Blaming westernized companies (by which I mean both western companies and local companies like Reliance/Infosys that try to run things in the modern manner) for the problems of the third world is silly.

All they've done is caused you to learn a little bit about other countries and made you feel guilty that things are a lot worse elsewhere. China would be poor even if your iPhone was proudly made in CA by illegal immigrants (yay for Nationalist Apparel), it would just be easier for you to ignore.

> Blaming westernized companies (by which I mean both western companies and local companies like Reliance/Infosys that try to run things in the modern manner) for the problems of the third world is silly.

It is perhaps a bit silly. I mean, there are actual examples of mining rights being held from colonial times, Dutch East India company, Haiti being forced to pay for slaves freedom from rebellion for 140 years etc. and some of those do still have influences, but I don't think they are the primary ones. I don't, however, think all of these values are always exclusively western though. Japan has worker rights, as far as I can tell from a cursory glance on Wikipedia.

Assuming India wants, or needs foreign influence, Japan is just as good a place to get it.

And we certainly can learn from India - that's a blog post idea. A bit more emo hipster than what I usually post, but maybe I'll do it anyway.

I think I may be learning I might not have the same definition of "western" as some people. I had always imagined Western as referring to Western Europe and the US but now I think there is a colloquial phrasing that uses western as a synonym for modern. If that is the case I think this next century is about to get really confusing...

Japan before WWII but after the West showed up, based it's whole economy and work system on Germany, after WWII it was essentially run by the US. They are completely "Western" (as in white people) when it comes to their way of business and economy.

/s

Oh, such wonderful news. So height is not a requirement for positions of power now! Someone should change the wiki page. And well, it might just be sheer coincidence that many big names in India have women CXOs. The western style management has ensured that women in the west are very well empowered to reach positions of power without any gender bias troubling them.

I really don't know what to say. If it is your assumption that every firm/organization in India follows nepotism and doesn't value true merit, it would be simply a wrong assumption, IMHO. Aren't we all aware as to how Wall Street or any big business in the West hires? cough "Business Networking" cough I guess a good read in this regard would be 'Liar's Poker' or 'The Big Short' by Michael Lewis. [1] There have been corporations(might not be in the truest sense, but a collective of skilled workers with a common directive nonetheless) in India which have achieved amazing feats in the past. One could even say that few of the harmful practices of the West (reckless crony-capitalism for one, or the practice of prioritizing the aim of maximizing shareholders' investment over general public/social responsibility) was an unknown thing but now, it is gaining good traction in India unfortunately. One might find it surprising that India didn't face a subprime/financial crisis when US was neck deep in it. 'Managing by output' isn't really a copyright of the West. In fact, the concept of measuring butt-in-seat time or shifts was totally alien till folks from the West brought it here. (And later pushed further by Adam Smith's Labour theory) Prior to that, it was pure ownership of a task and responsibility. Kautilya's Arthashastra specifically deals with labour theory and even flexi-time to an extent, by taking into account productivity and quality of throughput and not just rote effort/time spent. [1] The skilled artisans/craftsmen never worked by the clock, and thus were able to achieve great things. For them, it was all art. There wasn't even a clear line between art and sciences, but everything was art, including science/maths/engineering.

Off note, I wonder if the mother of that kid that died in Bhopal on that fateful night might have wondered, how the world would have been now if the white man hadn't embarked on the noble enterprise of burdening himself to civilize the non-white people.

Also, am quite sure that the affluent and middle class folks in the West are terribly happy treating low skill commodity workers (who might be immigrants) as human beings on the same social level as themselves.

I really would want to write a long post. Will certainly do so once time permits.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short [2] http://userwww.sfsu.edu/mbar/ECON605/Arthashastra.pdf

If you read my post, you'd clearly see that I don't believe every local firm does this: "...I mean both western companies and local companies like Reliance/Infosys..."

My belief, based on my experiences living here, is that this is far more common than in the US, Canada or UK. Admittedly, my experiences are biased - I spend most of my time in bigger cities, and in IT circles. So if you want to claim that your experience disagrees, all we have is our own dueling personal experiences (unless you know where to get data on this). Do you claim I'm wrong on this point?

'Managing by output' isn't really a copyright of the West...

