Management Next

Brands under Fire

2009-03-17T14:41:00.002+05:30

In Brands under Fire, brand experts Ivan Arthur and Kurien Mathews use case studies like the worm in Cadbury’s and the pesticide in the cola to cut through the common thinking on brand behavior to submit fresh insights into the brands of the 21st century.

Questions explored are: Are we witnessing the fading out of the traditional concepts of the brand as a deliverer of consumer expectations and the arrival of alternative models? What impact does the reach of new media, aggressive social activism, changing global sensitivities, agricultural, industrial and economic practice, the unpredictability and uncertainty of an increasingly complex environment, and, above all, a fully participating consumer who influences the product and brand dynamics, have on brand behavior and a brand’s dialogue with the consumer?

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Good talent within Small and Medium Enterprises reach

2009-03-10T13:52:00.005+05:30

Talent management revolves around attraction, development and retention of human resources. With the advent of new age industries and leaping developments in IT, BPO and the service sector saw the talent management imperatives change drastically. Similarly, the downturn in these industries has also brought about a different equation, like in IT and manufacturing.

Hiring is likely to continue in a slowdown, but it will be much more targeted and thought through. Clearly, there will be a lot of justification required for addition of headcount. There will also be a lot of care in following a clear process. Companies are likely to use psychometric tools, behavioural interviewing and assessments. The reason is that there will be no margin for hiring mistakes and newcomers will have to be good fi ts for the job and those who can be on boarded quickly. Recruiters and hiring managers are likely to be trained in the use of sophisticated techniques as hiring will become serious business.

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Metadesign

2009-03-03T12:24:00.004+05:30

Design can solve most of world’s problems
Richard Farson’s tall claim that design can solve world’s intractable problems may sound far fetched but the conviction with which he articulates his point of view in The Power of Design: A Force for Transforming Everything (Greenway Communications; First edition (October 2008)) will make anyone believe in him.

John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox has this to say: “This book is a must-read not only for designers and their students but for anyone concerned with our collective future.”

“This is Richard Farson’s masterpiece — the one and only book that illuminates the interdependence of design,organization, and leadership.” — Warren Bennis.

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Ten Commandments of Joy

2009-02-24T14:54:00.004+05:30

Welcome the year 2009 with a smile from within and wish everyone with a sankalpa (intention) for peace and prosperity for all the people on the planet. Make a resolution to do more good to society, help the people who are in need and bring solace to those who are suffering. Let our life be useful to one and all.

Today, most people are confused because there is no direction in life. The difference between flood and a normal river is that water fl ow is regulated in a river. Similarly, the energy in our life needs some direction to fl ow. If you don't give direction, it is all confusion. When you attend to the spirit, life attains its highest and becomes a celebration. Here’s how you can nurture the spirit.

1. Give the divine a chance
In the New Year, let your devotion flower and give it a chance to work. Prayer is a vital tool to improve your life. It also nurtures values such as Ten Commandments of Joy integrity and honesty.

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Interplay of interior and exterior spaces

2009-02-17T12:45:00.000+05:30

We have really come a long way if we’re discussing trends in luxury apartment design, considering that apartment living was never a luxury only a transformation that collective housing had undergone.

Of course, there have been major changes in the last thirty years, from being uniform, assembly line dwelling units, today we have rigorous and imaginative proposals that give priority to the inhabitants.

I do run the risk of sounding like a 'Total Environment – evangelist', but it is true that Kamal’s (promoter of the company) brainchild has changed the mindset of a number of people. After having lived all my life in an apartment in a ‘swank’ part of town in Mumbai, I was still craving my own “piece of sky”. And now I still live in an apartment but it is a Total Environment apartment and that means that it has everything that I thought was missing elsewhere.

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Unleash the power of middle managers

2009-02-10T13:54:00.002+05:30

Customers today are asking for more for less demanding enterprises to create value without resource augmentation.

All rational (strategic) steps have been or are being taken to
• Cut non-customer facing cost
• Shed the under-performing fl ab
• Raise the bar for individual performance
• Make quality processes more stringent
• Re-design roles to include customer-facing responsibilities
• Increase daily working hours in an endeavor to re-assure the customer with more value for less.

