Satish Pradhan, executive VP, group HR, Tata Sons

Is globalisation an imperative in today's business? What are the challenges that define this path? Satish Pradhan delves into globalisation from the HR perspective

There are different ways in which people look at globalisation. From our perspective, I think it is important to look at it in the form of a journey. From being a controlled economy, the 1990s liberalisation programme led to a big change. This created a situation in which overseas players were attracted to the Indian market and attempted to steal our lunch! The domestic players adopted a posture of guarding their domestic markets with zeal. This, according to me, is the first horizon of globalisation.

As companies used to a closed economy successfully defended their home turf, they also started questioning whether this was a sustainable strategy and whether they needed to extend the same strategy to markets outside India, create global options attempting to steal their lunch! This is the second horizon of globalisation. This led to the third horizon, which is characterised by three aspects:

• Accessing material, financial and human resources from the best and most competitive parts of the globe.
• Acquiring customers and accessing markets which constitute future profitable growth from anywhere in the globe.
• And finally, connecting these two through best-in-class processes and facilities to create the best value for our customers — leveraging global supply chain, suppliers, partners and locations.
  

	Ratan Tata:	Driving global stratergy
	J. J Irani:	Global corporation
	R. Goplakrishnan:	The challenge of growing
	Kishor Chaukar:	Truly global
	Bharat Vasani:	Legal recource

What differentiates a global company from others from an HR perspective is its ability to access and deploy people and connect them to customers in different segments and markets in different geographies through ‘Best in Class’ processes. The question boils down to "how do you do it better". This is related to the capability embedded in the company’s fabric. For example, the engineering capability the Tata Group possesses in companies such as Tata Motors, TACO, Tata Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services is phenomenally powerful. But if you look at it as a bundle of capabilities, it is about pulling the right kind of resources on a global basis, making meaningful propositions to global customers and managing the delivery.

As a group, we have taken several initiatives to enhance the global aspect in our people’s approach and thinking. Starting with the work that our companies began in horizon one on cost competitiveness etc. We continue to work along with thought leaders and faculty from top universities such as Harvard Business School, INSEAD, CEDEP and Michigan Business School to progress this.

With Michigan, we focus on figuring out how to manage the "woodwork" of managing a global business. Let me illustrate an example. We need to define and adopt a common set of principles and approaches when operating in a global way. For instance, how does one define and design a global compensation policy that takes care of people movement seamlessly within a company across various geographies? A global compensation programme has to be flexible enough to address unique nuances and at the same time, should have common underlying principles. This can be an intensely technical exercise, and is just one of the many processes that a company needs to define. Also, a company needs to develop and inculcate a comfort level of working with a multi-ethnic workforce in multi-geography settings.

From a senior management perspective, the fundamental challenges of building a global company do not change. What changes is the magnitude of it. One of the key attributes is for people to buy in to the global vision. The vision should not be too generic and neither should it be too codified. The vision should ideally be crafted in the form of a compelling story in which individuals can write themselves in as "heroes" and "heroines". It is important to engage people. The critical challenge to a global company’s leadership is to engage itself with its people with the same level of intensity and seriousness as it does with capital investments or business strategy.

The journey to becoming truly global has commenced in Tata Group companies but we need to do a lot more.

Uploaded on February 18, 2004