Anand Mahindra is managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra, a $15.4 billion multinational, multi-industry behemoth that rode the first great wave of Indian economic growth as successfully as any firm in the country.
That LEAP! started, he says, with the IT boom. Bright geeks used their smarts to succeed in spite of the country’s notoriously inept, corrupt and change-hostile government and created a global business presence. Suddenly, bright people everywhere in India were saying, in Mahindra’s words, “Hey, this could be a China.”
Then about a year ago, again in Mahindra’s words, “the halo disappeared.” What happened? The air leaked out of the world economy. But Mahindra believes that India will LEAP! again.
Here is his analysis:
“India is like a staircase. There are always some risers and then a little step there that you have to negotiate where things seem to plateau . . . at times the step suddenly seems to vanish and you go down again. But we always move in a way where you go to a higher level. We are never a ‘linear’ kind of escalator that’s constantly moving up. We are a staircase. Sometimes the risers are longer than one would want or higher than one would want and sometimes the plateaus are too flat, but we always get to a different level.”
As they sometimes say from the pulpit in church, “And there endeth the reading this day”—in this instance, from The Gospel of the LEAP!, Indian Chapter.
