The factories of innovation ..some of the greatest B schools of India seems to be on path to new kind of innovation , developing the most expensive post graduation programs on the earth. ISB, SP Jain Institute of Management and research are leading the pack with introduction of new program which can cost you more than 2.5 Million INR to get an MBA degree ( well to be specific some of these may be only diplomas or certificates if not approved by AICTE) . At one side ISB is starting PGPMAX which will be more of a part time MBA course for executives and will be taught at Hyderabaad campus with some sessions in Kellogs and Wharton on the other side SP Jain has already launched a course in collaboration with Schulich university Canada which will be divided between Mumbai and Toranto campus.
There is no doubt that some of the included expenses are stay in foreign campuses , food etc but the point to ponder is whether these courses will be wble to provide you the relevant return on investment. If we include other living expenses for around 2 years , it will come across 3 Million INR, It is enough amount to secure a middle class common man's pension for lifetime so what is the kind of ROI one is looking from this kind of investment , well I do understand intellectual development and ability to apply structured methods for solving strategic , operational issues etc would be some of the great take away from this course but at the end it all boils down to what can you do with such skills i.e How much you can earn or what is the kind of job you are offered.
If we even consider some of the normal not so expensive courses , they have failed to provide a good ROI to more than 50% of the participants . All the media hype about million dollar salary in pink news paper is focused on some top 5- 10% of the class participants , rest go back with a decent increment in their salaries and mostly almost in the similar area of work ( as even in campus placements organizations give due weight to the background of candidate). even though top 20 institutes take fees in the range of 4 to 10 lacs , and the salary of students coming out of program varies between 4 to 11 lac with average being somewhere 6.5 to 7.
two of the Three generic strategies which even watchman of these B school knows is cost leadership and differentiation
Cost Leadership : Salary , roles depend on various factors from business condition to industry need so why can't B school implement a more innovative model which they have been teaching for long time , They can take a fixed component of fees which covers cost of course material , infrastructure etc and a variable component of the fees which depends on what kind of benefit is materialized to the student after course , to be specific let it be a percentage of annual pay package received by student , isn't something similar today's IT organizations doing by charging a variable component depending on how much money IT saved / earned for their clients .
I think We all have something to learn from TATA's here , a 2000$ car and a 20$ water purifier , that is what Indian market demands value for every penny spent , specially in education which is very crucial for indian middle class .
Differentiation : There are very few institutes in India which have created a differentiation , I would consider NITIE (SCM), ICFAI(FIN), FMS(Service), IRMA(Rural), IIFT (IB), XLRI, SCMHRD (HR) , MICA (MarCom) as some of the leaders , rest all are more of "Me too" kind . They should start differentiating in a way which adds value to students and also makes sure that it is filling a wide gap in the industry
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
In Company of Kabeer !
Passion for doing something , starting something which may seem nothing but your interest. Your heart wants to follow it not knowing whether there is some benefit in it , whether there is a purpose to it , can it serve higher interest who cares?. Those who start walking are bound to meet with so many destinations , its upto them to choose whether to stop here , whether to walk continuously , should some one else be included , is there anything meaning full to this ... If you would have thought ofthese questions I bet you would have never started that kind of journey which Ms Shabnam Virmani in Kabeer Project.
Kabeer is a mystic poet of 15th century from Northern India , he did not have much knowledge of scriptures or any holy book but seems he had the ultimate experience of true self and purpose of human life , he wrote small verses which contain elixir of life from daily living to highest meditation and very aptly such knowledge can not come from reading , such knowledge can come only fromexperience . Map his words to the most ancient hindu scriptures and it will match word by word be it about description of the lordwithout any form or be it about rituals vs simple meditation. Yet he symbolizes what I may say the most secular figure of Indian history , no wonder India is a secular state , It is land of Kabeer after all. Ms Shabnam Virmani now director of Kabeer project in bangalore started her journey to collect different shades of Kabeer across India, the question is why across India , what do you mean by different Kabeer? well the fact is Kabeer died leaving his work unstructured and unconsolidated , later when people started collecting it they realised there are so many other verses written by local people and credited it to Kabeer ( huh and they say web 2.0 and user generated content is discovered in 20 century after internet) So there is a kabeer who wrote in awadhi and typical north indian but there is one who wrote in Rajasthani and then other in gujraati and also in punjaabi with urdu influence . There can be only one explanation that all these Kabeers are a core idea followed by local people to generate their own Kabeer the one which they understand better , the one which talks in their language and gives example for their lives.
