The Indian Budget for 05-06

The Union Finance Minister, P Chidambaram, unveiled the annual budget and the highlights have been tax reforms and focus on infrastructure of 7 major cities and increased rural focus.

NDTV has an interesting wrap.

One of the things the urban business crowd is going to hotly debate is the slapping of a 0.1% withdrawal tax if Rs. 10000 or more is withdrawn from banks/ATM in a single day. In effect, one gets taxed for withdrawing one's money on which one has already paid tax!

More stories on the budget:

From Moneycontrol.com, and Business Standard

Shel and Scoble put their first chapter online

Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are writing their book on corporate blogging, calling it "Blog or Die".

They recently put out the draft of the first chapter on their blog and I posted this comment:

One has heard so much about change management , about technologies that will
change the way we work that maybe we need to take another argument...tell them
that blogging is a tool, but the change is really that one they need to make
from a centralized communication medium to a many to many conversation, that
open honest communication is too important a thing to leave to marketing and
corporate communication and PR groups
That is the real challenge for business...else they well embrace the tool but not the mindset and then they will blame the bloggers , for hyping this new tool

What do you think?

B Schools - That question again

Madhukar Shukla takes a long hard look at the B School phenomenon.

It's a must read !

Careerjournal resources

Interesting site from Careerjournal the WSJ site. It offers various salary levels of consulting professionals like:


•Management Consultants
•Consulting-Firm Professionals
•Recruiter Consultants by Experience
•Recruiter Consultants by Specialty
•Management-Consulting-Company Professionals

Go ahead, take a look. The data is primarily US centric, but offers a good perspective. Specially these two recent articles:

Consulting Firms Court New M.B.A. Recruits
A Consulting Rebound Leads To Turnover and Higher Pay

Some recent consulting movements in India (from ET)

Vivek Bali, a former principal at AT Kearney, has joined Star TV after a stint at the consulting firm. Interestingly this is Star’s second hire from the consulting world, last year they hired Nitin Atroley, from E&Y to look after the corporate affairs. It seems the exodus from consulting firms is just not stopping, and corporate India can’t have enough of them.

Aviva and Ravi Bhoothalingam from Oberoi Hotels, have been brought in by headhunting startup Transearch, to consult for them. With so many movements in India Inc, it’s not surprising that even headhunting firms are looking around for new people and that too from outside the industry. Even Stanton Chase has brought in a fresh recruit from Exxon Mobil to head the Delhi office.

Dell named America's most admired company

This is a big deal about an organization that's only 21 years old !

Dell Inc. has been named by Fortune as America's most admired company !

Fortune polled 10,000 individuals, who ranked 582 companies on eight qualities: innovation, employee talent, financial soundness, quality of management, use of corporate assets, social responsibility, long-term investment and quality of products and services.

To compile the list, Fortune and survey partner Hay Group asked executives, directors and security analysts to rate companies with the largest revenues in 65 industries. To qualify for the list, a company must rank among the Fortune 1,000 or among the top 25 foreign companies in U.S. revenue.

The other top-10 companies are: General Electric; Starbucks; Wal-Mart; Southwest Airlines; FedEx; Berkshire Hathaway; Microsoft; Johnson & Johnson; and Procter & Gamble.

Frequent traveller scheme in Indian Railways

The Indian Railways is facing stiff competition from Deccan Air a budget airline, and therefore it's borrowing a page from the marketing lessons of airlines.

Deccan Herald reports:

The Indian Railways (IR) is planning to launch a frequent traveller
scheme, a la frequent flyer scheme, to ensure that they are not lured by the
airlines. Also, like online bidding in airlines, IR may introduce the facility
in select popular trains on a pilot basis.The frequent train traveller (FTT)
scheme may become a reality any time after the February 26 railway budget to be
presented by Union Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav.
The IR, sources say, is desperate to prevent upper class passengers
from being lured by airlines, especially the budget carriers. It is the upper
class which is the money spinner for the IR and hence this segment, along with
freight loading, becomes crucial. Although only less than one per cent of train
passengers travel in AC classes, they generate about 25 per cent of the railway
revenue.Differential pricingThus, even if a fraction of AC passengers switch
over to airlines, it will hurts IR very badly. He is also likely to announce
online bidding on trains. He may also announce the names of the trains available
for such bidding. The Railway Minister is also likely to announce the
introduction of differential pricing on select trains, aimed at improving
occupancy rate in the Indian Railways.

It would be interesting to see how this scheme pans out in reality. In my personal view, frequent flyer schemes are not such a big success. Essentially you're bribing someone to stick to your services. Railways, where people spend from their own pocket will not be able to bribe people specially if they can get cheaper faster travel in airlines like Air Deccan. I mean what would you rather have, fast travel from Bangalore to Delhi in 2 hours or a 24 hour Rajdhani train?

