What are the economic consequences of the growing cultural diversity of global cities? Is their economic growth affected by this new world phenomenon?

Abstract

The session explores the role that cultural diversity plays in the corporate world. The panelist shared their experiences on cultural diversity and how it can be best tackled and leveraged. The Panelists also debated on various facets of diversity and how they help organizations in bringing innovation within the organization.

Discussion

Kalyanaraman: The topic which we are going to talk about is cultural diversity and is there an opportunity to use it for economic growth within the organization. I have seen cultural diversity, a thinking process which varies across the board. We will talk about what this diversity means to organizations. We moved on to the post-industrialization age or IT age or age of the Web and the age of where people move across the world easily. We heard over years, concepts like creation of global village from a human point of view and the enough NGO talking about creating the global village, getting diverse people to unify work or from complex side. People talking about global corporation which in my understanding is a concept of putting people from multiple thinking capabilities together to create organization and work.

Everywhere people talk about unity and we had this great campaign in India running for about 8 years or so which talked about unity in diversity. How does unity in diversity make a difference in corporate and what can we do? Is there unity in diversity? Is it possible to create unity in diversity? Does it make sense to unity in diversity?

Pradeep Udhas: I feel perhaps we are at that inflection point, you know in productivity gain etc., in industry not only with the technology but also the way the world is coming together that if the companies do not use the diversity to their advantage, they will probably be left behind. If we look at the number of the studies that have been there, one of the studies denotes how the demographic are moving by 2020. What part of the world would have the highest number of new skills sets etc. Those kinds of skills are in DNA of some of the cultures, and one has to take advantage of that. I do definitely believe that.

Kalyanaraman: From earlier discussions we had we still refer to lot of people by the country of origin. Even within our own country, where we work, we referred people by the geography of the origin, by the locality where they come in. Is there a culture which matches our productivity requirement, which if the wordings which he used. Ron, what is your experience having worked across retail environment to where you are today?

Ron Glickman: Unity in diversity is oxymoron, something we have to figure out together. But in the work place for me culture is really defined as a core set of beliefs in the way that we work. And I absolutely believe that economic growth can be driven in two sorts of concepts. One from economic point of view, work tends to flow from low cost and highest productivity. It also flows to the component. So works going to move and therefore things are going to grow. From an innovation perspective diversity also plays really important role.

One of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein is that no problem can be solved from the consciousness that created it. We really need to learn to see the world from different point of view. If we believe that people who are in jobs, who are in roles have been doing things in a same way need to see things from different perspective bringing diversity and cultural diversity into the work place can have really significant impact.

We largely based on capabilities that exist in the other parts of the world, India in particular. Two lessons that I thought were important to learn. One was it is really important to understand not only the core competencies of the way people work, but also where the limitations are. I had awesome service provider and they would willingly walk off the end of cliff with a smile on their face. I didn't know I had a problem until the body piles were so high that I could see that there was something going on the environment that needed to be changed. I had to adapt the way we are working and get them to stay within kind of their capabilities and framework. Another thing that was important was my people really in some cases wanted to see things fail and so the first round of testing that came from offshore came back with some flaws and people said see this is never going to work. They cannot do it as good as us. They are not learning as fast as we are and so we just adapted and I sent the people who want those outcomes to India for the next round of tests and said don't come back unless you are satisfied. That's the result of the culturally diverse team ready to go. I think there's lot of opportunities innovation and economic growth. I think we have to understand how each other work and create a model that is successful in a culturally diverse context.

Kalyanaraman: Rajeeb, take out the point he said in unity and diversity and oxymoron and yet to be keep hearing people talking about unity in diversity. How do you approach the subject? What do you do?

Rajeeb: In terms of unity and diversity being oxymoron, I look at it in a different context if we look at the number of people in the world 6+ billion in the world with 197 countries, 7000 languages, 4000 religions, but when you look at the diversity. Diversity lately has taken a connotation where the term almost implies something like racial diversity where it's something good and it is almost a desired term that's the connotation we hear about diversity now. When you look at globalization it has created a spread of sameness. I think that's where we comes in terms of unity may be. But it also gives us access to differences. In terms of economic growth you are talking globalization has opened a few markets. There is greater need for different people approaching problems in different ways, but still driving economic growth. Maybe that's where the unity part comes in for economic growth, not necessarily we all have to work together. We have to work together, but we don't have to think in the same way. Same people in the same room you have a lot less of arguments, but you will have a lot fewer answers. So you have a lot of unity but you might not have the right effect.