Thats why Miss Virmani found it a passion to explore local folk song artist who sing Kabeer , she did not have any idea of what this project will turn into but today her journey has taken her from bangalore to Malwa, Ayodhya, Kanpur, Jaypur, Karanchi, Lahore and guess what to Stanford where there are research on Indian literature and Kabeer at its pivotal.
Kabeer project today has a set of 4 movies which are screened for free in annual events at Mumbai, Pune and bangalore followed by a gala event of marathon classical and folk singers across border , talking about love, spirituality and boundrylessness. It publishes literature and translation from Kabeers verses and has launched DVDs .People now give ideas to Ms Virmani that she should enhance the projec to promote secular image , to bring Kabeer to urban youth and what not but what she has already achieved was beyond imagination and transformative
for her self and people associated with her . Kabeer is truly becoming an idea much larger than just being a historic poet.. thanks to the project Kabeer
Follow your heart and every time you do start with grass root :)
Kabeer project ORGANISING Kabeer festival in Pune , today being last day there is a concert in Symbiosis Vishwashanti bhawan !
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Promoting organization and not the product
Intel has always been an organization believing in promoting name of the organisation and the brand it stands for rather than promoting any specific product of its own. It has repeated the attempt yet again and this time with all its might . In couple of recent adds where intel describes how its stars are different from common stars and in other where it talks about "our inventions are so big that you can not see them". In first impact it gave me feeling of some political parties which normally promote parties rather than promoting the work done by them but they do so because they have not done any work and they dont have any thing to talk about on the contrary this can never be case with intel which is so fast in product development that the time it releases its ad for one product till than you have other products on the shelf .
Than what prompts organisations to promote themselves rather than any specific product , one reason for sure is that they have moved beyond any competition and competitor in specific product segments which make them fearless knowing their products are picked up by customers anyway. but whats the objective of such ads In old time intels advertisements were criticised saying they don't provide any ( or enough) reason to buy the intel processor.These ads have been able to build a strong top of the mind recall and a better brand value for intel so much so that even people who do not know computers or whats a processor know intel exist at the same time it is difficult to name any other competitor in the same industry ( specially when intel captures 80% of the market share).
In case of companies like Intel the start of such campaign is the kind of product or services they are in, a processor may have been the most critical part of the PC but it was always hidden from the customer and that is where Intel changed the game with intel inside program plus it was very difficult to market or advertise the complexity and benefit of processor to a normal end user so it was easy to just ensure that the name Intel is known .
One more such attempt was recent ad of Tata with tag line "Desh ko hum chalate hai" for one moment I got confused that this is an advertisement of a political party specially its timing with elections but an organization like Tata which is servicing so many touch points of our daily lives can certainly claim that they run a major part of the country and the benefit will be in terms of much needed trust and goodwill.
Overall I feel such marketing happens in following cases
1) Surrogate marketing where product is tobacco, alcohol and can not be promoted directly2) Organizations which have too many products and services either in the same area (bank, LIC) or in diversified areas3) If the product is too complex to explain 4) Political parties or social organizations.
Than what prompts organisations to promote themselves rather than any specific product , one reason for sure is that they have moved beyond any competition and competitor in specific product segments which make them fearless knowing their products are picked up by customers anyway. but whats the objective of such ads In old time intels advertisements were criticised saying they don't provide any ( or enough) reason to buy the intel processor.These ads have been able to build a strong top of the mind recall and a better brand value for intel so much so that even people who do not know computers or whats a processor know intel exist at the same time it is difficult to name any other competitor in the same industry ( specially when intel captures 80% of the market share).
In case of companies like Intel the start of such campaign is the kind of product or services they are in, a processor may have been the most critical part of the PC but it was always hidden from the customer and that is where Intel changed the game with intel inside program plus it was very difficult to market or advertise the complexity and benefit of processor to a normal end user so it was easy to just ensure that the name Intel is known .
One more such attempt was recent ad of Tata with tag line "Desh ko hum chalate hai" for one moment I got confused that this is an advertisement of a political party specially its timing with elections but an organization like Tata which is servicing so many touch points of our daily lives can certainly claim that they run a major part of the country and the benefit will be in terms of much needed trust and goodwill.
Overall I feel such marketing happens in following cases
1) Surrogate marketing where product is tobacco, alcohol and can not be promoted directly2) Organizations which have too many products and services either in the same area (bank, LIC) or in diversified areas3) If the product is too complex to explain 4) Political parties or social organizations.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Next is (G)Wave
It is a lesson for us all to know how ahead of time google keeps itself , It has started developing google wave 2 years back and now is the time when it is ready with this amazing communication and collaboration tool named google wave, needless to say it is designed to accommodate todays youths changing communication method where they are now communicating in a group involving more than 2 people , hence the walls, scrapbooks or tweet posts are growing stronger day by day.
