Showing posts with label Strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Strategy. Show all posts

Invited Talk at SBI Leadership Institute

 Had an invited talk at SBI Leadership Institute in New Town, Kolkata. It was for emerging leaders at Clearing Corporation of India, which is into settling transactions of different types, like Derivatives or Forex trading. I had to research their business, being new to the terminology. But linked it to crises of the past two decades, and also to leadership in times of crisis. Was well-received, according to me.

Pics from the class and the campus. It is residential, for participants and faculty. Reminded me of Kirloskar Institute.










Organisation Structure

 Structure follows strategy, someone has said. But structure does play a major part in any organisation. A family can be patriarchal or matriarchal or neither. That makes a difference to how it functions. Same is the case with an organisation.

Top-down decision makers like the Army work differently from a grassroots driven organisation like a few NGOs or cooperatives. Decentralisation is possible through SBUs or Strategic Business Units, if it's a large organisation. But the style of leadership and decision making plays a role there too.

In other words, structure is the beginning, but not the end, of the story.

Performance of the organisation depends on all these.

Essay on Personal and Organizational Inertia

 Inertia is a concept well-known, thanks to Newton and his first Law. 

It is hard to wake up in the morning, we all know. We have to galvanise ourselves into waking up, and making that cup of tea. I have now mastered the art- of doing both. I usually wake up at 5 am, coz the Sun rises early in Kolkata, and I feel I have a duty to keep up with it.

Getting ourselves to do anything of significance- making up the bed, or writing a work email- sounds like a chore. Somewhat like washing dishes. So we generally delay, or to use a Tharoorian word, procrastinate. And this goes on, with various To Do lists in life.

We generally don't forget to marry, because of a constant push from parents, in accordance with Newton's First Law. But do you know that organizations also have inertia? Because humans make up most organizations- for now, until robots throw them out. 

They should be doing things like strategising, right-sizing, growing, implementing strategies, and many other things, to keep owners, or shareholders, happy. But they don't. They get caught up in an inertia vortex, and 'This is how we do things around here syndrome, and forget to do the few essential things for survival and growth. So some remain sleeping giants, like those mythical entities. And some slip into a coma, never to come out.

Those organizations that remain agile, beat them by a mile. Happened to K Mart in the US when Wal-Mart came along. Happened to Biyani (Future became Past?), when D Mart came along. And will happen to many others..

Gwalior Once Again

 A trip to Gwalior to celebrate the 25 year milestone of Prestige Institute of Management there, and also a strategy session for the group. Met a few people from an earlier trip to Jalgaon also. Nicely hosted.. pics..


With Tarika Singh and Chanda Gulati, of Gwalior Prestige at their campus.








10 Books on Management

 You may or may not need to do an MBA if you read these books- most of them available in paperback editions.

Corporate Strategy by Igor Ansoff.

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

The Mind of the Strategist by Kenichi Ohmae

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler


These are not text-bookish at all, are fun to read and will teach you most of the management that you will need. Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Human Resources Management. Other important books..

Henry Mintzberg's The Nature of Managerial Work

The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker

Customers for Life by Carl Sewell

Psychology is About People by H.J. Eysenck

The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki

Any book by Seth Godin might be a good addition to these. 

National Time-wasting Strategies

There is something we are no.1 in the world at- apart from producing babies, I mean. It has not been documented or certified, or we'd be at the top of the pops (no, not the baby-producing ones, the charts). We are the no. 1 Time-wasters in the world.

Time-wasting strategies, like those of corporates selling umbrellas, are seasonal. In April and May, we have the IPL- a so-called cricketing extravaganza, in which the cricket is hidden in a maze of before the match, after the match and during the match interruptions. Don't ask me how you can interrupt before the match-ask THEM.

In June-July, we crib about rain. Either too much, or too little. Shakespeare was right when he said something about floods leading to fortune. Famine or drought also leads to fortune for some.

August is a month we worry about foodgrain production not being enough. In September, we start planning vacations for the next three months. In the next three months, we actually go on holidays for Dasara/Durga-pooja, Diwali, Christmas, New Year, and a few others in between.

January is spent talking about the New Year party and the Christmas holidays, and how we plan to actually work in the new year. February is usually a mixed month, because there is an anticipation of a budget being presented at the end of the month, and March is spent dissecting the same after it is presented.

Test matches, football matches (even though we rank 189th out of 190 in the world here) and price hikes from onions to petrol, and evil bosses at work to destroy our careers are other hot topics. Celebrity gossip (whether Aishwarya is pregnant a second time, etc.)  takes away whatever remains, and we are left with little time to contribute to our GDP. No wonder we are growing at a snail's pace again.

And then, when we have the time, we crib about not having any.

Services Recovery

Assuming a service business wants long term customers, they should have a recovery plan to rely on for those days when the service does not perform well. Airlines facing a fog delay, or for a technical reason must know how to handle irate customers. The strategy could involve freebies like snacks, or stay in a hotel, or something else, including a refund for those who don't want the freebies.

A situation arose in the Pune theatre where we went to watch Barfi last weekend. The projector failed, leading to a delay and then a stoppage for 20 minutes in a previous show. Irate customers gheraoed (surrounded) the guy in charge, and he was unable to pacify them. Eventually, he was saved because the equipment started functioning, while the argument was on. What if it hadn't? Did they have a plan B? Apparently not. They could have mollified people by offering a free coffee in their foyer while they set the projector right. That might have helped cool things for a while. Another option would be to offer a substitute show/refund.

Some service providers handle this well, some don't. One can have role plays and training for these situations, to help employees cope up.

Mispronounced Words

 Growing up, a lot of words were mispronounced, by us and those around us. These included a few English words- Daver or Diver for Driver Tat...

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