And yet, somewhere, not withstanding all the strategic measures that are being taken, on-fl oor performance does not seem to have shown significant and consistent enhancement. Most are wishing that there was some way by which we could augment the efficiency of people across board to return exponential performance. Just as one would do with machines in an assembly line!

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Interplay of interior and exterior spaces

2009-02-03T13:20:00.004+05:30

Only entrepreneurship can solve Naxalite problem

2009-01-27T14:52:00.003+05:30

Professor C K Prahalad strongly believes that the Naxalite problem in India can be contained or even eliminated only by creating an ecosystem for entrepreneurship in the affected areas. He warned the Indian governments of dire consequence if the Naxalite problem is ignored or handled as if it was a problem of unequal distribution of wealth.

The Naxalite problem currently rages in one third of the 600 districts in India and Dr. Prahalad fears it may even reach 500 districts if nothing is done. “The solution is not in distributing income or redistribution of wealth but creation of new wealth,” he said addressing the entrepreneurs at the TiE Entrepreneur Summit in Bangalore recently. Dr. Prahalad was talking on the subject ‘Is Globalization good or bad for the Poor’.

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A son’s ‘shameless’ service

2009-01-20T15:37:00.004+05:30

SpiceJet is not exactly my favorite airline. But lack of options forced me to take the flight from Vizag to Hyderabad on November 11, 2008.

We had seats in the front row. And as soon as we entered the plane, across the aisle, in the front row again, was a man, may be in his 60s, looking sick and scruffy with unkempt hair, a salt and pepper stubble, old-fashioned black shell frame for his glasses, bare-footed and, most shocking of all, wearing alungi (not a dhoti). The first reaction was to silently blame low cost air-travel for such ‘poor quality’ of fellow travelers. Sitting next to this man in the middle seat was a younger man, about 30, who, we soon surmised, was his son. The son was wearing trousers and a shirt - dressed appropriately, we concluded with relief.

But as we settled down and flight safety announcements began, it became clear that the older man in the lungi across the aisle was not normal.

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India’s poor to get rich health care

2009-01-13T15:13:00.003+05:30

Health care has been expensive for most people across the world, more so when it comes to heart operations. Indians are three times more vulnerable to heart conditions and the average age when they set in is much lower. We need 250,000 heart surgeries per year, and yet, all the hospitals put together are performing only 80,000, and that too for the affluent.

It’s not that if we cater to the poor we won’t make money. Some hospitals like CMC Vellore and Gangarams Hospital in Delhi are looking after the poor and posting good profits. The economies of scale are very important in the sector. What we need is health cities that are based on collaborations between different types of health care such as can heart and other specialties. We’re developing one.

Six leading heart specialists are also grooming 32 brilliant surgeons who will be better than us in the next five years. We have a research lab in UK that is trying to develop a vaccine for preventing heart attacks.

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Premji’s golden tips to entrepreneurs

2009-01-06T14:58:00.003+05:30

Azim Premji is one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs and his tips to them at the recently concluded TiE summit in Bangalore, where more than 1,000 entrepreneurs turned up, are invaluable. Here are a few:

On working with governments: “If we play a low profile role, and are dedicated to a cause, we can work with any government” Mr. Premji said governments don’t like those who hanker for publicity in the projects that are ostensibly meant for public good. Was he taking a dig at some big Bangalore-based IT/ITES companies?

He said Wipro has been working successfully with government departments on its computerization projects in 10,000 primary schools and with training 5,000 engineering teachers.

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Over a cup of Naple coffee!

2008-12-30T13:44:00.002+05:30

O’caffè” is what I would call my coffee rendezvous with Ravi Bajaj. Just like the Neapolitans, we found our special cup aromatic and stimulating. Because it took us straight down the memory lane, his visit to Italy last year and my trip to Rome a couple of months back. So the coffee did its job well, as traditionally the ‘Naple Coffee’ symbolizes Naples like the Vesuvius or the pizza, and it reflects friendship and sociability.

