Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization

Chapter 3India: Beyond This World

India has the potential to perplex many who engage or seek to do business with the country. At one level it is a free, welcoming, and tolerant nation that embodies many of the values the modern world prizes—a surprisingly democratic outlier in the developing world, where authoritarian and despotic instincts for the most part still reign. The country's emergence as an economic and technological power supports these sentiments, giving the sense that the country must soon take its rightful place in the modern world.

At another level, however, India is a mind-numbingly bureaucratic and rigid society, difficult for an outsider to navigate, and a place where many leaders say doing business is harder than just about anywhere else in the world—including China, Africa, or the Middle East.

State-of-the-art campuses for IT and outsourcing companies can all too often be serviced by appalling infrastructure and sit in the midst of squalor and levels of environmental degradation that are difficult to fathom, but which locals seem to blithely ignore. Images of highly advanced satellite monitoring equipment for India's ambitious space program literally being carted to rural areas on rickety, bullock-pulled vehicles reinforces the sense of India as an incongruous, multifaceted place. Indians themselves can be confusing. On the surface welcoming, open, and warm, the capacity of Indians to be less than direct and to engage in opaque strategies can leave people ...