“The all-consuming work of inventing or developing a product and getting it to market efficiently and successfully, of solving problems, of figuring out the issues and expectations… these are all great cultural levellers.”

In sum, what produce results in the US and India are the same: ‘Time, knowledge, talent, and hard work.’

Boyer comes up with six generalisations, comprising three good things, and three bad, about Americans. The first in the ‘good’ list is that each American is just like each Indian — meaning that they are all different! “You cannot presume what a person can do or will do based on a job title.”

Second, Americans tend to be a ‘roughly right and let’s get on with it’ culture, though they often see themselves as quality-seeking perfectionists, the author says.

“They can be damned hard on suppliers, vendors, and partners who don’t deliver at the level they want, or who don’t come through with the level of breakthrough inventiveness or creativity they seek.”

He discovers that the key differentiator however behind American success is flexibility: an amazing ability to size up the situation as it develops and change course to take advantage of a new opportunity.

“Flexibility is a special type of genius. Whether Americans push on to 99.999 per cent quality, or ‘put a fork in it and serve it up at 80 per cent solved,’ their ability to make this decision in near real time has worked well so far.”

The British are good at this, too, but their stubborn, muddle-through confidence keeps them wedded to the original plan a bit longer, Boyer finds. “The Germans are so good at anything they do they are loath to change course; the French (who are very hard workers) labour for a higher God who doesn’t seem to care if they have a plan or not; and for the Japanese, the plan has been so well conceived it practically is a God.”

As for the Chinese, who are able to move quickly, Boyer finds their entrepreneurial flexibility inscrutable. In contrast, India scores ‘very high’ in his flexibility spectrum. “Indian IT professionals in general, perhaps because of their advanced technical educations, might tend to analyse a problem from four different angles while Americans will look at it from just three angles, and then run out the door and start selling it.”

Insights distilled from long experience.

D. MURALI

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