Questions which can not be answered

Since the downturn has started there are some of the questions which have gained popularity with all the business news papers and news channels , interesting fact is no one seems to know answer to these questions yet these reporters keep asking same thing to almost any one and every one they meet
What kind of recovery we would see? : Now we all know there are various kind of recovery , W, V ,U shape etc but how can one predict recovery from a recession which is not yet near to completion , anyways how does it matter to business and common man as what sort of recovery it will be . It sounds important only to great economist and academicians who are good only in postmortems and never in predictions.
How should industry leaders respond to this down turn ? : after reading couple of answers on this I am myself now expert to give an answer , tow things 1) Innovation 2) Cost optimization . These two are the buzz words and now even in normal times innovation is very difficult for an industry where thousands of players selling same thing so the easiest resort to the industry is cost optimization which means cutting on head count . I have till now not seen a different answer to this question and hence stopped reading at the point where this arrives , whether its been asked to some business guru or minister , I have yet to see some innovation in their answers.
What is your focus market ? : Dare any one answer this beyond India and China , people will think he is illiterate and have not even attended pre school education, even kids know that these countries are focus market from super cars to match boxes , whats the point in reading a whole paragraph just to get the same conclusion

Do you see these green shots as a sign of recovery ? : This is a binary question and half of junta replies in 1 and other half replies in 0 so you are left confused whether there are any green shots , whether there are any recovery ? no matter how logical answer to this question is , it will not satisfy your quest of knowing whether recovery is happening or not because you yourself keep looking at so many contradictory examples around.

My pick on top tech trends

I believe next technology business would see lots of potential in following areas
Mobile application : Internet did spread like a wild fire and every one had gut feeling about its potential but today mobile has much wider penetration then internet and also the time people spent on mobile is almost their entire waking up time. Currently where internet penetration in India is for 250 Mn people on the other hand mobile penetration is almost double with
around 500 Mn people . Organizations which missed on net applications can directly jump to mobile . Recently SBI's Mobile banking is a classic example , SBI could never make it big in ebanking but counting on the fact that now mobile technology is mature and secure , plus their are regulatory frameworks around , it can instantly reach to such a large user base.
With cheaper high end sets ( including iphone and BBs) applications dealing with media contents are also becoming popular and a large segment is using these apps exhaustively. Mobile is already transferring good amount of data from one place to other.

Security : Here I am looking at all kind of security , with global connectivity Internet security has definitely become high priority and companies and professionals in this business are making a fortune a logical extension to it is mobile security which seems to be more vulnerable thanks to wireless , blue tooth , data card etc.
On the other side now physical security is also taken very seriously not only at corporate level but also for personal and private usages, look around the new real estate development and you would find each flats have security systems.

Television applications : Television penetrates even much larger segment then Internet and mobile and now holds lots of potential . The first immediate preference would be to make it interactive and start selling products via live televisions. however the hidden treasure is in on demand content , today's lifestyle make it very difficult for people to follow some
program on a regular schedule , they must have flexibility to watch any program at any time of their choice , In India some operators are now already equipped with these facilities where any one can view any program ( at his own preferred time )telecasted in last one week .
Going forward a huge entertainment library which would empower users to pick and play her favourite programs ( no matter whether they are telecasted on current week or closed down last year) and watch them. Latest plasma LCD panels and home theatre system will compliment it very well

Reasons why Facebook can replace twitter

After doing some analysis of facebook and twitter I am feeling that the "share whats in your mind " feature of facebook could be a good replacement to twitter. At one place twitter started to facilitate only small updates about self but then it restricted itself to it , even after there is so much buzz about twitter in the web world and increasing users , it has not added any significant applications to attract more hits. Sharing a pic with follower would have been a very basic facility
Your message is shown to everyone connected with you : what ever you share in facebook is available for everyone to read instantly whereas in twitter one has to follow you to be aware of what you are up to

A pic is better than thousand words : Facebook like orkut enables sharing of pic and video plus friends can comment on those pics/videos . I see people using this feature much more than simply putting text on their status of facebook

Other applications : There are so many application which facebook is enabling its users to use ranging from surveys, quizzes , games, sending gifts and so on . This keep users involved and also generates more comments and related discussion comments

Celebrity trust : Twitter generated initial buzz because of some of the celebrities choosing it to keep their followers updated but look facebook today and you would find so many of them are already present there.
Structure : The way twitter shows messages of people you follow looks messy and unstructured some times whereas facebook has put across a good structure of showing messages and clubbing related comments in the same discussion

Even though the ease of accessing twitter from mobiles can not be debated but with so many high end hand sets around I feel accessing facebook from mobile is also becoming a trend. If twitter does not come up with some thing better , I feel it may loose its grip over the user base within couple of years

What a Mentor can do

Recent advertisement " What a Mentor can Do" of ET Idea has represented the nearest picture of what a mentor can do . a falcon is shown flying ahead and guding a cock in the open sky , well this is what a mentor can do a cock does have wings and willingness to fly but its not capable of taking long flights similarly there are many talented mind around who may have ideas and commitment to work on those ideas but they may not know the exact path and to approach things . This is where a mentor can do wonders by helping you streamline and focus your thoughts and giving you right inputs to not only start off but also go long way in the journey.

