Some insights on routine life

Tea, toast and today’s news, and you get a synopsis of changing world. I always bothered; the daily appearing changes are actually resulting from small changes every day. In past 10 years I’ve witness a lot of change in me and in my surroundings. I believe this will hold true for most of us. I am not debating here on quality of change like good or bad. But, even with acceptance of this fact, I get confuse when see my recent past with a typical day, a typical week or a typical month, I found everything constant, repetitive and continual. When the change actually happened?

I met a person, of my father’s age, retiring from his job, has made a home, supported his children, make them successful by a mediocre, repetitive, constant and continual job in a government organization.  At 60, is he satisfied? How satisfied will I be if reach 60?

There is no harm in repetition. It trains your subconscious to perform in auto mode. You may not be innovative, but you will be less strained and more relaxed person. But the other part of life’s truth is that we have an active life of approx 60 years in which around 25 years are consumed in educating and training ourselves. Do we early have enough time to achieve everything we really want?

The aspirations are always bigger than the capacity of time available, which is why it is called aspirations. But there are some people who, repetitively and continually challenge the capacity of time. For them, their aspirations are continual accomplishments. We have such examples in every field; name any; sports, arts, business etc.

Accomplishments are always balanced. Otherwise, it’s merle money or result. I believe in a balanced approach to life; challenging your capacity of time for all your professional and personal aspirations. If your personal aspirations like your love life, hobbies etc, trigger a balanced personality in you, your professional accomplishments provide a unique identity. In real terms both are complementary. Without one, the other can appear once in a while, but not in routine.

Journal; Journal

Recently, while I was going through a blog post of Pritish Nandi;  “Letters, tweets, one paisa sms” , I got nostalgic on old memories of letters and emails written in patience with full of emotions. Then I recall my habit or writing diary almost on a daily basis. I carried this habit along my journey till now but could not realize when the words “daily” and “monthly” became synonym. I am still carrying some of my college days diaries. Believe me the mental recreation and a feeling of happiness I get while going through those diaries are unmatchable. To keep this happiness to sparkle in future whenever I wish to,  i took a decision to post my journal on this page.

I am writing on this blog site since 2006. Most of my post can be categories in philosophical or managerial perspective of my experience. Now with journals being added, I’ll be publishing my point of view on interesting personal encounters. The only limitation i feel, while publishing a journal,  is the the difference in freedom when writing on someone. Nevertheless, I’ll try to steer my thoughts to flow unconditionally in all possible directions.

Journal; Car Music

Now a days, for last 3 -4 months, I get a chance to enjoy old Hindi song while travelling in car with Patwardhan sir, for office or from office. He’s got a good taste of old Hindi songs especially of around seventies. I am influenced by his passion on not to miss a chance of music concerts in and around Mumbai esp Hindi or Marathi. The effect is to the extent that,  of late , with 60s to70s era music, I got too some of the oldies as my favorites now. You know, a no music to all music taste does not come in seconds…well usually..but my taste for music, this time, got triggered in few seconds.

I always felt that I am not a real found of music. Except Jagjit uncle and Kishore da, no one really drove me to music stores. That was too very selective and more during my college days. In recent times, songs of “love aaj kal” got my attention, thats too in car while travelling with Anoop one day. This song was special. “Aaj Din Chadeya, tere rang..”. It a great romantic score with Sufi touch and a meaningful conversation with God. The first line itself stands both in praise of love and God simultaneously. This song can change my outlook towards music. Other songs of same album, i got attracted to, are ” Dooriya” and “Main Kya Hoon”.

Well.. a song can change your life…

Which category of love you are in?

In my previous two posts Unconditional Love and Beauty of Full Moon, I’d discussed two aspects of love; one, its unconditional which does not seek anything in return  like mother nature and two, you need to be crazy to be in real love like Kalidas’ passionate affection for Ratnavali.

