I rose before dawn in Mumbai recently to watch the city’s newspaper vendors get ready for their rounds. Scores of men were squatting under the arches near the historic railway station, sorting thousands of papers in some 20 languages into teetering metre-high stacks, for distribution by bicycle. The sellers commit each complex order to memory, not a computer algorithm in sight.
For anyone who started in print journalism, as I did, it is an exciting scene. But as a first-time visitor to the country, I also felt that the order-out-of-chaos underlined the challenge for foreign multinationals seeking to profit from India’s fabulous, fragmented, far-flung consumer market. As one consultant I met said: “The company that comes to India and is waiting for India to fix things is going to fail. The company that comes and marvels about how India has survived is going to do much better.”
Such acts of tolerance and flexibility are hard for some big companies to carry off. For years, many have glibly summed up their strategy by touting versions of the “think global, act local” mantra. Only a few have made it work, among them Nokia, until it started concentrating too much power at its headquarters, and Nestlé, whose Maggi noodles were successful enough to attract Indian food inspectors’ unwelcome attention last year.