We have been seing this relationship since ages and its transformation can be observed from mythological to hitorical era.I would say the best ever mentor has to be Lord Krishna who directed Arjuna and helped him choose the right path. In history also we would find many such examples where mentorship has helped in developing immortal legends out of ordinary man. Ramkrishna transformed a curious child narendra into a monk who could create a new perception about India and its spritual philosophy in the world.
So what all a mentee expects from her mentor

1) Inspiration : The very basic need of doing something , one has to be inspired and charged up. The inspiration generated from other source is much more impact full than the one generated from within. Mentor must be able to light up inspiration in the mentee.

2) Deep expertise in the area : IT will be very rare to have someone mentor without being good expertise in the area where mentee is working. Mentor is supposed to know all and resolve the doubts of mentee with entire confidence.

3) Ability to explain with simplicity: Mentor should be able to make things simple for mentee in terms of the understanding , he is like a watchmaker who can diassociate all the parts of the watch and explain each and every one to his mentee.

Time For New Spring

Once upon a time there was a great jungle , it had various varieties of trees , bushes , animals , birds and resources to sustain all of it. Some trees were really very old and strong . These big trees were from various variety and size . They were around since ages and now many of the birds and animals have nests over them. As these trees grew they were expanded into mammoth structures with capturing maximum space and resources in their area. They absorbed whatever came near by their roots. Water , soil and light was equally absorbed by them . Because of such consumption it was impossible for any small sapling to grow under their shadows since they
could not get enough resources .

With more urbanisation around the normal life of jungle was also interfered in many ways ,The grand river in the jungle was used to waste disposal as well , some canals were created to take the contaminated and toxic waste to the river and central jungle for disposal.The greed of big
and arrogant trees was such that they started sucking much of such toxic waste equally. The birds who were supported by the trees or any one else could not notice any thing from outside but because of high intake of such wastes roots and foundation of the trees were contaminated , insects and hermits have started eating them up. It was a painless and slow process
which went unnoticed to every one.
As winters started , there came a strong storm . Unaware of the weakness which these trees had accumulated in their roots , they could not stand this storm and started falling one by one. It was a chaos in the jungle since these were old epitomes and supported the environment around them. Many animals and birds became home less , while falling these trees also destroyed smaller plants and bushes around them . Some who fall on another of their kind resulting fall of both trees. There was hardly any thing could be done about it. Lots of unfortunate damage was definitely caused and we all will surely miss the sweet fruits , the grand shelter , esteemed identity and magnanimity which was associated with these trees.
With in some time fallen trees will be covered in soil and provide good fertile base to other smaller plants to grow on them . The positive side is with their fall they left a large open area where new saplings would be able to grow freely now , there will be new breed of tree , may be stronger and more diverse. With this kind of evolution probably these new ones would avoid toxic waste and depend upon clean natural resources for growth .

( PS : With GM filling for chapter 11 today , It was heartbreaking to see such large organization getting annihilated in given crisis . Hopefully there will be new ones to take charge )

Success Is A Thief

On our day of graduation we had Exe Director of Tata Sons Mr R GopalKrishan as Chief guest , at the last minute of start of his speech he decided to change it a bit and give some direction to students who seems to have programmed themselves to become CEOs. All the student Representative who spoke before him mentioned how they are ready to take on world and how SPJIMR makes them suitable for all C grade job , probably this made Mr Gopalkrishan encourage to give us some really friendly advice.

His speech started with a very unusual quote "Success is a thief" , To us all it was a new mantra which we have never heard nor imagined but as he explained us the reason behind calling success a theif , we had to agree. Stating the status quo of current young executives who sleep with their PDAs , Blackberries, Laptops , Communicators and all such fancy devices which seem to ring at different time resulting keeping these young achievers awake most of the time. These successful people have lost their sleeps , they keep missing their food and hardly have any time for old friends and family . Success had stolen it all from them.

