A field trip to India brings fresh insights

The eastern hemisphere is home to three of the Bric countries and our global executive MBA programme incorporates academic experience and business leaders’ discussion in all three of them. Following our trip to Guangzhou in China, we moved on to Hyderabad in India.

There can be no better place to understand the value of IT and global delivery systems than in a country known in the global business for its outsourcing IT centres. We attended this module at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and also visited and discussed this topic with the managers of local development centres for the leading Indian, as well as global players.

The top-notch lectures delivered by ISB faculty amid its modern campus made many of us think that for someone seeking quality business education with an interesting spin and the flavour of a significantly evolving economy, it is worth looking past traditional US or European addresses.

ISB is particularly strong in academic research and it came as little surprise that many of the case studies we were assigned as a group and as individuals and discussed in the class were based on companies which we actually visited and where we had the opportunity to compare our academic solutions with real-world managerial challenges.

The company site visits were a rather engaging part of our Indian module. They were all very inspiring.

We visited the Hyderabad development centres of a fast-growing Indian provider of business consulting, IT services and outsourcing, a number one player in internet search and the global number one player in operating systems (among others). Discussions with local management were truly academically and professionally enriching.

At what has been described as India’s most admired company we discussed the intricacies of the global delivery model which has brought about a landslide change in how business consulting services are offered nowadays and unlocked the increasingly attractive proposition for outsourcing beyond call centres and IT services. And the meeting at the Hyderabad campus of the global internet search group was even more inspiring thanks to discussions not only with two local members of management, but also to a teleconference with their HR partner who took time from his schedule to answer our questions from his office in Singapore.

The second group of our site visits was more India-specific. A division of what originally used to be predominantly a tobacco conglomerate has developed an IT arm, which places computers into thousands of local farming villages and creates an information as well as a purchasing platform which successfully competes with traditional local agricultural markets. The system gives farmers better information on current market prices for example and allows them to become more efficient and gain better prices for their crops.

On a personal level, one of the most influential site visits happened after a long bus journey outside the city. Deep in the countryside we visited the operations of a not-for-profit organisation offering free para-medical services and consultations to the local community. Apart from discussing the operations of a philanthropic bridge between fast-expanding corporations and less fortunate local communities, the trip to the local village gave us a glimpse of daily life outside the urban areas.

An insatiable thirst for growth, development and education can be aptly described as the characteristic features of contemporary India, based on our last discussion session with local academic and business leaders on the country’s future.

Listening to the anecdotes about the demands of local corporations for a qualified, university-educated labour force, we asked: “If this is the case, India must be a paradise for the rapid growth of the educational sector?” “Yes, it is,” was the prompt and unequivocal answer.

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