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What the book The India Way can Teach us in Business

According to the new book ‘The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders are Revolutionising Management’, there are 4 key practices common across the leading companies in this exploding market.

According to the new book ‘The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders are Revolutionising Management’, there are 4 key practices common across the leading companies in this exploding market.

  1. Holistic Engagement with Employees
  2. In a nutshell, ‘people are viewed as assets to be developed, not costs to be reduced; as sources of creative ideas and pragmatic solutions; and as bringing leadership at their own level to the company’. Employees are frequently consulted on strategic direction, and have a long-term future with the company. Investment is huge – the larger organisations often invest up to 12 weeks’ training in the first year of any employee joining, even after graduation.

  3. Improvisation and Adaptability
  4. India’s red tape and bureaucracy is well-known, and demands India’s entrepreneurs and business leaders to improvise and be immensely flexible. India’s business leaders ‘think broadly and act pragmatically, setting grand agendas and then testing through trial and error what works and what does not’. According to Hindustan Unilever’s CEO, India’s business leaders ‘have a much greater ability to cope with uncertainty, they don’t get disturbed by uncertain events, and… tend to be more creative as a result’.

  5. Creative Value Propositions
  6. India’s business leaders have ‘of necessity’ learned to be highly creative in developing their value propositions. For example, ‘customer centricity’ is different to the way it is in the West, where the ‘best’ customers are those that deliver the highest profit margins. India’s largest retailer Pantaloon, defined their competitive advantage as being driven by the customer experience, which was tailored to the strict social hierarchy. Nothing too radical there, except that all effort was invested in ensuring this aspect of competitive advantage was driven through every aspect of the business – all staff in each retail outlet was taught to think of the customer ‘at the caste and community’ level.

  7. Broad Mission and Purpose
  8. Personal values, ‘a vision of growth’ and strategic thinking was at the core of every business researched. But more interesting is the word ‘broad’ – meaning the sense of pride that India’s business leaders take in not just business success, but also in family prosperity, regional advancement and national renaissance. A core driver in the business is broader ‘societal purpose’ as well as financial reward.

I love these four principles of creating businesses that are highly successful, while also putting employees, customers and society at the heart of their purpose.

What can you learn from them and start to implement in order to set your business apart from the rest?

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