Using the term "western" brought up unnecessary emotional baggage and was not strictly correct. I should have used a different term, perhaps "modern" or "MNC-style" (I think economists have a precise term for it, but I forget what it is).

I have no idea what the relevance of mortgage underwriting standards is, but I think you might be arguing against some claims that I didn't make. I'm not asserting some sort of vague cultural/moral/racial superiority.

I'm claiming that certain modern business practices are not widely used here, but are common in the west[1]. And I'm claiming India will be a better (i.e. richer, happier) place when it adopts them more widely. This is no different than coming up with a list of plumbing devices and saying that they will benefit India's water supply when they are more commonly used. The only difference between business practices and plumbing devices is that business is a bit more abstract - as a result, I didn't even recognize it until someone carefully explained it to me after the fact.

[1] And I've stated elsewhere that they are not as common as they should be, even in the west. For all Michael O. Church likes to rant about it, VC-istan is a lot better than many other parts of the US.

Just adding another note, on the firms you mentioned.

Reliance, is a known to be a crooked player that uses non-ethical business practices and is a major crony-capitalist player. Modern business practice followed: profit at any cost.

Infosys, on the other hand, isn't ethically/morally corrupt and is actually known for setting standards in corporate governance. But these days, it seems to have lost the game and run into troubles by fanatically adhering to the "maximize shareholder value while minimizing risk" rule. Modern business practice followed: keep shareholders happy no matter what.

Both followed 'modern business practices' too much to the word, or so it seems.

Yes. I clearly see the original comment seems to infer that most of the (or almost every!?) local firms in India does that.

> Do you claim I'm wrong on this point?

To an extent, yes. India and Indian industry/economy is not just IT and not just big cities. There's a lot more to it. I would be most honored if I get a chance to show some of it first hand, if at all our paths cross in life and we get to meet in the real world, outside of these digital confines.

> I'm not asserting some sort of vague cultural/moral/racial superiority.

Pardon me, but the original comment indeed seems to mention that the "western style management and work culture" is morally superior to the local one.

> I'm claiming that certain modern business practices are not widely used here, but are common in the west[1]. And I'm claiming India will be a better (i.e. richer, happier) place when it adopts them more widely.

Yes, agreed. But one can rest assured that better practices are being adopted at a much better pace here, because developing economies are already resource constrained and thus they are forced to come up with best practices to maximize value extraction from a given set of resources. ISRO and recent Mars mission was big news already. I believe business practices always have locality as a dimensional factor associated with them for their applicability and relevance. (HSBC ad about local knowledge comes to my mind)

I have several Indian friends who've expressed approximately the sentiments that he did about the average Indian business, specifically very hierarchical management compared to American culture, which is indeed problematic in settings of knowledge workers -- you don't manage them the way you manage an assembly line. Heck, you shouldn't even manage an assembly line that way, the line workers know the equipment better than you do. You can disagree with him and them without accusing people of racism or blaming them for the East India Company.

Well, am quite sure all of us here are quite reasonable folks who do not harbour racist feelings towards another fellow man. The very fact that Yummyfajitas chose to come here and run a company stands testament to the fact that he isn't racist at all and is a very reasonable person. And if I sounded like I was trying to load a bundle of (unreasonable) guilt onto yummyfajitas, I humbly beg for forgiveness.

The only question was about "modern business practices" and "oriental (right word!?)/third world business practices". Even before we discuss this, we might have to consider the concept of success from angles, 'modern' and otherwise. If the definition/concept/understanding of 'success' differs, then most certainly the guidelines to be followed to achieve 'success' would differ, don't they?

Modern economics states "free market", "profit", "shareholder value" and people who pursue these and achieve them are termed successful. These might work for the modern and fully developed societies where 'scarcity' takes a totally different meaning. But these same things will have a totally different impact in third world countries when adopted without changing them to suit the socio-economic needs locally.

Treating low skill commodity workers as human beings on the same social level as yourself is such a good practice.

Yes. Can we summarize this as "do not expect others to be obligated to be subservient to you, irrespective of their designation/background/abilities"? If so, can we extend the same to the context where a developed nation forces a developing nation to sign a treaty (and threatening sanctions if otherwise), expecting the developing nation to act subservient to the powerful one? If this is wrong, then the 'practice' is nothing but 'anything that suits us based on the situation'. (well, this would become a totally different post altogether, let me not digress too further)

> blaming them for the East India Company

Well, that is past. I would not hold accountable/accuse the present day westerners for the Raj and all of our present day miseries here. It would be incredibly foolish of me. At the same time, I would find it difficult to believe the idea that everything that's worked elsewhere will work here as well and bring upliftment and social development. That is all.

