A Cornucopia of Confusion: A Tale for Travelers
As a Los Angeles based management consultant helping Western companies to succeed in India, I often fly alone to India. In business class, I often find myself next to an executive who is apprehensive about their trip or is confused about their success or lack thereof. I wanted to write a book to help such executives and managers.
India has more billionaires than China or Japan. Yet 700 million Indians survive on less than $2 per day. How do you deal with such contrast?
Indian engineers and doctors in the West are renowned for their intellect. Yet many graduates in India are unemployable. How do you sort out the good from the indifferent?
Professional salaries are generally low in India. Yet, top Indian executives are compensated as well as their western counterparts.
It’s confusing. If you are lucky, it’s confusing. It’s even worse if you quickly jump to the wrong conclusion. India offer opposing truths and it takes some expertise to recognize the right truths.
My boss’ boss at my very first job in India had once told me the story of the blind men and the elephant. The man who felt the leg thought that the elephant was like a tree. Another blind man thought it was like a rope, because he grabbed the tail. I wanted my readers to see the entire elephant. This miraculous, complex, friendly, emotional, powerful and somewhat unpredictable pachyderm.
I was clear about my baseline message from executive seminar that I teach at Caltech and from my management consulting on the subject. But I wanted to broaden the perspective. Top executives and entrepreneurs in the US and in India opened up their hearts and minds to me as I researched additional material for the book . The book became my second life for a year.
On some days I wrote as much as 3000 words; on other days, I struggled with as few as 100 words as I battled which opposing truths to select. I kept going back in my mind to the travelers whom I had helped on the flights to India. In the end I completed the manuscript a few weeks ahead of schedule.
When the advance testimonials came in and K. Memani of the American Chamber of Commerce in India (Amcham) suggested reading the book in- flight, I knew I had hit the mark. I was doubly pleased when his American counterpart, Ron Somers, President of the US India Business Council said “Take this book with you on the plane, keep it in your brief case, and consult it often.”