Bhagvada-Gita : Revisiting the message of doing ones Duty

Gita is my favourite topic since long time , not because I understand it but mostly because I am still trying to understand it . There are so many dimensions to it and mostly my conflict is with the core message of Gita " do your duty efficiently without being attached to or affected by the results" . I can not stop thinking how is it possible that one works out so many steps to reach to the ultimate end result and this message says it simply does not belong to you so don think about it There may be two reasons behind it .

1) Influence to the result by external factors : In childhood we confronted one science example many times " what happens when 1 kg of cotton and 1 kg of metal is dropped from the same hight , which will reach to the ground first" our innocent mind always tend to answer that lighter weight will reach on ground much later then heavier one which is scientifically not true if the experiment is done in vacuum . Thats the catch .... if the experiment is done in vacuum where there can not be an external factor but we live in real world where there are so many external factors always influencing each and every activity we do and hence all the end results. so if the same experiment is carried out in external environment then it will be impacted by gravity , air and some other environmental resistance which will keep lighter weight in the air for some extra time.
Same is true for our acts , there are so many factors to prevent the pure outcome of our activity , suppose I am preparing for an exam and I read all the course material but will my surrounding and environmental condition be the same as of my other friends ... I may have some personal issues , I may be not feeling well ... On the day of exam I may come across some un pleasant event and the list goes on . whereas some one else may get an excellent environmental support and score much better then what he intended to.

2) Looking at bigger picture : Another optimistic way of looking at this message of not giving too much attention to end result can be our precision for end result. Human is not accurate in predicting results and it is very much possible that what we predict is an understatement of what we can actually do or even we may miss out on some of the important side results and other cascading results.
To put it simply If a student sets a goal for himself to score first rank in school without knowing that his calibre is to achieve first rank in entire city or in entire nation...

Arjuna's unwillingness to do his duty as a warrior, because fighting involved destruction and killing but there are other outcomes to this which are more important , It will be victory of truth and justice , This will annihilate evil forces from earth and make life more beautiful for coming generations infact it will have cascading affect till generations to give learning and lessions . Arjuna fails to see the bigger picture here

3) To perform every act by putting best of our effort: second point directly leads us to this one , if rather then shackling ourselves with some expectation which could be an understatement for us we perform each and every step in the process by putting best of our effort , there are great chances that we achieve much more than what we would have set as benchmark.

This will also help us in stopping the differentiation between various tasks , we consider some are important and some are not and so we tend to neglect the tasks which are less important whereas theory of management says there has to be value addition in each step , if there is no value addition that means a redundant task and has to be eliminated.
These were just few of the many reasons which may have lead to this mysterious message of Gita . I believe this message is worth considering , last time I heard something similar from Tiger woods when he mentioned that in his game he does not concentrate on the scores rather he enjoys & concentrates on each and every step of the game which keeps him away from the nervous ness which players get in tournaments by looking at their and competitors scores ... thats another way to look at it and I wonder Woods know it even when he may have never read Gita !!

Future is Virtual

Ever imagine in 21st century someone is walking into a computer shop and asking for a laptop or desktop with 512 MB RAM and probably 1-2 GB of harddisk , you would say he must be living in late 19th century but I would say he is living in mid 21st century thats the future may look like where thin client may again be reduced to dumb client and every thing is taken care by servers over world wide web.
What does a person want from his desktop today , If he is a manager he would like to come to office and check his mails on oulook look into outlook calender for his schedule for the day , work on a presentation for next day and then may be check the excel template for qualiy control. In addition to this he may be using some intranet or internet portals for various other activities but as for as my knowledge goes typical managers who manage resources in an organization are restricted to MS office they don't have to do more then that.
Now with bare minimum memory and harddisk in a system one can definitely open a web browser ( or via Mobile) and connect to net , thats all you need Globally hosted operating system now provides a complete virtual desktop just one click away and all you need to connect to it is a web browser and a good version of flash running on your system ( now that would not need much of computing power !) even ur mobile is able to run a simple web broweser . This G.HO.S.T comes with 5 GB initial storage space and all basic tools and services you would expect an operating system to provide infact as competitive as ur windows desktop , It has it's own office tools , mailing solution , media player and much more .
There is facility given to upload and download files from local disk to G.HO.S.T environment and vice versa. Now isn't it all a manager needs , he will be getting his mailing service , doc, PPT and excel . Then there are hundreds of complimentary services being provided by different websites for example Zoho.com which is an online CRM solution you can maintain customer contacts and automate your entire
salesforce online at a very low cost , Google doc and ebook have already been there for a long time now. If thats not enough then there are portals which can provide a huge database and even mail archival for your corporation . Companies like Sonian provide mail archival solution whereas Amazon web services have started providing database on demand.
At onside there are huge benefits and absolute freedom of any hardware or software because of these services on the other side there is everything on stack , giving away entire database of an organization to a third party vendor is something which is still not thinkable, or even accessing remote desktop will give away your credentials which means threat to privacy but then everything in this world comes at a cost and associated risk the tradeoff ofcourse depends on us

