Where do you draw the line on affection in India?

Apparently Richard Gere is in trouble for kissing a woman’s cheek in public – in India.  The Indian courts cites public profanity for the act of affection.  But something’s not right here.  When I was in Gurgaon, a Delhi-suburb, to meet my team of analysts, I noticed that my Indian colleagues were quite affectionate with [...]

Office Space

We’ve hired a new managing director for research and consultative services, which means I have a new boss.  My new MD is great; extremely bright and pleasant and seasoned.  But he’s kicking me out of my office.  Until this morning, the research unit which consists of senior analysts for each of our three verticals (life [...]

Team Conclusion

Our three-day team building seminar wasn’t so bad.  We were cooped up for three full days at the New York Yacht Club in “board rooms” with wooden paneling and portraits of captains.   The seminar was long and repetitive of much of the stuff I learned in business school, and it was terribly frustrating to be away [...]

Team Tolerance

My firm is forcing us to attend three dreadful days of off-site team building exercises this week.  Wednesday through Friday, 8:30am to 6:00pm we’ll be at the New York Yacht Club learning how to be a team.  The Yacht Club setting is so very apropos; the team consultants are from a group called Topsail. 
This nautical [...]

You Say Tomato…

If you work with offshore team, you’d better develop a thick skin.  The American sense of humor and diction or work usage can differ dramatically from that of offshore colleagues.  And unless you become accustomed to these differences, you might be in store for some seriously hurt feelings.  Case and point:  This morning a high ranking [...]

Us & Them

We hired a new IT firm to upgrade our exchange server.  Today was the third and final day of the upgrade, and by the end of business, we couldn’t send emails to our colleagues in India.  Turns out that our office manager forgot to remind the IT guy that we’ve got 150 email addresses in Gurgaon.  Likewise, [...]

The “Other” Team

I work for a boutique research and consulting firm located in NYC with an offshore analystical team of 150 MBAs, PhDs, CPAs, and so on located in Gurgaon, India.   So when my managing director tells me that he’s arranged for a three-day team building workshop next week, it begs the question: Team building for whom – us or them? 
I [...]

Real Life Team Building

My boss asked all the analysts to prepare a 30-minute presentation on  their role in a key recent project and present to our colleagues at our three-day team building exercise next week.  I think the idea is to show how we individually contribute to projects so we can identify more opportunities to work together. 
I was supposed [...]

India’s Foreign Acquisitions

Looks likeIndia’s into outsourcing too – sort of.   The March 29 issues of The Economist revealed that “so far this year Indian firms have announced 34 foreign takeovers worth more than $10.7 billion in all, according to Dealogic, a market-research outfit.”  Given the difficulty of integrating onshore and offshore operations, I wonder how smoothly all [...]