A Neapolitan is generally very critical when it comes to judging a coffee. It is said that Naples has the best Italian caffè, even though “degustibus non disputandumest” or “There's no arguing taste”. It is undisputed, however, that all Italian advertising spots for coffee are set in a Neapolitan ambiance and there’s certainly a reason for that!

Known for his creative genius, the sober designer, Ravi always has something interesting up his sleeve, whether it’s his classy winter collection or a great destination he has visited.

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Human touch to online selling

2008-12-23T12:52:00.003+05:30

Despite the cookies and the number crunching of customer click prints, online marketers are facing the enormous challenge of converting online visitors into actual buyers. It is believed that conversion rates right now are at an abysmal range of 1% - 3%.

Irrespective of data mining and researching consumer’s histories and preferences, the conversion rates have not been going up. The missing piece, apparently, is the touch of the salesman who applies his art of selling to close the deal.

To plug this gap, some help is at hand, finally. 24/7 Customer, a business process outsourcing firm based in Campbell, California, has launched a software called SalesNext. This is software that categorizes customers into those who will buy anyway, those who may not buy at all and those who may buy online only with the help of some human persuasion and help at some point of their interaction with the web.

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Art of structuring winning deals

2008-12-16T12:45:00.002+05:30

Phaneesh Murthy, founder and CEO of iGate Global Solutions, doesn’t look as somber as many of his peers in the IT/ITES industry do these days. Instead of worrying about how the slowdown will hurt him, he says he is busy getting his company ready when the markets come back.

Mr. Murthy’s passions, apart from saving the Indian tiger, includes structuring contracts that stick - where the partners work for each others’ interests, not to get one up against the other. He lists three formulas for success.

First formula: When you are structuring the deal, you have to walk a thin line in protecting both the client’s interest and your company’s interest. If you go towards one you will let down the other. The fact is, if you get too good a deal for yourself, stickiness will become an issue. The right word to use is alignment of interests and objectives of both the parties.

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Harvard’s highest alumni award to Anand Mahindra

2008-12-02T13:59:00.006+05:30

As part of its Centennial celebrations, the Harvard Business School (HBS) recently conferred its highest recognition, the Alumni Achievement Award, on Vice- Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra & Mahindra, Anand G. Mahindra.

The other awardees included John Doerr, a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers, Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman & CEO of General Electric, Meg Whitman, former President & CEO of eBay and James D. Wolfensohn, former President of the World Bank.

HBS Dean, Jay Light presented the awards at the HBS Centennial Global Business Summit, a two-day event being held on the School's campus in Boston.

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The power of daydreaming and free time

2008-11-25T14:37:00.004+05:30

"Nearly every major decision of my business career was, to some degree, the result of daydreaming. ... To be sure, in every case I had to collect a lot of data, do detailed analysis, and make a data-based argument to convince superiors, colleagues and business partners. But all that came later. In the beginning, there was the daydream", says Dov Frohman in a chapter on ‘Daydreaming’ in his book Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can't Be Taught—and How You Can Learn It Anyway. (April 2008, Jossey-Bass)

By daydreaming, he means loose, unstructured thinking with no particular goal in mind. He thinks daydreaming is a distinctive mode of cognition especially well suited to the complex, 'fuzzy' problems that characterize a more turbulent business environment. “Daydreaming is an effective way of coping with complexity. When a problem has a high degree of complexity, the level of detail can be overwhelming. The more one focuses on the details, the more one risks being lost in them.... Every child knows how to daydream. But many, perhaps most, lose the capacity as they grow up. ..."

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Seven things that surprise new CEOs

2008-11-18T12:19:00.004+05:30

Here’s a treat for all Professor Michael Porter fans. Porter’s new book On Competition is just out (Oct 2008 Harvard Press). This book is a collection of Porter’s most influential articles from HBR, and new work on health care, philanthropy, social responsibility and leadership. The portion on advice for new CEOs, co-authored by HBS faculty Jay W. Lorsch and Nitin Nohria, who look at common surprises faced by new CEOs. Porter’s most influential article (1979) How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy launched a business management revolution among academics and practitioners.

