January 10, 2008

Day Six: IBM India, HP Labs, and Travel to Delhi
(As an impatient American, I will take the liberty to note that I am typing this entry for the second time, and will save every couple of minutes to avoid losing my work to a power outage like last time.)
I could not sleep last night, even after turning on my light to finish 'Banker to the Poor' at 4AM, so I went to the business center to reply to emails at 5:30. I ran with Scott at 6:30 this chilly Bangalaroo morning (apparently some locals say Bangalaroo rather than the British-given Bangalore) down MG Lane, the major shopping street; past some homeless sleeping in the streets; a park where an informal cricket match had broken out; and some palacial government buildings where we were greeted by unwelcoming guards with big guns.
Even after seeing the Infosys campus, the business park with IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo was impressively modern and would fit in with its best American counterparts. Upon entering the IBM facility, we interacted with a government contract manager, a university liaison, a strategy guy, and the manager of the service science lab. The latter, a curly-haired PhD with extensive US business experience, at first seemed to be talking in circles until I realized that the problem was on my end. He was one of the "scary-smart" executives that I had been briefed on, and once I grasped the concepts that he weaved, I felt honored to be in the same room. Click here for the IBM interaction notes.
Upon returning to our hotel, I packed, checked out, and joined our group for lunch with Nidhi Mathur, a manager at HP Labs responsible for market research and product development. Nidhi was relatively young and was the first female to present to our group. My greatest takeaway is that you need to understand the local culture at a deep level to conduct market research and prepare a business plan. Her example was taking a leading technology product to an Indian to get feedback. Indians are very nice and respectful and would rather compliment your idea and indicate that they would most certainly buy it than provide honest criticism. As a result, HP took products to market in India and found consumers were not willing to step up to buy as they had previously indicated.
We moved to the airport, a cultural experience to be sure.
Our group arrived amidst a clogged artery of rickshaws, pedestrians, and cabs providing a cacophonous symphony. We moved to have our baggage to be checked scanned through security prior to getting in line to obtain our boarding passes. We then moved to the personal security checkpoint, where we had our carry-on bags x-rayed and walked through a metal detector. No plastic bins were available so I kept my pocket items as they were. The guard did not like my camera and required me to run it through the conveyor solo. The officer nodded approval and let me pass and I grabbed my personal effects and joined my colleagues to wait for our plane. I had my second experience of buying something at a counter, which is worth describing. In both instances, I had been waiting to catch the eye of the attendant while an Indian moved up beside me, held out money and garnered the purchase before me. In this case, all I could do was lean into him and stare a bit, to no response of course. This was a situation where I wanted to impose my American standards but was able to extricate my emotions and learn about how things are done here.
As we began our cattle call to board, I provided my boarding pass to the attendant, who entered my seat number (why?), and let me proceed to the officer waiting by the door. He brought it my attention that my name-tag had been partially torn off of my laptop case and would need to be replaced. I went back to the boarding pass-taker-guy and asked for a tag, to which he pointed me to the security clearance area. I sighed audibly and ran to the officer that had cleared me, who pointed to another officer, who then pointed me back to the first officer, who grunted and pointed that I would need a tag before they could provide the authoritative stamp. I took a deep breath and ran back to the boarding pass area, reached over and grabbed a tag that I saw (thanks buddy) and ran back to the officer that had originally cleared me, who pointed me again to another of his colleagues. After begging three times, he stamped my tag (without looking at my bag, mind you), I ran back through the boarding pass area with not a word to the attendant, showed my victory tag to the officer who finally allowed passage, only to see a bus pull away on the tarmac. My heart skipped a beat before I saw two last classmates boarding our plane about 40 meters away.
Bureaucracy and inefficiency are no longer cute.
The flight to Delhi included another meal, which I find makes the flight seem shorter. The lack of sleep caught up with me and I was able to read no more than five pages at a time before dozing off. I read a total of twenty pages, with four mini-naps interspersed.
The Delhi airport noted significant development was underway with several pictorials of the 2009 vision. We passed a few Hare Krishnas jamming on a guitar and a drum. The luggage conveyor was appropriately sized, and the chaos to which we had become accustomed did not ensue until leaving the baggage claim. I strategically snapped a photo of the best mustache ever, featuring tennis-ball-sized bushy barbels. We negotiated our way through oncoming traffic of motorized rickshaws to reach our bus. On to MDI.