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The share of Indians who work in manufacturing is lower than in comparable countries, at 11%, and has not much budged for years. Exports of textiles and garments, one of the biggest sub-sectors, have actually fallen in value over a decade. Some economists think the time when India could develop through labour-intensive manufacturing of this sort has passed. Yet the achievements and challenges of somes of the superstars exporters suggests that there are still lots of ways to help such firms grow.

India’s clothing and textile industry is the third-largest sector by employment, after farming and construction. Yet only a fraction of its 45m workers labour in the formal industry, meaning for firms that are registered and pay tax. India’s textile and garments industry that, as a whole, exports far less than it could.

For some the explanation is poor education in India, which has left workers short of skills.  Weak infrastructure and insurance markets also get blamed. Instead three things hold India back. The first are labour laws. India’s Factories Act makes it next to impossible for firms with more than 100-300 employees (depending on the state) to fire workers. That makes them risk-averse, which affects how large they grow.  The second thing limiting India is its trade restrictions. America revoked India’s duty-free status in 2019 because Donald Trump deemed India too protectionist. The EU puts tariffs of 10-12% on imports of clothing from India, while maintaining trade agreements with Bangladesh and Vietnam. The third big barrier is that even manufacturers who are eager to expand can find it difficult to persuade Indian workers to leave farms and join factories full time.  As a result of all this, workers are some 20-30% more productive in Bangladesh than in India. As for Vietnam, another competitor, it has higher wages but also more business-friendly rules and better access to big Western markets.

What can be done? India’s government seems to understand the issues, but politics gets in the way. Amended labour laws were passed a few years ago. But their implementation has stalled at the state level. In any case, say firms, the reforms have not tackled their biggest concerns. Goodies that have supposedly been made available through the government’s flagship industrial-subsidy scheme (“production-linked incentives”, or PLIs) are “too hard to get”.

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According to McKinsey analysis, between 2023 and 2030, ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) and high-net-worth (HNW) families in the Asia–Pacific region are set to experience an intergenerational wealth transfer estimated at $5.8 trillion. UHNW families are expected to account for about 60 percent of the total wealth transfer, and many are setting up family offices to facilitate the process. Accordingly, the number of single-family offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, the hubs for such entities in Asia–Pacific, has quadrupled since 2020 to about 4,000 across both jurisdictions.

The growth trend presents a substantial opportunity for banks, insurers, multi-family offices (MFOs), asset managers, and WealthTechs (technology-enabled wealth fintechs that offer low-cost, personalized, automated advice), all of which can offer differentiated services to new and established family offices.

When thinking about the Asia–Pacific region’s family offices, two key jurisdictions play an outsize role. Although they are relatively small in population, Hong Kong and Singapore punch far above their economic weight as financial hubs, and that distinction extends to family offices. According to McKinsey analysis, the two cities together are home to approximately 15 percent of the world’s single-family offices, with authorities there having made it a point to attract more of them—including by providing tax benefits and clear regulations. Other attractive attributes of these two jurisdictions include mature financial ecosystems with access to traditional and nontraditional investment avenues, paths to residency for investors who meet certain criteria, and access to talent. In 2023, Hong Kong and Singapore each managed roughly $1.3 trillion in offshore assets—trailing only Switzerland’s $2.5 trillion total—affirming their importance in the global financial ecosystem.

Wealth flowing into Hong Kong and Singapore is primarily coming from within the Asia–Pacific region (led by mainland China, India, and Indonesia, followed by other countries in Southeast Asia). However, it is expected that increased wealth flows from Europe and North America as many global investors see Asia–Pacific as a third safe haven (in addition to Europe and North America) for portfolio diversification. This will affect service providers’ operating models and geographical presence as they serve family offices across multiple jurisdictions.

The region’s single-family offices fall into four main archetypes, all of which have different needs and preferences They are the following:  visionary entrepreneur family offices, traditional business owner family offices, embedded family offices, and professionalized family offices.

Interviews with representatives of family offices revealed five common challenges: weak governance, rising operational costs, limited access to bespoke alternative solutions for portfolio diversification, limited understanding of insurance products and adjacent value-added services, and out-of-date technology.

