I am back after nearly ten months. Should have posted some stuff earlier but just did not have the persistence. Not that any of you were burning the blog with comments and posts. Here goes some interesting stuff I attended.


Gary Hamel in Delhi

Gary shared some very interesting perspectives to what's happening in modern organisations. I will try to put my take on some of these here.

Till about 20 years ago, to get ahead in the business world you needed to have knowledge. I am sure all of us have come across terms like Information is power, Knowledge based leadership etc. The internet has now changed all that. You cannot win, with just knowledge or information. It has become a commodity, its accessible at a mouse-click. Whatever you want to know or learn about anything is available to the entire heirarchy. Information is no more power. The over-riding fear now is of becoming obsolete. You need to keep acquiring knowledge just to keep up with other.

The power now resides in innovation. Since the entire universe has the same knowledge or information, if you want to win you must have a different perspective. This comes out of innovation and initiative.

Most of our organisations are still structured for the old paradigm though. The senior-most honcho is still the most experienced and knowledgeable guy. Even at lower levels, what do we look for when we are hiring new people? Relevant experience, diligence and depending on the job, Intelligence. Performance is still measured in terms of efficiency and achivements are mainly through process improvements. All people have abilities. Because knowledge has ceased to be an edge, there are some hygeine abilities and some new world abilities. The organisations will need to look for and foster new world abilities.

Basic Employee capabilities

• Intellect
• Diligence
• Obedience

New requirements.

• Initiative
• Creativity
• Passion

The first three are commodities and are easy to hire. The next three have to be fostered. As a manager you can ask all your employees to be diligent and obedient and make sure they have a high IQ when you hire them. You however will need to create an environment to get your people to be creative, show initiative and have passion towards the organisation. That really is the new world challenge.

Large organisations are built on stiff processes and heirarchies that foster bureaucracy. To keep the flock together and give a uniform direction to the organisation you will need to standardise processes. It is meant to stifle innovation, not as a stated intent but is designed for it. We want the large mass of employees to be process owners and then want to create a Business Strategy department to do innovation. Thats the way it is.

Initiative, creativity and passion will make excellent organisations of the new world. New ideas must come from each and every corner of the company to get enough momentum in innovation. Business strategy dept. will never be able to generate enough new ideas. 'Bottelneck is at the top of the bottle'. We must open up the bottle from the bottom for energy to flow.

We did an interesting incentive plan in Sep 05 thought I should share it. Not something I invented (it was used many years ago when I began working as a front-liner) but someting I found working really well.

Banco

This is basically an over and above compensation program. Works mainly as a short-term (I used it only for One month) contest-incentive.

Product: Post-paid mobile connections.
Sales channel : Direct selling Feet-on-street channel of Associates.
Period: 1st -30th Sept 2005.
Applies to: 275 Front-line sales people working for our DSA's.
Objective: Create some excitement for the quarter ending, increase sales and improve morale. Also to build some momentum in the channel to motivate the channel partners to increase the field-force.
Target: Increase sales in the month by 15%.

Scheme details: Create a pool of Rs. 1.50 lacs. this is to be shared between the top 30 Sales people pro-rata according to the number of mobile connections sold. Paid out as cash at the end of the month.

Communication: We had built up an automated program which dipped into the mobile-activation data-base calculated the top-30 winners, split the Booty and sent out sms messages to the entire sales force every-day in the morning.

In addition complete lists were printed and displayed prominently in all DSA offices one a week.

The scheme created a lot of excitement among the players and we managed to get an upside of nearly 50% in sales during the month.

Obviously we supported the sales team with aggressive product discounts as well.

All parts worked well and gave us the desired results.

We also then took the results to the DSA organisations and asked them to increase the sales force for long term sustenance.

It all began a month ago when Rajesh Srivastava sent me a mail about the program. There was initially the usual cynicism about 'education' programs but speaking about it to some other people gave a slightly mellowed perspective and I was reasonably anxious when I reached the campus.

It was indeed a great experience for me. I thought the context of Indian business environment was missing but if we were to look at the program at a conceptual level I found it extremely rewarding.

I will try to write more about the program per se in future notes. The other part of the program which I enjoyed was meeting successful professionals from other organisations and hear about perspectives from vairous industries and organisations. The challenges that all of us face in sales, marketing, organisation building are the real learing touchstones.

This blog I thought could become a good posting point for our future experiences and serve as a platform for exchanging notes. It could be a good way to be in touch in a meanigful manner. I am hoping Prabha would also from time to time pop-in and share his views on issues posted or on new things he has published/researched.

Do look in from time to time and contribute to build this community.

Regds

Shankar
+919811918600