Why Steve Wozniak Is Mistaken When He Says Indians Lack Creativity

Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder, was at the Economic Times Global Business Summit in India a few days ago. In an interview with the Economic Times, he made an interesting point about India.

He also took the customary potshot at the IT (information technology) services industry, which apparently lacks creativity.

Responding to him on Twitter, Anand Mahindra, chairman of the Mahindra Group, said: “I love it when such comments are made. Nothing like a sweeping stereotype to get our juices flowing & prove it wrong. Thanks @stevewoz Come back soon. We’ll make you sing a different tune...”

This is an interesting debate. There are two parts to it.

First, the need for formal education to achieve success (as defined by the acquisition of material possessions)

Second, India lacks creativity.

The first point may or may not have causality built in. Plus, it is also open to the philosophical question of what constitutes success. So it is a broader debate.

But the second comment is intriguing. Is India really lacking creativity? I was discussing this subject with my good friend, Roshan Cariappa. We had a long discussion and hence decided to put this up as a LinkedIn article – this is a joint effort.

To start off, we back Mahindra in his response – “India lacks creativity” is a lazy stereotype. The reason – Wozniak used superficial arguments to make the statement.

The manifestations of this apparent lack of creativity, as per Wozniak, were – India hasn’t produced great technology companies, and the country lacks a multitude of professions and achievements.

Let’s look at the first point, where we are getting carried away with what isn't rather than focusing on what is! To define creativity as the presence or absence of large tech (or any other type of company) is shortsightedness.

This dogmatic view emanates from taking for granted the most important element of creativity – the operating environment.

Let’s address the elephant in the room right away. India has been a sovereign nation for just about 70 years and enjoyed even limited capitalism (the most efficient method of growth and prosperity) for only the last three decades. To compare it with a country that has enjoyed unbridled capitalism for over 150 years is comparing apples to agriculture – pun intended.

Creativity is not a foolproof guarantee against negative externalities. India has factor markets – land, labour, capital – all controlled and heavily regulated. Rapid scaling of creativity needs generous access to risk capital, which has been missing in India for the most part. We have rigid laws, multiplicity of rules, and debilitating infrastructure and bureaucracy, a lot of which is only now being addressed and cleaned up. India also has different social stereotypes – what constitutes success and failure, the role of family and so on. All of these together form the operating environment and, more generally, the context.

And since our context is so excruciatingly different from the West, especially the United States (US), what should be rightfully lauded as India’s creativity does not make it to the leading B-school case studies or to the front pages of the New York papers. When it does, it sometimes does so for the purposes of mocking – remember the New York Times asking hungry Indians not to launch rockets?

Modern management theory, which started to take shape in the 1920s and 1930s, draws heavily upon the works of such great thinkers as Drucker, Weber, and Kotler. A lot of that takes the US industrialisation journey as the baseline. Just as a comparison, the US’ per capita gross domestic product (GDP) was $17,000 in 1960. India’s was $300-odd. Our creativity is about the journey from $300 to $1,900 today – and the factors which impede faster growth.

Let's look at a few examples.

One, India today launches satellites for several countries, including those with much higher per capita GDP than India. Did Indian Space Research Organisation get here without creativity, given its shoestring budgets?

Two, when India sends a probe to Mars for a fraction of the costs which Western countries would have incurred, it’s dubbed as useless ambition of a hungry country by the high priests of journalism in the US.

Three, India today has a peer-to-peer payment ecosystem which has more users on board than the entire populations of several bigger per capita economies. While the template creativity (of the Western banks) was focused on finding why India only has 20 million credit cards, the context creativity from the National Payments Corporation of India created a countrywide payments backbone in just a few years.

Four, tech companies love talking about monthly active users and how quickly they get there. Jio got to about 160 million users in just about seven months, give or take a few days. Which tech company has had that kind of an onboarding curve? When large tech companies trade profitability with market share, they are creative. When Jio does it – and does it much better even on financials – there isn't a squeak of awe.

