Business Lessons to Cross the Boundary: Part 3

Many orthodox academicians teaching at top PGDM colleges in Delhi and elsewhere in India may not subscribe to the improvisation of equating business and cricket. The importance of learning in the contexts of both cricket and business can hardly be overemphasised. Both in business and cricket it takes some time for the best practices to make their way from the cricket ground or the board room to the coaching manuals and business schools. By the time they day, many of these best practices are no more the best practices in business and the new names coming into the big bad world of business and cricket learn what passé is.

Learning thus has to be taught of thinking, analyzing and practicing things afresh. A.K.Lahiri of Hindustan Unilever during the Project Millennium launched by then CEO Keki Dadiaseth had been quoted by the late Sumantra Ghoshal. Lahiri referred to the need for business enterprises to drop the baggage of history. How often do we tend to forget the need to drop the baggage of history under the pretext of empirical evidence, experience and time tested formulae to success in business and sports? Former English cricketer and then coach, the late Bob Woolmer very often used to quote Joan Rivers: “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery.” With so much technology integrated into the game, professional teams, players and coaches watching each other and trying to match step for step leaves no room to sit on old fat.

Those Were the Best of Times. Those Were the Worst of Times

Nobody sledges legends and experience can never be substituted for. Yet given the element of VUCA that has cropped up in business and sport, experience can no longer be blindly relied on. Both in cricket and business disruptors emerge from time to time and dislodge the dynamics of the industry. This phenomenon of disruption can be very unsettling for established market leaders who may be yet to come to terms with the business models of disruptors. South Africa began a dramatic rise towards glory once they were back from the ban and took everybody by surprise. Today Bangladesh is looked forward to with a certain level of respect that they have earned through good performance against established test playing nations. Nokia learnt these tough lessons with D.Shivkumar at the helm of affairs. What happened to Nokia in the Indian market with the advent of smart phones, sleek designs and dual- sim card technology is known to all. It makes sense to emulate the innovation and trend setting spirit of companies that we get to learn in books and case studies. But to compare the “heritage era” of players and managers with the modern rookies is more than unfair. It demeans the current generation of managers and players. For teams in sports and business to succeed they need to come out of the shadows of their predecessors often by going with the tide of time, space and scale. Kumarmangalam Birla did it when he took over the reins of the company on the untimely death of his father. Tim Cook is still trying to do it at Apple. Sadly one must agree that Manchester United, the beloved heartthrob of many across the world has not been able to do it.

If Looks Could Kill and Mean Business as Well

Recall the swagger of Sir Viv Richards when he used to walk down the dressing room into the ground to take guard. Sachin Tendulkar used to walk down any venue in the globe in the backdrop of people chanting his name like devotees. Purely in terms of sporting achievement, Shoaib Akhtar flying down the twenty two yards at Eden Gardens after having taken the wickets of Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar is another instance of a player announcing his arrival on the big stage of the game with his body language. Champion managers and players speak a lot through their body language.

It may not be the business end of business but cements the image of the company, the brand and finally that of the individual. It is difficult to have the body language of a heavy weight boxer like Sir Viv Richards and still focus on business without getting preoccupied with the small battles within the bigger battle. Champion managers and players sell aggression through the body language they emanate, not through actions. The point is to have an aggressive body with the calm and composed mind of a monk!

If Brains Could Win the War

To have an aggressive body and the mind of a monk at the same time sounds very pleasing to the ears but is very difficult to achieve. It starts with the player or the manager setting goals for self and the team. Goal setting is a term that evokes awe and fear in the same breath for both managers and cricketers. Being number one for sure cannot be the goal for everybody. If a company has been fighting to ward off the clouds of uncertainty all its life, then being in business can be referred to as a job well done. The same applies to cricket. There are nations that have less than one fourth of the population of a subcontinent heavyweight like India and still manage to punch above their weight. A fine example of this shall be New Zealand in cricket and Marico Industries in FMCG. New Zealand has a very small player base and yet has managed to do consistently well in all three formats of the game even without lifting the world championship even once. Faced with a giant like Hindustan Unilever, Marico has done well to focus on two to three product lines like coconut hair oil, oats and edible oil. In these product segments Marico comes close to being unbeatable.

