Freedom

In his classic Zahir paulo coelho makes an statement "absolute freedom doesn’t exist; what does exist is the freedom to choose anything you like and then commit yourself to that decision" something similar to what Geeta proclaims in very beginning When Arjuna faces confusion over fighting and killing of own family members and looked for help from Krishna , Even before Krishna starts revealing anything he makes it very clear , " Arjuna I will not take decision on your behalf , it is you who will have to take decision and then that decision will be your responsibility , the ownership of that decision will be with you if you think that some one else will take decision on your behalf and you will be spared from the burden of consequences , thats not happening"
This is what freedom in this world means , one can not sit as a victim because one is associated with its surrounding , family , country. These are emotional associations like Arjuna was associated with his brothers , wives , mother , cousins etc so even though in the beginning of battle he is devastated and thinks of renunciation to attain liberation or complete freedom but we all know that he would have not been able to sustain this. Imagine the scene when Arjuna leaves the battle without fighting , their would have been joy on the side of Kaurava's with sheer excitement they would have eliminated rest of the pandava's within few days , What would Arjun do then ? some one who can not see his teachers and uncles in pain would have seen dead bodies of his real brothers , was he so detached with the world that he could have still continued with his meditation .

I doubt if that would have been the case , instead we would have seen another Arjuna - the destroyer force , who would have again picked up his gandiv and hunted down Duryodhan and company in revenge. That's the reasons Krishna asked him to take a decision considering what his duty is (Karma Yoga ) .

Hence it seems to me that the best way of utilising your freedom is to choose what you consider is right , and stand by it with all might. You are free to choose what do you want but you are not free from choices as long as you are surviving in the society , choices have to made at every step . Let no one make those choices for you , people may help but can not take decision on your behalf because the only way to be happy is to know you have complete authority over choice , it is you who has chosen this path and it is you who will finish it .

The Bottom line of Business

Over the time again and again philosophers have dwelt into the question , what’s the purpose of business and answers have varied to cover almost every dimension from economic growth to value creation for its stakeholder and beyond. The greatest management guru of current time Peter Drucker mentions

“Business exists to supply goods and services to customers, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers, or even dividends to stockholders. Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity” – Peter Drucker

As per Drucker business identifies the need of the value creation for a particular segment of people and creates that value, if your business is making profit that just validates your creation of value for your customer. So there is something larger which is purpose of business , profit creation may not just be validity test ( as Drucker mentions ) but definitely be an integral part of it however there are other people like John Renesch who have put a very strong support for greater purpose of business

"Corporations are human-made organisms, associations of human beings. To see this association as having one solitary purpose and responsibility, to grow only in economic terms, is such an extreme view that implosions like what happened to Enron, WorldCom and other corporate collapses will become more and more commonplace." -- John Renesch

John has hit the profit creation part of business too hard, taking specific examples like Enron and Worldcom. Same sentiments are shared by James C Collins in his book “Built to last” mentioning that maximizing profit has not been the dominating force or primary objective of visionary companies, yes they seek profit but they are equally guided by core ideology – core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money. Even though we can never undermine the bottom lines for any business yet we have sufficient reason to believe that this can never be an ultimate goal of business. If we go back and find out reasons of starting of several organization we would come across passion for technology, innovation, identification of improvement and value creation, making things better and faster as some of the key reasons which may include something as personal as working for self of being once own master.

Anu Agha of Thermax sums it well "We survive by breathing but we can't say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is very important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot be the reason for business to exist".
Whatever is the objective of business, profits can not be negated but why do we need profit? If a firm wants to sell some product why can not it provide just by covering its operational and capital expense without taking any extra profit, this much should be enough for sustaining any organization but will that be enough for growth as well? Can it enable value creation and innovation?

Making IT a Rat RACE

in 2006 I was part of a team presenting proposal to new customer , after presentation and few questions customer asked whether we can committ that same resource will be handling his project for first 3 years ( which was the initial time frame of entire contract) , delivery manager answered very tactfully that Indian IT scene is very dynamic and growing at fast pace so people here move up in 3 years from one role to other hence it will not be possible to committ . That was the case few years back , conmpanies were offering promotions and hikes without giving much consideration to qualification , age or relevant experience . The main reason was growing size of teams and hence some one had to be given management job to handle others .

2007 onwards Infosys and other companies had grown upto one lakh and now it was not possible to keep the same rate of promotion going on so they used a new policy of mandatory certification every year to slow down promotions , recently they added another policy initiative called iRACE ( Infosys roles and career) which is bound to prolong the time in which an average employee is promoted , it may also deepen the hierarchy from previous grade system ( A to E) to new number system ( 1 to 8 ) with addition of some more roles like "Project lead" or "technical leads" which were not there initially.