Five broad types of providers have emerged to cater to the varying needs of family offices and of wealthy families that choose not to set up their own family offices. While banks dominate the landscape, new provider types are entering the family office space, including insurers, MFOs, and WealthTechs.

With these building blocks and the key enablers detailed above, service providers can create a solid strategy for achieving success with family office clients. Here are four key questions that service providers can use to jump-start their discussions of how to best serve Asia–Pacific’s family offices: Scalability. How can we adopt a pricing model that aligns with the performance goals of family offices while ensuring mutual benefits?  Solutions. How can we tap our existing partnerships to offer a broader range of bespoke investment opportunities to family offices?  Service. How can we utilize data and AI to gain deeper insights into the investment behaviors and needs of family offices?  Security. What measures can we put in place to ensure the highest level of data security and privacy for our family office clients?

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History has shown that technological innovation can profoundly change how business is conducted. The steam engine in the 1700s, the electric motor in the 1800s, the personal computer in the 1970s—each transformed many sectors of the economy, unlocking enormous value in the process. But relatively few of these and other technologies went on to become direct sources of sustained competitive advantage for the companies that deployed them, precisely because their effects were so profound and so widespread that virtually every enterprise was compelled to adopt them. Moreover, in many cases they eliminated the advantages that incumbents had enjoyed, allowing new competitors to enter previously stable markets.

The latest technology with the potential to radically alter how business is conducted is, of course, generative artificial intelligence. Gen AI identifies patterns in data to create new content—including text, images, and sound—that closely mimics human creations. And because the results it creates are fed back into the datasets it analyzes, it can learn over time to create content that is more innovative, more valuable, and more humanlike. Understanding the strategic implications of this technology must encompass not just what gen AI can do now but also what it might be able to do in the future—because it’s getting “smarter” all the time.

There’s no doubt that gen AI will create a lot of value.  Smart early movers in sectors adopting gen AI have certainly captured some of this value in the short term. But relatively soon all surviving companies in those sectors will have applied gen AI, and it won’t be a source of competitive advantage for any one of them, even where its impact on business and business practices will probably be profound. In fact, it will be more likely to remove a competitive advantage than to confer one. But here’s a silver lining: If you already have a competitive advantage that rivals cannot replicate using AI, the technology may serve to amplify the value you derive from that advantage.

Gen AI is certainly making companies more efficient.  The trouble is that gen AI can deliver similar savings to any company that deploys it. Value is created but not captured—at least not for long.  The technology can also be used to drive innovation. In fact, empirical studies have shown that gen AI may actually be more adept than experienced professionals at conceiving new products and other valuable business ideas. It would seem to follow that introducing those products and ideas could be a source of sustained competitive advantage. But again, when most rivals also have access to gen AI, they can generate the same (or similar) innovative results.

Learning capabilities turn the very idea of gaining advantage from the technology upside down. Because gen AI uses constantly updated data, your “first mover” applications of the technology are absorbed in the data that is analyzed when your competitors apply gen AI as “late movers.” They benefit not only from their own efforts to advance but also from your prior efforts to do so.

It’s probably true that an organization could benefit from developing and applying a customized version of the technology that has been optimized for its industry or sector. That could be helpful, for example, when pattern recognition in a particular industry has some unique attributes or requires unusual data that doesn’t work well with general-purpose gen AI.  So the innovative company might gain an advantage from its special-purpose gen AI, but it would be temporary.

And even if your data is proprietary and your competitors have no functional equivalents, relying on data as a source of sustained competitive advantage creates another problem. As gen AI becomes more sophisticated and incorporates larger and more-diverse datasets in its analyses, it may be able to identify the kind of data a company must have to be making the kinds of decisions it is making. It may even simply imitate your strategy after observing the favorable results. Your competitors could copy your successes without access to the primary data on which your strategy was based.

Even though gen AI is likely to “change everything,” it is—either by itself or using data that isn’t functionally unique and can be inferred—unlikely to be a source of sustained competitive advantage for any one company that deploys it. But what if your organization has valuable capabilities and unique resources that cannot be replicated? In that case, applying gen AI to improve how you take advantage of those assets may generate business ideas that wouldn’t emerge when gen AI was applied to more-generic resources and capabilities. If your assets are rare and difficult for others to imitate, gen AI’s insights can be a source of sustained competitive advantage for you—assuming that you’re agile enough to act on them (itself a rare capability).

