India is historically an entrepreneurial country that has absorbed business practices from other countries, explaining why India has steadily grown economically, said R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, a prominent Indian corporation at the India Forum held Wednesday in the School of International Service Lounge.
"Our biggest challenge in internationalization is to think internationally. ... Business runs because people wants to run it," Gopalakrishnan said, who stated that India has been open to the influences of trade from other countries such as Britain, China and Rome.
Gopalakrishnan said India absorbs something from each country, which has allowed them to constantly adapt and change.
Citing the rejection of the English language and culture in Indonesia, Gopalakrishnan said "there are more people in India who speak English than in England," to show India's willingness to internationalize.
India went through a "clean-up house" period in the 1990s where they made their markets more stable and efficient, said Gopalakrishnan. According to him, this was a period of time where India was like "a light covered by a blanket."
Gopalakrishnan also talked about his experience working for the Tatas corporation. According to Shalini Venturelli, director of the India Forum, the Tatas group is an "enlightened company" that has "assets held in trust and reinvested in social initiative."
Venturelli said the Tatas corporation, started in 1870, is remarkable because it has "been owned by a single family for 130 years."
The Tatas corporation is set up in such a way that company profit is grouped in a trust, according to Gopalakrishnan, who said the Tatas corporation used a trust before it became popular by businessmen and philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller.
This propensity to social awareness is "genetic coding built into the business from the beginning," Gopalakrishnan said.
Employees know their efforts are going to a good cause which makes them happy to work, Gopalakrishnan said, saying the first trust set up was a scholarship program that allowed those without money to receive funding to attend college.
"We run business for a much larger purpose beyond ourselves," he said.
