Shaping the Future: Aspirational Leadership in India and Beyond

By Arun Maira

The first book to get at the root cause of India's problems India is a country of enormous contradictions. On the one hand, India is one of the fastest-growing leaders in the new economy, with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471479195
• ISBN13: 9780471479192
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.11 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Coping ideas for a country that isn't likely to change

Although this book doesn't say it, it is really about why business investment flocks to China but is wary of India. What has gone wrong-and right-since India undertook a series of drastic economic reforms due to a reserves flow crisis in 1991? And if India has changed so positively for the better, why does investment in China exceed investment in India my many multiples?India is a modern industrial state, yet lives with ancient roots that still encourage a timeless vision of life in which values of several thousand years ago shape much of today. As with China's, India's sense of collective history is a formidable force. It underpins religions, languages, class, caste, and the strong remnants of socialist attitudes from Gandhi and Nehru eras. Despite millennia of conquest and colonization, India has kept its sense of cultural continuity virtually intact. Indians have a knack for absorbing useful ideas (like software development) while discarding unwanted ideas (such as accountability in government) like so many saris on the rag carts of history. Every attempt, whether generated within or by transnational entities, to change India into something else has failed. Village life remains very much the same as one reads in the great epics of thousands of years ago. Even in the fast-paced modern cities like Mumbai and Delhi, beneath the facade of with-it popstyles are age-old obligations and symbols of loyalty.Arun Maira's Shaping the Future is a case study in the surprising fact that business leaders are the most idealistic and reform-minded people in India; it is the godmen, the politicians, and the bureaucrats who hold the country back. Yet India lacks not for due diligence: Watch a laborer digging a ditch with a pick and shovel in the heat of the late afternoon sun and you will never again think the Indian worker of being lazy.Yet China still sucks in the bucks. Why?For one, India is a minefield of contradictions. It is way ahead of China in self-generated technological prowess-Mahatma Gandhi imprinted his message of self-reliance well-and about equal with China in encouraging entrepreneurs (especially women) to discover and exploit business opportunities. Yet it also groans under horrific and seemingly intractable poverty, a brobdingnagarian bureaucracy, a fault line between the relatively efficient central government ("The Centre") and dysfunctional, erratic, wasteful, nepotistic, and in some cases monumentally corrupt state governments.Chapter 5 is arguably the best in Mr. Maira's book, due in large part to the richly detailed case examples he draws upon to make his points. In sum, his message is how to plan and use leadership techniques such as scenario planning to improve organizational leadership. Chapter 5 introduces the complexities of Indian business and society; the rest of the book is devoted Mr. Maira's solutions. Roughly speaking, and rephrasing, his message is this:Each of us sees the world through a unique set of lenses ground by our pe