Yet the same cannot be said for a team like Australia and India. Winning means everything and it should. With the talent base and resources that these countries have, it is not too much to ask for these teams to win and be number one. It shall be outright demeaning for a company like Infosys to finish a close second. The theory of the second best does not apply to them. Goal setting thus is not and should not be about being number one. More over it is better to choose performance goals over result goals. It is very close to what the Bhagwad Gita teaches. Result goals are dependent on the ‘karma’. Performance goals are worth achieving, because it is up to the managers and players to give their 100% in business and sport.

At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the top PGDM colleges in Delhi, we focus on grooming aspiring managers to have the body language and mind of a champion without being overawed by big names that are in business.

Business Lessons to Cross the Boundary: Part 2

This is the second piece in the series titled “Business Lessons to Cross the Boundary”. While the first piece of literature aimed to introduce lessons from sports management to individual practicing and aspiring managers, in this piece we look at some of the tenets of team building, team ethic and team climate engineering. We also inspect some traditional wisdom of cricket in the context of business. Given that the ICC T20 World Cup has just begun, we could not have asked for a better timing to compare cricket with business.

Team Performance and Team Building is a Cyclical Process

In physics we talk of momentum that carries a body forward on its own even without the application of an external force. The bicycle that nudges ahead a few inches on its own after one has paddled really fast bears testimony to the importance of getting the momentum going for a team and a corporation. As every winter gives way to spring, each crest in a business cycle gives way to a trough and each boom to a recession. Holding the team together becomes a challenge amidst downturns. How many times have we seen cricket legends calling it a day in the aftermath of a poor showing by their team? How many times have we seen top talent exit a corporation during meltdowns? Cricket can be a hard taskmaster and a harsh teacher.

Winning is a perfect metric of team performance and a team that is great continues to rebuild and reinvent itself during good times. A great corporation continues to circulate talent from the grass root levels during good times. Victories attract talent, institutionalize talent and produce further victories. This is true for both teams in sport and corporations in business. On the flip side, once a team ends winning streak it inevitably cracks. Splinter groups fragment away and top talent flows out like liquid gold. Continuing the winning streak requires the team to paddle really fast under the water like a duck. It may look like momentum from the ringside, but the duck knows that it paddling really hard to swim against the tide. The cycle of winning means everything. Once lost it may be hard to regain.

 A Team is a Portfolio of Talent, Products and SBUs

It is common practice in the sub continent to hang on to daddy’s brands in both business and sport. In economics we talk of corporate dinosaurs. These are firms that fail to evolve with time and are afraid to tinker with the combination of the yesteryears. Did not team India stick around with the legends of the yesteryears for more than a while? Do not corporations commit the error of sticking to daddy’s brands calling them legendary? The answer is simple. A corporation is a portfolio of talent, products and strategic business units. Australia took a harsh but never the less correct step by pulling the curtains on the career of a great captain and cricketer like Steve Waugh. It must have been painful but was needed to keep the tem alive.

The Hand That Cracks the Whip Must Also Pat Other’s Backs

In a study done by leading business research company the average tenure of a CEO in the United States of America was found to be in the range of two to three years. The finding was based on the study of Fortune 500 companies in the aftermath of the global meltdown. The mantra of perform or perish is easier said than done. Both in cricket and business, it boils down to managing people. People, when they perform make the team perform and move up. But what happens when they do not perform?

In such crunch situations it is the leader who has to take up the job of doing the balancing act. The balancing act has to be done not just to retrench and motivate but to demonstrate values that the team or the organization believes in. This is where things can be challenging. When we look back today at the years gone by and how the Indian captain has evolved from the brash and youthful “Mahi” to the mature and calm “MSD”, one realizes that the true worth of a captain lies in earning the respect of the team by defending the performers and being decisive on the non-performers. Another thing, if the captain wins the applause for a good showing on the field he must with all due humility take the lion’s share of responsibility for failures as well. Walking into the Selection Committee’s office after a series defeat and walking into a board meeting after a poor financial report mandate that the leader steps forward to defend his men not to put the blame on their shoulders. Probably this is what equates leaders like M.S.Dhoni, Ricky Ponting, Nitin Paranjpe and Narayana Murthy. The importance of a leader earning respect from his team can never be understated.

Ishan Institute of Management & Technology is one of the best MBA colleges in Delhi NCR for a reason. Reasoning must outscore rhetoric, both in cricket and in business. We strive to drive home this point through case studies and assignments chipped into the academic curriculum.

