Welcome to the Firm!

The site visit of the day was to Infosys. As we were pulling into the campus, they were checking all the vehicles for computers and were taking the serial numbers of the computers. For a company in the information industry, that did not surprise me, but after we left I think that it was just a control issues. The person that we meet with was a director at Infosys. He had only been with Infosys for two years and did not have a lot of knowledge of the company and its values. Case in point, in each sentence he mentioned the “values” the company had. So after 30 minutes, I asked, “What are some of your values”? He did not have a very good answer. Todd asked him who he felt Infosys competitors were, and his response was, “we do not have any competitors” after a long pause, he said, if I had to pick someone, it would be Accenture. That was very pompous and not professional at all. Even though the campus had all of the luxuries of spas, tennis courts, banks, pharmacy, barbers, doctors and beautiful living quarters, I am a firm believer that they operated as a cult and only wanted total control of their employees.

What a difference a day made, two world class companies, but two very different philosophies. I like the L & T approach much better.

In the evening we were to have a talent show with the students of SDM-IMD. What a great experience. The native dances with the different dress was incredible. The culture of the various areas was neat to see. Because no one in our group had any talent, our fearless leader Rajiv was selected to play a game on our behalf. The game was, the audience shouted out a topic and Rajiv had to argue for or against the topic. The hard part was the MC for the night would throw out numbers and if the number was positive Rajiv had to argue for the topic, if the number was negative, Rajiv had to argue against the topic. We the first topic was “size matters”. You can guess the excitement that the topic brought. Hats off to Rajiv, he represented us will.

International incident #3 happened that evening. I was starting to get frustrated and missing home and it was not taking very much to get me irritated. We were going on a rickshaw ride when some of the other drivers in the lot we were at were trying to rip us off. Well my mouth got before me and I verbalized the international sign (FU). Apparently they understand what that means and it took 20 minutes to calm the crowd down. The amazing thing that happened was Harvey was the peace maker this time, and altercation was avoided.