Purchasing Power

This week’s business week has an article about V.P Purchasing of GM and how it is trying to cut the purchase cost, streamline the purchased products, thus reducing the cost. This triggered me some thoughts.

When I was working in mechanical industry in India, I closely observed the purchasing manager. If you have purchasing power, then you can control your vendors. This is true with any business off course. The bigger companies can get better deals, better quality and better service.

Typically, purchasing managers are helped by vendor development managers; who develop different vendors, who can give better deals. If you have a stronger purchasing power, actually vendors come to you!

Off course, I couldn’t understand how the whole system works then. But, that is just like any other business.

Inside Disney World

I am reading a book, 'Inside Disney' an amazing story. This is about how Disney parks are being managed.

The first two lessons, which I read so far, 1) Know your competition 2) Give attention to details.

According to Disney, the competition is not only coming from players in the same sector. The moment some one; it could be bank, post, pizza delivery, or any thing; delivers a superior customer service, people start comparing you with them. Thus, there is a new competition. Like, 'I ordered pizza last night, their service is not as good/bad as this company' etc.

This is a truly amazing explanation and notion. How many businesses feel and managed in this way?

Is BlogSpot blocked in India?

Is it true?

Need to check with some of my friends in India.

Midlife Crisis for Mid-size companies

Economic times has this article, where it raised a good question by and large.

Does mid-sized companies facing mid-life crisis?

This report says, top tier companies are doing great, posting market-beating results. But, the mid-sized companies are facing the 'mid level talent' problem, where most of the managers are shifting to MNCs or bigger players.

I am a firm beliver of leadership develop programs within the company. Companies need to groom people. Typically, with all its disadvantages, having two separate tracks of technical and non-technical streams help to groom correct people.

Having top leve technical knowledge is not enough, mid level managers with business focus is the need of the this knowledge economy.

Relience and Mukesh Ambani in NewsWeek

I read a cover page story about Relience and its big plan going forward in NewsWeek.

Since last two days I am thinking, how high those kind of thoughts are! I am amazed.

Building and running the business needs, thinking and that too big thinking.

Human Resource Department

In his weekly column in Businessweek this week, Jack Welch, a famous ex-CEO of GE, has pointed out the importance of HR in any company. How it is important and why it should take employee initiatives.

Some weeks back, I wrote in this blog about HR and its importance. People still believe it is a supporting cast and HR should make policies for employees. But, HR has a broder scope, its work starts in hiring a correct candidate, the candidate who can add real value to company and grow along with company. It’s important to develop culture of this sort, which encourages or challenges the employees to perform more.

People are the major part of any business; people are DNA of any business for that matter. So, having good, energetic people around is the first firm step towards having success.

The major role of HR is to keep employees motivated. Being human being, how ever self starter he/she may be, employees need external motivation. This is the big responsibility of HR to build and develop this culture.

Identification of correct talent within the organization becomes immense important. Some are good in sales; some are in people building etc. It is important for company to put correct people in correct places. Promotions just because of number of years of experience, has absolutely no meaning. Experience and/or personal interest should go hand in hand; this is the simple way to increase productivity. We all work harder on the work which we like most.

So, it’s rather sad that most of the companies treat HR as support, perhaps it is the important wing of the organization.

Spyware!!

Business week has very good article about Spyware and how they make money and how it gives trouble to people's computers. It's amging to note, a company specialized in this popup spyware is making millions!

It obviously cought my attention as I mysef got hit by this kind of spyware and I had tough time in getting rid of them. What all I did was,
1. Installed Windows Defender and Adware softwares
2. Cleaned the .exe files from harddrive.
3. Increased security in browser and set the trusted sites.

I have not seen any popups, at least for now!

Reginoal Cinema Vs bollywood Cinema

I was reading an article in the net paper, where author compares Regional movies with Bollywood movies and categorily labels Bollywood movies as just copies of Hollywood.

Agreed, there are few which are remake, but how to justify this statement as general?

-Is there a movie like ‘Bagaban’ which upheld the family and society values?
-Is there a movie which is as pure as ‘Maine pyar kia’?
-Is there a pure comedy movie like ‘Munnabhai MBBS’?

My point is, in glorifying some thing; we should not overlook the obvious facts of other things. Perhaps, we need to watch all, take the essence and throw out which we don’t need. This is how one should/will develop. There is absolutely no point is fighting about my mother language is good or your’s is bad.

Grow up guys! We are the pepole who quenched the term ‘Global Village’, let our mind be not restricted by any thing.

Why Toyota is not a darling of Investors?

I was reading an interesting article, author with data asks question, inspite of good numbers and good return over last few years and solid growth and sales, why Toyota is not a investor darling? Typically, in stock market good performing companies tend to attract more interest, but why not Toyota?

Honestly, I never thought about this from angle. It is true, volume traded in NSE is very less compared to Fort and GM. Author points out, even despite of 'not so good' performance of auto majors, they tend to attract investors.

Pretty interesting article.

Royal Gorge and Pikes Peak

Went for two days trip to 'Garden of Gods' and Pikes Peak in Coorado Springs and Royal Gorge Bridge and Canon in Canon City. It was a good, fun filled trip.

And went for a 5 miles hike on Tuesday on Rocky Mountains in Loveland.

Totally, it was good long weekend.

Selling Solutions

I was reading a story about new approach to sales. Its adding ‘Empathy’ to the sales approach, this is where sales force will think from customer’s shooes. This would help sales guys to understand what language a customer is talking. Its no more just aggressive selling. It involves understanding the entire problem before giving the solution.

This concept seems to be quite new and I was talking to one sales VP, where he mentioned that he believes in ‘solution selling’, I think this is what he mean.

As this sales career really facinates me, I read about this very interestingly. So, sales is not mere making pushy calls!!

