Winning in India- Black & White of Business, Market, And…

A lot has been spoken and said about India, yet less has been said about the country. Few random searches over the most intelligent specie of our time, Google, is all it requires to get acquainted with the common jargons every trade Pundits, economists, or CEOs speak relative to India. Most common of them all are – Young Population, Jugaad, Government, Policy, Tax, Infrastructure, Cheap Labor, China, Bihar, Culture etc. The list could go till eternity as we aren’t talking about some isolated island surrounded by sea or a company having few thousand people on its payroll. We are talking and trying to navigate through a polar quagmire of 1.21+ billion populace- ruptured by language, caste, religion, race, and favoritism- which is unfathomable.

Ironically, every time the topic of succeeding in India or for India to succeed crops up – we focus too much on the problem itself than actually making a tryst with probable solutions. We stress too much on creating something, which may actually take aeons, than trying to grow with the existing many things. We talk little too much about urbanization or creating urban hubs than actually creating a rural growth story. We strive to Copy-Paste than investing in innovation. And this has been a crippling problem with average Indian and India. Our DNA lies in imitating and copying than creating and spearheading. Blame it on to so many things; if you want to, that even if we succeed in doing or building something new, we don’t have courage to travel the unbeaten path and take that forward. No wonder we’re a service driven economy happy with 9 am to 5 pm and beyond syndrome. One tryst with our customer care centers, servicing partners, or any Government agency and you’ll know how good we are at servicing front.

We have assumed FDI & FDI as a ubiquitous panacea for all the problems. In case you’re wondering about two FDIs then one stands for “Foreign Direct Investment” and the other “Foreign Direct Innovation”. We look west for the innovations, and then look further west for investment to help us replicate those innovations. Be it Mobile Applications, Social Platforms, e-commerce biz, Movies, or anything else, you name it and we’ve have multifarious variants available in the market. Somewhere we have developed a habit of looking outside, may be this is Out-of-Box approach, than visioning inside and valuing internal stuffs.

Undoubtedly, the growth cannot be achieved in isolation, the world has larger stake to claim. But, the approach should not be always to go out and ask but create something which the world can’t afford to lose. Let the world come to you and say “I want to infuse capital in so and so thing”. It requires just a common sense to realize the benefits that would follow.

If the future is India then it needs to be built in a way that everyone should approach the future. Don’t we all go to our future than to sit and wait for the future to come to us – the way we expect? We need to canalize and build bridges, connecting those dots than trying to leapfrog few milestones and reach the acme. We need to learn how to romance with the future than sleeping with the present and creating insomniac past.

No living creature, superstitiously living ghosts, and ever living alien can succeed in the Indian market as long as it don’t learn to adapt to the 28 states and 7 Union Territories the country has, adopt the people and culture in “AS-IS” form, expect the best and be ready for the worst, and still be able to create that WOW!!!! There isn’t a dearth of idea, actually there are 1.21+ billion ideas roaming on Indian roads, but scarcity of willingness to pick the good ones, nurture it, and create a success story.

Winning in India and for India to win what is required is more of execution and less of planning. It’s because, given the already laggard status of India, by the time we end up planning relative to present the world already reach at different level, creating a new chasm and void. What we end up doing is trying to leapfrog that gap after few failed desultory planning effort, only to reach some ephemeral point.

Any business organization looking to create a large scale imprint on Indian consumer, if not satisfied with serving a small niche, needs to learn the art, craft, and science of doing business in India. You can’t expect to come with some global proven model and create a dent in the Indian market place. You need to think local and work with local to be a global Indian company.

If India is future then, in words of Peter Drucker, the best way to predict the future is to create it. Create the future you want to achieve, create the India you wish it should be. It’s in your hand, our hand.

Reach the author: The author of the blog could be contacted at Linked-In or reached at contact@366pi.com. 366Pi is a business and management consulting company. We aspire to be one of the leading firms in the business, bringing niche capabilities at our clients’ service, and surpassing expectations. We work with companies across sectors; help them achieve sustainable growth in value and revenue through a blend of customized solution, traditional best practices, and contemporary trends and innovation.