The other point to be noted was growing usage of instant messengers which are almost replacing emails, now even if the receiver is offline than also one can IM him which he can open after coming to online so the very first work GW did was to take a hybrid look of IM and email where now there is hardly any difference left . In GW when sender is editing /writing /musing in his email text editor , that is instantly visible WORD BY WORD , now imagine that , this is what is called real time messaging , messages at the speed of your thought ( though I would never like this much realtime ness so google has also given a check box to disable this ). Even more exciting is that attachments also appear realtime on the recipients wave window. The time sender drags and drops attachment , thumbnails will appear at receivers window much before he has downloaded entire lot.
Another cool function is to playback forwarded mails in the sequence in which they were originated and evolved,its so common to forward a mail chain to a new recipient and he has to go through entire chain from bottom to top but now he can just click on playback option and this chain will start appearing from scratch , pretty impressive I would say.This way it is much easier to add a person to the wave and again for people who would like to choose to send a private reply , they can do so privately in wave too. Google calls it a tree structured mailing/messaging where any branch of tree can be taken and expanded only to a limited group ( or to entire public).
This wave will without any doubt collaborate and consolidate all your communication channels. Very soon you will be using waves in your orkut accounts, blogging portals and anywhere else and yet be able to control and monitor all of them from your google wave (email ) editor. So what happens about editing, currently if you share something across so many comunication channels you edit it every where but in wave you just have to edit it once and it will be reflected everywhere . This collaboration is even possible for documents editing and production where same document can be edited (simultaneously!!)by multiple members ( it will include power point , spreadsheets and text based docs).
oh yes it also works on mobiles !
Undoubtedly it is the first and foremost collaborative tool of its kind and competitors of google (like yahoo, MSN and now their marriage..) will find themselves in a shocked state to counter it ,may be copying this formula from google would be easy and at time people do it well ( like facebook copied stuff from orkut and twitter and today is leading the social networking area) but we all know google has the ability to take a quantum leap every time..
The other point to be noted was growing usage of instant messengers which are almost replacing emails, now even if the receiver is offline than also one can IM him which he can open after coming to online so the very first work GW did was to take a hybrid look of IM and email where now there is hardly any difference left . In GW when sender is editing /writing /musing in his email text editor , that is instantly visible WORD BY WORD , now imagine that , this is what is called real time messaging , messages at the speed of your thought ( though I would never like this much realtime ness so google has also given a check box to disable this ). Even more exciting is that attachments also appear realtime on the recipients wave window. The time sender drags and drops attachment , thumbnails will appear at receivers window much before he has downloaded entire lot.
Another cool function is to playback forwarded mails in the sequence in which they were originated and evolved,its so common to forward a mail chain to a new recipient and he has to go through entire chain from bottom to top but now he can just click on playback option and this chain will start appearing from scratch , pretty impressive I would say.This way it is much easier to add a person to the wave and again for people who would like to choose to send a private reply , they can do so privately in wave too. Google calls it a tree structured mailing/messaging where any branch of tree can be taken and expanded only to a limited group ( or to entire public).
This wave will without any doubt collaborate and consolidate all your communication channels. Very soon you will be using waves in your orkut accounts, blogging portals and anywhere else and yet be able to control and monitor all of them from your google wave (email ) editor. So what happens about editing, currently if you share something across so many comunication channels you edit it every where but in wave you just have to edit it once and it will be reflected everywhere . This collaboration is even possible for documents editing and production where same document can be edited (simultaneously!!)by multiple members ( it will include power point , spreadsheets and text based docs).
oh yes it also works on mobiles !
Undoubtedly it is the first and foremost collaborative tool of its kind and competitors of google (like yahoo, MSN and now their marriage..) will find themselves in a shocked state to counter it ,may be copying this formula from google would be easy and at time people do it well ( like facebook copied stuff from orkut and twitter and today is leading the social networking area) but we all know google has the ability to take a quantum leap every time..
Friday, September 25, 2009
ITIL in real life
Those who have ever taken ITIL training know the toughest part is to explain people difference between incident and problem, it is very easy to explain every other difficult concept of ITIL to people but incident Vs problem is always a tricky one. Looking at a practicle example suppose every day when you come from office to home , you wife opens the door, takes your laptop from you , offers you a gilass of chilled water , this is standard operating procedure which is followed on your returning but what if one day to your surprise it did not happen , you came home and there was no one to open door, take your bag and make you comfortable , is this a problem ?
