What Works: Success in Stressful Times by Hamish McRae

Author:Hamish McRae [McRae, Hamish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, General, Economics
ISBN: 9780007358229
Google: TK94O-d4sZIC
Amazon: 0007203780
Publisher: HarperPress
Published: 2010-01-21T22:42:59+00:00

2. WHAT ARE THE LESSONS?

Bangalore’s stellar progress to becoming India’s capital of the information industries has been largely unplanned. It was the result of contributions from both public and private sectors that happened to combine and have an unintended consequence. It was the mix of being both a military quarters and a centre for scientific education that led the Indian government to locate its nuclear and space research there. But military high-tech industries are quite different from commercial hi-tech industries and I think it was partly luck that a number of companies, foreign and domestic, chose to locate there.

But not entirely luck. Higher education and high-tech industries require talented people, and to attract these people requires a place that can make them feel happy and fulfilled. Being a military centre alone would not have triggered this. Being a base for state-owned industries might have done, but only if the educational facilities were there too. My own first big lesson from Bangalore was that the best thing that can happen to a city is to have top-end university and other educational establishments located there. If you bring in enough clever people, they will figure out how to make the place hum.

The next lesson follows from that: critical mass matters. One of the paradoxes of a world of hugely capable and near-free telecommunications is that while in theory this enables online services to be located anywhere, in practice those services will tend to be clustered together. That same telecommunications capability enables centres of excellence to deliver their output anywhere. Yes, the economic playing field has been flattened, but the same forces that flattened it have also created new peaks-and higher peaks than would have been possible before the communications revolution.

Clever human beings need other clever human beings. They need them to co-operate with, sometimes to compete against, to socialize with, maybe to have families with. So they cluster together. A world where human capital is the key form of capital is a world of peaks and plains.

This puts a premium on places becoming and remaining attractive places to live. A city cannot do much about its weather but a city can try to make sure that its economic growth does not damage its attraction. It is true Bangalore’s growth has led to a deterioration in its quality of life in a number of ways. Obviously there is the traffic congestion, not helped by the tardiness in building a ring road and a highway to Chennai. Both of those projects are now happening, though slowly, and Bangalore is at last putting in a mass-transit system, which will help further.

But, and this is the central point, the fact remains that the city is an easier place in which to have a middle-class lifestyle than other large Indian cities. The quality of the private sector services, both those provided by the large companies and those that have sprung up in response to demand, is high. The infrastructure has to be acceptable but if the other

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