The paper is based on the collaborative experiences of a specific company in south India. This company manufactured auto components with Japanese collaboration. Hofstede's study of how culture affects workplace values is used to examine the relationship between the Indian executives and their Japanese counterparts. Extrapolating from this, the Hofstede scores for China, Japan, and Korea, dubbed in this paper as the Asian cluster, on the one hand, and Germany, the US and the UK, called the Western cluster, on the other, are examined to try to identify areas of similarity and differences between each cluster and India.

Corporate India's engagement with the world outside has mirrored the policies of the political establishment. The first four decades or so post-Independence were generally marked by a fair degree of insularism, a command model of resource allocation, limited influx of foreign technology and equity as well as restricted contact with industrial organizations worldwide.

The first spell of liberalization in the 1980s slowly started changing the contours of these policies, and the next installment a decade later, more radical than the first, facilitated very close contact between the world and India. These changes, over a fairly compact period of about a decade, caused drastic changes in the functioning of many Indian companies as, almost against their will, they were dragged out of the cocoon of protectionism to be thrown into the maelstrom of fierce global competition.

Now that about two decades have elapsed since India first started liberalizing, it seems appropriate to take stock of what has happened and see if the theme of `Global Mindset, Indian Roots' is relevant in India's present situation.

Management Research Journal, Global Mindset, Financial Services, Foreign Technology, Automobile Sector, Management Styles, Formal Communication, Organizational Culture, Macroeconomic, Decision-Making Process, Indian Economy, Indian Companies, Indian Culture.