In-house resource Development for Emerging Organizations
In today’s boundary-less economics, the policymakers and the business leaders have to consistently think to preserve economic democracy and business democracy apart from other varieties of extensive list of democracies. — Alok Singh
The Bharat has the highest number of youths today in the world. It’s a paradox that on the one hand the companies look for talent and other hand our youth struggle for work. The job providers look for talent with having higher learning curve. This is because there is a gap between the talent required for a specific job profile and the training provided in academic institutions.
The New Education Policy has incorporated these fallacies and it will take decades before the efforts of these changes will start bearing fruits. Currently employers rely heavily on the learning curve and the selection is based on aptitude tests and other psychometric tests. An individual having a higher learning curve is easier and more economical to train, i.e., such people learn fast. In the technology-driven economy, companies need people with higher learning curves to adapt fast. But this civilization is a blessing in disguise. It means that despite having poor performance of our educational institutions in world ranking we can cope well by harnessing our talents with higher learning curve. Even illiterate who use WhatsApp to do voice message and participate in financial transactions using BHIM UPI supports the belief that Bhartiya has a higher learning curve. Moreover, the learning curve has little to do with the educational qualification.
We can see the success story of Zoho Corporation. It succeeded as it strategized to tap the high learning curve of rural youths, trained them well for a software company in their own ZOHO School, employed them at their home location, and this way earned favorable human resources at a comparatively cheaper rate. This business model is a win-win situation for the organization, for the youths with higher learning curves, for society, and for the environment. It is helpful to the environment as it reduces the burden on city utilities. The Zoho Corporation has offices at several locations worldwide but the most talked about office is run from a village in Tamil Nadu. The portfolio of human resources associated with this organization is a ray of hope for other companies and organizations that can’t compete with deep-pocket competitors to hire the best-educated talent in their respective sectors.
The other business model is collaborating either with the financial support providers or with the technology providers. Providing equity in the business to the financial support providers is a costly business model. The deep-pocket individuals do not allow others to survive. Such entities can afford to offer deep discounts and kill the small players. There is a lack of law with sufficient teeth to check such businesses who aim to kill small businesses despite having regulating bodies like the Competition Commission. These small companies and new startups can’t provision fees for the costly lawyers and legal firms to defend them and hence the regulators need to develop more teeth to defend startups and small businesses. We have seen that many of our successful startups slowly fall into the trap of foreign technology providers or foreign financiers.
Today technology-driven companies like e-commerce or social media platforms have become a nightmare to regulate, and even their influence on democratic processes is a threat to democracy itself. The business model to collaborate with the technology providers is like hand-holding and should be welcomed with proper due diligence.
There is another success story of the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad (IIMA) to grow on its own. There was a time when IIM A roped in Harvard Business School to establish its management education. But the experience was not healthy. People from these foreign institutes visited Bharat as a holiday trip and spent most of their time on non-value-adding activities to IIM A, all at the cost of domestic taxpayer’s money. The experience of IIMA in its success and the way the foreign institutes affiliated people treated it is well documented in the book titled: Brick by Red Brick: Ravi J. Matthai and the Making of IIM Ahmedabad, authored by T.T. Ram Mohan. The leadership of Vikram Sarabhai and Ravi J. Matthai realized sixty years ago that foreigners won’t help us stand on our own feet even for establishing an academic institute. We have to rely on our own talent and slowly but steadily we will achieve what we aspire for.
The dependency on foreign capital, foreign technology, and foreign training can be considered for temporary survival but not for a sustainable future. The charity is rooted in our tradition only and no other tradition believes in one world, one family, one earth. We have started educating the world but we have to be careful for our own people. The out-of-the-box business strategy of Zoho Corporation is learning for such startups and small companies. That is rely on local talent, train them, provide them work at their location and hence retain them, and grow together.
The IIM A has been successful on its own, the Bharat Biotech has been successful on its own, the Zoho Corporation is successful on its own and these are sufficient illustrations that we need to train our own in-house talent to meet our own requirements.
Small, new, and aspiring organizations should rely on trustful business partners to move ahead. Once the trust is gained the strength to challenge the troubles in the path to sustainability becomes doable. The role of financial equity, sweat equity, technology equity, marketability equity, supply chain, human resource equity, and other stakeholders need to be assured that the business in which they are participating will be trustful to them all. Such business models can be labeled with many names, one name can be the cooperativities of corporates, i.e., cooperative culture to replace the corporate culture. It will take care of environment, social, and governance (ESG) and we won’t need a separate framework and exclusive regulator for ESG.
In today’s boundary-less economics, the policymakers and the business leaders have to consistently think to preserve economic democracy and business democracy apart from other varieties of extensive list of democracies.
(Alok Singh is a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Management Indore and a freelancer academician).
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