Brochures

1 Business and Culture (Brouwer)

We help you to achieve you company having a business culture that breathes openness, professionalism, flexibility, team spirit, responsibility and creativity. Paramount is result-oriented and ready to change in the global scenario.

Our programmes create mutual understanding especially between Dutch and Indian  business partners and employees.

Our Culture Training and Team Work Building programmes explain the why of actions and responses in negotiations and collaboration and cooperation. On the basis of the answers to the why question we formulate actions in thinking and doing aimed at a complete mutual understanding between business partners and colleagues.

We customize the programmes with the cooperative method. Thus we start with a Creative Conversation, followed by Creative Group Seminar prior to the course. This means an intense collaboration between your company and us. This guarantees that the programmes are answer to your needs.

Keeping your Company’s basic tenets in mind our programmes aim at creating and sustaining a dynamic atmosphere in which every person is challenged to function as part of a team. Such topics as taking responsibility, nurturing talents and loyalty and competition are part of the curriculum.

One of the foci is creating a fruitful balance between the commercial viewpoint and aspects of personal development and need.

All our programmes are research based. This research took place – and indeed continues to keep in tune with contemporary challenges – over the past 30 years in India. Geographically it ranges from the village level to urban settings. The focus has always been on the mentality component of culture. The findings on this level are continuously compared with those on the empirical level. Thus, the cultural specific theoretical concepts which guide actions are compared with the actions in the actual situation.

The behaviour in practice is usually based on cultural specific interpretations. Many times the physical structure of a Company setting and the idiom in which Company’s manuals are formulated are the same all over the world. Settings and manuals in the Netherlands and India resemble each other. Yet, the interpretation differs often and it is here that problems have their origin. Many time problems are unforeseen because they are hidden due to lack of cultural knowledge.

The programmes are an indispensible aid to sustainability and responsible business practices.

Diversity and Inclusion. The research and the programmes take place at the confluence of cultural specific categories and universal principles so as to contribute to a more stable and inclusive work environment.

2 Modern and Indigenous concepts (Brouwer)

Present day manufacturers in India have in most cases a trading or other non-manufacturing background. And so have the workforces in the industrial units. What they do have, of programme, is a series of indigenous economic concepts on which their actions and decisions are based. These indigenous economic concepts can best be identified in the traditional manufacturing situation. That is the situation of the artisans such as the blacksmiths, carpenters and goldsmiths. Today, these artisans have modern counterparts such as plumbers, electricians, masons, glass- and tile setters. In contemporary India I have first studied the indigenous economic concepts behind the actions and decisions of all kinds of artisans.

            I favour an approach to Small Enterprises and Human Resources Development which incorporates the cultural dimension of entrepreneurship and industrial management. Scholars and other practitioners who are interested in the problems of small enterprises are, surely, well versed with the technical and administrative problems such enterprises face. In this context, it has rightly been said that success stories cannot be copied. "Learning rather than copying" is the advice. This learning, then, takes into account the technological and administrative factors ignoring the concepts lying behind the local specific decisions.

            I distinguish entrepreneurs and management on the one hand and labour on the other. This distinction is not based on classical theories of the mode of production, but rather on field observations which revealed in India distinctive ways of thinking between these two categories.

            The traditional artisans make a distinction between (i) finishing a work and completing a work, and (ii) between the use of these two terms in two different contexts (textual versus colloquial). This adds to our understanding of their perceptions and actions concerning the delivery of their product. Naturally, after having delivered his incomplete product, the craftsman engages himself in a new work. After some time, while this work is in progress, he receives a call from the previous patron to attend the ceremony to complete the previous one. The craftsmen call it a 'new work'. In our words, each work - the old one, the new one, and the completion of the old one - is considered a separate assignment. Thus, the manufacturing of a product up to its delivery and the making of the product ready for functioning are viewed as two different issues.

            This system of breaking up a single production into two different assignments is not restricted to so-called traditional artisans. In modern construction work, carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, glass setters, painters, polishers and similar artisans of any caste background follow more or less the same lines of meaning.

            In its most simplistic form, the reasoning behind this "splitting system" is thus: the transcendent order is the order of completeness and perfection. It is placed outside the world which human beings only reach on their death. The avoidance of completion and perfection is thus one of avoidance of death. This is to be seen both metaphorically and sociologically. For during the time lapse between 'finishing' and 'completing' a product, artisans start up new works for other patrons. The cultural ideology is thus inseparable from the mundane survival strategy: here two domains that in the West and in the modern state are separated, are intertwined.