Raj Ramasamy: I look at the room here. I see culturally diverse people and we are global coming from many places. Of course you are all socially connected, and it is economic engine for HCL generating revenue through your assignment or association. I would say rather for India as well to US customers so the question was here today at the panel can cultural diversity be an engine of economic growth for globally socially connected one. Of course yes.

To answer your question unity among diversity what I think is the country still magnet of immigration which is United States. if you look at that country even today scores of people want to come to the country. When they come to the country through the process of naturalization either they go through what we called melting pot that was the country's approach originally rather hasn't worked out that well rather we ended up a new social order what we called mosaic. The meaning is one country many cultures rather than one country one culture. But the economic engine of that region has regenerated again and again. The economic downfalls had happened many, many decades ago. If we look at two television stations which caters to the entire Latin America and South America, Telemundo and Univision those of people living there they generate enormous amount of revenue by producing television programming exporting to Latin and South America. So if you look at those kinds of cultural diverse communities, they do contribute handsomely. So speaking of the topic of the subject itself I can attest to it.

Kalyanaraman: Talking about the topic going from melting pot to mosaic. It is very, very interesting way of looking up things. Anand you have been in the whole concept of trying to create what you call as a cultural bridge between various organization and you come in from a service provider side to talk about it. Can you talk about your experiences on this?

Anand: First of all let me add my comment to this statement unity in uniformity. You know everybody talk the same language came from the same engineering college, or was from the same culture. That would definitely not be what we wanted it to be. In fact we work toward that then we will be fulfilling the definition of insanity. That is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That is not going to happen. Unity in diversity something is here to say and global corporations are ushering in that particular concept. See unity in diversity is a parameter that is definitely driving engine growth not so much because of cost arbitrage, labor arbitrage, but because of the kind of innovation I look at three things.

Unity in diversity or diversity, cultural diversity is bringing in three distinctive contributions. One is this whole concept of innovation. And if you look at organizations, if you look at if you look at culture if you look at countries, countries which have a diverse culture. America is a classic example. In fact America has taken the diversity principle so very well. They even have a diversity visa section in the way they allow immigrants to come in, that is in countries or cultures who are not represented in America, their green card system is completely different.

Diversity is being discouraged by companies which are by countries which are really in the leading edge of innovation. So innovation is definitely a byproduct. Each culture has got its own best practice. There is nothing good or bad about culture universally. It is all with respect to the context. In the business context we will have to learn to imbibe the culture without losing our identity. And that is exactly what the IT industry is doing in the whole business of transformation in the whole business of transition. The third component that comes in is this model of integration. If we are not able to integrate diverse cultures where is the question of us integrating diverse technologies.

The integration that is coming in, I as a service provider with the various companies we are working with, bringing in cultural integration, cultural sensitization. It is increasing the innovation level, the co-operation level and the productivity level. So there is no two ways about it. I personally conducted over 180 sessions to as many customers and each one of them come back and said 'yes' there is a mark difference in us appreciating the culture, integrating the culture and blending with the culture. So the cultural diversity is definitely an engine for the economic growth.

Kalyanaraman: Cultural diversity is there and we have to create unity and work around it. How we do it? What we need to do on it? What we done on it? Anup, you are the first person who worked on the area of trying to create understanding with Japanese saying how do we work as an organization with Japanese. But before I ask the question to anybody having a view on issue about unity and diversity which you would like to talk about? The reason I want to do is back in 80's the whole concept of management of a global organization was creating an organizational culture. We talked about having a unified culture which can work, and we did not talk about unity in diversity at that time. The classical examples are IBM and GE, which came out with the concept of the GE way or IBM way of working. So there was an organization culture which we tried to build onto it. I want to come back to the question of the organizational culture what are the views? Why do think it is required? Is there a necessity to create it? Anup, can you share the experience of why you have to do this whole Japanese unit?

Audience (Anup): Given the background I am responsible for the Japan delivery unit from HCL point of behavior. When we started engaging with the Japanese customers, we found that there are several gaps that we need to learn and we need to adopt ourselves before we can start doing meaningful exchange of business with them. The objective of creating this entire Japan business unit was to sensitize our employees about the various cultural aspects of dealing with customers in Japan. Also understanding when they say something what is the meaning of that and many times our people used to be very confused that when we ask certain question we are not getting response from the customers. What does that mean? Simply it means that the person does not want to answer that question. So there are a lot of certain learnings that are there over a period of time learned that process painstakingly and imparted knowledge to our employees. And we also took help from outside agencies and bodies and those kinds of things to understand the things better. And I don't say that we are experts in understanding the Japanese culture now, but I think we have learnt a lot we have come a long way and it is very important when you are dealing with your customer to understand their culture, their way of working, before you can respond to their businesses there.

