Mention India, and you will likely start to draw fire about taking away jobs from Americans and sending them offshore, how frustrating it is to deal with customer support in India, etc.  But just a slightly closer look at business news will reveal that businesses are increasingly looking at India (and China and emerging economies in general) as a new and growing market, as well as a labor source.

Two recent articles in the Boston Globe about EMC illustrate exactly this point.   One article titled “EMC sees a bright future in India” immediately attracted a string of vitriolic comments about giving away American jobs, fining American corporations for “moving” jobs to India, and dealing with customer service in India.  But what the article actually said is this (italics are mine):

EMC Corp. of Hopkinton is betting big on India as a major market for data storage hardware and software, and as a key source of first-rate engineering talent.

…Meanwhile, Gelsinger saw major growth opportunities at EMC, especially in international markets. “EMC is not nearly as globalized as it needs to be,’’ he said. While Intel derives about 75 percent of its revenue from outside the United States, EMC gets about half its revenue from abroad. Gelsinger believes that EMC must expand its sales in fast-growing overseas markets like China and India.

EMC’s push towards growing markets in emerging economy countries is paralleled by similar strategies by leaders across many industry segments: technology, consumer products and services, pharmaceuticals, and financial services.

A narrow focus on preventing job losses through greater regulation misses the big picture, that growing jobs requires growing businesses, and the greatest opportunities in business growth at this time are in international markets, especially in emerging economy markets.  What’s different in this phase of international business is that while both markets and production are globalized, they are not necessarily in the same country.  Functions are more likely to be regionalized and networked, rather than organized into country silos.  Using EMC as an example, it has R&D centers  in a few key technology hot spots around the world, a regional customer service center for Asian markets in India, and it’s headquartered in the US.  The challenge in front of us is learning how to manage these new global business structures effectively.

Shortly after my post about how spelling errors can cause your buyers in another country to dismiss your company as “unprofessional,” comes this post at Harvard Business about sales emails that are “lost in translation.”

Nadia Nassif writes about two kinds of problems in sales emails: first, spelling and grammar errors; and second, using a generic message that is not personalized to address your potential client’s needs.  She has a great example of an email she received, and how she would re-write it to increase its effectiveness. Check it out here.

I think there is another message in this example that still needs to be teased out, about the challenges of using new social media channels in cross-cultural selling.  (The email in her example was written by someone who is in a LinkedIn group and referenced a discussion there.)  There’s lots of excitement and interest about using social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to enhance the relationship-building process and increase overall sales effectiveness (see this discussion of Sales 2.0).  These tools tend to have a culture and style of their own and, no surprise, they vary across different countries and cultures.  Trying to follow the style that fits both the channel and the regional culture of your intended prospects requires extremely careful attention to nuance.  What makes it more tricky is that, to be effective, web 2.0 messages should be highly personalized – that’s the whole point, users are involved in relationships, not just taking in one-way pushed content.  That means you can’t count on the carefully crafted sales messaging put together by your marketing team, each message should be unique, and the risk of communication gaffes across languages increases significantly.  How can globalized businesses use these tools effectively to sell across cultures?

A number of people in my life have recently started, or are getting ready to start, new roles and lives in new countries, and I’ve been putting together a list of resources I know about to share with them.  If you are considering an expat assignment – or creating your own expat transfer – here are a few good starting points online.

Expat Exchange This is an excellent place to start.  While the site is entirely in English, there is useful content about moving to almost any country in the world, from any other country.  The site publishes a weekly newsletter with articles about international moves in general, and specific countries.  There are also individual country forums, where users can post and respond to queries from other members.  Some of these are thinly-disguised ads from businesses seeking to serve expats, so take them with a grain of salt.

HSBC country guides are detailed guides for people moving to a new country, with information about housing, schools, economics, visas, and, of course, banking – all for expats.  When we moved to India, this guide had accurate information about the rental costs of apartments for expats in Pune.  The guides used to be available for downloading directly from their site, but the only way I’ve found to access them recently is through an online form where you can request them to be sent to you by mail.  The guides are free.  HSBC also conducts a detailed expat survey annually, and you can access survey reports for free here.  They’ve recently started a blog with current articles related to the survey and their offerings for expats.

Expat Focus is another all-country expat resource website, also all in English.  The home page is focused on selling you their book, but there are lots of free resources and individual country forums, too.  The Expat Focus blog offers lists of great blogs by expats in different parts of the world.  A recent post leads to a forum discussion about expats on Twitter.  Look for bloggers in the country where you are moving to get first-hand perspectives on the expat experience.

The Expatriate Life blog just got started last month, but already has a series of excellent overview articles and a good list of online resources (some of which are included here).