Mr Gopalkrishnan jokingly mentioned how he has realized that the lift man who is taking people up and down in the life always has a silly smile on his face but a top rank executive travelling in the same lift looks so dim and depressed , concerned as hell like burden of entire world is on the shoulder of this poor fellow. The problem is people have started programming themselves to occupy corner cabins in organizations , rather than waiting for success to come to them naturally.
We have become mechanical in current environment and keep worrying about things which are not even in our control . The need is to take a break from regular routine some time , stick a silly smile frequently on your face, talk to some strangers (now that's fun), make some one laugh because at times to build momentum one has to slow down

Managing the business processes

Whats the difference between business decades ago and businesses now ? what has changed them ? What has become competitive advantage as Mr C. K. Prahalad
would ask ? Lets pick up companies in any industry and put some basic questions
1) Were these companies able to deliver standard experience on every customer touch point?
2) Did these companies care about their internal processes of inbound, outbound logisitics and operations as mentioned by Porter in value chain
3) What was the core strength considered by these organizations and what was the competitive advantage over which they relied?

Lets start with the first question the most important one in every context . The ultimate aim of every business is to make customer happy and we know gone are the days when customer was happy by just getting what he has asked for , at times he had to be satisfied in much lesser than what he has asked and he was still happy. Considering the example of Bajaj Chetak , once the vehicle which ruled all hearts of all Indian . It worked like a charm across the age
sections. customers have to wait as long as one year to get one for themselves and company was in no hurry to scale up or start a new venture , so much so when Honda approached them to start a producing motor bikes , Bajaj turned it down assuming scooter business will always remain what it was at that time.
Considering this was the case we can very well assume what would have been the customer service and how customers would have been dealt , there was hardly any effort to build customer relationship afterall it was all game of demand supply equation , for huge demand there was a limited supply so no one needed to pay much attentio about customer experience , pre purchase , during purchase or post purchase.

Consider the same bajaj in today's scenario , they are running a campiagn which no one ever heard in India. For Bajaj XCD 135 CC bike they have put a challenge to the customer saying they can come and test drive the bike and if after that they purchase any other bike than Bajaj will reimburse the price for other bike. Where seems to be focus today , entirely on what customer experience , even though this example is talking about experience of the product but
similarly experience of the processes and customer serices have also taken strong ground thats why the new advertisment of Maruti talks about how customer can get a Maruti care service almost at any part of the India from rural to urban area.

In nutshell we have moved from the times where Mr Ford declared I would give model of any colour to the customer as long as it is blcak to the era where youcan customise your car over web and it will be produced for you. It is with the help of streamlined processes that organizations are able to develop highly personalised experience for customers.
Having extablished some gound on the hypothesis that customer experience is important , lets see an obvious extension to it . If customer experience is important than can an organization make sure that it delivers same customer experience gain and again . A product may certainly deliver same customer experience again and again but what about service? Any service where lots of manual intervention is required will be a great challenge for standardization.
For such kind of activities what is required to have a process map and train all the employees on that process map across the locations. Similar kind of efforts were put by outlets like Mc donald and Pizza huts and thats how you get same experience ( of food as well as service) across all the outlets but upto than it was just a vision worked out withwhatever help available around , today we have made an entire methodology which is less science and more art called Business Process Management. There are lots of tools and standards to model organizational processes .
Its now when organizations have realized that a successful business not only means a block buster product but also efficient and standard processes. It is also an effort to manage business processes explicitly considering there are very frequent changes in business and related processes and if we don't have a strong hold on our processes it will be difficult to respond to changing business enviornment.

Our second concern was regarding internal processes which include various processes in the value chain of an organization, In old times when organizations had customers flocking on thier door for whatever they create , they had very less time to think about various internal processes and optimize them for maximum benefit. It is after Motorola and GE taught the value of 6 sigma to the world , we realized how much can be gained by exploring in this area. There have been various process improvement techniques and 6 sigma pioneered all of them but what was missing ? To have detailed process maps and micromangement of each of the assocuted processes, To make sure that each complex process is broken into small ones and each modular process can be handled seperately. 6 Sigma was a good tool for improving but not for automating because 6 sigma treated etire process as a whole and concentrated more on the quantative abilities to come to a conclusion.

Third and another differebce between businesses done in past and today is Identifying the core stregnth or competitive advantage of your business. Couple of decades back no one thought that processes could be core strength for an organization and then emerged examples like southwest airlines , which has changed the rules of aviation industry by just redifning thier internal process from the way fleet is scheduled to the way a carier is prepared for the next flight , creating end to end cost effective systems.

Its very simple to understand that highset benefit lieas in controlling each and every critical process of business from selecting a vendor to producing goods/ services and delivering to customer. In todays volatile world it is important not only to develop these processes but also to map them and keep them with you in codified form so that you can always go back to find out whether these processes are being followed , if there is any change needed and how best
they can be automated.
The basic need of dividing complex processes and than modeling , monitoring and managing them has given birth to BPM