Kalyanaraman: Ron, How did you manage the shops across 16 countries? These are specially shops in the airports, where you have footfall of multiple cultures coming in and you have your staff people with local cultures. How you could create an organization wide methodology of working for such a differentiation?

Ron Glickman: We still a kind of rainbow coalition, when we formed our new team. We integrated a new culture, which was a blend of all of the cultures that were participating in change program and we found it very helpful to have a lot of dialog around the outcome we are trying to achieve. Get very, very clear on where we are going and make that non-negotiable. But then very less about how to do it and in really give that more to the people in the various cultures who were going to get us to achieve that outcome. We found that if we stop telling others how to do it and focus on what needs to be done and really letting them do it in the way that suited them best we achieved much better results. So that was the one of the key things that we learned in the journey.

Kalyanaraman: When you talked about how much of weightage would you give to area like allowing people, the ability of people do their way versus purpose around which and methodology around which they have to work, where would you put that in?

Pradeep Udhas: One of the mistakes when your organizations make when outsourcing or sourcing in their own shared service center is that they put too much structure. It's an evolution. Initially they put too many rules, the contract 1500-2000 pages long. In my experience that rarely works. The biggest point they said is the cultural acceptance and congruence was either the biggest barrier or criteria for the success for them. All these contracts etc., really came secondary in nature. It is really important to manage at architectural level and not get down to that level of detail.

One question that has to be asked that if we look at different countries can Infosys create another Infosys in China or Can you create another HCL in Russia? Where you know or that part of the world, engineering and other skills and I think having you worked both US and here I feel we need to actually move beyond saying okay we are doing all these things to actually move up to the scale. We did a study on emerging destination how Indian companies' foot prints are in those countries.

Kalyanaraman: Rajeeb, on the point of about innovation being a driver, diversity being a driver for innovation how would you go about making it happen? How do you go about creating it?

Rajeeb: It is easy to say that 'yes' diversity. Create a purpose and therefore innovation can be the bulb. How do you use diversity to create innovation? As you get into globalization you are going to get into new markets, where you have new products to address new customers and with sameness you cannot do that. You have to have a diverse workforce to be able to do that.

We needed to shift from a context of agreement to commitment and what we tried to do was to bring the diverse ideas together, but not really outsource the accountability of making the decisions and making them stick. We had to build an internal meeting culture of debate. Everybody have their say on their idea and innovation and by involving them it really led to stronger commitment and leadership came with excellent decisions and it was very important that once the decision was made everybody fell in line and worked for the ultimate outcome and those that resisted because it wasn't their idea whether they were internal or external need to be dealt with appropriately and that really helped us to drive innovation and stay on track.

Pradeep Udhas: When I was talking about the teams, getting the team from India and the team from the US together and getting representatives in India in our teams have helped one thing is, the rich diverse culture of India has helped us keep in check of going gun-ho doing something that cannot be done, but also the commitment you can get from the whole team; because there are some people who are so committed to it of making it happen that has helped the whole team.

Kalyanaraman: You talked about getting people from one culture to sit along and balance what people from other culture can go, instead of tipping away. Anand, Is that what you talked about? Would you try and set up the whole cultural bridge in organizations?

Anand Pillai: When we refer to the word culture, many of us unanimously saying that culture is equivalent or synonymous to the country's culture. In its true sense, culture has got about 6 dimensions. One of it is the country's culture. There is a departmental culture. There is also something called company culture, which is one of the things that we at HCL have got diverse culture within HCL and therefore one portion of HCL which identifies with that particular unit, JBU for example. Then there is also relationship culture. When we function as colleagues, we have a particular culture. The moment I am not colleague, I am reporting to you, I have got different culture altogether. And the way I interact with you is going to completely different from the way I would have interacted in a different relationship. Then, there is a gender culture what is being said about this whole concept of what they think is going to be different. This understanding of the different cultures and the way they contribute to our productivity, and how they impede or enhance is what we need to be sensitive to. If we are not sensitive to that it can lead to disaster. I think it was Mckenzie that first said that about 90 to 92% of all projects that are offshored failed, not because of the technology, not because of the project management, but because of the cultural "mismatch".