In ITIL terminology , this is a disruption from daily standard operating procedure hence it is not a problem , realisticaly if you think your wife may be caught up in some other work or she may be out to buy vegetables in grocery store near by , this was just one off incident , specially if you see that from the next day onward you are back on the same routine । But if next day also same incident is repeated and even after that you do not get the expected reception on your home coming than there are multiple occurances of the same incidents pointing to one common root cause and thats a problem for you so ITIL would take it into problem management process.
Now once you have realised that this is a problem , you would have to resolve it and for resolution you would need to do a root cause analysis , after putting some stress on your head and talking to your wife you realised that the root cause of this cold reception may be because she has been doing it from so long but you never care to talk to her about her day instead
you switch on TV and engross yourself on useless breaking news of 24X7 news channels. Now this problem ( having identified root cause) becomes a known error for you and it seems for solving it you would need request for change to change the standard operating procedure , now instead of turning to TV on your arrival you would rather have a small chat with your wife
and find out how was her day .
Even if this approach does not solve the problem than you have two alternative one is to do a functional escalation that is to escalate some one who is higher in authority and can handle the problem in this case it may be your father in law or mother in law who. Otherwise you can do a hierarchical escalation to a person who is expert in this type of problem , it may be your sister or brother in law.
See ITIL is even relevant to daily life !
In ITIL terminology , this is a disruption from daily standard operating procedure hence it is not a problem , realisticaly if you think your wife may be caught up in some other work or she may be out to buy vegetables in grocery store near by , this was just one off incident , specially if you see that from the next day onward you are back on the same routine । But if next day also same incident is repeated and even after that you do not get the expected reception on your home coming than there are multiple occurances of the same incidents pointing to one common root cause and thats a problem for you so ITIL would take it into problem management process.
Now once you have realised that this is a problem , you would have to resolve it and for resolution you would need to do a root cause analysis , after putting some stress on your head and talking to your wife you realised that the root cause of this cold reception may be because she has been doing it from so long but you never care to talk to her about her day instead
you switch on TV and engross yourself on useless breaking news of 24X7 news channels. Now this problem ( having identified root cause) becomes a known error for you and it seems for solving it you would need request for change to change the standard operating procedure , now instead of turning to TV on your arrival you would rather have a small chat with your wife
and find out how was her day .
Even if this approach does not solve the problem than you have two alternative one is to do a functional escalation that is to escalate some one who is higher in authority and can handle the problem in this case it may be your father in law or mother in law who. Otherwise you can do a hierarchical escalation to a person who is expert in this type of problem , it may be your sister or brother in law.
See ITIL is even relevant to daily life !
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Can't Fire
It will be a dejavu for Mr Naresh Goyal , head of jet airways. Last year during tougher times he tried to remove around 1900 employees from the jet payroll , which sounded a right decision for the company as many of these people were on probation and they had completed their probation period post which it was Jet's call whether it want them to continue or not, given the special macroeconomic conditions there was no other option . Of course no one can deny the human side of the story but this risk has always been associated with private jobs and people today come prepared to face it any time .
Doing a job today does not make you feel as safe as it was 4 years back or much safer before 2000 bubble burst or safest before GE Neutron Jack era when lifetime jobs were guaranteed and companies like IBM was famous for committing to life time employment of its employees . Currently once more jet fired 2 pilots facing an unprecedented situation with almost entire pilot staff going on a synchronized leave. Organizations which are service intensive and have to face volume of customers on many touch point every day turn themselves into a tricky situation by such issues , some thing similar happened in 2006 when some staff of gourmet ( a food supplier to airlines) was fired resulting a strike which meant no food in flights irrespective of the fact that many of these flights were as long as 14 hours journey.
In such conditions company would not have any choice but give it up to the demands of the union. Even though there is no such instance observed in IT industry where in last two year thousands and thousands of people have left the job but there is definitely damages, when companies remove employees who are redundant or so called non performers , people who have been retained also feel the fear and start looking for the opportunities to leave the current company . It may result to a fast attrition rate once normal times return back which leaves companies into a situation where they have work but no resources and now they are bound to hire resources from market at higher costs.
Given this vicious cycle , it seems organizations just can't fire but still they do ....