Business Lessons to Cross the Boundary: Part 1

Cricket and business are not estranged twins born to the same mother. Yet one does beg to differ in the context of India, where achievements in Cricket have coincided with economic growth. Starting with this piece, academicians at Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the best MBA colleges in Delhi NCR shall endeavour to cross the boundary from cricket to business and extract business lessons that the game can teach all of us.

At the very outset it may be commented that when India won the first World Cup in 1983, India was very much an inward looking country in the context of both Cricket and business. It makes enormous good sense to assert that the performance of Indian teams touring overseas for Cricket was similar to that of Indian corporate enterprises in foreign markets. In Cricket parlance we refer to the ability and attitude to take the battle to the opponent’s camp. An inward  looking import substitution policy for international trade, an aversion to competition from multinational corporations and lack of attitude to invade foreign markets were strikingly similar to the soft natured touring Indian teams that played to save face by playing for tame draws in tests.

Out of My Comfort Zone

As the former Australian captain and legend Steve Waugh has put it in the title of his autobiography “Out of My Comfort Zone”, business and sport are about stepping out of one’s comfort zone and playing to win. In order to win teams in sport and corporate enterprises must risk losing. Teams that seek to achieve greatness in sport must learn to win overseas. Similarly corporations that look to win must learn to penetrate overseas markets and grab market share in foreign markets. It is not a mere coincidence then that at the same point of time when Indian corporations were learning to invade foreign markets in their attempts to convert to being global firms, Indian cricket team also began its act of transformation under Sourav Ganguly. The year 2007 belonged to India both in corporate boardrooms and on the cricket fields. While Tata Motors acquired Jaguar, Team India under M.S.Dhoni lifted the inaugural edition of T20 World Cup.

Talent Alone is Not Enough

As in the world of sport so also in business talent alone is not enough. The first time Sachin Tendulkar took to the cricket field and smashed the legendary Abdul Qadeer out of the park, the world sat up and took notice. There was another God gifted cricketer in that generation who made the most impressive debut-Vinod Kambli. What happened next is the stuff of legend and analysis. Why do some fresh business school graduates make a dream debut in corporate sector and yet flounder as they move towards seniority? Why do some batsmen get out playing the same shots in the matured stages of their careers that once fetched runs and plaudits? Why do some managers struggle to cope with targets, as they climb up the corporate ladder? At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, our Placement Cell believes that managers just like cricketers must have attitude. Attitude determines how long a professional can stay put at the peak of their game once they have achieved it. The ability to “dig in” becomes a key differentiator between champions and lesser mortals. It is difficult to achieve greatness and even more difficult to stay put once one has reached there. Great teams, great sportspersons and great managers have discovered this truth by throwing in the towel and succumbing to the burden of greatness.

Reinvent Your Game Constantly

As said above it is difficult to win and more difficult to maintain the winning streak. West Indies did it in the 1970s and 1980s. Australia did it for a long time under Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting and now Michael Clarke. Tata Sons have achieved that in business. Hindustan Unilever and Infosys have achieved that as well. The winning streak in sport comes very close to the concept of sustainability in business. It is subversive if not paradoxical that Australia has won the ODI Wold Cup in 1987, 1999, 2003, 2007 and in 2015.  Yet when it comes to T20 World Cup archives, the same Australia does not have an enviable record. It happens to great companies as well. Colgate Palmolive found this in the early 1990s. So did Infosys when after the global meltdown, it was down for a while before bouncing back. Great sportspersons and managers reinvent their game. Great teams and corporations reinvent their game. It is an authentic truth that factors that lead to victories in business and sport and are often referred to as strengths change over time. 

In our lectures for PGDM and MBA at Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, academicians assert that strengths are subject to three dynamic constraints:

·        Time

·        Space

·        Scale

     Great corporations and teams evolve by reinventing their strengths with respect to time, space and scale. Batsmen who score on sub continent pitches struggle on overseas tracks that offer seam movement and bounce. Batsmen who do wonderfully well in test cricket may flounder in T20 cricket. Similarly shots that earn runs in the early stages of one’s career become obvious weaknesses in the middle stages of the career. Managers face these challenges as well.

The PGDM program at Ishan, one of the top PGDM colleges in Delhi is designed to reinvent the academic curriculum, teaching methodology, soft skills training and grooming for a long lasting career.

