THE PULSE by Sivakumar Gopal

Create a Product or a Consumer?

Peter Drucker had said that the purpose of business is to create a consumer. How true is this statement with the Start-ups and the Unicorns of the past decade creating new consumers of products and services?

What drives the efforts of a business to create a consumer? Is it a strategy or a structure? what drives what? Some say Strategy drives structure and some say the reverse. There will be a point when we realise that the reverse- structure driving a strategy – is ineffective because the outcome of the strategy – what you want – is not exactly what you had intended when the structure was created. It is always prudent to let the strategy drive the structure because the structure can be modified when adjustments are needed to execute a strategy in reaching consumers. What we exactly want is achieved only after many iterations and alterations in execution. There are of course exceptions due to environmental hurdles such as trade barriers, local laws or limitations in organizational resources that make the structure rigid and consequently the outcome in the form a product or service that was envisioned is impacted.

Let us understand more about strategy- where does it come from? We do many SWOT analyses of strengths and weaknesses of the little sparks of ideas that can change the world or create value additions to a product or service. People’s psychological impulses lead to strategies, but they get conditioned by an external environment. In a real term, strategy gets evolved from an environment which has multiple layers – macro forces like technology, economics, politico – and micro socio -cultural aspects. Sneakers for example are classic example of how simple foot wears have taken shapes in terms of materials and comfort – fabric, size, weight, Safety, sole, or contour- for manufacturers like Nike, Adidas, Reebok who constantly engaged with people’s emotional and comfort needs and have been innovating for several decades to make newer models just to serve a single purpose of covering our feet. Further creating a baby-sitter job comes out of both husband and wife becoming income earners or a home medical attendant is hired to look after aging, sick parents while you are away for work.

Starting or nurturing a business is always done with a creation of a consumer in mind, duly acknowledging macro environmental factors and matching the opportunities / threats with the internal strengths / weaknesses of the organization.

#strategy

#createconsumer

Business in Future

Business today is all about the focus on customer touch points and adding incremental values to an organisation’s offerings to address the pain areas in a business engagement. The concept of a business in a steady state has given way to an alternating scenario of deep change and stability in a cyclical loop. That’s how the business is being compelled to be always in an agile mode, breaking the barriers of hierarchy and a traditional structure but to breath in delivering innovations and newer experiences all the time. Any business that fails to recognise this shift in a static business model to an intense change in execution, will face an accelerated decline.

Embracing a digital transformation is the best way to address the new business challenges. Cloud shift, Artificial Intelligence, Automation are gaining momentum in both mid sized and large enterprises and they help to recalibrate the business offerings to add exponential value to a customer engagement and by effectively leveraging the eco-system, they drive the changing personalisation needs of target customers.

Whilst on the topic of personalisation, it is interesting and revealing to learn that by 2030 business will look completely different than what we see today, according to the expert views of Mauro Guillen, Professor of Wharton Business School. He goes on to say in his best selling book ‘2030’ – How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything that businesses will move from a target group of syoungsters to the groups of elders and women to reshape their marketing strategies to address a new set of consumer behaviours. He cites the successful business concept of Airbnb that cater to two different target groups – the owners who are mostly 50+ as investors in properties and the travellers in mid 30’s as the group preferring to stay in such accommodation and explore the cities and locations.

Entrepreneurs of this decade is besieged with opportunities that will make them think out of the box to create products or services that capture the imagination of a new set of consumers.

Ref: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/359953

Start-up Entrepreneurship – Innovate, Create or Adapt

Start-up Entrepreneurship is about being practical and aware of what works and what does not. The spark in someone with an idea alone is not enough to go an Entrepreneurial way. It is about expanding that idea, checking if a similar one is already in the market, which market segment will be receptive to that idea and also soliciting views of experts to know if that idea will be alive for a span of 3-5 years down the road. On-line education, Share rides, Home food delivery and vacation homes etc are great examples of ideas that have stayed on with amazing success.

Entrepreneurs innovate afresh or create incremental values to existing products or services. While doing so, they need to be careful that their offerings or ideas don’t suffer premature death due to their inefficient commercial methods or lack of funds to sustain those ideas in operation after a successful test marketing. If promoters are not good enough in this area it is no shame to invite an expert to provide a helping hand. Most of the ideas die an early death because of changing market preferences, lack of good marketing techniques or a competition rejigs similar idea to a mass scale at a rapid pace.

An entrepreneurial mind needs to be always on the vigil of what adaptations are needed to keep the idea alive with a working product or service, closely following the market trends in different segments and knowing the early reviews on the performance of the product.

Focus has to be a key trait for the start-up entrepreneurs and spending too much time on day to day activities retard their business growth. They need to live and sleep with their ideas or creative sparks till they hit the growth graph. The most important thing an entrepreneur needs to do is to protect his creation with IP rights, ensuring it does not infringe on an already existing IP. The decision to commit more funds should happen only after this is done.