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Gelsinger, who was named CEO of Intel in 2021, has essentially bet the company on 18A, a new chipmaking process. He hopes it will position Intel as a viable alternative to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world’s leading contract manufacturer of chips.

The reason for Intel’s struggles is clear: It fell victim to a classic innovator’s dilemma—not once but twice. First, early in the 21st century, its preoccupation with producing chips for PCs and data centers led it to miss the smartphone revolution. Then, in the past decade, it missed the emergence of chips designed for artificial intelligence.

Intel rival Nvidia took a type of chip originally designed for the demands of video games, the graphics processing unit (or GPU), and turned it into the workhorse for training and running AI models. Now the generative-AI boom has made Nvidia one of the world’s most valuable companies, worth more than $3 trillion, compared with Intel’s relatively paltry $84 billion. 

Gelsinger is racing to reverse Intel’s slide by repositioning the company around manufacturing excellence, while also trying to establish Intel as a player in the market for AI chips. Many are skeptical he can pull it off and fear the company may be in permanent decline. 

Intel wound up in such dire straits owing to missteps in its core business for central processing units (CPUs), in which it was once the unrivaled king. Production delays and problems in its own fab facilities have let rival AMD steal significant market share.

Distracted while trying to fix these issues, Intel failed to see the extent to which graphics chips would come to dominate the market for AI. Instead, it thought AI would be run on systems that still had CPUs at their heart. 

Even after Intel belatedly recognized the fast-growing market for AI-specific chips, it bungled its efforts to get into the AI game. In 2019, it announced its own GPU design for AI called Ponte Vecchio. But the design was complicated, requiring three different fab processes to make, and expensive. Worse, its performance couldn’t match that of Nvidia’s chips. This year, Gelsinger shelved Ponte Vecchio in favor of a new design due in 2025.   Intel also bought AI chip startups but struggled to turn their products into blockbusters. 

Gelsinger’s immediate problem is that Intel is hemorrhaging cash. The 18A gamble is expensive. The company has committed $185 billion to build new fabs and upgrade existing ones.  Meanwhile, costs for Intel’s planned Arizona fabs and two more in Ohio have soared past initial projections. 

Finding the money to pay for 18A, though, is rapidly becoming an existential crisis. Intel’s annual sales have flagged—down $24 billion, or 30%, since Gelsinger took over. In 2022, the company’s free cash flow turned negative. It has worsened since then. As of late June, Intel was burning through $12.6 billion more cash than it was taking in on an annual basis. Investors have reacted to the cascade of troubles by punishing Intel’s stock, driving its shares down almost 60% so far this year.  To reassure Wall Street, Gelsinger has been forced into painful decisions. In August, he announced $10 billion in cost cutting that included laying off 15,000 employees—15% of Intel’s workforce. He also reduced capital spending by $5 billion and suspended Intel’s dividend.  Then, in September, he announced more radical action: Intel’s foundry business will be formally spun off as a separate subsidiary. 

The company has turned to the U.S. government for help, too. Intel has been counting on money from the U.S. CHIPS Act, signed by President Biden to boost domestic chip production, to assist in paying for some of its new 18A fabs. In March it was awarded $8.5 billion in direct CHIPS funding and $11 billion in loans. But the money is tied to Intel hitting certain construction milestones, and it has yet to receive any funds.

At some point Gelsinger may be forced to choose between preserving Intel’s core chip-design division—and selling off the foundry business entirely, an admission that his 18A strategy has failed. Whatever Intel ultimately does, drastic measures are likely necessary if Gelsinger still hopes to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

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What can leaders do about lack of engagement in meetings? Many turn to rational approaches to keep meetings moving, such as offering attendees detailed agendas, prereads, and time management strategies. But that’s not enough. Meetings are more than transactional exchanges — they involve people who grapple with emotions, struggle with complexity, and are prone to influence by others.