One rave talk about this whole cultural bridge, they talk about cultural bridge from all these 6 parameters to aid or to bring in productivity. And the context in which we bring in the cultural bridge is the transition management academy. Before a project is transitioned, the key component that has to be done is cultural sensitization. Now several of our clients have used as itself within HCL Technology as an organization to bring in the cultural bridge. Some of our organizations have said we want uniformity; we want little transparency and they have gone ahead and hired other organization. Irrespective of whatever they have done, they have brought in this component of cultural bridge which has invariably prone to be a key success factor in the transitioning that happened of the projects that of course the productivity of offshore itself meeting the objective of the entire offshoring project.

Cultural bridge is absolutely necessary within the organization, before we go forward whether there is offshoring or not. If you take any organization within the same organization, within same legal entity that has got people from various cultures. Ease coast Vs west coast. If they have to work together they have to understand and appreciate one another. Offshoring is just an extension. But there is cultural diversity within the organization, whether we like it or not. HCL Technologies is a classic example, where we have got an equal distribution of our work force, probably the only company within the top 5 to have this kind of distribution.

How do we integrate cultures toward productivity, is what is leading to transformation. Actually a case in point is Harvard Business School exactly has noted this as a parameter of HCL Technologies in blending with the culture of the diverse set of industries that we operate in, the diverse set of customers that we operate in and also the diverse set of employees that we are having. That is a challenge in itself.

Kalyanaraman: Theoretical world which we are talking about right now in terms of why culture, what it can do now. As the head of IT and I'm not using the word CIO and somebody who is controlling IT. Where does the whole concept of culture come into your life in the organization?

Rajeeb: First of all let me little bit contradict the earlier statement. Innovation does not require diverse or diversity. All it requires is the meritorious people. Why diversity happens in the work place is, if you don't find the qualified resources you tend to go wherever you find the resources whether onshore or offshore or the diverse population wherever you draw from. But innovation itself depends upon people who are qualified for, who are able to accomplish the meritorious task. To have a successful IT to deliver to the end users on an SLA basis, you go with the HR principles that you hire people who are qualified. That is the bottom line it starts with the hiring process. If you bring in as a result of best hiring practices of diverse population of IT staff, then you go through cultural sensitivity, in spite of what HR does, you have to have your own set of leadership skills and mentoring skills, and giving all the cultural sensitivity courses so that people all work as a team. Then you are able to deliver your projects on time. At the same time you have a cohesive IT community where we can withstand what we have to deliver.

Raj Ramasamy: I respectfully disagree with the notion that innovation doesn't require diversity. I believe that if we get bunch people on the room who all have the same way of thinking or the same way of doing things, it is going to be very difficult for them to get outside of the context to figure out what is possible and what they believe is. Innovation may be incremental compared to somebody else's point of view perspective given that context and experience.

Kalyanaraman: Rajeeb, on these questions of where can IT play a role on, what you do as head of IT? How you would play a role of culture?

Rajeeb: As Head of IT or Product Development, I agree with you and I don't agree with you. I don't think you require diversity in the traditional sense to have innovation. Agree? But you have to have diversity. Everybody who thinks the same, comes with the same background, has the same experiences. It is not going to help innovation. One person can innovate something; that kind of innovation is very unusual. Its usually people have to work, 2-3 people together becomes major innovation. You have to have diverse experience, background and skill sets so you have to have innovation in that area definitely.

Kalyanaraman: Different thinking, different perspectives can come from the same community. So what we are saying is different thinking heads with different experiences, different educational levels, brings a lot of variety to you choose from.

Anand Pillai: So that is what we are saying no two white people think alike, that means that they are from diverse departments, they are from diverse educational backgrounds, still coming to back to the point diverse.