OP in particular observes on experiencing lingering caste pressures and strongly misogynistic trends in the expectation of business environments. You're suggesting this is preferable to employee equality and industriousness?

Western business culture is primarily "profit is the end that justifies the means" - exploit any person, resource or environment to their|it's detriment as longer as you make more profit for the owners/shareholders.

Many times I've seen on HN "the purpose of a business is to make profit; stat".

Equality, helping those in poverty, cultural benefit, elimination of crime - none of these are Western business ideals; they're cultural constraints placed on businesses that they do their best to avoid losing profit to.

Now not all businesses are so immoral - but I'd say immorality is indicative of "Western business practices"; they only appear better because of cultural constraint, when those businesses get to exploit people and environments that aren't being monitored and aren't subject to legal protection that's when the abuses of the business ethic rear their head.

This is certainly not true as otherwise there weren't as many charitable funds sponsored by businesses and as many publicly useful things done by those.

>>> exploit any person, resource or environment to their|it's detriment

That is not true either, moreover - this is not true even if we accept your previous premise. There's nothing in making profit that mandates that it would be to the detriment of any person, resource or environment. Moreover, not ruining the resource supporting your business is certainly more conductive to the profit than ruining it, since it allows to extract profits for the longer period of time, so even from pure profit-driven approach you are wrong.

>>> Equality, helping those in poverty, cultural benefit, elimination of crime - none of these are Western business ideals; they're cultural constraints placed on businesses

Equality taken as equality of citizens before the law is certainly good for business, since inequality usually means inability to conduct certain profitable deals. E.g. when there were place "for white people only" in US, it meant profitable business involving non-white persons could not be conducted there. Crime is obviously bad for almost every business (maybe excluding security guard and alarm systems business).

>>> Now not all businesses are so immoral - but I'd say immorality is indicative of "Western business practices"

Since western business practices is nothing more but Western people conducting a set of voluntary transactions, you've just called the whole set of Western people inherently immoral. Not only this smacks of racism, it is certainly not matching the observable truth of Western people having a lot of morals guiding them.

>>> when those businesses get to exploit people and environments that aren't being monitored and aren't subject to legal protection that's when the abuses of the business ethic rear their head.

Oh, I see what you mean. Western people are immoral in general, but there is a tiny sliver of them - those that enact and enforce the "legal protection" - i.e. the government - that are the moral backbone of the Western society. As soon as the person joins the government, they become moral, and able to enact the protections derived from their freshly gained morality, and as soon as they leave the governmental aegis, they revert to their natural immoral state and only the "legal protections" keep them from running rampant exploiting people around them.

Westerners are descended from all races and creeds, they just happen to be part of a certain geo-political and financial region now.

There is a minute proportion of the population of the "Western World" that has any control over the business process beyond that they're able to leverage by voting with their dollars, through their unions or when voting.

>but there is a tiny sliver of them - those that enact and enforce the "legal protection" //

On the contrary, the established culture - moulded most recently through democratic process - has created an environment that limits the extremes that remain profitable. Most major companies in my Western country will [seemingly have] flout[ed] the law if the fines are sufficiently low; they're limited largely by what is going to be considered reprehensible enough to prevent people buying their goods/services. Directors receive multi-million dollar remuneration packages whilst they employ children and women at extremely low wages and often in situations in which they're effectively captive - we're talking companies like Adidas¹, Unilever, Nestle, those with the most recognised brands.

Many of the members of the controlling sections of Western government demonstrate at times a, shall we say, fluid approach to morality too. They often seem almost equally willing to lie and cheat and exploit the good of others to their own ends without due regard for the effect on the populous or environment.

tl;dr Power is oft to corrupt.

--

1 -- example, http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcompanyratings/adidase..., Adidas's employment practices are illegal in Bangladesh imagine how out of sync with the moral mores of USA they are.

Western government practices haven't been all that constructive, either.

About the only ideas I think the west should be exporting to the developing world are a general intolerance for corruption and graft, and its engineering standards for multi-story human-occupied buildings.