Even though this is a standard practice with international service and product organization companies like SAP, Google , IBM to promote people after they have spent sufficient time in team and organization , at times it takes a decade to become a project manager . But this was more because of flatter structure followed by these organizations .
The kind of initiative proposed by Infosys may not go down well with employees specially in a situation where for almost 2 years they have been working without incerements and pormotions, some of the rival firms have taken a upside appoach with declaring new increments and promotions to compensate .

Post Sales Service Strategy for Consumer Appliances Industry

This article gathers information and insight into current strategies and key objective in post sales area. I have divided the strategies followed by consumer manufactures into 4 parts

1) Customer Delight: With a focus on customer touch point and empowering customers for gaining better value and satisfaction from products and services. This will also contain strategy development for entire customer relation management practice.
2) Streamlining support processes: All the internal processes which provide support to customer service have been kept under support processes. With current economic environment and for better customer experience, it is extremely important to stream line support processes to gain maximum efficiency
3) Better Market coverage: Continuous product innovation also demands expansion of relevant services to the areas where products will be launched. Organizations are also determined to expand its service centers by various channels.
4) Common processes: These processes are common across all of the above three areas and used in all.

Customer Delight:
Organizations are continuously working for enhancing the customer experience in the areas of post sales support and services. One of the important outcomes being certification offered by Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA) for providing superior technical support and services

Predictable service delivery: With the help of excellence in operation companies would be able to provide services which give predictability to client resulting minimum distortion in their daily life. This predictability ranges from assurance of data security to the timely delivery of products and parts.

Standard and global customer interaction processes: The Key factor for predictability in services will be developing standard process maps for global operations which will ensure similar customer experience world wide.

Customer Education: Organizations have been reaching out to customers and educating them to gain maximum value out of products. Some companies offer customer self repair processes to empower customers to fix their products at their own convenience. One leading organization recently launched Power To Change campaign that encourages personal computer users around the world to make behavioral changes in support of the environment.


Streamlining and Cost Optimization of support processes:
For Repair parts forecasts, pricing, product portfolio, introductions, rollovers, competitive response, and supply in an integrated way to enable risk management of business plans at a worldwide level.

Co creation of value with Outsourcing: Developing an operating model based on sourcing strategies which can provide quality product and services at optimum cost. This will require managing interface with international vendors and developing a process leadership in partners to bring them to the same level of efficiency where manufacturer functions.

Better Management of channel partners and service support centers: It remains a key goal for all global players to better manage these partners across the globe as they are face for end customer.

Developing and sustaining Eco friendly practices: Players have been working towards reducing the impact on environment from last 50 years now which include developing more eco friendly products as well as creating better recycling and product disposal Practices.


Market coverage:

At one side companies have to penetrate further for providing services to existing products on the other side it also keeps its focus towards developing service strategies for new products

More Service Options for existing products: Provide customer more convenience in terms of preferred location , mode of shopping/replacing/repairing products : Dial-A-Cartridge service, which enables customers to order any part through a toll-free number as and when they have run out of supplies. The part can be delivered to the customer within hours of placing the order, at their door-step.

Developing service strategies for new products: Companies have to push themselves to become a leader in product innovation across the segments hence it becomes bed stone for success of any product to have a strong service network which can fulfill all requirements related to repair and parts replenishment for end customers.

War in the Air

Pune's Radio space is not very cluttered but real competitive for sure , upto early last year it was lead by Radio Mirchi which had created lots of creating and ear catching campaigns and continuously attracted audience by various online , on air and other events . One of the recent tool was to convince listeners that station plays maximum songs without too much interference of advertisements , Mirchi achived this by putting concept of back to back songs without any
break in between. This strategy forced other players like Radio one , Radio city followed the trend . Radio one went one step ahead and declared a war with committing 13 songs an hour which is maximum , it sounded next to impossible with average length of songs being 5 minutes , even if you play continuously for 60 minutes , one can listen only 12 of them but amazingly Radio one is very comfortable in playing 13 songs with its RJ's doing sufficient talking as well as
playing advertisements in between. The trick was to play smaller songs and avoid long once , stop the song much before its ending or cut some of the portion ( mostly music) . This went unnoticed and successfully because people listen to radio while conducting their routing activities so they never pay it full attention unless there is a favourite song being played.
Overall Radio one had beaten its competitors in their own game without compromising on anything and now it was One's turn to go offensive , A channel which was any way more versatile and played all kind of music including regular program for old songs as well as English ( It is the only one in Pune Playing English songs) ।