Expatica provides some great resources for English-speaking expats in seven EU countries.  In addition to country information and discussion boards, the site offers classified ads and an ask-an-expert feature by country.  It also has articles on topics relevant to all expats, regardless of their countries, such as managing health insurance, family adjustments and moving pets.

For families with kids moving abroad, appropriate schooling is one of the biggest challenges.  I recently had some very positive interactions with School Choice International, and suggest considering their resources (both online and in-person consulting) as a starting point.

There are also a number of communities for  Third Culture Kids (TCK) to be found in social networking online.  Do a search for TCK or third culture kids on Facebook, Live Journal, blogspot, etc. and join the ones you like the most.  An excellent starting point is TCKWorld.

Two websites point you to some of the leading books about expat assignments: Robin Pascoe’s site, the ExpatExpert.com, has great articles related to her books about expat family life, and a link to her blog.  The ExpatGuide.info site has excerpts from the very useful book The Expert Expatriate, by Hess and Linderman.

Finally, if you have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal,  check out Alan Paul’s columns about his family’s life in China.  I found his columns to be both informative and often gripping, and think they are a fascinating read no matter what country you are coming from or going to.  You can also check out reactions from many other expats in the comments section.  Finding all of the columns in WSJ’s weird search function is not easy, but if you go to this link, and enter “the expat life” (including quotes) you should get them.  You can find more personal stories and family photos on his blog Alan Paul in China.

Got some other favorites?  Please feel free to suggest other resources through comments or by writing to me privately, but please refrain from advertising commercial services.

One of my favorite business authors, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, just put up a post on the Harvard Business School blog about the Gates arrest and its connections to global business management, “Henry Louis Gates and the Global Economy.” She went straight for the jugular on this issue, emphasizing that:

The incident is about race, regardless of Sgt. Crowley’s intention, regardless of whether the officer reacted appropriately, and regardless of whether Gates should have held his temper.

Then she drew a parallel with the situation of a white American manager working for an Asian company, who “felt increasingly marginalized, stereotyped, racially profiled, and excluded from inner circles.”  The point is that race is embedded in the context in which we work, whether or not there are active racist intentions at play.

She concludes:

Obama’s election, and now Gatesgate, moved discussion of differences from under the table to the center of the table. Business executives everywhere should start talking about this topic openly. If we can mention it, we can transcend it. And transcend it we must, if we are to prosper in a salad bowl of a global economy where talent comes in hundreds and thousands of varieties.

She said it much better than I did!

It’s been an “interesting” time in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where I live) in the past week.  Every day the front story above the fold of the Boston Globe has been about one aspect or another of the controversy around the arrest of a black man, Harvard Professor Louis Gates, by a white man, Cambridge Police Officer Tim Crowley.  And every time I open my iGoogle news page, one of the top 5 news stories is related to it.

Out of all the commentary I’ve read, this comment by Donna Brazile stands out for me:

“No one wants to talk about race,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist and ABC News consultant. “He [Obama] does not inject race into the conversation regularly because it clears the room. There are designated times, like Martin Luther King Jr. Day or when we have a large gathering of black folks, like at the NAACP recently, but that’s about it.”

When I read this remark, it struck me that in the seven or eight years that I’ve worked with or in the Indian outsourcing industry, I can’t think of more than a handful of times when race has been mentioned.  We have conversations about cultural differences, regional differences, multiple religions, and different communication styles, but no one wants to talk about race, and when it is brought up occasionally, it often clears the room.

I don’t think that’s because race is an insignificant issue.  Race – however we define it – is a major element in the history of both the U.S. and India and, as the recent news coverage shows, continues to be a controversial and emotional topic in U.S. politics.

I think this is a blind spot in our conversations, and one that we can ill afford.  The root cause of outsourcing engagement failures almost always lies in the relationships between the organizations and team members, and rarely in the contract or business process definition.   Developing a shared understanding of the business, culture and environment, across both the outsourcing client and the outsourcing vendor (or distributed locations in a shared services model), is key to a successful business relationship and engagement.  And recognizing the differences in those cultures and environments — from the business model, corporate culture, language, communication practices, to holiday schedules, phone service and weather — is part of developing that shared understanding.

When outsourcing projects go bad, there is almost always finger-pointing about the other side, and it usually includes remarks about “Indians do this…” and “Americans think that…”  While the issue is often not racism per se, I think it’s impossible for us not to be intertwined in our racial histories in one way or the other.  If we don’t recognize and acknowledge this, it’s difficult to have open, productive conversations about what’s going on, and if we can’t discuss it, it’s almost impossible to fix it. Given how much we invest in making outsourcing engagements work, can we afford not to talk about race?