Think of a painter who is mixing various colors to produce his or her thoughts on canvas.  The unconditional love, passion along with a little craziness is evident in his or her real work. He or she remains in unconditional love with his work until the work becomes his or her profession. And at this point he or she starts demanding return in the form of appreciation and rewards. So; unconditional love; when exposed to desires converts into conditional love.

The above example is not ‘love of convenience’ in which we choose the most convenient option available to us. Most of us will fall in this category…Well our tailor made professions are the example. This is for people who take so called sound decisions. The beauty of love of convenience is you never realize when you are in real love with your selected option.

Take a case of ‘Chota Hathi’ (an elephant) who is separated from his family and forced to live with a man called ‘Mahavat’, who keeps and train elephants and uses them for his living hood. The ‘Chota Hathi’ was not happy with this hectic schedule of work coupled with undernourished food. And a day came when the ‘Hathi’ got a chance to escape. But he did not do that. He was in love with the ‘Mahavat’. This is love of no choice. In this you fall in love with one who is closest to you irrespective of his or her characteristics. There could be some debatable examples like love of a son towards his father, religion, community, country etc.

I am not going to discuss “love for all”. Instead I will site “love for self” which is actually inherent characteristics of human being. I’d advocated this in my post SELF CONCEPT.

Well; there is lot to explore on love which will appear in my subsequent posts on the topic.

Slow and Steady

I’d been taught from my childhood and experienced too, that slow and steady wins the race. Undoubtedly I agree that its true but what is the most important word in this saying; ’slow’ or ’steady’.  We will agree that it is ’steady’. So what about ‘fast and steady’?

If slow and study can win the race, fast and steady will definitely win. The only thing to debate here is how ‘fast’ can you manage with steadiness? We will agree the peak performance is not steady, thats is why we name it a peak.

In one of the discussion with my boss we argued about change and concluded change slowly by injecting 5 ml of dose for an incremental improvement. I thought in my mind why 5 ml? why not 100 ml thats too every time consistently. The doubt was who will decide the pace?

I got some cues to resolve this doubt. The environment around us is changing and if this 5 ml is doing equal to or more than that its fine. The pace will depend on time bound objective but it will require consistency. Because if you have to win you have to steady. Along with objective, slow or fast can be decided by the individual capabilities of maintaining consistency.

Just a thought.

Surprise Expectations of Consumer Every Time

When we say we market is changing we should ask ourselves who is changing the market? If it is not you, changes done by your company will not yield significant gain.
I am going to discuss changes in market dynamics with respect to introduction of new products. If a company is not leading the product innovation in the market, company is bound to compromise on the bottom line. In such situation the new product will be new to the portfolio of the company only but not to the market. A real new product introduction means surprise to market.
In one of my earlier post I discussed the correlation between new product introduction and market share. I listed some variables like working capital of channel, rotation of working capital and pace of introduction of new products should be properly planned well before laying out the product road map. It seems theoretical but I convincingly suggest to focus on following parameters at the time of introducing a breakthrough product to make sure that the planed gains are intact:
1. Pace of introduction. It is a philosophy of a company’s strategy which defines dynamism and youthfulness. High risk with high returns. If executed properly, it will establish a product leadership image of the company. Every successful introduction will fetch a yield, during its life cycle, much more than the cost incurred in ten mediocre or failed introductions. When we say pace, it’s important to assume the competition will copy it in no time. Pace is introduction of real products in the market, consistently with a motto to surprise expectations of the customer every time. In competitive environment it will give you a first mover advantage with better sales realization and in monopolistic environment it will increase barriers on entry of competition. The pace of introduction can be decided based on the intensity of existing competition.
2. Working capital of channel. Only new product introduction may not give the desired growth. Think this in a way that if cumulative working capital of all the channel partners is constant, the retail will only replace the existing portfolio with new one. This may give better top line because of higher realization from new product but overall volume will remain constant. If a company’s thrust is to expand, the sales volume will increase only with increase of selling capacity of the channel. This can be done with penetration into untapped market. More distributors or more retailers means more working capital. If such distribution plans are in place the real volumetric growth of new products can be assessed.
3. Cycle time: Or the speed of rotation of working capital of selling channel. This is the area which any company in any industry will love to improve. This is also a measure of supply chain performance. With the proposed implementation of GST (in India) we will see a radical shift in collaborative supply chain management with better distribution at lower cost. A longer term strategy on depot and inventory planning in line with product road map and futuristic capacity planning is required.

