India's Next Soft Power—The Manager?

It is not by accident that many ‘Indian’ managers assume a global face.

- R Gopalakrishnan And Ranjan Banerjee

Many management academics are Made-in-India people: CK Prahalad, Nitin Nohria, Dipak Jain, Sumantra Ghoshal, Soumitra Dutta, Sunil Kumar, and the list goes on. Many top global practitioners are also Made-in-India people: Shantanu Narayen, Satya Nadella, Rakesh Kapur, Sundar Pichai, Indra Nooyi, Ajay Banga and this list too goes on. Apart from these visible names, there are other highly successful thought leaders and practitioners. (Made in India is defined as those who have received their foundational education and degrees in India till their late teens or later).

Can management thought and practice emerge as India’s soft power that will influence the world? Ideas with strong roots in Indian philosophy and tradition have made a strong impression: conscious capitalism, bottom-of the-pyramid, frugal innovation, wellness and mindfulness. This is a noteworthy and important trend crucial to the premise of our argument.

“India conquered and dominated China culturally for twenty centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her borders,” said Chinese philosopher, Hu Shih, in an adulatory speech at Harvard University in 1937. Romain Rolland was a great admirer of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. Swami Vivekananda mesmerised the American public in the 1890s. Yoga has become a soft power for India in many countries abroad. Food is another soft power and over the last twenty years, Indian food has acquired global currency. Harvard academic Joseph Nye termed such influence ‘soft power’, and India has wielded considerable soft power for centuries.

In this article, we briefly explore the idea that management thought and practice could evolve as a future soft power from India.

Evolution of Indian management