Tips on Effective Time Management from a Former U.S. President

Soon after the rice and curry for lunch, zoom goes the siesta. This is perhaps a very apt description of the quintessential non- performing assets that corporate and government enterprises in India tend to accumulate and nurture. A busy man is never short of time. Given that we Indians love to spend our time they we want and refer to it as having spent quality time, it makes enormous good sense to dive straight into the depth of the ocean where the problem emanates. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the top PGDM colleges in Delhi NCR, the two year program is designed for learning time management through a system that integrates lectures, student activities, and campus events and on campus housing. The objective is to create a campus climate where students, academicians and staff optimize solutions to problems with respect to time.

The Teacher Leader Dwight Eisenhower

Dwight Eisenhower the former U.S President was a multi-tasking man. The fact that he donned many hats at different points of tie in his life with great poise like being the President of Columbia University, a five star general in the U.S. Army being responsible for the execution and planning of Allied invasions in Africa, France and Germany during the Second World War, a fine amateur golfer and also the first Supreme commander of NATO speaks volumes for time management capabilities that this iconic leader possessed. 

Multi-tasking ability and business leaders who possess this kind of ability are asset to a company. First multi tasking leaders bring a portfolio of skills to the table and hence can be a part of multiple teams. Second, when a company gets the best of many worlds than a master of one, it saves money, time and efforts. Third, these men optimize and save time. As such they are not the usual fire fighters or plumbers who keep themselves engaged throughout the day at the work place dousing one fire after another or looking for plumbing opportunities. They have an unusually high strike rate or efficiency level when it comes to solving problems.

The Eisenhower Matrix

When we talk of the short run and long run in lecture sessions in B-schools, it is common for academicians to delve into delivering well chosen homilies on the fixity of factors of production, sub-optimization of resources in the short run and the different nature of costs in the short run vis-à-vis those in the long run.  The merit of the Eisenhower matrix lies in the distinction between tasks that are important and those that are urgent. He argued that tasks that were important were seldom urgent and vice versa.

 What is the Difference between Urgent and Important?

The difference between urgency and importance in the context of task and time management is based on the classical differences between short run and long run in microeconomics. As in the short run, sub-optimization of resources is asserted, urgency requires fire fighting or availing of plumbing opportunities. On the contrary in the long run, optimization of resources is asserted and thus importance may be ascertained by institution building.

In the context of task management at the work place the to-do list of an individual is the starting point of everything. So it begins with the optimization of the to-do list by classifying tasks as urgent or important. Tasks like responding to emails, phone calls, text messages and documenting reports are essentially urgent because they come with a deadline or are guided by the necessity of prompt response to keep the chain moving forward across levels n the value chain. On the other hand, tasks like achieving targets of sales, revenue, streamlining the system and creating value for business through relationship building.

Q1: Urgent and Important Tasks

These are tasks that are time bound and may create windows of opportunities that can help us in realizing our long term goals. Examples of such activities are answering to emails pertaining to job offers, lead generation, closing sales, etc that require immediate action and may result in a stream of results in the long term. Other examples shall include tax deadlines, emergency room situations, household chores and daily team meetings.

Q2: Not Urgent but Important Tasks

Tasks contained in the second quadrant are those that they may not have a pressing time parameter but are important for realization of long term goals that matter. These tasks typically require strengthening relationships and drilling efforts for the long haul to complete a project or progress to the next level of the project. Completion of these tasks requires planning and time scheduling.

Q3: Urgent and Not So Important Tasks

These are tasks that do not require personal attention. These are priorities on the to-do lists of other people. Instances of such tasks come in the form of interruption to our work. Stuff like phone calls, emails, text messages and requests for ‘help’ on a non transactional basis are some common examples. These tasks need to be delegated.

Q4: Not Urgent and Not Important Tasks

These are tasks that come as distractions. These tasks do not have any bearing on realization of long term goals and do not have any deadlines. The best way to deal with these kind of activities is to delete them from the to-do list all together and make it look clean, mean and thin. Doing so allows us to reduce our burden.

At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, there is a time table for lecture sessions and the remaining part of learning in the form of assignments, projects and group tasks are all announced spontaneously to enable students streamline the clutter of their time table and deal with task and time management so as to raise efficiency levels. We believe that engagement is not efficiency. Achievement of targets is.

Move over B-School: D-School is Here to Stay

India of the early 1990s used to react to B-school graduates and the brand value that B-schools brought to the table with awe and respect in the same breath. The times for sure have changed. As India steps into celebrations of 25 years of economic reforms, the academic team at Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the top MBA colleges in Delhi NCR lays the mortal remains of the B-school concept on the surgery table for a post mortem analysis.

