The average Indian is industrious, intelligent, and disciplined. Indians, by nature, are extremely good at planning. But fail when it comes to fulfilling the plan. It is not as if he doesn’t have an implementation strategy nor the ability to execute this strategy. He does make a honest effort to implement. But, then he gets caught up with what is generally called the ‘last mile syndrome’.
Remember the Hare in the ‘Hare and the Tortoise’ fable? The Hare takes off in a flash and then gets complacent. He loses focus on task completion, takes a nap and is mortified to see the slow and steady tortoise in the finishing post leaving the Hare red faced with embarrassment. This might be an apocryphical story but this best illustrates the Indian mentality.
The Indian tends to lose interest once we have completed 90-95% of the task on hand. It is the last 5-10%, comprising mainly of finishing, attention to detail, polishing, ensuring quality, reducing errors, that would create a positive impact on our customer, reducing cognitive dissonance and ensuring perpetual customer satisfaction leading to repeat business. Most of our work, unfortunately, is usually a sad story of sloppiness, neglect and dangerous, even callous, and leaves many loose ends.
This has perhaps its roots in the Government and Public Sector controlled socialist economy that was prevalent in India during its first 50 years since independence. With products not having to be marketed in a competitive environment , due to licensing constraints, it was the norm to make substandard products and get away with it. How else can one explain a customer buying a brand new Ambassador car in 1980’s, taking it straight to a body shop, redo all the spot welding in the car and then repainting the whole car before he has even driven a single kilometer. The importance of quality workmanship was never instilled in us. With a couple of generations brought up in this culture, is it any wonder that we are known for shoddy workmanship, unreliability and poor quality. With this same generation training the current gen X people, there is no end in sight to this malaise.
This ‘chalta hai’ attitude should change if we, as a nation, have to achieve super power status. There has to be a paradigm shift in the way we think and work. This change has to come from within, every single individual taking a pledge to meticulously complete the task on hand meeting the highest quality standards. We need to take a leaf out of the Japanese who never compromise on quality. Post Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they channeled all their energy into creating a Quality Culture that is the envy of the world. The movement that started in 1950’s bore fruit in late 1970’s. Today, customers are willing to pay 50% additional premium for the same product made in Japan, as against those made in Hong Kong, Korea or China.
Quality is and should be a way of life. We should aim for zero defect in everything that we do, even the trivial.
