Why Large Indian Corporates Fail at Innovation A recent piece in the Business Standard accurately pointed out a glaring problem in India’s business landscape: while our startups build frontier tech and the government successfully drives massive digital and defense innovations, our large, legacy private corporations are lagging. The popular consensus often blames this on "rent-seeking"—the idea that large incumbents are too comfortable operating as oligopolies in protected markets to bother with R&D and building innovative ideas and stoking innovation and experimentation in their organisations. While rent-seeking is certainly a factor, in my long experience of large organisations, it is not the predominant one. When you spend decades in the trenches of corporate strategy and execution, a very different reality emerges. Companies do not actively hold board meetings and vote against innovation. Instead, they fail because of a massive structural and cultural misali...
In the millennia before the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s there were large families. Not only were people living in joint families, parents had 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 children and more. What that did was it these two factors, the joint family system and large immediate families, parents with large number of children built a strong interconnected family structure. The effect of this was compounded by the gotra system wherein the relationship was supposed to be maintained over the past five generations; after five generations you could intermarry because then it was considered that the blood relationship had broken. Now in this contextual background it developed a society which was deeply interconnected and it developed a family system which was deeply interconnected. People cared about each other not just real brothers and sisters but even cousins. That is why when marriages took place entire villages were involved and a lot of people came because there were a lot of interconnecti...