McKinsey interview with Ratan Tata of Tata Group

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Tata Consultancy just won the Chrysler IT contract, worth billions. It’s probably a good time to look again at McKinsey Quarterly’s interview with Ratan Tata from 2005. The Indian mega-corporations have some different ways of thinking than their US competitors, holding values that oddly sound more democratic. Well, India is the world’s largest democracy with a robust (and admittedly sometimes violent) polity. There’s much left to be done in India, but the same can be said of my nation. It looks like, barring China starting a war with a neighbor (inevitable) or Pakistan lobbing some nukes (unlikely), that India is the place to be.

Who would put something in China, which hasn’t even got Rule of Law, when you could put it in India? There’s just so much to like about India, even with what we would perceive as problems. Of course, coming from a nation that can’t even feed its own, hard to be talking here.

Tata is always fascinating. Worth looking at again.

It’s exactly the same as the philosophy for the car, and it’s a philosophy that’s also being thrown out as a challenge to our watch company—why can’t we produce a watch at a much lower price to go on everyone’s wrist? The mandate has gone out to our people that we now really need to look seriously at the needs of the larger part of the Indian income pyramid, where most consumers can be found. If we don’t do that, I think the Chinese will come and do it for us.

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