Dipak Jain on campus

The really great are the one's who can have a light head in spite of great achievements. Today I found that Dipak Jain(Dean of the Kellogg School of Management) is one of that kind and not just that. He is the first Indian to become the dean of a top US B-school and is a truly inspirational speaker. His address to the ISB student body was titled "Global Macro trends" and he touched upon a few major trends

i) Demographics - The western world is aging. The number of centurions in Japan is increasing every year. The proportion of old people in western countries is going to increase dramatically over the coming years. In this context India has a unique advantage 'coz we have 70% of the population less than 30 years of age. This effect is totally gonna polarize the world with the majority of the workforce from India. Prof. Jain calls it the 'Browing of the global workforce'

ii) Hypercompetition - The next trend Prof. Jain emphasized is the way competition is looked at. According to him the competition to the airline industry is not essentially between airlines. Rather it is video conferencing. Bulk of the air travel is business travel and if video conferencing reaches a certain level business travel will reduce as much as 80%. So the strategic angle for airline industry has to be perceived in a totally different way.

iii) Innovation - While we learn a lot about first mover advantage and market share and how great it is to have these advantages Prof. Jain talked about how Google enters after Yahoo/Microsoft and captures everything. The way the company innovated was the key. The customers of Google are not really the people who use the search engine. It is rather the website that receives the click. Google realized the fact and this innovation was the key to it's success. He notes several Indian students in a Mexican business school trying to learn Spanish(with a Mexican accent). They are all going back to India to set up BPOs to cater to the burgeoning spanish speaking American population(mostly migrated from Mexico). These are ways to innovatively forge ahead.

Prof. Jain's humble beginnings, his meteoric rise and true Indian spirit was totally inspiring. I felt really enthused after the speech. Well, anyhow I should have guessed that you cannot go wrong with a name like that.