In the last ten years, India's taken
300 million people out of poverty.
That's not just a social good.
That 300 million people, the size of the US,
is not poor anymore, but that there is consumption.
That there is demand.
The entire narrative and dialogue around the world
has been around the rise of China.
The accelerating growth of India has actually been missed.
In 2000, there were 3 million cellphones in India.
Today there are upward of 900 million.
In 2013, about 50% of Indian households
had access to bank accounts.
Today that number would be over 90%.
It's really changing how people live today,
how people consume, and how people interact.
And it's changing many businesses.
To succeed in India,
you have to take India on its own terms.
What we are talking about is continental scale.
1.3 billion people, 31 states, 16 written languages.
When I land in Chennai, I have to speak to the taxi driver
in English, because I don't speak Tamil
and he certainly doesn't understand Hindi.
It is something which people really need to be granular.
You have to really rethink and reimagine
how you participate with the emerging Indian consumer.
And talent becomes a bit of a constraint.
You really need to have your talent
and organization model worked out.
How are you going to get local talent whom you can trust?
And whom you can empower
so that they can make decisions for the market?
Or if you're going to have people coming from outside,
how can they actually get sensitive to the needs of India?
One of the things that companies
are going to be really faced with in the next ten years,
is that a lot of the experience
with which they have grown up and they have succeeded
is now becoming a bit of a drag.
Every element of your organization can operate, can change.
But you have no experience of what this thing looks like.
Problem with the imagination is it's good to imagine,
but then how do you bet on your imagination?
How do I hire different types of people?
How do I allow them to experiment?
And how do I build on those experiments as they succeed?
And the CEOs that will succeed in the future
will know that they will have to learn this faster
and will have to bet on this learning
in a manner which is critical for the success
and survival of their company.
Actually, not just success, but even survival.