Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The Indecisive Indian

As an IT leader, I have shared this on many platforms. What has blocked the “Indian” IT brand from reaching the heights enjoyed by Germany in automobiles or the Swiss in watches is the lack of finishing. We just don’t create enough wow for our customers. And this lack of finishing or quality can be attributed to a very large extent to the soft skills of our people. Their lack of ability to many times understand the context or appreciate the culture of the customers they are serving. The most often faced dilemma by a US or European customer when it comes to dealing with an Indian is to figure out whether when and Indian says “Yes”, does it really mean a “Yes” or a “Maybe”. That indecisiveness of whether to say "Yes" or a "No" stems from our "never say die" spirit. We Indians have a very powerful tool called “Jugaad”, which the rest of the World has a very hard time with. Always juggling between different variables in our mind to find the most optimum answerAnd given this behaviour the world has not only characterised us as the “Argumentative Indian” but also as the “Indecisive Indian”. 

During all my visits abroad, the one place where this indecisiveness is so evident - and I am sure you will have a wry smile on your face when you read it - is in a restaurant. I have seen that look of horror so many times on so many faces whenever I have walked into a restaurant abroad. I am sure invariably the waiter must think, here comes an Indian and first he will order x and then he will say...sorry can you please change it to y. When they get a clean order, they are so pleasantly surprised that no one has made any changes. 

The reason for this is that we are not used to thinking about all the aspects before we give our decision. Very often, long after we blurted out our choice, the options are still running in our mind. If we have to wipe out this image of “indecisiveness”, we will have to not only appear firm in our professional dealings but also in our social ways. We will need to preplan everything. In our professional commitments, we will have to layout a plan of exactly what we are going to deliver to when we are going to deliver to how we are going to deliver and communicate that in a transparent and unambiguous manner. And when it comes to social behaviour, we will have to plan out our logistics as much as we can. So that when we use a service, we don’t say this and than …..er….sorry that.

Some of us may say…."But why?" What is wrong with that? Well for one, it has created this impression that we must be like this in all our dealing, which is definitely not true, at least to a large extent. 

Cheers!


H

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