The entrepreneurs' observations may be brought under two main headings: practical problems in the financial and technical areas and conceptual problems on the micro level of the organisations.

            Here, I shall restrict to an attempt to throw more light on the conceptual problems. The noted problems such as lack of manpower for R&D, lack of attention for details of products, overall quality control of production and the inclusion of a contribution to society in the measurement of an enterprises' achievement are problems that relate to the cultural dimension of development.

            This led most of the implied industrialists to the conclusion that India has to evolve its own model of development. According to Dr Malathi Bolar, Director of the Sri Dharmasthala Manjunathesvara College of Management:

"When we talk of liberalisation, we talk of the growth model given to us by the western world. What the country needs to do is to create a model that benefits our own needs."

Quoting the noted economist Dr M.S. Swaminathan who stated that 'we are on the brink of sustainable life lines and unacceptable poverty', she added that a new model should measure industrial success also in terms of a contribution to the society.

            In other words, a genuine model remains to be built on concepts from both the global and Indigenous Knowledge Systems, as the present one, originated in Europe, apparently does not work satisfactorily in most industrial sectors. In the present model the concept of 'development', identified with progress and growth, remains an exclusive concept, a monolithic, unidirectional and singularly economic one. By contrast, the indigenous concept of 'development' appears multi-directional, pluralistic concept and covering different domains simultaneously - the economic, the ritual, the political and is often worded in a religious term, namely, 'purity'.

            The two concepts are thus not only contrasted, but value ordered. The indigenous concept encompasses the modern concept at the same time. The more comprehensive nature of the indigenous concept stands therefore open to certain aspects of the modern concept. The openness or flexibility of indigenous society gives opportunities for modern development to find its niche in or among the indigenous developments.

            The small entrepreneurs and other players in the local markets who head manufacturing or trading companies seem to be well versed in practising the modern view of the economic domain as comprising the perceptions that

1. production and consumption are different aspects of the economic domain;
2. division of labour is directed to individual needs in objectified terms;
3. cash operates as a nexus;
4. profit is made between production and consumption; and
5. investment decisions are taken under economic abstractions. Subsequently 'development', meaning growth, is a purely economic concept.

            This view of the economic domain, which remains prevalent among the industrialists, entrepreneurs, and the state, contrasts with indigenous perceptions of the various factors. The workers perceive

1. production and consumption as belonging to a single disprogramme;
2. division of labour as a metaphysical aspect of the ritual domain;
3. cash not as a means of connection, but as a means of disconnection, thus strengthening the ritual domain;
4. profit being made during production and thus as a left-over of ritual;
5. investments decisions as cultural ideological abstractions.

            Recapturing the statements of one of the industrialists, I feel, one should certainly not "forget the past", but first apprehend and understand the past in designing new directions. What we do know about the present, modern model is that money creates a relationship, for example between employer and employee. We also know that a salary or wages is paid for the work done; that there is a relationship (in the sociological sense) between the payment from A to B and the work or services delivered by B to A. Furthermore, a loan is viewed as belonging to a separate logical domain of financial reference and equally logic it is to be repaid.

            The concept of competition is placed on the side of manufacturers. It exists between them vis-a-vis the market of consumers. Hence, the network of producers and consumers are considered distinct. Finally, in the modern view, profit is made at the time of delivery of a product - when it is sold the Maximum Retail Price includes production costs, overheads and profit. The profit margin is then influenced by the demand for the product.

            When I suggested that the actors in this system need to learn 'from the past', at least in India, I do not mean this strictly historically. For the history of India has shown more cases of juxtaposition than of replacement of systems. Therefore, we may look for the past in the present.

3 Thinking patterns and Teamwork (Leupen)

In modern society all kinds of knowledge are copied, however the actual process of thinking is neglected in nearly all educational programmes. In what way do we copy also thinking when we copy knowledge? Understanding the ways of thinking gives a deeper insight into the being of human itself with its emotions and how we can better understand internal and external human conflicts. Also social trends can be understood better. In many organizations documentation is often structured to a limited extent, poorly traceable, inconsistent. Enterprises will benefit from knowing how documentation content can be better aligned with our way of thinking. By doing so, project cooperation can be improved. Modern approach in business is horizontal cooperation and not vertical cooperation.