To unlock a team’s full potential, leaders must embrace this reality and then make a few changes to shift the format from transactional exchange to meaningful dialogue. Doing so can help spark innovation, foster connection, and energize participants. Four tactics managers can use to make meetings more engaging and move people from apathy to energy: 

1. Shake up the usual.  When you run meetings the same way week after week, they quickly become predictable. One way to increase participants’ engagement is to rethink the meeting’s structure and approach.  Another way to make meetings more engaging is to change the physical context of the meeting room. Alternatively, you could conduct walking meetings or declare the meeting laptop- and screen-free. Such changes disrupt the usual pattern, which can refresh participants’ minds and increase alertness.
2. Address the elephant in the room.  When people avoid discussing difficult topics in meetings — perhaps out of fear of conflict or discomfort with the power dynamics — tensions will rise.  For leaders, addressing the emotional impact this behavior is having on the meeting without blaming others is important. The leader can voice their own frustration to dissipate the tension and open a conversation. This can also deepen the connections within the team.  For these approaches to work, leaders must create psychological safety, or an environment in which people feel safe to take risks, share ideas, and express themselves without fearing negative consequences. Leaders can achieve this in part by setting meeting principles with their teams to ensure that everyone feels comfortable participating in the discussion.
3. Make everyone feel heard.  People want to know that their opinions matter. If meeting attendees don’t feel this way, managers may notice silence or frequent interruptions, nonverbal cues like sighing and eye-rolling, or minimal responses to questions. Designing an inclusive meeting agenda ensures that participants feel valued and have an opportunity to contribute.  Managers can create inclusive meetings by using tactics like asking participants to write their views on Post-it notes before starting a discussion on a topic, or having someone summarize the previous speaker’s point before adding their input. This gives participants time to reflect and articulate their thoughts clearly and equalizes participation.  In discussions where a majority opinion faces some opposition, don’t aim to convince or overrule the minority. Instead, ask, “What can we learn from this viewpoint?” Often, the minority view holds wisdom.
4. Respect your company’s DNA.  How you engage employees in meetings should align with your organization’s DNA — its deeply rooted strengths and core values. Root strengths are skills and personality traits, such as resilience, while core values are guiding principles and beliefs, such as fairness. Ideally, your company DNA can be captured in three to five words, with each word accompanied by a sentence or two explaining its specific meaning to the organization.  Articulating the company’s DNA informs the do’s and don’ts of your meetings and helps your meetings resonate better with employees.

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At this time of the year, many organizations are drafting their work plans for the year ahead. During this season, numerous change projects are being birthed in service of the grand strategic vision. For each approved initiative, resources are allocated and a project team is formed. While this might work for standalone projects, increasingly, dealing with complex external environments and internal structures means that organizations must adopt a systemic view of the whole.

This means that driving organizational change is more than just the sum of all “change projects.” It requires teams that are adept at navigating complexity, fostering collaboration and sustaining momentum. The concept of systems leadership offers a powerful framework for guiding transformational change, focusing on five key roles:

1. Steward: Building Confidence By Leading From The Emerging Future.  In the context of organizational change, stewards play a critical role in maintaining alignment between the transformation efforts and the organization’s overarching goals. They ensure that every strategic initiative or pivot aligns with the core values, thereby safeguarding the organization’s integrity even as it evolves. For the transformation team, having a steward means there is always someone who can articulate why the change is necessary and what need the change is addressing—anchoring the team’s efforts in a broader purpose that motivates and inspires.
2. Theory Builder: Building Consensus By Concretizing Theories.  In a transformation team, the theory builder helps build consensus by grounding discussions in well-developed hypotheses that can be tested and validated with evidence. This role is essential for ensuring that change initiatives are not based on whims or untested ideas but are instead rooted in a deep understanding of organizational dynamics. By doing so, theory builders enable the team to make informed decisions that are more likely to lead to successful outcomes.
3. Designer: Building Culture By Being A Change Agent.  For the transformation team, the designer is the architect of change. They envision the future state of the organization and design the pathways to get there. By taking a holistic view, the designer ensures that the change is sustainable and scalable, addressing not just the symptoms but the root causes of organizational challenges. The presence of a designer in the team fosters a culture of proactive problem-solving and innovation, which is critical for driving long-term success.
4. Coach: Building Capacity By Increasing Competence.  In organizational change, the coach is essential for building the capacity needed to sustain transformation. By focusing on skill development and empowerment, using systemic coaching frameworks such as the PEARLS model, the coach ensures that the team is not just following directives but is actively engaged in shaping the change process. This role is particularly important in building resilience within the team, enabling them to adapt and thrive in the face of challenges.
5. Teacher: Building Commitment By Role Modeling.  For the transformation team, having a teacher means there is a clear standard of excellence to aspire to. Teachers inspire commitment by embodying the principles and practices they teach, making it easier for the team to align their actions with the desired outcomes. This role is crucial for maintaining momentum in the change process, as it reinforces the behaviors that lead to success.