Matter of Spirit or Spirit of Matter

In the movie “Finding Nemo" towards the climax there is a scene where marling and dori are stuck inside a giant shark , Marlin knows it is almost end of it now there is only one way and that is to the belly of the shark whereas dori is typical fish with flash memory she hardly remembers anything beyond few seconds and she is also happy go lucky ( just imagine she met Marlin on the way and since then she is with him ) .
When a final blow of water comes from outside and Marlin tries to hold on hard his place , Dori says leave it , she pretends as if she can talk and understand whale and tells marlin that let go and everything will be fine. Obviously it is a tough decision which marlin takes seeing no other choice he lets go his grip and both go down the throat of whale , suddenly whale sprinkles all the water accumulated in it's throat and bingo both fishes are out .again.
This is the typical life scenario many times we are faced by adversity and we think this is it , this is the end of the road. Most of the time these bad phases happens to be a passage to something better , may be a new opportunity , a new avenue which you would have otherwise never explored. There are so many examples to consider from mythology to history and to the modern world. What worst could have happened to Prince Ram and Ayodhya then sending him to jungle for 14 years but it turned out to be making of entire saga which necessarily meant elimination of evils from earth and Protection of many noble souls.Would Mohandas karamchand Gandhi have any chance of becoming the great mahatma gandhi had he never faced the cruelties of British in Africa.
What was the rejection and deniel of giving technology to produce steel in India to Mr Tata made him open his own company which proudly stands worlds most respectable company.
Examples are plenty but what is often missing is our attitude towards life , why not find a new opportunity in every problem as this can be the only thing which can make you think out of the box , extreme and desperate situations would lead to highly extra ordinary solution . The best part is once we are able to successfully face it , we will not be afraid . This is the spirit which keeps sending adventurers to continuos explores even if they have marginally escaped from death in the last one , they know what is their potential and capability and behold they become so resourceful and confident that they just don't care. as the saying goes " The secrete of life is to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks".
Keep the spirit alive !!

People and Event Management : From Nimitt

As soon as you get into a B school , studies are not the only thing you get involved in so many things . Same was with our batch as well when we. joined SPJIMR . After induction there was committee division where people have been divided into various committees . PRCOm for building .relationships with corporates and other institutes , ACADcom for taking care of academic schedules , PLACom for placement related activities ,
IT-NFRA com for making sure that our physical and IT infrastructure works fine , ITEACOM to take care of leadership guest lecture and work on college magazine and ADMAP to boss around These were the traditional committees which existed in SPJIMR (PGDSM-MIT) since its inception but this time there was a new committee formation " Nimitt Com " .
Nimitt is the annual event organized by our batch ( instituted by our super seniors) and in 2007 it could not be grander then it was . A two day action pack event based on the hottest theme around which would later picked up by many other colleges for entire event or part of event. On The day of committee formation I came to know I am in PRCOM , that is also the preference I had opted for but then overnight shuffling happened , After looking at the scale of Nimitt it was decided that a new committee need to be formed , Nimittcom to take care of Nimitt activity over the year. 6 people were moved to it ( of course taken out from other committees) Including me , I guess I was moved in it because I worked in many activities in Nimitt . People were apprehensive and thought there would hardly be any work to do ere in this committee , in 2 days 3 out of 6 members left the committee to join a interest which suited them , what a start , I joked with my faculty coordinator , attrition rate of 50% ! Will it sustain , whats the guarantee remaining 3 of us will last specially when there was only one thing common between us and that was our heights....

We just now finished the event successfully and probably with the highest relevance any other institute has ever done in India , A comprehensive research to back our event and participation of highest authorities in the area of SMEs ,there is so much to write about , It's been a journey full of frustration , hard work , depression , dejection , excitement , learning , achievement .
But first thing first , people issue which can make or break events

Personal goal Vs organizational goal : It's almost one year again to another memorable event of life , I won my first paper presentation contest in IMI Delhi in an event called SPandan . It was on the theme of aligning personal goals with organizational goal . I definitely remember how I convinced audience that it is difficult , today given a chance to deliver same presentation , I would say it's not just difficult , Its very very very difficult to align personal goals with organizational goals.

