Prior to our company visit to Accenture August 18th, we attended three lectures at XIME. The first session focused on managment education in India and featured the president of XIME, Professor J. Phillip.
The business schools in India are some of the largest in the world and graduate more than 160,000 students annually. Since there are so many schools, there is a lot of competition and demand for high performers. Most of these schools are located in south India where there is a high literacy rate among women and population growth is less. What I found most interesting was when Professor Phillip lectured about David McClelland‘s theory that people have three basic drives; achievement, affiliation and power. A business professionall will likely be less successful if he or she has an improper balance of any of these aspects.
The second lecture focused on cross cultural aspects of doing business in India. Some interesting subjects that were covered included India’s many red tape heavy government procedures, how many Indians view the castes today, and the how India’s government and businesses got to where they are today.
The final lecture was given by Dr. M. P. Ravindra, an employee of Infosys on sabbatical at XIME for the next year; it covered Information Technology (IT) in India. His lecture focused on the evolution of IT in India and it’s current challenges to achieving greater success.
Later that afternoon we visited the company Accenture, which is an innovative back-end software provider, emerging technology leader and provider of other customer services such as software development life cycle consulting. We were able to test out their latest technology related to consumer services. They also overviewed how they provide some of their accounting services such as accounts payable processing. I was impressed with their many layers of security assurance and controls for handling their customer’s information.