Skip to main content

The power of an ecosystem

The late 90s to early 2000s were all part of Indias service economy boom. Everybody who was anybody became an engineer. Every engineer from mining to petrochemical became interested in IT services. If not anything, it offered a steady income for an aspirational country. But this interest in services also came at a cost. In my own experience, I found people thinking purely of work as a service, devoid of too much initiative or risk and spending their lives as it were on a spec sheet and clients orders. It also de-skilled people - unless they were careful about building a skill - it was an instant road of managerial anonymity and a career devoid of any skills.

Along the way, for those who are familiar, were lamentations from people that all these services are not enabling India is not producing the next Microsoft or even a web browser. There were IT services giants, but they were not producing any products. And such it went that people argued that services was an industry while others said how unskilled it was an industry and about how Indians were wasting their lives working in BPOs and so on.

Needless to say, all these lamentations did not lead anywhere. A slowdown came about in 2007/8 and then the cloud killed many basic manual service work streams and RPA did what ever else was left. And all those who claimed the primacy of Indias IT service industry continue to do so, but by now it is clear that there is no services industry - atleast no future glory. It is a steady and sure decline, but somehow it does not seem to matter for Indias tech industry today.

So what happened? That is my next piece - the power of an ecosystem....
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call
Post a Comment
Read more