The article warns new CEOs to be acutely aware of the environment and people, and suggests ways of avoiding common pitfalls. He says that most new chief executives are taken aback by unfamiliar new roles, time and information limitations and altered professional relationships.

The seven surprises are:
Surprise One: You Can't Run the Company
Surprise Two: Giving Orders is Very Costly
Surprise Three: It Is Hard To Know What Is Really
Surprise Four: You Are Always Sending A Message
Surprise Five: You Are Not The Boss
Surprise Six: Pleasing Shareholders Is Not The
Surprise Seven: You Are Still Only Human

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Downturn cowboys

2008-11-11T12:23:00.003+05:30

An economic slowdown, more so a recession, really tests the mettle of a company, the tenacity of its leaders and the confidence of every executive. Surprisingly, a majority of the leaders and executives seem to panic at the first sign of slowdown. In the name of cost rationalization, they even sell off parts of businesses and let good people go.

Why does this happen when evidence and research by credible agencies have shown that leaders and managers who use the slump to position their companies for superior performance emerge as winners ?

Mehrdad Baghai, Sven Smit and Patrick Viguerie in their article in McKinsey Quarterly (August 2008) titled ‘M&A strategies in a down market’

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Ready to start the fire?

2008-11-04T14:45:00.003+05:30

Control and usage of fire as a source of energy marked the turning point in human cultural evolution. It began a movement where man impacted the environment rather than letting the environment impact him. In ancient communities, FireStarters were revered individuals responsible for starting the fire and ensuring that the fire was sustained, thereby benefiting the entire tribe.

This basic premise is what the FireStarter movement is all about. Just as fire in many ways helped create the Industrial Revolution, the purpose of the FireStarter movement is to create an Innovation Revolution across teams, businesses, industries, countries, the world and consequently on humanity.

Erehwon Innovation Consulting recently launched the Erehwon FireStarter open workshops in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai with a clear intent of taking innovation to Individuals across locations and across industries launching the innovation revolution.

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Analog to Digital

2008-10-21T13:10:00.003+05:30

The dream of seeing the latest flick first-day first-show in the comfort of our homes is not too distant. We are almost there. While we wait for it to happen, we are already witnessing a revolution in the way Indians are seeing movies and the shake-up in the business-politics of the Indian cinema industry.

In just over two years, UFO Moviez has 1,100 digital screens across India and the growth will be exponential when smaller towns join the digital cinema revolution currently sweeping the country. While this may seem inevitable because technology is already here, making a viable business out of it needed an innovative and a gutsy mind.

For Sanjay Gaikwad, the brain behind UFO Movies, this is his second big and perhaps much bigger than his first brush with radical business models. The first one was the online lottery ‘Playwin’ which caught on big time, but due to social pressure is under a cloud.

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Carbon finance cuts project risk

2008-10-14T13:37:00.006+05:30

Climate change is a reality. For businesses, greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions have become an opportunity/challenge to reduce financial risks. GHG reductions offer important information and insights for guiding new strategic business models.

Carbon finance is a new instrument which can make a project more attractive. In the transport sector, which contributes to one-third of the world’s carbon emissions, this potential has not been explored sufficiently. The Switzerland-based Grütter Consulting is one of the pioneers in this area and has so far realized 3 out of 4 approved CDM (Clean Development Mechanisms) methodologies and has registered large-scale CDM transport projects.

Carbon finance can be an important, albeit not the only primary contributor, to investment and can contribute towards making the project financially more attractive, less risky and more sustainable not only in environmental but also in economic terms.

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Innovation explosion

2008-10-07T12:25:00.003+05:30

India is at an interesting point in innovation. Today, things like product quality and timeliness are taken for granted across all industries.

The new buzz in India is innovation. We are trying to harness the knowledge of our clients, knowledge of domains and the knowledge of technology trends. India is innovating at the market place in a big way.

The Indian market is fundamentally different because it has to be high volume and low cost, it has to be scalable, it has to have a national reach and it should be relevant to population that is not well educated. The unique demand of the marketplace is forcing innovation in this country.