There are living legends that created huge business empires and their stories are not inspirations alone but a guide to be successful entrepreneurs.

Innovate, Create or Adapt!

#entrepreneurship#entrepreneurs

I.C.F.D

One always laments why things are not happening the way he/she wants them to be. We visualize, make elaborate plan, gather resources, yet the outcome is not reached.

Intent

A business strategy is conceived keeping the desired outcome in mind. Thoughts and views are put together, the process is evolved, people are briefed yet we hit a road block during the course of its execution. The intent to do a certain action is surely in our minds but we fail to follow the process with a total commitment from all stake holders. That is where we start seeing the lack of seriousness in people who have made that commitment.

Commitment

Priority is accorded to something else to douse the day to day fire and not to a strategy that the leadership had intended. The leader believes that the team had promised commitment in taking the intent to successive steps to reach its logical outcome but the team digresses midway thinking that each of its members is doing his/her job. No intervention by leaders is made to take a corrective action because they are not yet aware of what has gone wrong as no feedback has reached them. Operational inefficiencies derail the process and the outcome.

Focus

What is totally missing is the focus at all levels in identifying what are the show stoppers and how to make them good. Focus needs constant attention, follow up meetings, fixing up responsibilities, re-aligning the resources and re-iterating the damage the failure of the strategy would cost in terms of time lapse to customers or market and loosing the competitive edge.

Delivery

However great may be the intention to drive a strategy, a successful delivery happens only when the intent is followed by commitment and focus. It is true for a Government, an Organization and an Individual.

Organizational Hierarchy

An hierarchy is derived from an organization’s strategy for reaching its consumers or customers. It may manufacture a product or trade in a product or provide a service but each activity defines its operational layers that determine the fastest way to make a decision and implement it. Larger organizations tend to build overlapping layers in hierarchy over the years but it is imperative to revisit the structure at intervals and make it as lean as possible to serve the customers. Such a set-up will have a clear line of responsibility of a manager and his/her accountability for a defined outcome that is expected. Also it is easier to find out at what point of a decision making chain, a strategy or its execution has failed to help take a corrective action. We have seen companies cutting down on service lines and man power to bring in the agility to deliver a product or service because the excess flab has retarded the growth and profitability.

Does Hierarchy in an organisation impede the growth of an individual?

Most of you would say Yes and rightly so. The more the layers in the decision making chain, the higher will be lack of motivation and fire to excel. Many successful organisations have been able to handle it better by breaking the decision making chain into smaller ones and making new leaders responsible to manage P&L of sub-units and cost centres. They have understood that the frustration of an employee that he or she is not being heard or recognised could kill innovation and blunt the talent.

Similar to an agile way of developing and delivering a solution to a customer, a decentralised hierarchy and a leaner team makes it agile and responsive to a new situation or environment or a market demand. Smaller units bring in a sense of entrepreneurship to achieve the common purpose of the larger unit or the organisation. Incremental values added by these units help to appreciate the contributions from managers and their teams.

#agile #hierarchy
#entrepreneurship

#employeemotivation

Path to Success

How do we find out the path to success if we did not know the reasons for our failures?

Failures are results of how we have conditioned our minds and actions by not focusing on what we had aimed to achieve but on how others did their work.

It is human nature to keep complaining about people. It is just an attempt to raise oneself by speaking ill about others. The roots of hatred frozen deep in us shows up in our disposition to find faults everywhere – in people, society and system. We comment on people we don’t like but not on those we love.

The growth of others, their happiness, their contended life, their beauty and their fame sow the seeds of jealous in us and they manifest into our finding faults in them. It is an ugly attempt to fill in the cavities in our mind. We dig ourselves deep and stifle our growth by this demeanour.

In an office environment, some people tend to cling on to their jobs by speaking bad about their colleagues, for their own career advancement and growth. But that will not keep them going for long and they will know at a point that it is their capability that will propel them to go up in the career path.

Human ego is like a banyan tree and the aerial roots are our faults. The egoistic nature makes us to look at faults in others with magnified eyes. If we make an effort to get rid of our ego, then we will see how this bad habit in us just vanishes.

As per human psychology, people desire that they want to be always spoken about or noticed and this is a reflection of their inferior mind set about themselves.

If we are determined to mend our ways out of this bad habit, we need to first realise that we are indeed afflicted with it and go out with an open mind to seek an honest assessment from your partner or spouse or close friends or mentor as what had gone wrong with us. The moment we are made aware of our apparent defects in our dealing with people, we take out a huge load off our shoulders. We realise this load has kept us long, away from our self development and from realising our true potential. In as much as we don’t feel happy about others finding faults in us, they also feel the same way.