From the D-school established at Stanford University with the aid of $35 million by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, to the baby steps taken by the then new CEO designate Dr.Vishal Sikka for 20 top corporate leaders at Infosys to the obsession that late Steve Jobs had, design thinking is creating ripples out there in the market. With evidently inadequate literature on design thinking in India and most B-schools yet to integrate it into academic curricula, design thinking represents one of the biggest opportunities to corporate India and its conspicuous absence from syllabi of B-schools, the biggest challenge.

A few months back the CEO of Infosys, Dr.Sikka in an interview to a leading English daily remarked that the rise of automation to such unprecedented levels will in the near future lead to a day when people will no longer be required to solve problems of business and engineering. Machine learning, big data, internet of things, machine to machine communication and artificial intelligence shall be more than adequate to solve problems. The challenge for people shall be to find and identify the nature of problems. Perhaps this may be the shortest and surest way to understanding design thinking.

I do as Said, Not as It Can Be Done

Steve Jobs, the iconic entrepreneur and artist of design thinking had once said that design thinking was not how it looked but how it worked. More and more companies across the world are beginning to realize this statement. It may appear subversive if not paradoxical that the Indian way of doing business as stated by Peter Cappelli in his book “The India Way” relies on the obedience school of leadership. This in effect limits the performance of employees at top and middle levels to compliance of protocol, achieving stipulated targets that are essentially financial metrics and have less or nothing to do with the people and programming one’s work to obeying to spill over of instructions. Is this what explains India’s non-performance in innovation at the corporate level? Sadly the answer may be yes.

Design thinking is like an empty canvass with the boundaries being set by the corporate protocol and targets of revenue realization. Yet, it is possible for academicians to lay out some fundamental principles of design thinking and follow the same at top MBA and PGDM colleges. These are as follows:

Move Over Performance to Experience

The euphoria over the products of Apple may be mistaken into being an extended reflection of the charismatic leadership of Steve Jobs. Agreed that there is a man in the machine and a machine in the man, but nothing substitutes for buying and using experience. In fact user experience which is about how the user feels about the product is in many ways more important than the performance of the product itself. This is straight from the Steve Jobs manual. Saying “Hello” to your customers when they least expect it to do so is after all a great way of creating business value.

Understand and Design around the Customer

Right at the board level, there has to be a Chief Design Officer. The Chief Design Officer backed by the personnel from operations, sales and strategy must become the voice of the customer at board meetings and in key positions of meetings where strategic decisions are taken. They may be conceived of as the chaos group in the company. Organized chaos is a precursor to innovating solutions to problems that clients face within the scope and ambit of business projects. It is not that this chaos group shall have the liberty of rebel poets, but must have the democracy to voice customer centric woes to redesign products and processes in tune with what customers demand.

Faster Time to Market

A faster time to market takes a beating when companies try to create products that are perfect. Instead it is advisable to create a minimum viable product, create systems for customer feedback and learning, and incorporate that learning for product improvement as the company hits the ground running. It saves time, money and efforts. Most importantly it allows a company to learn from the teacher leader “coach” like a football team does during the progress of play.

At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, the academic team has conducted a mini case study on the Aikido project of Infosys that was introduced by Dr.Vishal Sikka and the department faculty members are working on a project to study it in greater detail aimed at a full- fledged case study on design thinking to be taught in strategic management.

Tips to Boost Performance and Productivity at Work Place

The noted sports commentator and IIM A alumnus Harsha Bhogle had once remarked: “With a project deadline dangling over our heads, we waste time when there is ample of it available like nobody else in the world and yet in the closing days we work hard to get work done like nobody else in the world.” The statement may appear subversive if not paradoxical. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the top PGDM Colleges in Delhi NCR, the academic team presents before you this short piece where we have put forward some time tested tips on performance and productivity management at the work place.

Early Bird Catches the Worm

This may sound like good old parental advise but there is real business behind it. Many Indians are catching up with the unhealthy lifestyle of waking up to the snooze button and a steaming cup of coffee. It is advised to start the day with a shower and a light breakfast. Moreover there is scientific evidence available that asserts that the production of cortisol a hormone that promotes alertness hikes between 8am and 9am, i.e 30-45 minutes after waking up. The time preceding 8am-9am therefore can be used to enhance creativity, think and reflect on out of the box solutions to existing challenges and ideate brilliantly on campaigns that require the leveraging of innovations.

