Books: Billions of Entrepreneurs by Harvard Business Schools Tarun Khanna

These are the buzzwords in management literature today. But most books see events through the India Vs China paradigm, and not see them as collaborators. However, a new book Billions of Entrepreneurs, written by Harvard Business Schools professor Tarun Khanna, looks at how entrepreneurs from China and India can collaborate to reshape the world economy. The premise doesnt seem far fetched, as around 300 years back India and China accounted for as much as 50 % of world trade.

In Billions of Entrepreneurs, Tarun Khanna uses new business developments and research to show how China and India are embracing the world on their own distinct terms. The book reveals how such differences will influence Chinas and Indias future development as well as what the two countries can and must learn from each other today. Billions of Entrepreneurs paints a vivid picture of how China and India are reshaping business, politics, and society around the world.

Writes Prof Khanna, For the first time since the rise of Western capitalism, entrepreneurs in China and India can ignore. New York and London ???and still build companies worth billions. Thanks to social and economic revolutions, Asia has captured the best minds and money from all around the world.

Prof Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School. He works with entrepreneurs, companies, and NGOs in emerging markets worldwide. In 2007, he was elected as Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Smart, innovative Chinese and Indian business leaders are learning to make profitable use of one anothers resources and as a result have reaped huge financial gains from, for example, tractors, telephone carriers, and granite.My thesis is that entrepreneurship in developing countries occurs in far more encompassing and far-reaching ways than in more developed settings for the simple reason that there is so much more that needs to be done. It is done so very differently too, in response to the different nuances and rhythms of the societies in question. So the subjects in this book are the usual business-school types of entrepreneurs, who start successful companies and reap Croesus-like riches, writes the author.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, Foundations, chronicles the very different choices made by the nascent modern nation-states, choices based on deeply held beliefs about appropriate societal norms. Part II, Enterprises, chronicles, in a spectrum of locations and settings, and through my experiences with individual businesses, organizations, and entrepreneurs, some of the consequences of those choices being realized today. Part III, Future, views the savvy companies and individuals, local as well as elsewhere from the developed and developing worlds, who are learning to leverage the skills of both China and India.

Billions of Entrepreneurs is a good read for those wanting to keep abreast of globalization buzz, and budding entrepreneurs who can combine the power of India and China in new futuristic business models.