A course at Cà Foscari in Venice helps businesses adapt their behaviour to the Indian market.
In Italy the myth of India as a Western businessmanfriendly country inexplicably persists. Over the past few years, dozens of small- and medium-sized Italian entrepreneurs have tried to keep up with a shifting capital market, chasing the El Dorado of easy and fast profit that certain narratives of India’s economic boom would like us to believe.
But the tale does not stand the test of reality: coming to terms with a commercial environment light years away from Italian customs and traditions revealed all the limitations of a business relationship which, in India, depends on a form of mutual courtship rather than on mathematical calculations to be sealed with a handshake.
“The main difficulties have been the language (the local idiom, not just English – Ed.), the taxation system and all the laws we must comply with. The help of a local, trustworthy person is essential”. Gianluigi “Gigio” Mentasti lived in New Delhi full time between 2005 and 2009 when he I moved his footwear business to one of the most promising markets on Earth: wonderful India.
The 2008 economic crisis, which did not spare the Indian subcontinent, brought him back to Italy, but he hasn’t relinquished the technical-tactical baggage he gained in the field. “My relationships with the Indians were very good. Some envy you for your status, but generally speaking the people I met were very respectful and extremely kind, from factory workers to millionaire businessmen. A supplier from Chandigarh at our first meeting insisted I stay at his place and meet his family; this sort of behaviour, as I later discovered, is standard practice in India, while Italians are not used to it. People who go there on business, perhaps for no longer than a week, react to this kind of invitation by thinking ‘Why should I? I’ll be wasting time I could use to do tons of other things’. And they’d be wrong: human relationships of this kind are of crucial importance if one wants to do business there”.
As further evidence that local customs demand a change in approach, Mentasti points out – with the benefit of a few years of hindsight – that a potential business partner who lives in India for longer periods of time appears extremely more affable and reliable to the Indians than a competitor that is here today, gone tomorrow. Tending the personal-commercial relationship on site, in person and regularly gives the Indian partner a stronger sense that one is seriously interested in doing business and willing to upgrade the acquaintance from a level of mutual profit to a nobler level of human intimacy. Of course, it’s not all a bed of roses: Mentasti himself caught one of his “reliable” Indian partners “with his hands in the cookie jar”—a tangible demonstration of the unavoidable risks that arise when business activities become an anthropological rather than a mathematical activity, with all the pitfalls this involves. Paradoxically, Italians, who are known the world over for being ceremonious, complain about an excessive and impractical emotional involvement in the work sphere, which they have a hard time handling. Unfortunately, the importance of getting acquainted, or even becoming friends, before establishing a commercial relationship escapes them, and frustration with the lengthy process required to achieve the desired outcomes (in conjunction with India’s bureaucratic chaos and deep structural problems) often leads them to throw in the towel. Indeed, the small figures reported on the government portal infomercatiesteri.it show that import-export trade between India and Italy amounted to only €8.5 billion in 2013, approximately 1% of the overall trade volume in each country respectively. That’s peanuts considering that the trade between China and Italy, for example, was worth over €33 billion during the same period.
Nevertheless, India certainly is a market full of opportunities, and the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice has launched a master’s course that should help bridge the cultural gap of India’s unwritten business rules. It is titled Italian Global Approach to Management in India (IGAMI), and has been devised by Marco Zolli, an indologist and a regular in the subcontinent for the past ten years. “We Italians display a stubborn ignorance in certain respects, a lack of interest in other countries. And the matter is further complicated in India considering how different the two countries are and the prejudices we bring from home, starting with the myth that in India everybody speaks English anyway. It’s not true, and even if some do, it’s often not enough”.
The graduate students, seen at work in Varanasi, are thrown into Indian everyday life. They must learn to get by and to operate in the urban jungle, as well as in public contexts – how to behave in other people’s homes, how to drink tea, how to eat and cook. All this on top of the basic requirement of mastering the Hindi language, which is essential to set up the pre-business bonds of trust as well as for everyday life tasks, such as paying the bills, ordering water supplies or buying groceries.
“We firmly believe, based on the experience of Italian entrepreneurs who have been running businesses in India for years”, says Zolli, “that it is impossible to operate in the country with no knowledge of the territory or its cultural and social contexts. A bottom-up approach to the different regions of the subcontinent is not only advisable, it is unavoidable”.
A course at Cà Foscari in Venice helps businesses adapt their behaviour to the Indian market.