Dealing with Emails and Morning Blues

It is advised that emails that require a respondent to think and then reply should be sent straight away at and after 6 am in the early morning. A research by the digital marketing company Hubspot shows that emails that are sent at 6am have higher open rates. The time before leaving for workplace is not ideal for answering emails at length but a great time to read emails.

Innovate and Ideate on the Go

It has been asserted that innovation is inverse proportional to alertness. Even before one reaches the workplace and while on the go, alertness is found to be down and out. This is the time that can be used to do the thinking part.

Start the Day Firing on All Cylinders

There is more physiology to explain the alertness levels and focus at work place. Most adults do their best focussed work in the late morning. A rise in the body temperature brings agility to the mind, enables focus and concentration and thus gives a boost to alertness. This is the time to rush through the toughest part of the day at work place and slog through the things that are important and call for the long haul. A generous dose of caffeine can really help to propel you.

A Power Lunch Break

It has been observed that alertness dips soon after the mid day. People should ideally not work during the lunch break. This means that people should ideally take a long break from work during the lunch hour. A real break means going for a walk around the campus, some leisure reading, catching up with news in the canteen of the workplace or perhaps a meditative break.

The Second Caffeine Dose

The most sluggish part of the day is post afternoon. Productivity dips after 2.30pm and this is the perfect time to move to the coffee vending machine or the workplace kitchen for a second dose of caffeine. Yet another leading digital marketing company Mailchimp says that this is yet another peak time for reading emails. Most people even on field jobs are found at their desks at and after 2.30pm and thus it makes sense to hold short online meetings with them over Skype and send emails that solicit adequate response from respondents.

Hit the Gym in the Evening Hours

The American Heart Association points out that lung capacity and muscle strength are at their peaks after 6 pm. One should truly consider hitting the gym at this time or at any point after returning from office. Many Indians tend to substitute this with a stint before the television which is not advised at all. Apart from keeping the physique lean and mean there is a necessity to delete the memories of the day at the workplace-good or bad. While there is no reset button for the human hard disk, even a 10 minute focus on the treadmill or the jogger can be of great benefit in reducing the clutter accumulating in the brain.

At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, PGDM and MBA students are put into a system that consists of a regular academic curriculum that resembles the rush hour at the work place followed by dedicated session of yoga, meditation and power training at the gym. The on campus housing is designed for a corporate lifestyle. 

Disruptive Innovation: Join the Pirates Not the Navy

There are various literary and cinematic adaptations of business lessons that the late Steve Jobs taught us. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, the best MBA College in Delhi NCR, the academic team has handpicked three such pieces. First, there is this all time great business film: The Pirates of Silicon Valley that focused on the early days of Steve Jobs and the challenges of growing Apple from being a junkyard start up to a blue chip corporation. Second, there is the book written by Walter Isaacson which many of our generation have felt as one of the very best on the late iconic Steve Jobs. The third piece is yet again a movie. Steve Jobs as the movie is titled got Michael Fassbender a nomination at the Oscars in the best actor category and while his acting may not have created ripples, the movie drives home important business lessons on disruptive innovation in a very stylized way.

                                 

Disruptive innovation, a brainchild of business academicians of Harvard business school has been doing the rounds in academics and business. Since the year 1995, the term disruptive innovation has been used very liberally by management theorists and business leaders leading to the distortion of the concept. Steve Jobs the original disruptor and these pieces of literature and cinema that are referred above teach us some very important business lessons on disruptive innovation.

First, disruptive innovation is about breaking the rules of the game. It is about what software developers and digital marketers working on search engines and social media refer to as “gaming the system.” As such disruptive innovations as a thumb rule originate in low-end and new market footholds. Low end footholds of the market are those segments of customers who have been taken for granted by the existing market leaders and thus there is an elbow space to cater to the requirements of this segment of the market by focusing on design thinking. Design thinking enables disruptors to design products and processes around these customers who have been neglected and are good enough to make inroads into these markets. Yet again there are precedents where disruptors participate in market development and build markets from the scratch.

Secondly, disruptors do not chase mainstream customers unless product quality improves to their standards. The iconic Steve Jobs worked with singular focus on improving the graphic user interface and the drop down menu. Getting Lisa to say “Hello” was yet another attempt to send a crystal clear message to the audience that unlike the “Big Brother”, Apple was willing to make its products interactive. They did not believe in selling boxes. They wanted to sell machines that would appreciate and understand the challenges of users.

