If I put it in an extremely crude and simplistic form, organizations in the future will be like IKEA, the Scandinavian furniture retailer. It's a brand, it's a franchise, you don't know where the manufacturer is, you don't know who's designing the furniture, or who is motivating customers to want to buy these products, but there's a set of forces that are helping make this happen. Most corporations will take that position, whether they are in engineering or otherwise. And when that happens, work will be redistributed within countries, across countries and in multiple countries. This is our opportunity ahead.
This prediction of the global firm is from Shiv Nadar, co-founder of Indian technology giant HCL, in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton. Nadar recounts stories from the trenches of his company's growth over the past 3 decades. Of HCL's founding in 1976, he recalls:
Interestingly, our toughest challenge was not designing or making computers but getting the [Indian] government's approval to produce them.
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