Infosys’s Globalization Strategy
June 23, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant
Creation of diverse workforce would be the greatest challenge for corporations in a globalized world, says Infosys Technologies’ chairman and chief mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy according to Silicon India article “Creating diverse workforce greatest challenge for global firms”.
In a bid to address this daunting challenge, Infosys has built a global base to grow in the future, with over 91,000 employees from 70 nationalities working across 90 countries. Recounting the initiatives taken during the year under review, the chairman said by adopting a policy of ‘follow the sun’, the company had ensured to build delivery capability in India, China, southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, the US, Canada, Mexico, Britain, eastern Europe and Mauritius.
As a global firm with a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic workforce and delivery centers, Murthy says the IT bellwether had taken several measures to create a high-level of diversity in its workforce by enhancing its recruiting efforts in different countries.
I think Infosys is doing a great job turning itself into a global company by hiring diverse workforce. But underneath these efforts to build diverse work force, Infosys or any other company vying to be Global Company primarily need to pay attention to their corporate culture. Most of the corporations have what I call “ethno-centric” corporate culture. Initially when Infosys was small, it had all its clients and employees in India. All its executives were and still are of Indian ethnicity (although there is some diversity in its board with 3 board members are not Indians). Therefore its corporate culture is mainly influenced by Indian culture (both ethnic and country). When they begin to open development centers in other countries, Indian corporate culture unknowingly percolates and influences the local culture. If those two cultures are diametrically opposite, creating a diverse work force may in fact hinder with employee productivity. So, ethno-centric corporate culture may curtail the ambition of any company to becoming global.
In my opinion, the only way to overcome ethno-centric corporate culture is to have multi-ethnic and multi-national top executives. Infosys needs to create diversity at the top executive level first. That will have a long term affect of neutralizing ethno-centric corporate culture and building a truly global organization. That is the only way for Infosys or any other company to achieve globalization strategy.
I have couple of example to show that this approach is winning globalization strategy:
Example 1: Sony Corp of Japan is a global company but its culture is strongly influenced by Japanese culture and that has lately affected Sony’s Brand negatively. To overcome stagnating sales, Sony in 2005 promoted Howard Stringer as its first non Japanese CEO. Born in Wales with extensive work experience in US, Stringer has been very active in trying to neutralize negative aspect of Japanese ethno centric influence on Sony (check out NY Times article). Diversity has been implanted successfully at the top executive’s level at Sony (Look at the bio of Sony’s top executive here)
Example 2: Lenovo, a Chinese based PC hardware company bought lucrative assets from IBM couple of years back and has been on a path to transform itself into a globalized company. Again check out the diversity of top management team at Lenovo here.
Management teams within Infosys are all Indians (Check out the profile of the management team here). Bottom line is simple. Internationally well known brand will not make a company Global. Global manufacturing/development center will not make a company global. Multinational, multiethnic employee by themselves may not enable the company to become global. It’s the “ethnic neutral” corporate culture that will unleash any company to become truly global. That cultural change can be brought about by the diversity at the executive and the top management level. I think Infosys should get busy hiring multinational top executives along with hiring multinational employees.
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