That's why I backtracked and said culture does not necessarily mean country or racial culture. It could be educational culture, professional culture, relationship culture. That's where the dimension is. I actually wanted to add one case study. In the early 60's Johnson & Johnson had this product tie and all which was scheduled H drug, the Johnson brothers move that being the scheduled H drug to being an OTC drug which means you don't need prescription with that. Technically speaking you know the sales should have shot up drastically. But it didn't. When Johnson brother looked at it greater detail they found it was the pharmaceutical person who was earlier CEO and continued to be CEO. There were under the new regulation. So what they did was they hired a person from P&G. This person came in and looked at the packaging and said no wonder this product is not selling, because it packaged like a drug. So he got it in a bottle of 25, 50 and 100 and the sales shot up drastically. However, the drug packaging had one advantage that it was tamper-proof. In the bottle packaging either somebody was a disgruntled employee, they brought in some lead poisoning and that led to lot of side effect and the product had to be withdrawn. There was a massive campaign for providing compensation for people who had this side effects and the CEO was summoned. He knew that he was summoned to be fired. So actually wrote down his resignation letter and brought it to the Johnson brothers. Johnson brothers asked him "do you know why we have called you?" he said "I understand. I admit the mistake". In fact the total loss in the early mid 60-65 was US $25 million. He said "I have been responsible for bringing this US $25 million and I know that you have called me to fire me. You don't have to go through that experience and here is my resignation letter. So the Johnson brothers said this "we have just spent US$ 25 million in educating you. Why on earth will we fire you?" This guy thought not bad, my nightmare is over so I can go. Johnson brothers asked him to stay back and said "now we will tell you the three conditions under which we will fire you. Condition number 1, you will be fired if you repeat this mistake again" which is understandable. "Condition number 2, you will be fired if you do not document this learning and share it with your colleagues". He could not believe his ears when he heard condition number 3. "Condition number 3, you will be fired if you do not take such initiatives again". That is what led to innovation.

Audience: That brings me out to something else which we don't need to look at it in corporate point of view. Even if we look at it from economic point of view, from a religious point of view, any methodology wherever you look at it from. Is culture defined by the leader and therefore that the growth that you can expect out of using culture depends on what that leader does? Is there view on this? What is the role of the leader in building that culture or role of the leader getting the culture to work for him? Any views on that?

Raj Ramasamy: Organization culture has to stem from the top and it has to be implemented across the corporation or organization through the HR and every leader in every department has just go along with it. If every department has its own culture by itself then that is not productive either, such as one mission statement for corporation. Every department starts to have its own mission statement. Then we are saying a kind of organization in chaos. I would tend to go with whatever the corporate culture or organization culture that has being defined. In large organization, it is very common. In smaller companies probably may or may not. So if we have such an organization you are fortunate enough to work for them and just follow the line and to be a leader to taking the principle across the organization.

Pradeep Udhas: When you think about HCL you think about very market driven organization, very much customer oriented, whatever needs to be done will be done. Even Narayanamoorthy has admitted that in engineering and those kinds of things, HCL probably among the best. I think let other companies would have different cultures. That was in the DNA of the company and the DNA idea comes from the leaders, founders and people who get started and the art is preserving some of that as the leaders move on and things change. If you look at leadership kind of drivers, I look at the value systems, vision and strategy. Value system changes the least; it's the slowest to change. Vision can change with different leaders coming and strategy of course every year. You look and respond to an environment and value system sometimes they also have to change. But it takes a long time. Some of the other organizations also had to change their values to add speed to their value in their company. So it's something that is very much part of DNA, but DNA could also go through some changes over period of time.

Kalyanaraman: We had multiple people saying that 90% of my time and budget managing business as usual. Here we talked about how the culture diversity can help us in innovation. If 10% of the effort is what is about future and innovation and 90% of the time effort and money is going into running business as usual. How do you manage the diversity of culture into getting that 90% in order and working? Or is it saying that 90% we should have a single organization culture to run. We should not allow multiple cultures to work on their own and use the cultural diversity for the 10% growth.

Ron Glickman: I think that it is a terrible ratio 90:10. I think more to be focused on figuring out what is driving 90, reducing that to greatest extent possible, possibly giving some of those costs to P&L; but then reinvesting in expanding that 10% and going for more breakthrough oriented results. But cultures could be very satisfied with 90:10 ratio, and therefore not particularly interested in making changes. I do think the leader sets the tone and most importantly they need to reward the behaviors that required to drive that the culture and make sure that people are not aligned that corrective action is taken.

Kalyanaraman: If the role of most managers in organization is to fight the daily fire, and there are very few people who are really about taking the organization forward. One level which talks about it, but larger level in the organization talks about having to fight the fire every day. How do they fight the fire with the cultural diversity? Is there something any of you have tried with your teams which helped you?