We have a whole host of young people joining our companies and they are not burdened with the past. I think there will be an innovation firestorm in India.

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You are the leader!

2008-09-30T12:06:00.006+05:30

Leadership? You? Isn’t that just for the top of the ‘food chain’? You just want an entry-level job, a promotion to the next rung, or to simply keep your job in tight times, right? In today’s corporate world, you think to yourself, you’ll be lucky to get to a leadership position in the next five years. Wrong! If leadership is not the most overused and misunderstood word, then it certainly ranks in the top ten in today’s corporate corridors. It’s time to set the record straight.

In my book, The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable, Gwen, a key character, learns leadership is not about title or position or being the decider - that’s positional authority. It’s not about knowing it all, creating a fearful atmosphere, or getting obedience from others. Real leadership is about collaboration, asking questions that promote learning, and creating an atmosphere of innovation. And, she also learns, real leadership is for everyone. Moreover, it can be honed with practice, but it starts internally and grows from there.

Gwen comes to understand real leadership is a way of life. It is a choice about creating open, honest, authentic relationships that urge others to want to discover their power and focus on what matters to them and their community. It is about knowing what matters to you and what you want from your life, not just your job. Gwen learns real leaders ask, “what do I want my life to look like today” not, “what do I have to do today”. Big difference.

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‘Jam’ begins to pay off

2008-09-23T13:00:00.003+05:30

It’s one thing to get thousands of people together to brainstorm and quite another to translate what came out of it into profitable business. IBM’s, rather the largest ever innovation exercise, that started in 2001, and a follow up jam session in 2006 to translate the outcome into business ideas, seems to b paying off.

In an article titled ‘An Inside View of IBM's Innovation Jam’ Osvald M. Bjelland, chairman and founder of Xyntéo Ltd and Robert Chapman Wood, professor of strategic management at San José State University, in the latest issue of MIT Sloan Review, say that “The Jam was successful to a considerable degree. It uncovered, solved problems in and mobilized support for substantial new ways of using IBM technology.” The process involved 150,000 IBM employees, family members, business partners, clients (from 67 companies) and university researchers. Participants Jammed from 104 countries, and conversations continued 24 hours a day. Incidentally, "Jam" was IBM's term for a "massively parallel conference" online.

Here’s a list of businesses to come out of the Jam process:

Smart Health Care Payment Systems: Overhauling health care payment and management systems through the use of small personal devices (such as smart cards) that will automatically trigger financial transactions, the processing of insurance claims and the updating of electronic health records. This business has "graduated" from the in cubator stage, and its products are now part of the IBM Healthcare Industry Solutions product offering.

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Demystifying virtualization

2008-09-16T13:23:00.006+05:30

Simply put, Virtualization is about sharing resources of a single computer across multiple environments and users. Virtualization helps increase the utilization and flexibility of hardware by making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time. A more radical way of thinking is of virtualization as a method that allows you to transform hardware into software.

Anyone who uses a computer can benefi t from virtualization. It saves time, money, energy and helps people achieve morewith the computer hardware they already own. Software such as VMware ESX helps transform or virtualize the hardware resources of a computer including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller to create a fully functional virtual machine. Multiple virtual machines share hardware resources without interfering with each other so that several operating systems and applications can be run at the same time on a single computer.

For small to mid size organizations, there are several benefits of virtualization that are direct and upfront – reduce costs of IT staff, get a service provider to remotely provision a range of services covering hardware, storage, backups, content filtering, patch management, license management, information security and several other such everyday uses priced as utility bundles from a managed service provider. The biggest benefit will be that of having enterprise class IT assets and services at an affordable pay per use pricing model which will help such companies reduce their ‘sunk costs’ into large IT assets that will obsolete soon.

Levels of virtualization

While a single computer can be easily virtualized, software such as VMware also allows creation of a robust virtualization platform that can scale across several interconnected computers and storage devices to form a virtualized infrastructure. Virtualization helps create pools of dynamic resources

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