Recently Mr. Narayana Murthy had commented about the falling standards of students in IIT, and how coaching seems to be one of the main reasons. Do you have any opinions on that?
The problem is, everybody talks about the ‘good old days’. In the good old days, it was so difficult, and all that. The fact is it is still intensely competitive. There are multiple things that are still issues. One of them is the fact that the attention to detail has become very much important. Coaching gives you the ability to pay attention to detail where you can learn when you make mistakes, which is I think very important overall in life. If you are telling me the quality has dropped purely on conceptual ability, yes probably, but the coaching may have actually helped in many other things. So I think it’s a mixed bag. The overall thing at the end of the day, I believe is that as some skills go down then some other skills get picked up elsewhere.
What is your take on the issue of the top jobs across IITs today being offered being mostly by consulting firms or financial giants? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing, or do you think that’s natural and we shouldn’t do anything about it?
I think it is a good thing – this is what opportunity is all about! Because you have put in efforts to get into the institute and have worked hard at the institute, you can get good jobs. Facebook, for instance, is offering high packages because you have got into IIT and you have done amazingly well too. Well, financial companies may take IITians because they think it is going to be a good value addition to them.
I am a very free-market kind of a person. If the business thinks it makes sense to recruit IITians, they will do so and if IITians think they should go into that business, they will do so as well! I don’t necessarily have a view that because you are in IIT and the country pays for your education, you will have to give back to engineering only. I think it is a question of people doing what they enjoy and contributing to the economy in some way or the other.
Indian Industry and Entrepreneurship
From a technical perspective, what is our current state of the industry? Are we still largely suitable as an outsourcing destination, as IT service providers? Or do you think it’s time we had our own core technology firms, like our own Silicon Valley? There is also a view that the non-IT technical requirements (say, automotive) are generally outsourced to countries abroad. Do you feel this should be corrected? Is this the right time for us students to enter this area?
I think it is important to build an industry in India that is different from purely outsourcing. The question is whether we are there yet; and I don’t think we are. This is because of the many things that are missing.
The first set of products that would really make sense from an Indian perspective is telecom. India has got a large market, with a few hundred million subscribers and we should be building products and solutions which can then be transferred and used in other places.
I think the biggest challenge in India, is we don’t respect soft skills enough. We respect a guy who can take a differential equation and work it out in his head, which are our hard skills. We don’t respect the fact that somebody else can see the differential equation and explain it in a few words to somebody else who doesn’t understand it. And until we start respecting soft skills, people don’t do soft skills such as leadership, etc., as part of their education. So what ends up happening, unfortunately, is that when you are setting up a company or an industry, hard skills are a very small part of what you need.
So yes, we definitely need to get there. The question is, are we ready? I don’t think so. Parents, teachers and students should start paying attention to the softer side of things. Whether in IIT, or anywhere else, there are excellent teachers in the subject. But I don’t think they also paid any attention to soft skills such as the ability to deal with people, handle conflicting situations etc. As you gain experience working in a company, your technical confidence keeps coming down, and your soft skill confidence keeps going up along with your intellectual content with respect to making strategies, and the like. So you are preparing for a little bit of that technical part through problem solving techniques but you end up missing out on a larger piece which, in my opinion, is the ‘softer content’. To me, unless that changes, I don’t think there will be an environment for the successful creation of a Silicon Valley in India.
In IIT too, not much importance has been given to this. Back in those days, courses of that type were called a ‘fraud course’; and I was equally one of those guys who didn’t respect those courses at that point of time.
But, absolutely yes; the market is ripe for products and services. You have got a few hundred million subscribers. You can’t tell me the market is not strong enough. You have to start thinking how you can tap that while I also believe that it is not just the Indian market but about catering to the global markets from India. But if you look at most of the companies that have succeeded in the global market, they have succeeded first in their home market. So, a product may succeed in the US because the ‘culture’ of usage of that product/technology is formed there. Then you can superimpose that culture in different places; but first you have to understand that culture of usage.
Think about it. The way the evolution of Apple has happened – very highly culture dependent on the US. Everybody in India loves the iPhone, but in reality the ‘culture’ of usage does not resemble that of the US. Apple’s initial products were very bad at text messaging, which India has a very strong culture of. Thus, you have to build the right cultural context for the product which has not happened in India yet.
Would you advice students to start up as an entrepreneur immediately after college, or would it be better after studying for some more time?
Well, my advice for anybody who comes for advice whether or not to be an entrepreneur, in the first place: “Don’t!” One should firmly believe on the idea and should be committed enough to say, “Who cares about what anyone thinks, I am going to do this!”
However, I believe that once you work in an industry for a little while, you will be able to identify the white spaces immediately. Not that you can’t do it when you are a student – Bill Gates did that. There are enough students who did it and followed that path. So the question isn’t really about whether you are a student, or if it has been 10-20 years since you passed out. It is when you identify the white space that you feel you are so committed and passionate about. It doesn’t matter at what stage you are then.
What are the key emerging areas and trends in the technology sector in India that we should be looking at? Where will the action, so to speak, be happening next?
I don’t think that it is dramatically different around the world than in India, except that the value points that you have to deliver in your services are very different in the subcontinent. Clearly, mobility is a fantastic trend and India is a success story in mobility. Now using that, what is the value point for which you can deliver value added services in mobility?
In technology, the next big thing that I think is in the area of what I call ‘shared services in different places’. Many Indian companies are not of the size and scale that will benefit from dedicated models; so I would say that whether it is shared models of infrastructure – through cloud, applications or computing – that is the next big thing.
And clearly one of the areas that India has been relatively lax about over time is that of information security. That is something corporates will start paying more attention to over the next 5-7 years as a technology trend. We do pay very scant respect to it; after all in India they say there are no secrets! That culture cannot perpetually extend to all aspects of our lives.
Management Education
Coming to your management education, why did you make the jump from IIT to IIM? And is the IIM tag required on your way to become a manager in the IT, or in any industry for that matter?