For any event to be successful you will have to map the common goal with people but people are so busy chasing their personal goals , they just don't see the forest for trees. Who cares about organizational goal specially if that is not adding any thing concrete to you and to certain extent it's true building academic records , winning awards , preparing for placement and doing certifications is much more important then helping in conducting an event . It is like moving mountains , specially if you don't have any authority , how on earth you can convince people to see the vision which you have.
I'll have an obvious advise here , identify people who do you think can contribute , who are good time managers and know how to balance things , who are enthusiastic about more then just academics in life and yeah with whom you and your team members have good repo , handpick such people for your work and then start .

Make some one accountable : Now this is a very interesting point , most of the time in cases like event management you want people to work in group or teams for sponsorships , corporate coordination , promotion , infrastructure and so on . We divided groups at the very beginning but then we thought every time a group or team is made in class , we are asked to choose leader and their starts ego clashes , attitude problems . Isn't it paradox that at one side B school teaches us team work and on the other side every time their are obstacles in team work because of such practices . We opted to not choose any leader for any group , assumption was that some people will work hard and emerge as leaders rather then we choosing one .
Well it will not be too tough to guess that things do not work out in this manner , the problem was now no one was accountable for anything , there was no one pushing deadlines , motivating people and setting milestones that means eventually we ended up doing this for all things . We were quick to learn that it is not going to work this way , we formed next group of teams soon and this time their were some people accountable for activities of entire group so now we coordinated with only one person in the group.

Exercising power / Authority : Now this has to be the next after we made someone accountable in a group , often it is seen that people would like to be in key positions where they can take decisions and influence others but then there are very few who can take this job , leadership is not to be given but to be achieved by once deeds . We made team leaders but there were very few who could practice authority in the team without fraction. Even when there were best friends then also it will be obvious for your team leads to come back to you and tell you how they have been either completely ignored or countered by their members . Even we in Nimitt com faced this problem , I don't know whether there is any solution to this or not but my suggestion is authority if proved with a stick in hand will not have a long life instead you will have to lead by example and of course at the same time be humble.

Sitting on stuck work : This was the fact which I have learnt hard way during my corporate life hence I was very alert about it , At times people take responsibility but they just don't move because they are waiting for some important information or go ahead , now the problem is no one knows that someone is waiting for something , one has ring alarm bells that he is stuck , which normally people don't do , they just wait .that means continuos status update becomes a must on the part of event manager or organizer , he has to make sure that every one is moving and moving fast.

Involvement and initiative taking : parato could have thought that 20% of people will take 80 % of initiatives but the percentage is even smaller , 10 -15% people will take initiative and at the same time will have courage to come forward to take on those initiatives with a sense of ownership. There may be other genions with better ideas but either they would like to just give a passing remark on the issues or keep mum cause speaking of an initiative may also need them to get involved in it's execution.
Anywhere in any project , it is very important for one to identify both kind of people and create some kind of mapping to make sure you don't loose out on the idea factory .

Have some perfectionist in team or make some : When one person or a set of people have to be involved in many activities at one go then it is very difficult to maintain quality , there will be errors . It is always better to get it verified from someone who is perfactionist , identify such people and use their passion for perfection , if you don't find anyone then the only option left is to make one , someone got to be finicky about details .

Ready to learn new stuff , just in case .. : In such activities which do not have a formal structure and abundance of money to spend on outsourcing jobs , one must be ready to learn new stuff so that he can practically of some help to other people who are getting stuck in such areas.
This quality is a must have because you never know when someone is going to say that he doesn't have any idea how to do this and then the only way out is to get your hands dirty , if you will not do it , no else would!

Reverse Customer loyalty

The whole concept of customer loyalty is misplaced , If we say today customer is king then why customer the king should be loyal to something or someone . It should be companies and organizations which should be loyal to customer. It should not be customer loyalty rather it should be company loyalty if I may call it so ( probably a better term would be reverse customer loyalty) . Consider example of iPhone , when new iphone launched customers across globe shown tremendous faith in the company and its product , there were queues for whole night to take first hand set of iphone from the shop , thats great and shows customers were really loyal to apple otherwise for hi tech product people do not show such a faith in early stages as people have shown for iPhone ( normally they wait and watch , have a feel of the product , see how robust it is and purchase only after its been around in the market for some time ) . Result , probably apple broke even within few months as for as iphone is concerned . In return what did apple do to its customer , within months it reduced price of iPhone by 200$ leaving the customers who have been early buyer of the product in distress and frustrated , what did apple do to make sure that those customers who have shown so much loyalty in apple product are farely ? it did not do anything substantial . So here is a case where customer is loyal but is company loyal to its customer...