Link to the article.

Innovation-Brain storming sessions at Samsung.

Business week has an article in Innovation section, where the brain storming session at Samsung has been explined in detail.

The summary is, the innovation engineers are locked in an office, until they complete the project, they will be out of distraction from the external world. There they will propose new ideas, discuss design and analyse the competation’s design. This will only result in better design and innovative products.

Every step of the way, team members drew what Samsung calls "value curves." These are graphs that rank various attributes such as picture quality and design on a scale of 1 to 5, from outright bad to excellent. The graphs compared the proposed model with those of rival products and Samsung's existing TVs. The VIP Center specialists also guided the team in discussions exploring ideas and concepts from entirely different industries, picking up hints about the importance of the emotional appeal in the offerings of furniture makers and Hollywood.

Great idea!!

Fit to be a leader.

I am a firm believer of the fact that leaders should have a high energy level, which generally reflect how they interact with customers and employees. Its vital to have a very positive body language.

I was reading an article about how keeping fit is important for leaders. This business week article gives some examples and concludes how it would help you to become a better communicator.

Aligning to client’s culture

I was reading a pannel discussion abut BPO and outsourcing. The participants have stressed on the importance of aligning to the vendor and their culture for success of an ooutsourced project.

I have been working in this kind of industry since almost 6 years now. Obviously I prefer and encourage offshoring with my clients, but not many clients have understod the importance of aligning with vendor’s culture. During one of the project, I remember our CEO told us, align to their culture, then you can expect better results.

This is most forgotten part of such projects. The responsibility on both parties, vendor needs to understand the culture of client and client needs to understand vendors. I found some general outtings and discussion about sports or general issues tend to break this barrier. One should not feel, the technical part is one and all. Off course it is important, but alignment helps to cover a long road.

After all, we all would like to be treated well and respected at our work, is that right?

A Failed Merger

As per reports in Indian media, the merger between Air Sahara and Jet Airways is called off. The exact reasons for this may not be known, but it triggered me to think about this from a business perspective.

When a merger is planned, so many changes happen in bought out company. They need to align their operations and executives in to parent company and in an service industry like air lines, where customers measure your business, the impact would be too much.

It reminds me one tihng, I read this piece some where, mostly in eWeek. One needs to understand two cultures before even talking about mergers. Integration is a real big challenge and aligning both the companies and continue providing value to customers should be seen as a backdrop of any mergers. I really don't think just merging the companies keeping revenu in mind will simply not work.

Miami Heats are NBA Champions

Miami Heats beat Dallas Mavs to win the championship. It was a true exibition of team spirit, where everybody supported their start player. And it also an indication how the tempo changes during a series. In game 3, with 6-1/2 minutes left in the game, Wade took over and executed, since then it was just Miami all over.

What I observed was the mental toughness one should have to play or coach at this level. The series was well fought, and the coaching decisions proved very vital.

It should not mean that Mavs didn’t do a good job, their run in to Finals was fantastic. We should not forget that they beat defending champs. I liked the their strategical coach, Avery Johnson.
This is why I now prefer best of finals. When I was young and used to follow cricket in India, I used to wonder why there is only one final? I still believe a series would bring out a true champion.

iPop Nano

I got an iPop nano, its sleek design really fascinated me. Its worth of its cost for the quality of music we get. It’s easy to load and use.

I guess this is truly an example of how innovative the design could be.

Hiking The Rocky Mountain

We went for around four miles hiking in Rocky Mountain national park.(Long’s Peak and Wild Basin). Oxygen filled environment and fresh air really made me more energetic.

We witnessed waterfalls, lakes, mountains, trees, canyon and steep roads.

It was good outing all together.

‘Global Integration – Challenges and Implication’

The globalization is the buzz word now a day, with every other company trying to expand the business beyond one country and this, obviously, requires integrating and interacting with other global players.

To me it looks like a great opportunity, companywide. With expanded operations, the revenue will be increased and on other hand a much wider horizon for employees. I am a firm believer of the fact that working in different countries gives a much wider experience for any body. It could be teachings from social life or be it learning from business interaction. Mental growth is the biggest plus point of working abroad. It’s petty, how some people don’t learn out of such chances.

And with this global market, India is poised to gain. India has a natural advantage of its younger working class, who don’t mind relocating to other countries. With age, this relocating activity looks more painful.

There is more necessity now a day to integrate with a global player. Now days, innovation is the key point and integrating with players who are already in this kind of business in other part of the world. Thus, you need not to build the operations from scratch.

This integration reminds me a well known success story with partnership model. Dassult Systems and IBM. Though IBM doesn’t have its own PLM operations, it works as distribution channel for DS products, there by adding tremendous value to DS as well as PLM industry. This is much successful. And Geometric software, the company where I work, has adopted same ‘partnership business model’ and I think even that is successful. This was clearly an innovative thinking back then by our CEO.

A recent panel discussion about globalization need and challenges in IBM trigged this thought.

Innovation in Services: A Case study from Bank of America.

I was reading a case study in Business Week about how innovation can help companies. Innovation in services is rare. In financial services, the last big breakthrough was online banking, nearly a decade ago. Bank of America came up with a innovative product, which is called ‘Keep the Change’.

The product works like this: Every time you buy something with a BofA Visa debit card, the bank rounds up your purchase to the nearest dollar and transfers the difference from your checking into your savings account. It also matches 100% of transfers for the first three months, and 5% of the annual total, up to $250 a year.

The result? Since the launch, 2.5 million customers have signed up for Keep the Change. Over 700,000 have opened new checking accounts and 1 million have signed on for new savings accounts.

There was a lot of market research and brainstorming was done before they finalized this product. What is really fascinating is the how innovative the companies are becoming.