India, a Primarily Hindu Country, Is Emerging

India, a primarily Hindu country, is emerging as a player in the software industry. With over 1 billion people within her borders, India's culture is one of the oldest and largest in the world. Such a vast pool of talent intertwined with cultural identity makes for an interesting breed of workers, and, at the top of that chain, a fascinating approach to managing these workers.

Sunil Jalihalm, CIO of eVector Mobile, a wireless software provider in Bangalore, India, was born in raised in India and has worked in various executive positions in India and America. Thirty-six years old and he has already worked at several large and start-up companies - several here in America. The toughest part of management has, and always will be, surprisingly enough, the actually managing that must be done. Not the management of decisions and the direction of the company, but leading the people underneath you. Understanding them, relating to them in a manner that they will respect and follow loyally and with one hundred percent. To effectively manage one must understand the people underneath him/her and the appropriate managing style to deal with those people. The physical infrastructure of America's Silicon Valley and India's equivalent in Bangalore "have been very similar for a few years now," states Jalihalm. However, the people behind the machines, the people that need to be managed, have idealistic differences. The general culture of IT companies across the world is similar. Computers will be computers. Indian engineers are rival Silicon Valley workers in creativity, eagerness to do new things, and technical knowledge. However, the basic Indian philosophy of "knowledge for knowledge's sake: don't expect to get any gains from it" holds true for the Indian workers while American workers tend to be more specialized, utilizing the knowledge for specific reasons. Indian workers are more emotional, believes Jalihalm.

Jalihalm, an expert in managing companies in India and the United States, has a bird's eye view on Indian Management. He says that Indian management style is a combination of the American/European and Japanese/Asian styles, because neither approaches can be directly applied to the Indian workforce. "There needs to be a combination of applying structured management techniques, which include driving/guiding people out of their complacency; handling the emotional side of your team; and creating and giving growth opportunities to members of your team" says Jalihalm.

In another instance, John Calvert and Richard Francey's of the 22nd WEDC conference critiqued the current management of India's Public Health sector. Calvert and Francey state that the current managers in the Indian Public Health sector, while being excellent administrators in the strictest sense, are outdated. They have very little understanding of "strategic management, institutional development and the wider policies of environment, gender and commercialization." Basically, they Indian's managers, just like they technological level is playing catch-up with the western world.

The way to remedy this situation is developing programs to address these issues. The main issue is to expand the horizons of Indian managers. They need to see the bigger picture, the global view. They need to be completely up-to-date with technology and how it can be implemented in the workplace, the environment and how it plays into modern politics and their industry and they particularly need to be taught how to utilize all these tools effectively and efficiently. Specific techniques that aided the Mangagerial engineers of the Indian Health Sector come "as engineers but [leave] as managers" are daily learning logs, simulation exercises, benchmarking and personal action plans with split programmes and report-back periods.