Outsourcing: Raju Reddy, Chairman And CEO Of Sierra Atlantic (Part 8)

By guest author Tony Scott

Business Cultures: Silicon Valley Redux?

Tony: Let’s talk a bit about business culture differences and work environments – how do you find those in India and China compared to the U.S.?

Raju: Surprisingly, I find the work culture in India and China to be much closer to what we have in Silicon Valley. People are pretty hard working and very vibrant. You may not have a deep pool of management talent though. Often for middle-level management there is a shortage of qualified people, but in terms of work ethic and everything else its, it’s encouraging.

Tony: Are you taking people from the United States and having them go back to China and India to help fill the gaps that you have in various management levels?

Raju: In India, surprisingly, there is no reliable source on it, but they say that about 100,000 people have returned from the United States to India over the past four to five years, so there is a relatively good supply of management talent. That was not the case five or seven years ago. Within my company there are a lot of people whom moved back to India, and who interestingly, I did not have to push. And it wasn’t purely for family or social reasons.  They wanted to go back to India because the opportunities there are better now, and compared to what it was, the gap between the pay here and the pay in India is not as much. It’s a much narrower gap than five years ago.

But for China, in fact we have a lot of American citizens who actually like going there and spending time there, which is actually very heartening. And the physical infrastructure in China is certainly very advanced. Compared to India, it’s much more advanced, and often on par with what we have in America. This is certainly true of the airports, roads, hotels. In India it might be more of an adjustment, and fewer people go there. But in India the availability of such talent really hasn’t been an issue for us.  In China, we do have to address it by having some of our employees here spend extended periods there.

Tony: It used to be that China was a hardship posting, and now it’s not considered a hardship at all [laughs]. There’s the pollution of course, but that’s another story. We do a lot of business in China, recruiting experienced executives – typically of Chinese background – for multinational companies. But when we do a search for a senior role in China, we not only have to look in China, we have to search in the United States, and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The right person could be in any of these places.  If you look only in one location, you have limited your capability to find the best.

Raju: The good news is – you would know this much better than I do – but compared to three or five years ago, I think there are people who are more willing to live in China or India now, and that might not have been the case five years ago, right?

Tony: It’s a great career move for a lot of people.  Many who are ethnically Chinese and were born in the Mainland and came to the United States to do their graduate study, now they are interested in going back. There are also many people who are not ethically Chinese and not born in China who would view going to China as an opportunity. There are a lot of people who are learning Chinese, speak some Chinese, or have become quite fluent in Chinese, and they find this is a great career move because, as you said, things are really happening in China and India. The rapid advancement of those economies gives people a lot of opportunities that they wouldn’t have if they were in the United States.

Raju: Very true. So, do you also work with any of the venture firms?  Because I know that a lot of the venture firms are investing in India, and they look for that sometimes – people who have lived in both the West and in India – to become more comfortable with the team there.

Tony: Absolutely. We do a lot of work with venture firms. We have helped venture backed companies build their management teams, and venture firms find their own partners.

Raju: Oh, that’s good, in both China and India?

Tony: More so in China than India, historically. But this was partly because one of my partners, Jean Su, was actually the first search professional in Mainland China. She set up the executive search operations there for Korn Ferry back in 1994. She did her undergraduate work in Beijing and her master’s degree at MIT, and has worked in executive search in both China and in the United States. She is sort of like you and your background in this way – another globalized executive.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Outsourcing: Raju Reddy, Chairman And CEO Of Sierra Atlantic
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