Thirdly, many people and pundits on disruptive innovation get it wrong by asserting that disruptive innovation is a one point stop that leads to something that is water shed in the history of that industry vertical. This is in contrast to what reality offers. Steve Jobs showed the world that disruptive innovation had to be a continuous essay in persuasion rather than a one point development of a new product or process. It has to be a long lasting campaign that has shock value for the bigger and more established market leaders and unsettle them and the dynamics of the market. The value of disruptive innovation lies in challenging the equilibrium of market dynamics and the status quo enjoyed by market leaders.

Steve Jobs used to very often remark: Join the pirates, not the navy.” This statement is worth a million dollars in our attempts to understand disruptive innovation. Companies like IBM that have always focused on an all out frontal attack on the markets have been able to do so using the great repetitive model. This model enables them to scale up rapidly and expand business models that are already tried and tested. Apple under Steve Jobs had been the disruptor. It was built around the strategies of guerrilla marketing that involved hide, hit and run. The navy offers discipline, protocol, anticipated moves and non accelerating speeds of growth. Pirates offer shock value, innovation and speed in their business models. 

Land Acquisition: The Most Important Impending Economic Reform

As India awakes to the razzmatazz of digitization and industrialization, it is worthwhile to ask ourselves about the priorities that we set for economic reforms. The next generation of economic reforms is more about a long haul in certain aspects and an emergency in certain other aspects. Broadly assuming that India as an emerging economy continues to reel under the problems of a labour surplus economy as stated by celebrated British economist Sir Arthur Lewis, it makes enormous good sense to assert that economic reforms that India needs may be classified into two types namely: those for social overhead capital and those for directly productive activities.

While it is true that in an indirect democracy with federal administrative structure, good economics may at times be held to ransom by good politics for the sake of scoring brownie points in elections, it is equally true that some tough decisions need to be taken in order to institutionalize the economic system with much needed vitality in the long run. Land acquisition sadly is one of those decisions that will never be easy to take but needs to be dealt with not using an iron hand but by answering the incentive question.

Most questions in a free market economy concern questions of fair incentives. The incentive question is what bothers the stakeholders in cases of land acquisition. Historically speaking land acquisition is a strategic imperative for any economy before it gets set to take off on the route of industrialization. There are two comments that need to be made here. Firstly, the economy that initiated the industrial revolution, that is Great Britain had to witness the agonies of an Enclosure Movement before the Industrial Revolution. Historical accounts suggest that even a country as great as Great Britain had to forcefully and brutally acquire land by using means that were largely un-British to use the language of Indian economist and statesman Sir Dadabai Naoroji.  Secondly, the Indian economy offers a curious case of economic growth sans any worthy contribution from the manufacturing sector so far. The Clarke Fischer hypothesis that generally applies to economic growth asserts a pattern of movement from primary sector to secondary sector and them to tertiary sector. India’s case is different. Indian economy has traditionally been an agrarian economy and slowly has shifted course from agriculture to services sector by leapfrogging the manufacturing sector.

India’s growth story desperately needs a full proof land acquisition policy that answers the incentive question. The lad acquisition policy has to come clean on the method of assessment of price of land, the administering of remuneration to sellers of land and in certain cases arrange for the relief and rehabilitation of project affected people. Moreover the land acquisition policy needs to answer questions on the guarantee of securing of property rights through an effective legal economic structure as stated by the economist Hernando De Sotto of Institute of Liberty and Democracy, Lima. Yet another challenge is to adhere to the requirements of environmental clearances. Lands coming under the ambit of forest cover and tribal regions are great challenges that need to be handled with human touch. Tribal property rights present a major challenge and one has to unfortunately admit that corporations should not impose the will of free markets on tribes and indigenous people. It shall be great to assert that corporations may think of offering decent options of training and development to project affected people under their agenda of corporate social responsibility and create value by better stakeholder engagement with project affected people. Such initiatives or efforts to offer jobs to project displaced people may be made tax free. Yet another solution may be to offer pay roll subsidy to companies for offering jobs to project displaced people.

The sooner that elected legislators of India, economists and advocates come together to resolve issues mentioned above the better it is for India’s ambitious plans of Make in India campaign. On the other hand farmers and brethren from tribal communities need to understand that land as a factor of production is subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns with every season of cultivation of crops.

