SmartBrief is partnering with Big Think to create a weekly video spotlight in SmartBrief on Leadership called “VIP Corner: Video Insights Powered by Big Think.” This week, we’re featuring Anil Gupta, a global strategist.
India and China have almost unfathomably large labor markets, but unemployment is not in itself a major issue. Rather, it’s a lack of of “experienced managerial talent, and in certain specialties, certain professions like accounting in China, IT professionals in India, because essentially this kind of talent cannot be scaled up very readily,” says Anil Gupta, a business-school chair of global strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland.
These nations have, in many respects, moved beyond outsourcing to become independent centers of economic generation, and with that comes a need for managers, research and development and other positions requiring skilled, trained and experienced labor. While this situation will benefit the scarce number of people with those talents, Gupta says, it also benefits multinational companies that can not only recognize the need, but also respond to it.
“[T]he talent in China and India, they’re looking for training, they’re looking for career advancement, and multinational companies have certain advantages vis-à-vis the local companies because multinational companies typically have much better opportunity to give global assignments, assignments outside of the home country,” Gupta says. “Second, multinational companies typically have a far longer history of being professionally managed than the domestic companies in China and India, and so therefore they are seen as far better training grounds.”
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