COST is a Strategy

Post financial crisis of 2008, followed by fear of sustained recession, most of the players across various industries have realized the importance of four letter word COST. I define COST as a strategy which has emerged out of recession. The startegic definition of COST is explained below.

C : Collaborative Operations

O : Optimization of Resources

S : System Thinking

T : Termination

Collaborative operations: Beyond manufacturing and integration of information, beyond outsourcing, I foresee the impact of globalization will give opportunity to collaborative operations in all areas of business like sourcing, logistics and services. We have examples of airline industry where companies made a cluster through code sharing. They did it after a lot of bleeding and at the time when they were at verge of survival and death. Functions like procurements, ticketing and operations, not only simplified with a significant reduction in cost but also given an opportunity to focus on brand building and consumer experience. The other industries need not to wait for situation to be worsened to consider collaboration. They should move proactively to chart out collaborative global sourcing, logistics and customer services.

Collaborative logistics: In India a big opportunity in on the way to shake all the industries is the implementation of GST by 2010. This can open the doors of collaborative transport, warehousing and distribution. All third party logistic companies have an opportunity to expand their services. Now few companies already started planning out such options. See the following quote of Mr Pradipta Mukherjee, GCPL Vice Chairman, in one of the interview given to business standard recently:

“We would be looking at re-doing our supply chain and logistics costs once the goods and services tax (GST) is implemented from April 2010, and CST is phased out from 4 per cent to nil. We also intend to consolidate the FMCG companies in the Godrej Group, and so, post-GST implementation, we would be looking at how the group FMCG companies can get together to use common depots and supply chain. This would not only reduce cost of operations but also enable reduction of inventory levels”

Optimization of Resources: There is no end to the upper end of required resources for any task. All we need is adequate resource planning. Optimization of resources is nothing but defining just adequate numbers to all the direct cost like manpower and infrastructure. Remember all the adequate numbers can also be optimized. So it’s a continuous process. I say optimum and not the minimum as its not a cost reduction strategy, but its an strategy which will give maximum of all your manpower and infrastructure by challenging their capacity or output on a continuous basis.

System Thinking: I am a fan of Deming philosophy. So I believe that both success and failure are the outcome of good or bad systems and not the manpower. Investment in system actually reduces cost by enhancing the outcomes and efficiencies. The challenge here is not only implementation of world class practices but also how philosophy and strategy of a company can be inculcated in system itself.

Termination: This is law of nature that end of everything is certain. I suggest just deciding the end before nature does. So it will be a wise decision to get rid of not performing assets, business, and manpower as early as possible. This will reduce negative energy of the organization significantly to focus on performance and new opportunities.

Though ‘COST’ seems to be a strategy of recession manager, I feel its reliability even in better times.

Positioning Through Neuromarketing

Recently I was surfing for term neuromarketing on the web. After a great deal of digging, I found simplest definition from Wikipedia.org to restate here:

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, andaffective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain,electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one’s physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.

My next search was on to understand the use of neuromarketing beyond color of the packaging, the sound the box makes when shaken, lights used in the store and near display. The question in my mind was how neuromarketing sinks with positioning strategy of a brand. Or is it a merely sales conversion strategy at the moment of truth? And I found a beautiful article written by Anoothi Vishal in Business Standard on August 04, 2009; “Tweaked to please” on positioning strategy of Le Meridian Hotels in India. And I would love to restate some lines from the same article here before discussing positioning through neuromarketing:

When you step in to any of the eight Le Meridien hotels in India, indeed any in the world, you should be able to smell almost as soon as you step into the lobby — emerging through a portal, an art work usually, at the hotel entrance — a peculiar scent of old books and parchment in a library. The scent machines in the lobby, not always visible except to the most discerning of the guests, are there to get you in the “right frame of mind” in sync with the hotel chain’s positioning as a destination for “guests who seek out a new perspective and cultural discovery in their travel experience”.