At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, the first graduate business school of Greater Nodia, Delhi NCR we appreciate the efforts of the Indian leadership under the Indian PM Shri Narendra Modi to fast track the reforms agenda. As academicians of a business school we believe that businesses need to solve problems of mankind and that land needs to be put to its most productive use.

Creating an Ecosystem for Start Up Firms in Business and Tech Schools in India

India is finally getting its act together to create an ecosystem for start up firms to bloom and prosper. Growth drivers for start up firms may be classified into three categories: legal, economic and financial. Legal drivers of growth include government measures and reforms in order to demarcate a crystal clear policy to define start up firms. Economic drivers include measures by educational institutions to foster the right environment to integrate research and development initiatives with business plans and managerial know how. In other words these drivers call for the integration of scientific know how with managerial know how. Financial drivers for growth of start up firms include access to capital in different forms.

As India gets crazy over the “Start Up India Stand Up India” campaign, the faculty team at Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, the first graduate business school in Greater Noida, Delhi NCR perform an intellectual surgery to comprehend the anatomy of an ecosystem that is required for start up firms in India.

First the government led by the PM Shri Narendra Modi, has played a master stroke by defining a start up in no uncertain terms. This will enable bankers, institutional investors, private equity funds and angel investors to identify potential start up projects that are lucrative targets for credit. In fact the best and the most important step under the new start up policy is that it offers an easy exit option to entrepreneurs. Access to life jackets can be great motivation to budding entrepreneurs to dive into risky waters.

Economic drivers that may be recommended for the start up movement to gather steam shall include the twinning of scientific and technological research with business research through collaboration between researchers, students and academicians of business and tech schools. This shall enable transfer of technology and synergies from backend integration of business processes with scientific know how. In short it will close the gap between invention and innovation. It is authentic truth that Indian techies in software, information technology and other avenues of engineering are great with technical know-how but to extract business mileage from their scientific research they need the business know-how. Techies make for great product development talent and managers with expertise in business development bring a strong revenue realization proposition to the table. A cross-over of the two is a winning combination.

Thirdly financial drivers for start up business in India call for access to capital at different stages and of corresponding types. Seed capital is a challenge that most entrepreneurs identify with. Yet, another and perhaps a bigger challenge is to provide start up firms the capital that is required to be deposited as security or collateral for access to bank credit for seed capital. This is known in business school parlance as mezzanine assistance or risk capital. Bankers can ponder over suitable financial products to offer risk capital for start up firms. Angel investors and venture capitalists have a bog role to play as start up firms expand and vouch for scalability. Over the years, start up firms that struck the bull’s eye, have focused on scalability. Red Bus, Flipkart, Snapdeal and many other companies are great evidences in support of this argument. Scalability and expansion call for sound financial support.  Corporate philanthropy initiatives by captains of blue chip companies in the form of investments can be great not only in terms of financial support but also in terms of the experience that they shall bring to board meetings and thus institutionalizing corporate governance in start up firms from the early days.

As academicians of a business school, we offer our tokens of appreciation for the government to institutionalize start up firms in India and humbly suggest the close working of the ministries of human resource development, MSME and finance. 

News

PM Narendra Modi will monitor projects via 'Pragati' sessions, says Nripendra Misra 

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be starting a monthly conference call with state chief secretaries and secretaries of the Union government starting March 25 for the speedy redressal of grievances and monitoring and implementation of projects. 

The new governance programme has been dubbed Pragati — Proactive Governance and Timely Implementation. Nripendra Misra, the prime minister's principal secretary, explained the thrust of the initiative in a March 9 note to Union secretaries and state chief secretaries. 

"The PM has been quite anxious to design a credible mechanism for redressal of public grievances," he wrote. "He is equally keen to see that programmes and projects launched by the government(s) are monitored properly for timely implementation and desired outcome. In the same spirit and for holistic development of the country, it is also necessary to facilitate from government of India level the projects of the states." 

The programme will be tied together by technology, with information on projects being available at a click. The Pragati sessions will take place every fourth Wednesday. Misra's note elaborated on the architecture of the Pragati IT platform. 

"The design is that when the PM reviews the issue he should have on his screen the issue as well as the latest updates regarding the same," Misra wrote. "During the interaction, PM will discuss and understand the problem areas and will give suitable directions. These directions will remain in the system for further follow-up and review till finality of the matter."