Just finished reading the book ‘Offshore’ by Gaurav Rastogi and Basab Pradhan. I follow Basab’s blogs and was expecting a lot from this book, ever since I read blog that this book is coming.
“How India got back on the Global Business map” is what the authors set out to explore or may be explain. The book tells you about what you probably do not know about the offshore industry if you are not a part of it. If you are a part of the industry, it tells you about the growth of the industry and how an account can be managed and grown. Now that defines the audience of this book very clearly: World – people in offshore industry – those who engage with the offshore industry as clients. Now, this audience can be divided into two – Indians and Non-Indians. I think the authors oscillated between these audience, sometimes they wanted to address the concerns of Indians and sometimes they wanted to explain small things about India the way only a non-Indian audience requires.
The book is an informative, and easy read. The people in the professional services industry and the client organizations will benefit the most in addition to people with interest in tracking the developments and evolution of professional services, and those who are intrigued by India's growth story in the services arena
The book details the secrets of Indian offshoring success with great fascination. The authors have done a great job in demystifying the "code" and explaining the success of India offshoring, in addition to outlining the current challenges and opportunities. The Indian social context that is a key underpinning to the success of the offshoring industry is well presented.
The clients will gain a deeper understanding of the motivations and aspirations of their offshoring partners (I should say partners with offshoring strategy since most successful companies like Accenture, IBM Global services have embraced offshoring to the scale of many Indian companies) and create more successful contracts and engagements. The client's quest to understand the wide spectrum of offshoring issues - cultural, social, and economical is addressed comprehensively.
The book is well packaged with thoughtful selection of the most important topics offering excellent insights. The book should help clients to design better partner programs (including offering inputs to their own captive strategy) and the sales teams to compete better in the market place. As an example, the chapter "The Hard Slog for Account Growth" is an amazing narrative of how companies like Infosys, TCS and others have built several 100M clients taking over market share from traditional services firms who were slow to react to the offshoring evolution.
The book reinforces the pride to everyone instrumental in creating and driving the offshoring strategy to great success for their organizations.
