For Infosys, a pioneer of India’s outsourcing revolution, the world used to be flat. Now it is looking more pear-shaped.
It was Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of Infosys, who first put the idea in Thomas Friedman’s head that the world was flattening. Mr Friedman, who was wowed by the oasis of calm and sophistication he found at the company’s shiny Bangalore campus, recalls Mr Nilekani telling him: “Tom, the playing field is being levelled.”
That led him to think about how technology was rendering distance and borders increasingly irrelevant, and accelerating the process by which hundreds of millions of people in emerging countries were pressing into the global workforce.