Decision-making
In MNCs, decision-making and conflict resolution follow a straight line. With the empowerment mantra picking up speed, MNCs try very hard to delegate by explicit specification of authority schedules and aggressive goal setting. If decisions are held up due to conflicting viewpoints, the issue is expected to speedily traverse up the line for a resolution. In our context, two possibilities exist. Sometimes there is no empowerment. Thus many decisions are taken by the owner, achieving speed. Or there is a form of delegation which requires consensus to be built, thus sacrificing speed, and sometimes even motion itself! The inter-ministerial form of consultation practised in government is the best example of this.

Western companies largely practice leadership by system. They institutionalise succession planning though their systems, admittedly with varying levels of efficiency. They like their managers to be valuable and skilled cogs in a well-oiled wheel of systems (information, budgets, reviews). If a top manager changes, he would be missed, but only temporarily, as the new cog gets operational. The word ‘cog’ is misleading insofar as it suggests little or no value addition by the manager; this is not an intended insinuation. It arises inevitably out of the machine metaphor!

In the Indian milieu, leadership is by personality. It is the magnetism and personal charisma of the top man that is believed to make the difference. The systems surrounding him are not thought to be that important, though systems are perceived to have some value.

Status
Fons Trompenaars points out in his book that many Anglo-Saxons believe that ascribing status for reasons other than achievement is quite archaic and inappropriate to business. The Indian mind accords status not purely by achievement but also by age, class, education and so on. It is an ascribed status. So, he quotes the example of a Swedish manager who had to make a choice between two Indian managers, both excellent for the job. He did his best to be objective and chose Mr A.

Mr B was very upset and the Swedish manager found, to his great surprise, that what really rankled in Mr B's mind was that "he was senior by two years in the same college to Mr A". I have observed such fixation with ascribed status in several cases during my own work experience. It is precisely this fixation that leads to a proliferation of bewildering designations — manager, senior manager, assistant general manager, deputy general manager, senior deputy general manager and so on.

Doing things
In Western companies there is a great deal of emphasis on getting things done by analysis, logic and intellect, sometimes even to a fault. There is a constant drive to get the most important facts and analysis on the table to take the right decision from among many alternatives. In local companies there is a desire to have more facts, but the means to get facts are often lacking because a system has not been institutionalised. Partly for this reason and partly, I believe, for cultural reasons, things get done subjectively, intuitively and through connections (Guanxi in China, Waastha in Saudi Arabia).

Openness
Being frank and open is a strong feature of Western companies. The Dutch culture is an extreme one, where if you ask a Dutch audience for criticism after a speech, you can experience the closest to being machine-gunned!

But in India being open is no virtue. It is more important to be nice about it. "If you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey," goes an Arab proverb. Maybe this is the reason why Indians are thought by some Westerners to be speaking with forked tongues — unfairly, of course!

The Indian paradigm
In stating the above differences, I have taken license in two ways — firstly with some generalisations about Western/Indian positions and, secondly, with some caricaturing as two polar opposites. I plead guilty. I have done so to allude to ‘tendencies’ rather than type casts. Neither do I have a judgement on right and wrong. I only seek to share a few perspectives based on my experience of working with many nationalities. The important thing is that there has to be, and will be, some convergence over time, but not congruence. The convergence will occur by some Easternisation of Western behaviour and some Westernisation of Eastern behaviour. This will probably evolve, and maybe it cannot be mandated.

Westerners are often surprised that Easterners don't implement what is so obvious to them. Many Westerners marvel at Indians, whose minds they find scintillating both here and overseas. Indians know perfectly well what is required to be done for their company to prosper, or even for their country to progress. Our clarity is stunning, our articulation of ideas is gripping. Where we fail is in doing what we know has to be done.

Quo vadis?
Nobel Prize winner Douglas North explained that countries which emulate best practices from other nations are not always successful because those best practices are not matched with the heritage and values of the host country. I postulate that in India there is cultural transformation in play, the fitting of a Western intellectual tradition to an Indian social context. I am not clear how we can devise a programme to accelerate this fitting. It has to happen naturally.

* Mr Gopalakrishnan wrote this article for the April 2002 issue of Indian Management

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