The New Face of Global Competition

Back in Bangalore, the folks at Wipro are paying close attention to this. Not just Premji and his top executives, and not just the marketing department. Every Wednesday morning, Paul emails his "weekly highlights" to every Wipro Technologies group employee. He recounts each contract win and loss, assesses the state of the industry, and lays out Wipro's near-term strategy.

And amid the blonde-and-gray cubicles at Electronic City, in the massive lunchroom where servers fill steel trays with rice and curries, employees digest every word. They know all about Accenture and EDS, about the accounting firms and IBM Global Services. And they're not one bit daunted. "We are getting confidence that we're world-class," says Vinayachandron P S, a 35-year-old program manager in Wipro's Oracle practice. "It's a fact now. We know we can beat them."

The Mission: "We should be world-class"

On my last day in India, I flew to Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Mumbai is one of the world's biggest cities: seven islands in the Arabian Sea land-filled together and crammed with 16 million people. There are slums, of course, with people living on top of one another amid mud and garbage. There is wealth too. Or at least the remnants of wealth: spiraling buildings, many now in decay, built during India's two centuries under British rule.

India won its independence in 1947, yet its people are still coming to terms with the result. Arguably, the second most-populous country in the world has little to show for the past half-century. It has forfeited leadership in manufacturing to its Asian neighbors, exported many of its brightest minds to Europe and America, and grown poorer.

Imagine, then, that you are a young Indian engineer working for an Indian technology company that is successfully starting to challenge some of the most established service providers on the planet. Yes, you want to make good money and buy a home. But just as likely, your work isn't solely about personal achievement or even your employer's market cap: It's a statement of national identity. "There is the same feeling that I found in Japan many years ago," says Gurcharan Das, the retired head of Procter & Gamble India, now a writer and venture capitalist. "In the 1970s, I visited a factory there; it may have been Toyota. And a worker told me that he was working for the greater glory of Japan. It's the same sense of destiny that is partly driving these people today in India."

There is a young marketing strategist at Wipro named Anupam Mukerji whom I came to know during my stay. Mukerji works tirelessly. He has the Indian equivalent of an MBA, but he could have gone to Wharton and joined an American consulting firm. In one of our first conversations, he revealed some of the emotion that I later heard echoed in different ways throughout the company: "All of us were brought up with the thought that India was once great. We had such a rich heritage. Under the British, we lost a lot of that. Now we're rebuilding.

"Indians are proud and patriotic. Many people feel that we're superior in math and science. We invented the sundial and the numeral zero. So we think that in anything having to do with technology, we should be world-class."

Wipro won't soon stand shoulder to shoulder with Accenture or EDS or Deloitte Consulting. It will struggle to create a brand that truly can compete with those of the big boys. But there is some powerful passion at work here. Wipro's employees are intense and brimming with confidence. They know how good they are. They are enjoying themselves. And really, how long has it been since we could say that about most American workers?

The people at Wipro have seen the future, and it is them. They are the explosions, brilliant and exhilarating (and, yes, cheap). Again, think hard. How will you compete with that?

Sidebar: Boom times in Bangalore

Bangalore has the neglected feel of any number of developing cities. Overstuffed trucks vie with motorized rickshaws and mule-drawn carts for control of the few paved roadways. Ragged children chase dogs around corrugated-aluminum slums, and women sweep the streets with straw brooms.

It lends an eerie cast to Bangalore's technology-driven building boom. The skeletons of new buildings are visible everywhere around the city's dusty suburbs. They are gangly affairs with cement floors propped up by raw tree limbs and the odd scarecrow dangling from a beam. Soon, though, they will teem with technology workers.

"Yeah, it's weird," says a manager from a big U.S. media company sent here to oversee his company's nascent outsourcing operation. "It's like we're training our own replacements." IBM has a big development center in Bangalore. So do Dell, Fujitsu, and Siemens. Motorola just announced it will spend $13 million to build a 280,000- square-foot R&D facility in Bangalore.