Global Culture

A recent exchange with Richa Govil from Infosys led me to a couple of posts on their blog: The War for Talent Heats Up and Talent Wars, cont’d…. Their blog provides an insight into globalization from the perspective of those on the other side of the equation, supplying the talent to the corporations looking for ways to remain competitive.

My position in the matter of outsourcing was established in the post the outsourcing culture, and while it may be assumed antagonistic to the views of a company like Infosys, I found some support to the ideas presented earlier in their own blog:

Business communities in any country (at least at the mid to senior management levels) tend to be small. Even India with its billion people, relies on a much much smaller business community and business graduates to run its companies. It seems that young workers in India have not yet developed the maturity to realize this fact. With the over-abundance of opportunities this behavior appears to be the right choice (or even the logical one by some calculations). But this will prove to be a short-sighted approach when the economy turns as it eventually must.

The particular behavior they talks about is the perceived unprofessionalism of those workers that may not feel bound by a contract as a result of how many opportunities there are. It seems is becoming quite common for people to continue looking for opportunities even after accepting offers at a particular company. In a market with such a high demand for talent is only to be expected that people will adjust their attitudes.

However, I would also like to suggest an alternate explanation: after exhausting the original talent pool that led to the outsourcing boom in India, they may have created an important shift in the work culture, making it easy for youngsters to earn a quick technical diploma in order to participate in the labour market without really having an interest in anything else but benefiting from the apparent chaos caused by corporations deploying their armies of headhunters and cheap-labour tactics. You can say that some people learned how to fool the system, creating a difficult landscape for businesses, but more importantly damaging the work culture of an entire industry.