"Few service industries are designed to be 24x7 in India, and thus there was no 24x7 mentality"
About this Quote
The line lands like a blunt postmortem on India Inc's default settings: it is not condemning effort, it is diagnosing design. As a businessman, Sanjay Kumar isn’t romanticizing hustle; he’s pointing to an operating system built for office hours, not continuous uptime. The phrasing "designed to be 24x7" matters because it shifts responsibility from individuals to infrastructure - staffing models, shift norms, vendor reliability, compliance, customer expectations, even public transport. If you don’t architect for round-the-clock delivery, you can’t will it into existence with motivational posters.
The subtext is a quiet critique of copy-pasting global service promises onto local realities. "No 24x7 mentality" sounds like a cultural jab, but the sentence structure suggests the opposite: mentality follows incentives. When most service sectors - retail, repairs, healthcare-adjacent support, logistics back ends - are optimized for predictable, daytime demand, the ecosystem never normalizes late-night response times or redundant coverage. That, in turn, shapes what customers tolerate, what workers accept, and what managers plan for.
Contextually, it echoes the story of India’s BPO and IT boom: a few export-facing pockets learned 24x7 because American and European clients required it, while large parts of the domestic economy stayed diurnal. Kumar is arguing that "always-on" is not a vibe; it’s a supply chain. Until the boring stuff becomes 24x7 - staffing depth, escalation paths, maintenance, payments, last-mile logistics - the mentality will remain exactly what the system has trained it to be.
The subtext is a quiet critique of copy-pasting global service promises onto local realities. "No 24x7 mentality" sounds like a cultural jab, but the sentence structure suggests the opposite: mentality follows incentives. When most service sectors - retail, repairs, healthcare-adjacent support, logistics back ends - are optimized for predictable, daytime demand, the ecosystem never normalizes late-night response times or redundant coverage. That, in turn, shapes what customers tolerate, what workers accept, and what managers plan for.
Contextually, it echoes the story of India’s BPO and IT boom: a few export-facing pockets learned 24x7 because American and European clients required it, while large parts of the domestic economy stayed diurnal. Kumar is arguing that "always-on" is not a vibe; it’s a supply chain. Until the boring stuff becomes 24x7 - staffing depth, escalation paths, maintenance, payments, last-mile logistics - the mentality will remain exactly what the system has trained it to be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Customer Service |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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