and recently received a $10 billion line of credit from a state-owned Chinese bank.

Worryingly, though, “Huawei is privately held, and the ownership structure is not known. It is rumoured that Huawei was organised and developed by the Chinese military and is managed today by generals in the Chinese army.” The authors mention that the Indian Government recently underscored this factor “when it expressed national security concerns over Huawei’s bid for some local telecommunication infrastructure projects in India.”

The second uncertainty is that of China as a technology innovator. Popkin and Iyengar speak of factors that conspire to limit innovation – such as government ownership of private companies, tolerance of IP piracy, and intervention in bank-lending. “The Chinese provide a production arena for cheaper, faster, and smaller goods, but rarely are they smarter and more innovative.”

Part two is on India, and part three, on Chindia. The authors conclude with ‘eight priorities to focus on now’, to help strategists and decision makers prepare for ‘whatever realities in China and India develop between 2007 and 2012’.

A book you shouldn’t wait to read!

Wrong user’s manual?

By 2008 it is highly likely that China will generate IP (intellectual property) at a rate comparable to developed countries.

The central idea of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in ‘The Black Swan’ ( www.penguin.com) is about our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations.

What you don’t know is far more relevant than what you do know, argues the author. Focus on antiknowledge, he urges, therefore. “We do much less thinking than we believe we do – except, of course, when we think about it,” rues Taleb. “It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect…”

He divides professions into two, the scalable and the rest. “Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time… Your revenue depends on your continuous efforts more than on the quality of your decisions.” This type of work is largely predictable, and so are revenues.

In contrast, the scalable profession allows you to add zeroes of income with no great labour. “If you are an idea person, you do not have to work hard, only think intensely.” For example, “the same amount of work is involved in buying a hundred shares as in buying a hundred thousand, or even a million.” Unlike a baker who has “to bake every single piece of bread in order to satisfy each additional customer,” J.K. Rowling “does not have to write each book again every time someone wants to read it.” Ditto with software development too, you’d agree.

A scalable profession is good only if you are successful, reminds Taleb. Such professions “are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities, and are far more random, with huge disparities between efforts and rewards – a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely at no fault of their own.” In these, there are either giants or dwarves – “more precisely, a very small number of giants and a huge number of dwarves.” The book explores what factors drive “the formation of unexpected giants – the Black Swan formation.”

Not for ostriches.

Keep off the CAVE people

Get ‘more’ of power, purpose, and success, Thompson exhorts.

Do you feel pushed to the precipice by work pressures, and so want to quit? Wait, there can be an alternative, says Vince Thompson in ‘Ignited’ ( www.pearsoned.co.in), offering “a way to stay within the corporation and begin making the kind of real difference.” It really is up to us, the managers in the middle, to make the changes we know are necessary, he writes. “A new, genuinely empowered generation of managers can steer their companies off the paths that have led so many into scandals, unnecessary layoffs, catastrophic misreadings of the market, and other disasters.”

Get ‘more’ of power, purpose, and success, Thompson exhorts. And, for each ‘more’, he offers practical tips. Getting more power, for instance, can be through making teams work and controlling the CAVE people. “The CAVE (citizens against virtually everything) people are the ones in every organisation who go out of their way to kill buy-in, spread negativity, and create failure,” is a quote of Laurence Haughton cited in the book.

A key lesson, therefore, is to keep any cave people off your project until after you have generated some early critical successes. “Having them around is not worth the risk, because killing projects by destroying other people’s enthusiasm is what they do.”

Power, again, comes from speed. “Respond right away,” is one of Thompson’s instructions to help you accelerate. “When you get a message, phone call, e-mail, or letter from someone in your network, respond immediately, while the impulse is strongest, the message clearest, and the relevance highest…. Dash off a quick, top-of-the-head answer now, which contains 90 per cent of what needs to be said. That’s more valuable – and will be more appreciated – than a 100 per cent answer two weeks from now.”

Light up.

Tailpiece

“Our systems people think theirs is not a service department!”

“That explains the abysmal service levels you have.”

“True, so we speak of ser-wheeze levels.”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in