The problem of modern management theory is that it has become normative, just like the other sociological “sciences” in the last few decades. If anything, creativity is nothing without context. And if anyone sees the Indian operating context of the last seven decades, the above examples – meant to be representative, not exhaustive – are huge achievements. At a more mundane level, Indian creativity is spent on countering negative externalities, and that’s hardly a reason to blame the people for!

Indians who have migrated abroad (to a different set of operating conditions) have done the kind of innovation Wozniak would be proud of. Today, 33 per cent of all immigrant-founded companies in the US have Indian founders. The CEOs (chief executive officers) of two of the most valuable technology companies, Google and Microsoft, are Indians. Indeed, it is difficult to find a cutting-edge field, whether engineering, science, or medicine, that doesn’t have Indians at the forefront. These people did not turn more creative overnight; they just got an amplifying and enabling environment (industrial ecosystem, access to capital, ability to take risks in the social context, past examples of success and failure to learn from) to capitalise on their talent. It is not that Indians aren't creative; it’s just that we haven’t seen the best of it yet. Making a judgment in 2018 on this subject is premature, to put it mildly.

That brings us to the point of IT services – the favourite whipping boy of product giants. What did IT services do for India? It created a burgeoning middle class with increasing discretionary incomes, the highest number of engineering graduates in the world, and truly global aspirations and confidence – to be able to compete with the world on an equal footing. As a result of the outsourcing industry, India still enjoys a broad, diverse technology skill set.

With the exception of China’s unique state-sponsored capitalism, no other industry has taken out a whole generation from inevitable drudgery of low-paying jobs to the middle- and upper-middle class comfort of a better lifestyle and global exposure. And this has been largely achieved in just 25-odd years.

Sure, the IT services industry does not do a lot of things. But think about where it started. Today, three million people directly (so, about 12 million people including families) and five million people indirectly (so, about 20 million people including families) benefit from the elevated lifestyle which IT services have brought to the country. Most of these three million people would have not found any other jobs commensurate with their aspirations and talent in 1980s India. This was the baseline. You trace a journey outwards from a real-life baseline, you don’t define an arbitrary end point and decide that the journey has failed!

Thanks to the large talent pool which IT services enabled, India today has a class of entrepreneurs who have now started to create world-class products for the Indian market. All said and done, Ola is holding its own against Uber, as is Flipkart against Amazon. It is now incumbent on this next set of entrepreneurs who have narrowed Wozniak’s context deficit, to succeed in the way West defines success. And this process is just starting – writing it off based on past data is ill-advised. Mohandas Pai, who played a key role in building one of the most successful Indian IT services firms, has extensively written about this dimension of the services business.

India can become a product nation – we have the talent and resources. And we are also now nearing the first full generation of relatively improved prosperity, the likes of which benefited American technology companies. It won’t be surprising to see cutting-edge products being developed for the world in the near future. As Mahindra said, hopefully Wozniak can appreciate some of these on his next visit to India!

This brings me to the last point – do Indians like a stable job? Yes, but that is not a uniquely Indian phenomenon. It is a shared aspiration in any developing part of the world. No surprise that people are more risk-averse when they have mouths to feed. But it is not a lack of creativity to stay employable for 40 years of one’s life. If everybody quits their day jobs to build the next cool app, who will lay the pipes and the roads (or build less cooler apps)?

Also, did I read that India does not have enough singers, dancers, musicians, and writers? Did I grow up in a different country from what Wozniak is observing?

Finally, I would end with a suggestion to read a paper titled ‘Is there an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay’ by A K Ramanujan, published in the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology. Ramanujan, English and Kannada poet and a scholar of Indian literature, has explained the fundamental differences between the “context-full” and “context-free” styles of thinking and judging. His seminal essay can explain both – the need to evaluate Indian achievements in the light of an India post-1947 rather than a California post-1980 as well as why Wozniak failed to do the same.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn and has been republished here with permission.