Lin Chase of Accenture spent 2 years in India as the first head of Accenture’s R&D lab. In Part-2 of the interview Lin discusses and shares her experience of working in India. Her advice for working in India is this: India always wins and you cannot win India.

What are the cultural underpinnings and context of hiring and working in India? Lin’s focus was on hiring people with fire in their belly but that also meant keeping the cultural context of the hiring process in mind. Lin says she had to built her own HR process since R&D jobs were not readily available in India. India is a consensus-oriented society, where trends can go off like live fire she points out. What is unique to India is how well engineers and their extended family understand and grasp the trendy economic behavior of the IT services industry. For example, Lin discusses the role of extended family in the hiring process and its impact on marriage since the jobs in her organization were not “services jobs” but a new kind of R&D job. Tune in to find out how she handled these cultural issues that in some ways are unique to India.

Besides the cultural underpinnings, Lin also talks about the lack of product companies in India and what it will take to create an ecosystem for product managers and companies in India. Her advice to young professionals in India interested in a product management role is to spend a couple of years working abroad and gain hands-on experience. While in India Lin spent a lot of time with advising and working with startups.

She is currently a senior executive at Accenture’s San Francisco office and reports to CTO Don Rippert.

In case you missed you might want to listen to Part-1 of the interview with Lin.

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