Let us accept people as they are and we do it first with our own self.

Life is going to be purposeful and wonderful !

ETHOS

A nation, an organisation and a community prosper to reach newer heights because of its people, leaders and the eco-system they create around them. The more they care for their people the better is the capability they are able to build in them. They cannot sustain their existence and growth through unethical means and by suppressing its people and their potential.

Let us support leaders who have this ethos!

2021 – How does it look like ( Contd.)

Digital Health Passport

The future is going to witness a new document that an individual will virtually carry or be expected to produce is Digital Health Passport.

COVID has pushed nations to be more demanding from citizens or travellers, information about their Health, Pre-existing diseases, Lab Reports, insurance cover, Vaccine history etc. Similar to what you already have, a digital locker on cloud to secure your driving license details, Licence plate certificate nos.,Insurance papers etc, this Digital health passport is an additional docket that you will be required to show on demand to Airlines, Hotels, Concert Halls and Cinemas or ER services during an emergency. Many advanced nations have a record of what medical tests have been performed on their citizens but usage by other agencies are not prevalent today.

We expect these data to be as secure as possible and are available with only Govt departments, yet we do not know how they can be extracted with sophisticated software tools. You may be surprised to receive marketing mailers reminding your next date for Doctor’s appointment, reminder about health insurance premium or about a new policy or the validity of vaccine dose taken and a parking or speeding ticket.

DHP will invoke a new era of citizens’ surveillance and may be linked to an already available Citizen Registry – like SSN or Aadhar ( India).

Women Leaders

It is heartening to note there are more women donning CxO hats in top firms around the world but there is a strong feeling that a gender bias still exists in organisations, more so in India.

Over the past few years women have risen faster on the career path than what it was a decade ago. If their numbers don’t match up to men it doesn’t mean only gender bias is the reason. It is evident that men far outnumber women in organisations and obviously the competition at top is not a match given the leadership criteria for both the genders are the same.

Example, from an Indian context: The number of technical graduates coming out of IITs and top notch engineering colleges has less than 10% women engineers even today and hence it is low at the entry level in technology firms.Their low % about two decades ago determined the no of women vying for top positions today. Note, this percentage is already mandated by Indian Govt to be > 20% and that is really gratifying.

In IIMs, it is much better with women management graduates passing out at a ratio of 25% and below about a few years ago to a healthy 33% today. These are the women who will be ready to take leadership up positions in 10-15 years from now and they will be more women occupying senior roles.

Worry not about the present but be positive that you, our society and I will make it an even match in the future.

#womenCxO

Source :

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=percentage+of+women+in+IIMs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-in&client=safari

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=percentage+of+women+in+IITs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-in&client=safari

2021- How does it look like?…(Contd..)

Work From Home

Everywhere we hear people mentioning ” New Normal” and that includes businesses that are being conducted in a cozy comfort of homes, irrespective of your own business or your organization’s. A lot has been written about how work has shifted to your drawing rooms and in many cases to the only room in your homes but the happy aspect of this WFH model is that your boss is not snooping over your shoulders. Look at the positive side – your wardrobe is not growing bigger, your vehicle is gathering dust, your fuel bills are astonishingly lower, your early morning hurry has turned into extended sleep hours, your spouse spends more time on yoga or exercise, you spend more time with the kids, your parents wonder what on earth your were doing at office that you are not doing at home. The flexibility in work hours is a boon for working couples and they now partake their household chores to an advantage. Businesses are claiming higher productivity as everyone now works between 10-14 hours a day and jobs are getting finished ahead of time and customers are happy if your work is based on your output at desk and not at an assembly line or with the machines. Energy bills are low, maintenance costs of work place have come down and idling hours have gone away. Employees work 1.4 days more in a month and the average commute time of an average 2 hours in a day to office has just vanished.

Has WFH come to stay as a permanent way of our daily life? Is it really good for individuals and organizations in the long run? What will happen to those lovely offices, buildings etc? People are already complaining that it robs us off personal life and the hard barricade that existed before between office and personal lives is now gone. It has created a sort of psychological toll on people who have increasingly become irritating for each other at home. Employees don’t get paid for logging extended hours and your mind is always pre-occupied with work related actions. In the long run, this may create health issues and as we know insurance companies and labour departments are re-writing their verbose on work place insurance coverage applicability. The huge office buildings look like monuments and people who are dependent on their maintenance have gone jobless. The roads are deserted and people’s livelihood on the road sides have taken a heavy beating. Taxi drivers, Auto wallahs have no jobs to run their families.

In my view, WFH is certainly not a good long term solution for everyone however good it may be for the bottom line of businesses. The sooner we go back to office, the better for all. Don’t we long to indulge in office gossips about your colleagues or boss and bring in the social courtesies that are pleasant to exchange and are refreshing to our moods?