Mission Statement
Three months ago I made a phone call to India for the first time in my life. I called my team of analysts at the Gurgaon office to introduce myself as their new boss. I had been offered a great position at a boutique strategy consulting firm in New York City and would need to learn the names and skills of more than 150 analysts and researchers in the offshore office.
Three months later I’m still learning. They teach you in business school how outsourcing and offshoring work operationally and why many industries can’t survive without them. But they don’t teach you, a novice manager, how to make it work when you’re managing a team more diverse than you ever could have imagined, thousands of miles away from business life and culture in NYC.
Offshore business is going to get bigger. So this blog is about learning first-hand what it’s really like, so you’re prepared when it happens to you. I’ll tell you the challenges my team and I face everyday and why B-school textbook solutions typically don’t work. Your job is to share your experiences working with offshore firms, either as a manager or customer. If we do this right, we’ll create a management course that people can really use.
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Interesting stuff. My views on this are from the other end. Before I switched careers, I was a Partner handling strategic advisory work within one of the Big Four firms here in India. On one of my last engagements, I had to work with teams operating in the UK and North America. The client was a part of the government of India and we were trying to privatise a key portion of India’s transport infrastructure. While this was not a classic offshoring situation, it had all the issues associated with cross-cultural interaction. Trying to translate Brit-speak and Canadian-speak to Indian bureaucrats & the reverse (actually more the reverse) was the biggest challenge of all. And the late night conf calls used to drive me up a wall.
harinair - February 23, 2007 at 11:55 am
Harinair, thank you for commenting.
I emphathize with the late night conference calls. Was it your experience that American and Indian verbally presentations integrate well while written communications falter? It’s the writing that drives me up the wall more than anything. I find that senior members of my offshore team give eloquent and thoughtful presentations but turn in 100-page documents that bury every insight they’ve identified.
My coping strategy so far has been to ask them what the three most important things in a large document are before I read it. The golden nuggets always surface in the conversation, and then I’m left with a 100-page report to revise.
Can you offer any advice?
NYC Manager - February 23, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Sorry for the delay in responding.
I guess asking for the top 3 points is a good option. Maybe you can give them an upper page limit for the report. I suspect you will get some resistance to this – but, it is probably worth insisting on it anyway.
harinair - March 8, 2007 at 5:42 am