Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere by Ravi Venkatesan Page B

entrepreneurship, courage, a higher purpose,
     learning agility, and people skills or emotional intelligence. Assessing candidates
     for these qualities and developing them in the pipeline of rising leaders is vital.

4
    The India Strategy and Operating Model
    The trick in globalizing is to strike the delicate balance between being mindlessly
     global and helplessly local.
    —ASHOK GANGULY, FORMER CHAIRMAN, HINDUSTAN UNILEVER
    October 2010. John Flannery, president of GE India, had a big smile on his face as
     he left a celebration in Delhi at which CEO Jeff Immelt had congratulated GE’s India
     team for winning a $750 million gas turbine deal—India’s largest order for turbines—from
     Reliance Power. The main reason GE India had won against tough German and cheaper
     Chinese competitors was speed: the company took sixty days from bid to close. Reliance
     Power had been amazed; a year earlier, it would have taken GE India anywhere from
     nine to twelve months to put together such a complex deal. Each unit would have negotiated
     separately with the customer and lawyers would have taken months to wordsmith each
     clause.
    This time around, the GE India team, operating under the “One GE” model that Immelt
     had unveiled a year earlier, had been empowered to close the commercial transaction
     from end to end, which included arranging for financing. Determined to prove the operating
     model’s power to Reliance and to GE’s headquarters, the GE India team worked 24/7
     to win the contract with the full backing of the global GE network that provided technical
     expertise and supply chain capability. It marked the vindication of GE’s new strategy
     and operating model for India, and signaled a reversal of fortunes for a company whose
     revenues had declined from $2.1 billion in 2008 to $1.6 billion in 2009.
    Consider an example from another industry. By 2008, telecom giant Nokia dominated
     the Indian mobile handset market, with a share of nearly 70 percent. India had become
     Nokia’s second-largest market after China. The company had executed a textbook-perfect
     strategy, making an early commitment to India, developing a wide range of models at
     different price points, investing in manufacturing and distribution reach, and building
     a respected brand. Then, a few unknown Indian companies like Micromax, Spice, Zen,
     and Karbonn started offering an unusual product. Using low-cost chipsets from a Chinese
     company called Mediatek, their innovation was a handset that could take two SIM cards.
     Customers liked these phones because they could take advantage of concessional offers
     from Indian telecom operators, which were then waging an all-out tariff war. One SIM
     card (and telephone number) stayed constant, allowing friends and family to call.
     Customers would swap out the second SIM card every month to take advantage of the
     best deal for outgoing calls. Despite frantic pleas by Nokia India for such phones,
     it wasn’t until June 2011 that Nokia Finland finally responded by developing the dual
     SIM phones, C1 and C2. The consequences were catastrophic: by then, Nokia’s market
     share had plunged to under 30 percent, while the upstarts captured almost 30 percent
     of the market. 1
    Why did Nokia in Finland not respond decisively to what its local team so clearly
     saw? How did GE change and allow its Indian operation to move quickly? The answer
     to both questions lies in what I call the India operating model.
    Until now, multinational companies have done well in countries that resemble their
     home markets. They don’t do as well in countries like India that are economically
     and culturally very different. Except for a few industries like commercial aircraft
     and armaments, a one-size-fits-all approach guarantees irrelevance in emerging markets.
     However, standardization is critical to success in a multinational company that plans
     to operate in many countries. Limiting product proliferation drives