IITBHF and IITBAA (http://www.iitbombay.org)

Adil Zainulbhai to head McKinsey's India Operations

By Aziz Haniffa

Excerpts from article - the full text is in copies of India Abroad on the newsstand.

Our mandate is to help companies become global champions, says lIT alumnus

Adil Zainulbhai, who headed McKinsey & Company's Washington, DC, office till last month, has moved to India to take charge of its Mumbai office. Zainulbhai, 50, was with the firm for 24 years in the US. In his new role, he will oversee the global management consultancy's huge expansion plans in India.

Zainulbhai, who has worked for a wide range of McKinsey's clients on a variety of strategic, organizational, marketing and financing issues, told India Abroad that his being sent to Mumbai was a decision by the firm that followed its most recent Asia strategy. "We were the first consultants to set up base in India in 1992," a year after the economic reforms instituted by the then finance minister, and now Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. "We've done well there. Our position is really dominant now. As the Indian economy grows we believe we can do even better," he said.

Zainulbhai said his agenda, in re-energizing McKinsey's operations in India as is being done in China, is "to help the economies of these countries to continue liberalizing and to grow. In India, our mandate is to help Indian companies become global champions - become globally competitive and become real major players worldwide. "That's one piece of the practice we want to build. The second piece of the practice we want to build is to help public sector utilities and other under-performing companies to become more competitive. If they can't be global leaders, at least they can become a lot more competitive. "The third prong of our agenda is to help multinationals figure out how to enter and compete in India. Most of these MNCs are going to have to learn how to compete at a price point that's significantly lower than they've seen in other countries.

Zainulbhai said he intends to expand McKinsey's operations in India and employ more staff than the nearly 800 employees it now has across the country, reinforcing its consulting services, outsourcing of knowledge professionals, and Power Point chart-making, which is essentially done in Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram. "We were the first people to do outsourcing of knowledge professionals about eight years ago and a lot of our research around the world for our clients is done out of Delhi. We found fantastic people in India who can do charts and research for our offices around the world and do it fast and accurately," he said. Asked if McKinsey has gone 'native' since all of its reports now have a pro-India bias when it comes to economic performance that may not always be in sync with reality and the pace of liberalization and reforms in the country, Zainulbhai took strong exception to such a contention. "We have essentially a pro-trade bias - what drives economic growth worldwide is what we are interested in," he argued. "For example," he said, "we have a strong practice in China - so we could say the China practice is totally pro-China as much as the India practice is more pro-India."

Zainulbhai said the mandate from the powers-that-be is "basically how does one get growth in the world because when you get growth in the world, the United States does well. So it's from that perspective that McKinsey operates."

He said he does not believe that the outsourcing controversy - where India has virtually been made the 'whipping boy' for the loss of some IT jobs in America and exacerbated by CNN's Lou Dobbs dubbed "Exporting America' - would sustain itself. He said the decibel levels on the controversy drop rapidly when major Indian companies begin to employ American workers and open branches in the US.

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Zainulbhai said "in the near-term Indian companies are not worried as their sales are booming and the noise level [against outsourcing] has decreased. But in the long-term, they are seriously thinking of launching major operations in the US and investing in the US to get the noise level down even further." ... Zainulbhai, who was also among senior McKinsey officials who recently met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss ways of moving the economy forward and making things even more attractive for foreign direct investment, said: "One of the things he [Singh] is worried about is that the licensing mindset is slowly creeping back in some of the regulatory bodies in India. He wants to get rid of this because he knows that for India to grow he has to get rid of all these bureaucratic snafus. We believe it w happen sooner than later and we believe the momentum certainly there." "For me, it's also wonderful to go back - kind of give back to the country," he said. Zainulbhai is an Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay graduate and received his bachelor of technology degree mechanical engineering. He is also an alumnus of the Harvard Business School from where he received his master's in business administration.

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