Does CII truly represent Indian Industry?

Interesting to see that Confederation of Indian Industry ( CII ) membership has fallen for the first time after early years of liberalization. Is it a sign of high membership fee, that in difficult times small companies/firms with less than 10 lakh turnover might have withdrawn? Not sure, as it just costs Rs 5000 to renew the membership annually for such companies. or Was it an exercise  by CII itself to axe more than 600 members? It is also interesting to see the self proclaimed representative of Indian industry has just got close to 8000 members while companies registered with ROC(Registrar of companies) might easily be in excess of 2 million. Does CII need to do more to widen the base to call itself the true representative of Indian Industry?

An Attempt to optimize Vegetables/Fruits spending

"India’s Food Inflation Quickens to 12.21%, a Nine-Month High", says  Bloomberg report . 

With Mamta ready to withdraw support from UPA govt on Petrol Price hikes and Prime minister Manmohan Singh attributing high inflation in vegetables and fruits prices to growing prosperity, These are difficult times for poor and middle class families in India. I happen to buy vegetables today(5th Nov 2011 from local hypermart in Bangalore and did a quick comparison with prices offered by HOPCOMS(The Horticultural Producer's Cooperative Marketing and Processing Society Limited).  Here is the comparison

It was expected for prices to be higher at Village Hypermart considering the higher profit orientation but price difference was as high as 160% for Green chilli. Except Onion, all vegetables were priced higher than HOPCOMS.

So Key Takeaways in Bangalore

• Before you buy, Compare veggie and fruit prices  with HOPCOMS prices on their website  or just by sending SMS HOPCOMS VEG OR HOPCOMS FRUIT to 9243355223.
• Find nearest HOPCOMS stall near your home when you plan to buy

The world pays tribute to Steve Jobs

The whole world is paying tribute to one the greatest icons of our times.Apple's Home page looks like above with a tribute following on click of image. I wish his creativity and spirit of doing unknown and unthinkable inspires us and many generations to come.

Birthday wishes by Google

Was surprised with Google's attempt to personalize customer experience, when saw the Doodle changed on my birthday(See above). Way to Google.....
Also, gave me a thought how Companies,Organizations,employers can do a similar act and make their customers,employees feel better.


As a learning from this Google experience, all employers can send a Birthday message to employees, also IT Systems  can trigger a reminder to reporting managers for birthdays of their reportees. 
This simple HRMS, CRM functionality can be useful in creating a better company-customer, employer-employee connect.

Can Kingfisher Airlines reduce its in-flight trash?

Can airlines such as Kingfisher reduce the trash generated as a result of their in-flight culinary delights?

Comment if you have ideas, I will send them to Vijay Mallya , Chairman Kingfisher for taking the lead in making Kingfisher not only most loved airline in India but also the most ecofriendly.

Cricket Insights and Winning Lessons

It was a jam-packed session at Landmark, Forum mall where Harsha and Anita Bhogle addressed audience and answered their questions with utmost humility and poise making people feel comfortable and entertained with all his intelligent humor.

Harsha Bhogle, You meet him and sure to be enamored by his glib talking and his down to earth attitude. In my personal observation, I have found Marathi people in general to be very humble and simple people without a tinge of flamboyance. Harsha and his wife Anita are two such individuals who fit into this category of “humble, simple and non flamboyant people.

In his book launch in Bangalore, he made a point which reminds of his personality, “Generally, people make mistake of assuming polite people to lack aggression and aggressive people to be impolite. He broke the general misconception, by giving examples of Anil Kumble who is very polite but with full of aggression on field and M S Dhoni considered to be very aggressive player but extremely polite individual. Such presumption of “aggressive” being “non polite” and “polite” being “non-aggressive” is common malady which one should be beware of.

His and Anita’s book “The winning way” is incredible piece of work which is simple and fascinating. It gives lessons on success, failure and leadership in a context which people can relate very well to and this precisely is the “USP of book”. The examples from cricket, football, tennis and other sports make the book easy to read, help in correlating with real life examples and keeps the reader engaged. The parallels from sports and comparisons from Business makes it one of its kinds in the world of books where books on leadership are replete with on boring and unappealing winning themes and leadership messages.

Sometimes, the celebrity status of Harsha places all the focus and accolades on him and Anita sometimes doesn’t get that much credit for her contributions in this creation. It was very evident during book launch where almost all questions where directed to Harsha and rightly so as he this star attraction and I am sure all cricket insights in this book mostly come from his cricket mind.

Overall, full marks for this extremely well written, insightful and reasonably priced literary treasure.

Why should you quit an organization?

Some food for thought, why should you quit an organization?

1> Lack of Information, its availability and access

Many companies have stated policies that senior management is very much accountable to junior most staff in organization, still large number of companies suffer from “Ignore Mail policy” where in senior management don’t respond to queries from employees directly or through their Office. New age companies such as Infosys have been known for their accountability and responsiveness shown by senior members of the company. If a company doesn’t evolve a mechanism where voice from ground is heard and responded, then that company is not worth y for your talent and time.

