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

Billions of enterprises to enterprises of billions

Time of small has come , last year apple released its ipod nano which was smallest and sleekest in the family and after that there was much hyped dream of Mr Tata , Tata Nano which shown to the world that small is really disruptive it can bring a paradigm change in the industries and prove that impossible is nothing . There was a time when people used to long for big , today the liking has changed ( If we keep some exceptions like real estate out) and it has been rapidly caught up by Industry biggies , at one side Fijitsu and Apple have come up with the smallest laptop this year on the other side from mobile to hard disk everything is shrinking into a pocket size portable device.Now the question is does small mean that it has some tradeoffs , is it compromising something ? Today in most of the cases answer is no. Small is as powerful as its larger counterpart and whenever small comes into market, it instantly becomes favourite of masses. A very comparable trend has been seen from last couple of years in industry, there is a huge surge in number of small and medium size industries worldwide. These SMEs are emerging as the growth engine of the world economy . In the EU, SMEs comprise approximately 99% of all firms and employ between them about 65 million people. In China there are close to 8 million SMEs and in India the number is 4.5 million.SMEs are also responsible for driving innovation and competition. These are the businesses which later on become some of the largest empires in the world, recall the days when Infosys started with 5 man and a two BHK apartment in Pune and went on to become the second largest software services provider in Asia . At one side where big stalwarts of India Inc are making news worldwide, back home the efforts of the small and medium enterprises are also gaining appreciation and support from all the dimensions.

Great Governance :

Indian government has been closely monitoring the development in SME sector and formulating many supportive policies to boost it further and it has to definitely do this for a sector which employs more then 178 lakh people. For funding SMES financial institutions like Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) , National Small Industries Corporation have been instituted . the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has already issued guidelines to the public sector banks to ensure 20 per cent year-on-year growth in credit to the SME , other banks are also encouraged to provide loans to SMEs .

Advocacy by Non profit associations:

Most of the Industry associations like CII , FICCI , NASSCOM which represent all sections of industry have not only setup a separate wing catering to the SMBs but also started encouraging SMEs by giving away various awards in almost all of the verticals where SMEs are functional. One of the most talked about awards is "Emerging India Award" which is instituted by ICICI in collaboration with CRISIL. Corporation bank has also initiated an ward called National award for mSME which will be focussing on sector wise contribution of mSMEs. As per my understanding the most critical role played by these authorities is by doing advocacy for SMEs with government as well as private organizations specially banks , this helps in bringing attention to the areas of improvement and creating better opportunities for SMEs. It is because of these effortsmany organizations are joining hands with regulatory bodies and trying to come up with solution and funding products for SMEs. Media is also fully supportive of these efforts.

Now IT is easy :

There was a time when arrogance of IT companies was at peek , it was impossible for anyone to realise that any small business can leverage on power of the mighty mainframe or for that matter any state of art computing facility like data centres and storage solutions but today rules of the game have changed . IT companies have suddenly started targeting and building solutions for SMEs not only because they want to help SMEs grow larger but They have also realised this is where their future top and bottom line is. As per the latest Microsoft-AMI Partners report, "the India SMEs are on a firm growth trajectory, with 60 per cent of PC-using businesses expecting 20 per cent growth and 16 per cent planning to add branch offices to expand operations". Some of the classic example of these focussed solutions are storage product by Sun , HP , Toshiba , Network solutions by Cisco , nortel . Another breakthrough in this space is emergence of software as service have given value for the cost put in by SMEs as they only pay for what they use and hence they are not bound to purchase complete packages to use just a small part of it. Now setting up IT infrastructure is possible in very affordable prices for SMEs thanks to the concepts of platform as service and On-Demand delivery model enabling firms to move their entire IT infrastructure management to the ‘multi-tenant system’ shared resources where complete infrastructure can be leased or rented .

Environment :

Whenever entrepreneurial ventures are discussed , we always discuss successes and not failures whereas more then 80% of start-ups never complete their one year of existence . I see this a good sign for other entrepreneurs because they always have fascinating success stories like virgin , FedX , Infoys , Microsoft , Dominos , Air Deccan to follow and no failures which can cause any hesitation in their minds. Visionaries like Dhiru bhai Ambani gave a life to this word "Entrepreneur". Entrepreneurship today is the most respected occupation !

This is the time when SMEs have a perfect balance of opportunities and sources to leverage on those opportunities , at one side globalization is continuously opening new opportunities for industry and on the other technology enablement like ecommerce.

There is no dearth of talent specially when they are sitting in the hub of worlds coast arbitrage centre.It is worth appreciating that everyone is realising that one size does not fit all and hence special nurturing is needed in case of these small but powerful giants. The quest for searching new growth avenues never stops , up to now we are master in putting lower categories up in value chain and so will be done here as well , the concept of micro small and medium enterprises has already caught up the momentum and given various supporting factor there is every possibility for each of these billions of enterprises to become enterprises of billions.