Doing a job today does not make you feel as safe as it was 4 years back or much safer before 2000 bubble burst or safest before GE Neutron Jack era when lifetime jobs were guaranteed and companies like IBM was famous for committing to life time employment of its employees . Currently once more jet fired 2 pilots facing an unprecedented situation with almost entire pilot staff going on a synchronized leave. Organizations which are service intensive and have to face volume of customers on many touch point every day turn themselves into a tricky situation by such issues , some thing similar happened in 2006 when some staff of gourmet ( a food supplier to airlines) was fired resulting a strike which meant no food in flights irrespective of the fact that many of these flights were as long as 14 hours journey.
In such conditions company would not have any choice but give it up to the demands of the union. Even though there is no such instance observed in IT industry where in last two year thousands and thousands of people have left the job but there is definitely damages, when companies remove employees who are redundant or so called non performers , people who have been retained also feel the fear and start looking for the opportunities to leave the current company . It may result to a fast attrition rate once normal times return back which leaves companies into a situation where they have work but no resources and now they are bound to hire resources from market at higher costs.
Given this vicious cycle , it seems organizations just can't fire but still they do ....
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Challenges of third kind!
Recently I was reading the 2008 annual report of varian Inc which is one of the leading medical equipment manufacturer , in the opening statement of the report Varian Inc CEO mentioned that he put forward a challenge in front of his employees to save 100,000 lives every year , that is the number which can fill a football stadium.
This challenge aptly suites to Varian which has already developed many cutting edge instruments based on radiotherapy and other cancer related treatment technologies to save cancer patients , enhance the accuracy of the results and reduce the overall treatment time to almost half. One latest example is their rapidArc beam which targets tumor in a single continuous
rotation around the patient leading to the highest possible precision and control of the treatment ( Hence lesser chances of killing healthy tissues) . Whats motivating in this case is rather than putting forward a target of increasing bottom line , increased rate of product development, rapid go to market timing ( and what not) CEO hit on a point which can be related by almost every one in the company and also by supplier and customers of the company , a higher cause which is worth putting every bit of effort . Should it has been a normal sales and number oriented motivation , only top and middle management would have been running behind those numbers but now every one would be willing to contribute looking at the noble cause.
This should be a learning for many other in different industries as how to thing of a bigger picture and inspire people to do something which can give them extreme satisfaction and drive their enthusiasm to the peak point of making a difference. The beauty of such inspiration is that it has not ignored top and bottom lines in fact it has encompassed everything in much better way then any other vision could have been , meeting such challenges means producing most innovative products, driving highest quality level and near zero defects , taking direct feedback from customers and their customers and implementing them , carving a niche for yourself and when all of this is done numbers will follow.
Look back in the history of business whenever such a vision statement was created , it had become an instant success . I see Mr D B Ambani's objective of making a call cheaper than a postcard considering our rural population can afford only this much for communication created one of the largest telecom player of India, there are many more !!.. Tata family also put forward many such challenges to its employees like creating a world class Indian hotel when Indians were not allowed in british hotels, Developing leading science institute like IISc to groom young india !!
This challenge aptly suites to Varian which has already developed many cutting edge instruments based on radiotherapy and other cancer related treatment technologies to save cancer patients , enhance the accuracy of the results and reduce the overall treatment time to almost half. One latest example is their rapidArc beam which targets tumor in a single continuous
rotation around the patient leading to the highest possible precision and control of the treatment ( Hence lesser chances of killing healthy tissues) . Whats motivating in this case is rather than putting forward a target of increasing bottom line , increased rate of product development, rapid go to market timing ( and what not) CEO hit on a point which can be related by almost every one in the company and also by supplier and customers of the company , a higher cause which is worth putting every bit of effort . Should it has been a normal sales and number oriented motivation , only top and middle management would have been running behind those numbers but now every one would be willing to contribute looking at the noble cause.
This should be a learning for many other in different industries as how to thing of a bigger picture and inspire people to do something which can give them extreme satisfaction and drive their enthusiasm to the peak point of making a difference. The beauty of such inspiration is that it has not ignored top and bottom lines in fact it has encompassed everything in much better way then any other vision could have been , meeting such challenges means producing most innovative products, driving highest quality level and near zero defects , taking direct feedback from customers and their customers and implementing them , carving a niche for yourself and when all of this is done numbers will follow.
Look back in the history of business whenever such a vision statement was created , it had become an instant success . I see Mr D B Ambani's objective of making a call cheaper than a postcard considering our rural population can afford only this much for communication created one of the largest telecom player of India, there are many more !!.. Tata family also put forward many such challenges to its employees like creating a world class Indian hotel when Indians were not allowed in british hotels, Developing leading science institute like IISc to groom young india !!
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