Can Expats give competitive edge over Indian compatriots?

Thank you Mr. Narayan. I have also had a very similar experience and thats why I am so vehement!!

I fully support Mr. Bhave. In my experience with foreign engineers who have come to India to commission their equipment , I have seen only one foreign engineer , a gentleman from Alstom France , who was an absolute expert in his job. The rest were just about average , and any good Indian engineer could also have done the job.

It is just our mindset that a foreigner has to be good at his job because of their hire and fire culture ; if he were not so good , he would have been sacked ! This just does not hold true , even in the best of companies. Even a company like Microsoft , about whose interview questions so much has been said on the Internet , does not have the best brains or knowledge in the business ; consider how many innovations in the last 50 years have come from Microsoft - I can only think of the basic OS and the X-Box ; can anyone give more information on this ? Against this , consider how many new ideas have come from the rest of the computing community.

Every company has a mixture of average , good and brilliant employees ; it is only a new startup that will send its best employee out on a job , since that employee is its brand ambassador. A company like Siemens or ABB can afford to send even an average employee out , since it does not have to bother about its image. Its image is so strong that it cannot be damaged by the sub-par performance of one or two employees.

I would like to answer your question by another question ; why would a company in India want to hire expats ? Consider why many of the airlines hire expat pilots ; because Indian pilots with similar experience on the relevant planes are in short supply. If there were enough Indian pilots with the required experience available in the market , then what additional benefit would be served by hiring an expat pilot ?

Honestly it does'nt matter if the employee is an expat or local. What really matters is the competence and its application to do the job well. If expats were the driving force would we have so many our country folks driving their economies?   

I must say that many Indian managers recorded many progress in business in last years. But what of their lacks are human and employee relations and ıntercultural management..

So if they start hiring expats, what happens to the people living in the same country, where will they get their jobs from?On one hand our prime minister says India will be such an economic superpower that NRI will come back to India, with loads of money and jobs in India itself. But the picture is something else- no job nothing, simply sitting,nothing have the skills in international workers. So many skilled peoples are there in local,they don't have support. Perhaps we should become expats and work in other countries

out of the 200 Mn expats or so quoted as numbers most of the expats are generic developers and more of work force than key decision makers, while we do find references of big names in international markets who are indians but really speaking how much is  the percentage,

expats cannot drive business generation and opportunity creations, what the industry needs in expats is to be able to generate and drive business and unless the expats are able to grow the value chain from workers to decision makers hiring expats may not yeild the desired results for business in my opinion