2> No roadmap for career progression

If you don’t see a short term /long term career path and how can you tread that to reach to a goal then leave the company. If you don’t know what you will become 5 yrs /10 yrs/20 yrs down the line in an organization, then those organizations can never give you a career roadmap. It will be all confusion and maze, which will keep you non focused on your dreams and goals.

3>No Variable Pay

As we know, variable pay is added to one’s pay structure to motivate and incentivize individual performance and aligning the individual performance to achieve company’s goals. With variable pay, companies ensure that employees are geared towards profit orientation, more the company grows, more it gets profitable and higher the variable pay to employees. That’s why you find Sales and senior management jobs have bigger variable component in their compensation in order to drive them towards higher Performance. Hence, think twice why should not continue in your organization.

4>No Profit orientation

What is the difference between a mail dispatch department and Product Management department? One is internally focused other looks externally. One is cost center other is geared toward customers orientation and profit generation. If you work in a cost center think twice, there is higher chance that you are rewarded more for your efforts in a profit center than in a cost center

5>Where Bosses don’t create leaders?

An environment which gives birth to natural leadership is essence of long lasting organizational setup. If there is shortage of leaders, where leaders are not created where leaders are not recognized and groomed then perhaps the place will suffer from lack of growth or unmanageable growth.

6>where you can’t inspire and get inspired (lack of mentor)

Mentorship is absolutely essential. It is required not only at junior levels but all levels. Higher you go more is need for a structured and unstructured mentorship. Chanda Kochhar talks but how KV Kamath groomed her to be in his shoes . Mentoring helps eliminate barriers and enables a cultural continuity. Mentoring clear doubts, gives a direction to mentee’s aspirations, and enables mentors to be always in touch with organizational human dynamics. Good mentors are few but organizations should create an environment where mentors are produced and mentors easily seek and find mentees. So if you don’t have mentor, can’t find one, you guessed right, quit the organization.

Convocation on Youtube

Just finished uploading Videos( 8 parts in total) of Convocation on Youtube. It was refreshing going down in memory lane.

Here is the Part where I spoke on my experiences.

Some intelligence in Business Intelligence game

I was recently involved in a Business Intelligence (BI) assignment wherein we were pitching power of BI to a customer. We did couple of weeks of consulting (mostly interviewing customer to understand systems, processes and their pain areas) and built a POC to demo our power of product and implementation cum consulting capabilities. This was first BI assignment for me and felt the need to document few leaning that I have had in last few months.

BI market is highly competitive with plethora of BI tools from MS BI, IBM Cognos to SAP BO and many others. Hence, in a deal on BI is going to be competitive with different product vendors and partners making an aggressive stance to sell product and their implementation capabilities to customer. Hence, never take a BI deal lightly.

Customers are quite aware of BI and mature in terms of their expectations. They don’t talk about basic features anymore. They might be looking for standard Dashboards to start with but go all the way to convince you that they looking for fancy and stuff from in memory analytics to Dashboards working on Android Mobile phones.

Never only build scenarios or dig KPIs from past experience or domain understanding. Always request to play around with various source data (transactional, master etc) to understand the relationship and how scenarios, KPIs etc could be effectively built from it.

Always keep Datawarehosuing expert in your team: He will be key to map relationships, perform very important ETL activity. He will be the one to provide solid foundation for analytics project to follow. Customer feels comfortable if you demonstrate what you can do with BI tool using real data. Always request customer to provide you with real data.

If you are building a Proof of concept (POC) which typically is the case these days, always work in an iterative model. The first output will never be perfect so never try to make it perfect. Share and showcase some of portions of POC as early as possible to ensure that customer appreciates your work and give important insights of its business and make the your output more meaningful.

POCs are typically nobody’s baby. A Customer more often than not doesn’t care whether he pays for the it. Neither do the internal organization where resources are deployed on live, Rupee/dollar generating projects. So it is important that only those resources are carefully put on such short assignments who have capability to deliver fast and who could be effectively channelized to create an impactful showcase.

Convince customers to pay for POC: It is always good to get some money from pocket of customer. This will ensure that customer is keenly involved in responding to presales and POC activities. See a sea change in terms of how a POC develops once customer shells out few bucks.

Never hurry in jumping to create or deliver a BI solution. It is extremely important that important set of KPIs from mountain of not so useful KPIs are selected. Build scenarios carefully of how would you dig into a business problem and find a root cause of it; suggest possible solutions which a decision maker can rely on.

and Finally, Involve the product vendor early on as he would be most eager to sell a product license to your customer. Hence leverage their infrastructure, ideas and resources to build an invincible story which customer can trust and feel confident about.

image:http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2007/08/06/george-bush-on-business-intelligence/

Cricket and Harsha

No one can talk so eloquently with such deep insights on Cricket than Harsha