On the other side is example of tata , a year back tata promised nano , a car with one lac price tag . When it was launched price of many input factors have gone up as good as 15-20 % but during launch Mr Tata said " A Promise is a promise " and kept the price still one lakh even if that meant taking a hit on margins. That is what being loyal to your customer where you consider closely what your cutomer demand and build your product accordingly. CRM is upto some extent helping to serve customer better but I believe it is a good automater of processes and tool for managing customer still it's purpose should not be to ipmprove customer loyalty rather it should be to help oragnizations become more loyal to customers to increase reverse customer loyalty. USAA comes closer to this definition where they use CRM by all means to help customer , they are not bothered that they should sell products which give high margin to them , rather they advise customers something which will be of more value to customers , they use the data not to exploit customers but to serve them and gaurd ther interest .

If still we are talking about customr loyalty then how is it more different then old days of fords and bajaj when customer was supposed to be loyal force fully in absense of enough choices .

ABC of Creative Costing

In traditional costing system it was a simple method because it was made for a simple era , imagine why would Mr Ford need to worry anything in traditional costing after all , he had to produce only one thing and that was black cars . Ford wasn't changing any model in earlier days , forget about model he wasn't even changing colors of the cars and in such a case traditional costing made perfect sense where all the overhead and other costs were proportioned equally to the number of units produced . there was hardly any confusion or apprehension about costing .

No one would have imagined in those days that a process as simple as finding out cost of labor , material , sales and administration and allocating it to number of units will become so creative in coming days. Very soon days of monopoly and cost plus were on their out from industry , it was time to produce more and with various varieties . ( just after one decade GM would have near 8000 model of cars in its portfolio). Then started the problem , not all the product needed same kind of materials neither were they produced by similar processes . Some of them were simple and needed easily available materials but some were specific which needed expensive material and special treatments. In fact Cost differentiation started much before manufacturing , In case of motherboard , chips or other research extensive electronics product research and design also contributed to the cost and determined the way these products need to be produced during manufacturing.

These complexities gave birth to a new comprehensive and creative way of costing , Activity based costing where no longer the cost was a simple function of direct labour , direct material with equal distribution of overhead to all the products . In ABC each phase of product lifecycle was divided into various activities and cost incurred in each activities was calculated , this obviously gave a clearer picture rather then a generic overview.

What were some of the basic points to consider while deciding between ABC and traditional cost.

Disillusionment : At times traditional cost created illusions , lets take a very bookish example which is there in almost all costing books . If a car manufacturer is manufacturing cars of two types one is standard cars which are made in assembly line and completely automated whereas another types of cars are competing head on with Maybach ( Remember these high end cars in which entire interiors is done by hands) and after making these two kind of cars he is simply dividing the total cost incurred in making them by number of units produced , obviously he would now find that the margin for his standard cars have decreased .....
traditional costing created this kind of false illusions for management which may lead to disastrous decisions like closing down production of standard cars or increasing the price of these cars . ABC helped management in such situations by providing them precise information

Hitting right on the correct problem : In earlier days when major portion of motherboard fabrication was done by hands in HP , they found that over all cost for motherboards was high and the obvious blame was on manufacturing . What they missed is two things
1) How will the device be manufactured is decided much earlier in design phase
2) Manual fabrication is much costlier then automated manufacturing.
These are typical example where either a product need some special treatment or one of the process in product development is eating larger chunk f resources then other processes . In such case we need to concentrate only on those pain areas.

Traditional costing could have never detected these issues , it was again ABC which came to the rescue .

Importance for service industry : Traditional costing could have never done justice to service industry . In service industry there is no tangible product to be delivered , every service is simply combination of activities . To find out which activity is costliest you need to apply ABC and once you have done so , you can decide on next strategic move , whether you should keep such activity with you or outsource it to some third party vendors.

Similarly there is one very crucial question which traditional costing will never be able to answer and that is which customer is causing more cost or which is the most profitable customer.
In short here ABC can help you providing right set of services to right set of customers

Can IT be your quantum leap : Coming Soon