It really is a small world. The modern executive maintains personal and professional contacts on several continents with customers, sales teams, R&D teams, production facilities, friends, and colleagues. Technology helps establish and foster these far-flung relationships, and many of us routinely communicate electronically (by voice, videoconference, e-mail) with people throughout the world.
In a high-tech career that has stretched over three decades, I have witnessed the evolution of this trend from the times when outsourcing anything but the simplest tasks to a low-cost, overseas producer was a great risk, to the present when international collaboration with equals is fast becoming daily routine.
Early in my management career I was tasked with overseeing an R&D group in Europe for a Silicon Valley based company. Their work was outstanding, but their approach to business and customers differed from the way we did things back at the corporate headquarters. It taught me that becoming a multinational company meant there was no single standard that could be applied to different locations on the globe. Centralized control, as was exercised in the erstwhile Soviet Union, failed miserably and the same could be equally disastrous in business.
It soon became apparent to me that the way the team in Europe did things wasn’t ‘foreign’ to them or the customers there – their way of doing things was conditioned by the knowledge they had of business and culture, and that worked in their country.
In those days ‘globalization’ was not being practiced in the wider sense it has acquired now, it was almost exclusively ‘outsourcing’ then. When I arrived at Sequence, I partnered with an Indian company. Though I grew up in Mumbai, I went straight from IIT to graduate school and a career in the U.S. So my experience with Indian business practices was nil. So our idea was to start by getting our feet wet by learning about R&D management in India through Interra. That experience changed our world from ‘outsourcing’ to true ‘offshoring’.
We learned the most important lesson in the process: You can’t motivate remote teams by insulting them with low-level tasks. That’s when we devised the concept of ‘Centers of Excellence’, working with local talent and local schools. The true meaning and essence of globalization is realized when you create teams of equals in locations scattered around the world. In our case, we presently have teams on both coasts of the United States, the U.K, India, and are looking to expand further.
Given this approach, the very first thing you have to lose is the concept of ‘headquarters’. I like to think that our headquarters are wherever I am at the time. It is not a big bureaucracy headquartered in California, and I’m most productive and useful when meeting with product teams wherever they are in the world.
For our own workforce, it has meant that we have moved our U.S. experts into more of an architect role for new products. They share their ideas with product managers, project leaders, and experienced people in other parts of the world. Naturally, we also reward good initiatives with ideas such as our very successful ‘Made in India’ program that has spurred a great deal of innovation from our team in Noida while also reinforcing the idea that great ideas know no geographical boundaries.
When I talk to the CTOs of the Silicon Valley startups, I hear that any new business plan with hopes of attracting venture capital must show a strategy for establishing distinct Centers of Excellence around the world. Nobody wants to fund a standalone company in Silicon Valley now. You can have your architects here, but you need to have Centers of Excellence in Romania, Egypt, China, Vietnam, India – wherever expertise and markets coexist. So, young entrepreneurs, think globally but excel in your understanding of local business methods and culture. Great opportunities await you, wherever you are.
In yet another privacy goof-up, Facebook has admitted that 14 million users were affected by a bug in May that automatically suggested posting publicly when the users were writing posts meant only for friends.
The bug, according to Erin Egan, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, occurred as the Facebook developers were building a new way to share featured items on users' profile, like a photo.
"Since these featured items are public, the suggested audience for all new posts -- not just these items -- was set to public.
"The problem has been fixed, and for anyone affected, we changed the audience back to what they had been using before," Egan said in a blog post late Thursday.
Facebook admitted sharing users' data with Chinese company Huawei -- facing the heat in the US over data privacy concerns -- along with three other China-based smartphone makers Lenovo, OPPO and TCL.
Starting Thursday, "we have started letting the 14 million people affected know -- and asking them to review any posts they made during that time.
"To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before, and they could still choose their audience just as they always have," Egan said.
"If you posted publicly (during the period May 18 to 27), you'll see a notification from Facebook when you log in that leads to a page with more information -- including a review of posts during this period," said Egan.
Every time you share something on Facebook, it shows you an audience selector so users can decide who gets to see the post.
For example, if you choose to share a photo with friends only, your audience selector will automatically suggest you share to friends next time you start a post.
"We've heard loud and clear that we need to be more transparent about how we build our products and how those products use your data -- including when things go wrong," Egan said.
Facebook is already under intense scrutiny for misuse of millions of its users' data after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal became public.
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