This is a good example of neuromarketing activity which actually demonstrates the positioning of the brand directly to the target customer. Though this is the example of a hospitality industry, neuromarketing, if properly defined, will work in any kind of industry.

Beauty of Full Moon

Have you ever observed beauty of full moon?

In Indian literature you can find a lot of writers and poets who has endorsed the beauty of moon as the best in the world. There are two assumptions, one the beauty is feminine in nature and other, though it is not spotless, still nothing is comparable. On feminine beauty of moon, Bollywood has its own stand in their typical romantic songs. Here again the beauty of moon is at top.

There is another fact that moon is also known for is ‘crazy behavior’. The word ‘Lunatic’ means the same. Is there any correlation between ‘Lunatic’ and ‘Beauty’?

You must have heard story of Tulasidas, the great poet writer of ‘Ramcharitmanas’, a Hindu holy book in which the character of Lord Ram is portrayed as the best in human mankind. Tulasidas had a beautiful wife named Ratnavali. He was so deeply attached with the beauty of Ratnavali that he could not afford to be without her even for a moment. Once, Ratnavali went to her fathers place for some day. During those days of separation, Tulasidas could not control his emotions and went to see her in very difficult weather. In those days, in India, even for a married couple, meeting openly used to be treated against mannerism. So, Tulasidas, thinking of Ratnavali, tried to get in her room without knowledge of anyone, through a window which was above the ground level. It is told that he could not even recognize a cobra on the wall and used the same assuming a rope to get into the room. It was embarrassing for Ratnavali, seeing her husband so crazy about her beauty; she scolded Tulasidas reminding his craziness and referred her body just as lump of flesh and blood. That incident changed Tulasidas for ever and he become ascetic.

There is no doubt that beauty attracts. When it involves your emotions we term same as love. But let us not attach love with beauty in this discussion. In the above story Tulasidas was crazily in love with beauty of Ratnavali and a small logic explained by her changed his emotions for ever.

Full moon, representing best of feminine beauty, or otherwise, if attracts our attention is natural. And like Tulasidas, if not for a longer time, even for a second, we become crazy while encountering beauty, it’s normal. By this logic love at first sight and being lunatic is no different. It can be assume that being in love needs a much more passion and emotion than what we can define with logic because with logic we can not understand love.

Need of different approach to anti piracy

The view mentioned in the topic will look controversial if the economy attached is not explained. Piracy costing more than 5 lakh jobs and a loss of around one billion dollar to bollywood. See the article in ET ” Pirates of the Indian Ocean” on 18.07.2009. This is the virtual premium industry losing in the name of intellectual property. Let us not confuse my views as I am not advocating piracy, but in turn I want to highlight some of the associated economics and industry inefficiencies.

The first point is the millions of dollars of small scale unorganised industry spread all across India in manufacturing low cost VCD and DVD players. This is one of the largest unaccounted source of self employed youth who earned their skill in small assembling of these consumer electronics to the trade in the supply chain reaching a customer in rural most areas at lowest cost. The point to mention here is the incentive of the rural consumers in buying a vcd or dvd player is the availability of his favourite movie at rs 10 to rs 20 per vcd or dvd. If the cost of same increased to Rs 150 to Rs250, the self employed industry of vcd and dvd players will be crashed.

The second point is the inefficiency of the industry in providing their intellectual properties at reasonable price. If piracy can, if organised players like Moser Baer can, why not others? The government should first set pricing regulatory norms for the industry before taking any harsh action on the piracy. An efficient and transparent price mechanism will protect the incentives of the small scale industries I mentioned in first point.

The third point is different as I agree in favour of anti piracy because of its malicious supply chain originating in Pakistan. This could cost an illegal organised system of flow of goods across borders, the side effects of which need not to be explained. Government should make special task force to bust these systems. Piracy would automatically be curbed.