Radio one launched new plan of not repeating any song for entire day , with a library of lacs of songs this is cakewalk for any station but it is One which connected to the real purpose of Radio where listeners want to be surprised all the time , with new songs as well with old ones. Radio one could also identify the frustration which audience faced when stations kept playing a new number dozen times in a day.Its been close to a month and competitors are clue less on how to counter this move, the only option as of now seems to follow the leader..yet again :)

Remove the barrier

In early days of business the focus was to create entry barriers for competitors , especially putting constraints at customer end . Ensuring that the product which customer has bought will provide him service only under one vendor and he will not be able to switch vendors. This way customers have to at times take decision to stick with one service provider and one of the classic example is mobile number portability .
In my 5 years of corporate career I have changed more then 5 places because of work , that means every time I have to change my mobile number or at times I if it was short duration like 2-3 months then I had to take a call to be on roaming and increase my phone bill . With mobile number portability my service provider who gave me first number is not holding my number in case I decide to change to new operator.
People talk about customer centric organisation , here I see a customer centric industry . Thanks to innovation in technology , regulations and of course willing ness of players now entire industry is thinking from customers point of view .
Another similar example will be one of the recent decision to enable customer accessing any DTH operator using same set top box , this will be called conditional access and will be executed by associating a small device with your Set top box.
It is definitely hard decision for service providers to let their customers go to some one else with such an ease but developing a seem less experience for customers will be beneficial for entire industry in terms of common standards and competitive environment . If one will loose customers then similar manner he will gain them from rival providers.
Overall entire industry will be very competitive with all service providers have to match the best offers given by competitors and The differentiation will be significant from each other to retain the customer base.

Preparing for MBA Enterance !

Given the difficulty level and competition of these exams , you would need to think through why and how you would do it
Define : Definition of your goal is very important , what exactly you want to do in life , why would you like to get into an MBA after all its a place where they would not let you sleep more than 3-4 hours in a day , it will cost you fortune , you would continously staring at your laptop screen and reading numerous reports in record deadlines, there will be cutthroat competition among your pears , you will be almost cut from your family and social life.

Why would one want so many trouble ? and if you have already made your mind then you better have a definition ofyour goal, may be not as ambitious as becoming CEO of MNC in next 20 years but definitely as basic as what do you like to do in general.

1) Peopls People : Are you the one in team who knows most of the people around, communication is an opportunity for you , when you speak people just can not drift their focus , you can get along with every one. In addition to these points lots of clue can be taken from the job you have been doing , have you coordinated many events in college , are you involved in interacting with customer regularly from you team , do you handle communication with internal stakeholders , do you think and work with creativity
If these are some of the things describing you and your work then you must consider Marketing as your choice of specialisation for MBA.


2) The Money man : you have a dmat account from before any of your friends even understood what is dmat, you love to understand money matters , you have done your graduation in finance related subjects , your client is financial instituion and you enjoy understanding thier business processes. If these characterstics describe you to some extent then look for finance as an option of specialisation.


3) Always operational : If you have background of handling things at various levels in shop floors , graduation in mechanical , production , automotive engineering etc and you like to get involved in activities which run an organisation then operations management is the field for you


4) Tech lover : Now a days there are lots of option for doing MBA in systems management and information management , It makes sense for some one who has already spent signifant time in technology oriented


Develop : In all the B school assesments they try to find out candidates who have been groomed well in almost all the facets of thier personality , One may think then what are these people going to do , isn't it their job to provide you direction and develop your skills in multiple dimension of personality but please understand it is easy to start from a point up to where some work has already been done rather than starting from a blank page.


As part of develop phase you would have to develop your skills and personality with respect to the career field you are interested in ( As we talked about in Define stage) so start taking more interest in the areas of your work which are directly aligned with your career definitions. In addition to this work a little on personal aspect as well , good communication skill , positive thinking , good people skill , keeping a calm and composed head are some of the things which you should try to achieve for a successful career in any field.


Decide : After defining your career objective and doing some ground work to develop skills in those direction now is the time to decide which institutes you should choose . The institutes should have good reputation in your choice of area . It is time to do a thorough research both primary as well as secondary and find out which all institutes you would like to target , please keep your mind open and do look at some of the global (but feasible ) options .

After taking this decision you can start applying for admissions in respective colleges.


Demonstrate & Differentiate : Even though steps so far may not be easy but the toughest part is to crack the exam and selection process , this will need a structured approach . Once you are through with the written test , group discussion and interviews need to be taken care and this is where your ground work in step 1 and 2 will help . For beating your competition you will have to stand out in crowd, you should have differentaition points and deep knowledge in the education and work you have done so far.


It may sound difficult to differentiate oneself from thousands of other candidates who have done the same graduation ,worked in the same areas that of yours and even have same hobbies and passion that of yours . That is the reason you will have to focus in a narrow scope which can play as your strenth .