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According to the author when he started mentoring aspiring founders and small businesses a few years ago, he anticipated that he would get mostly tough technology questions, but instead, he more often hears things like “Where do I start?”  A wealth of books are available to address the basic facts of business life, like the classic by Bill McBean — aptly named The Facts of Business Life — based on his 40 years’ experience running large and small businesses. Bill does a great job of outlining the key realities as follows:

1. If you don’t lead, no one will follow. Good business leadership begins with defining both the direction and the destination of your company. That’s where you start. From there, you need to hone a whole set of skills to survive and prosper, including effective communication, leadership under pressure, and constant adaptation to change.
2. If you don’t control it, you don’t own it. Control in business requires teamwork, which occurs in successful companies when team members, products, and processes work in unison. You have to define the key tasks that must be handled every day and institute the proper controls to make sure they happen effectively and consistently.
3. Protecting your company’s assets must be your first priority. Assets include the required equipment, accounts receivable, and cash. Maybe more importantly, your long-term survivability is tied to intellectual property, like trade secrets and patents, as well as other less tangible items like your customer base, your experience, and your skills.
4. Planning is about preparing for the future, not predicting it. Planning is not just an early-stage activity, it must be an ongoing activity, based on current and accurate information as well as educated guesses on future changes. Planning should keep you focused on what’s important and prepare you for what lies ahead.
5. If you don’t market your business, you won’t have one. Marketing and advertising are business realities. Word-of-mouth and viral are not long-term solutions. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is if most of your potential customers don’t know about it. With 4 million new websites per day, customers won’t find you by accident.
6. The marketplace is a war zone. Every company has competitors or there is no market for what you offer. Successful entrepreneurs know they have to fight not only to win market share, but to retain it as well. Past success is no guarantee of future success, and the only way to remain successful is to maintain a fighting mentality.
7. You don’t just have to know the business you’re in, you have to know business. Understanding one’s industry is necessary but not sufficient to be successful. Many businesses fail simply because they ignore or do poorly in one or more of the basic aspects of every business, like accounting, finance, personnel, or business law.

Thrive Against the Odds

By Arian Adeli | Edited by Micah Zimmerman | Entrepreneur Magazine | September 18, 2024

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In the high-stakes world of startups, founders often find themselves facing a paradoxical challenge: how to attract buyers without sellers and sellers without buyers.  This chicken-and-egg problem has derailed more promising startups than we care to count. Successful marketplaces like Airbnb, Uber and Etsy have already achieved this by the following advice.

1. Single-player mode.  The key to solving the chicken-and-egg problem often lies in temporarily ignoring it. Instead of trying to build both sides of your marketplace simultaneously, focus on creating value for one side first.  As a rule, identify which side of your marketplace is more vital to acquire and start there.
2. Fake it till you make it.  In the early days, your marketplace might look a bit empty. Don’t let this deter you. Instead, roll up your sleeves and start curating content manually.
3. The piggybacking strategy.  Why build a network from scratch when you can tap into existing ones? This strategy involves identifying platforms where your target users already congregate and bringing them onto your marketplace.
4. The exclusivity gambit.  Nothing drives demand quite like exclusivity. Limiting access to your marketplace can create a sense of scarcity and desirability that attracts buyers and sellers.  Plus, this way, you are not building expectations of immediately going mainstream. A quieter marketplace would be acceptable and expected by your existing users.
5. The loss leader.  Sometimes, you must sweeten the deal to get your first users on board. This might mean operating at a loss initially, but it can pay off in the long run.
6. The network effect.  Design your product with viral growth in mind. Make it not just easy but advantageous for users to bring others onto the platform.
7. Trust and credibility.  In the world of marketplace startups, trust is your most valuable currency. Without it, buyers and sellers will not feel comfortable transacting on your platform, no matter how slick your UI or how vast your offerings.