Pradeep Udhas: I feel it is not really a matter of planning something. I think it is business as usual has to happen, but more on again delegate some of the work and it depends on your quality of people you are delegating to. I believe that top 10% of the organization is to focus a lot more on changing the ratio and then you can't really manage cultural diversity. It is something instinctive. One has to accept as a policy. Just do it and things will happen. One has to accept one thing that they had shared vision and agreeing that it is important. Once you invest time in that, say okay, leadership agrees in it and those who don't agree it may be don't have consensus. Those people move on in life. Then one has to drive it.

There was a book you know 'good to great' came a while ago this is all consultant talk about huge strategy. You put the right people together. They did analysis of 25 years companies who created value, as they put right people together. They always keep coming back with better strategy and create more value for the stakeholders. I really believe in it that you just have to focus on having such vision, value system, getting the right people together and things will happen.

Kalyanaraman: Anand, You defined 6 different cultures in the system. Where the value coming into that 6 systems?

Anand Pillai: It is above all. Value is culture agnostic. We cannot say, "listen I hold to the value of integrity, but I am an American and I want to do it in a different way". Let us say that is non-negotiable. Let us not mean we are very good at English language. The strength of India is the largest English speaking nation, but we confuse people with our language. So let us keep value aside. Value is the principles or it is non-negotiable standard, you take irrespective of culture. You cannot say "I am Indian, therefore I find it difficult to say no and I said what I said but I don't mean what I said". Therefore, can we renegotiate the contract? I don't think that is anything for discussion at all. Value is above culture.

How you execute that value is the way the culture comes in. Because this is where many people have taken it. Our value is integrity, but the way we look at integrity is only saying yes, but not doing what we said yes for. That is wrong. As you wanted to go back I was quite intrigued by you making a statement that the organization's leader determines the culture. I tend to disagree on that because I have done various studies. I think you are part of one study where we actually did a cultural fitment between Vineet and his direct reportees.

We did a particular psychometric instrument Myers-Briggs type indicator. We found that he is the only one of his type. The reason for that is God does not repeat mistakes. One may look at it that the success of the organization lies in the fact that people think alike to execute the same decision. And that diversity is what really has been the strength of many organizations. I think to reiterate once again, value is culture agnostic. Let us not mince those words.

Audience: I am Anil Gupta. I basically interacting with Japan a lot and was involved in Japan from 1981. One thing that I have found that there are two aspects to the culture. Today we are emphasizing at the surface culture. One is the surface culture aspect and the deeper culture aspect. When we use the term unity in diversity, most of it stems from the unity come from deeper culture aspect. We as human beings have certain values and there at that level very easy to get unity and most of the problems and at the surface culture aspects which is how you talk, common sense is not common, whole lot of factors that there which makes it difficult to interact, just because you don't know the language. For example here we are talking a language assuming that we talk each other's language.

So you have already crossed a level beyond which you can handle other aspects. In Japan, while deeper cultural aspects to Indian's are very similar. But because of tremendous barrier of language and some surface cultural aspects, it creates a problem. But once you understand deeper side, I find there is no difference and hence a lot of unity and hence the innovation, and when you get diverse people together since the deep core they are unified and when you have your value system which is same to all.

Kalyanaraman: The value system can be on both sides of whatever we call as surface level culture and that is very nice way of positioning the whole concept of culture. Any specific views or points you have in your mind?

Audience: There is a very important point. The recent survey on CEOs of multinational companies from US and Europe and one of the things the CEOs said that the second biggest thing of their challenge is managing in a globalized multi cultural company. The second biggest thing was managing cultural differences. And that was at the micro level managing cultural differences and the first was changing the people's behavior. And right after that was managing cultural differences and the other thing they also said that only 50% of CEO felt that their company practices were cohesive with people's cultural differences. They have a common vision. But their company policies, how they manage people, they are not in tune with all different people like that. The thing was that 30% of CEOs felt that their companies were ready to manage global cross cultural difference kind of a company.

Concluding notes

Kalyanaraman: 80% of people feel they need for it and only 30% are doing it. I believe others are doing. Just try; don't talk about it; it is going to happen. My closing remark on this what I have been able to take from all this is there is huge value on diversity, which can be utilized if we are able to reign it right and keep the value systems across the board to drive that culture. We go back to history. We found that people who have used the different culture in any of the 6 tenures, you talked about, have successfully changed. I think they used the culture for change management very well. And every organization has done it. It could be just changing the CEO. But moving in from one culture bringing in a person of different culture has changed the way the organization is worked, and therefore led to the economic growth of the organization.