The railways would be better off marketing the journeys themselves as the destination (as the old cliche goes!) , specially in the case of scenic travels like Konkan railways, the toy trains at Darjeeling and Ooty, and a budget version of the exhorbitant Palace on Wheels.

Foreign consultants spark off controversy again

The Left protested when BCG and McKinsey consultants were slated to be reviewing the Planning Commission's work ....and now its deja vu time...

The Employee Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) has chosen Mercer Human Resource Consulting to advise the EPFO on investment opportunities. Trade unions have slammed the move, no doubt scared by 'foreign consultants' and the foreign hand !


The consultancy firm will suggest methods to "fine tune" the existing investment pattern in consultation with the finance ministry. It will also suggest methods to minimise idle funds and examine legal issues involved in investments of provident funds in equities.

Besides, Mercer will also design and develop an institutional and legal framework to facilitate investment of social security funds like provident funds in multilateral guaranteed international investment instruments.

Mercer will also suggest methods for identifying investment risks, besides recommending international best practices of management and governance for portfolio investment. “We have appointed the consultants to suggest improvement in the pattern of investments," Labour Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao told reporters here today.

You're in marketing and don't know what RSS is?

then Scoble thinks people like you and his Microsoft colleague should be fired !

I just love they way Scoble says it: directly !

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.
I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.
Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks.

And those folks who are still asking "What's RSS?" here is where you might find some help. And for the right wing folks in India, I am not talking about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh !

HP hires headhunting firm

News is out that HP has hired headhunters to search for Carly's replacement, and it happens to be Russel Reylonds Associates

The earlier headhunters who placed Carly were Christian & Timbers.

Interesting article on the search.

wi-fi at bangalore airport

This is amazing, I am accessing broadband wi-fi internet at Bangalore Airport !

Ok, so its a promotional offer from AitTel and I get half an hour of access...but that's enough to while my time away till my Hyderabad flight takes off...

By the way, did I tell you all? I'll be in Hyderabad for a week on work.

Coke India's new marketing chief

Madhukar reports that Coke's new Marketing Chief is an XLer ! Yay !

Coca-Cola India has announced the appointment of Vikas Gupta (88BMD)as the Vice-President (Marketing) for India division that also includes Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives. He will assume his new responsibilities at Coca-Cola India from March 1, 2005. Gupta replaces Shripad Nadkarni, the erstwhile marketing chief of Coca-Cola.Vikas has worked with companies like Brooke Bond and Procter & Gamble India in their marketing departments between 1984 and 1994. He joined Coca-Cola India marketing team in 1994 and held various portfolios, including brands and regional marketing assignments. He moved to join Coca-Cola's marketing team at Atlanta in 1999 until his return to India last year. Making the announcement, Sanjiv Gupta, president & CEO, Coca-Cola India, said, "We are delighted to have Vikas Gupta join us and look forward to propelling our marketing success to even greater heights under his leadership."Vikas Gupta said, "I am excited to return to the Coca-Cola family that continues to create excitement in the markets and has won scores of national and international marketing excellence awards."Vikas is an alumnus of XLRI Jamshedpur where he specialized in marketing and finance. Along with an extensive experience in marketing, he brings along an excellent knowledge of Indian markets, consumer insights and hands-on experience of having worked with the Coca-Cola system in India and Atlanta.

Asia's new export

Tom Peters points to the Current McKinsey Quarterly cover story:

"Asia's Next Export: Innovation."
Pertinent question:
You didn't really think China was going to be satisfied with baseball caps & socks?

Emerging markets such as China and India have become breeding grounds for
new management processes and practices that help companies to maintain or even
improve the quality of their products and services while simultaneously slashing
prices. The disruptive impact is now confined to developing countries, but
"blowback" from this surge of innovation could quickly be unleashed on the rest
of the world. To meet the challenge, established businesses must learn new
skills—not least important, an ability to orchestrate complex networks of
specialized enterprises.

MBA aspirants...do you have queries?

Then ask them here , XL prof Madhukar Shukla is one of the panelists, other distinguished folks on the Businessworld MBA advisory panel are:

Ajit Rangnekar-deputy dean of the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business.
Mansoor Agha- academic director, Princeton Review and Manya, India.
Derrick Bolton-assistant dean and Director of MBA Admissions, Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Satish Pradhan-executive vice president-group HR for Tata Sons.
Dharni Sinha-chairman ,COSMODE, a think tank based in Hyderabad, which conducts the most exhaustive annual survey of business schools in India.
Vijaya Khandavilli- educational advisor, U.S. Educational Foundation in India, New Delhi.

Bad ideas

Seth has a post about bad ideas .... I found these words priceless...

The reason is simple: in most organizations, you don't get in trouble for embracing the status quo.
More than a hundred years ago, Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to get rid of his enemies in the German government. He noticed that they were all over 65. So he decreed that this was the official retirement age, and it still is.

I remember my prof, Dr. Madhukar Shukla giving some other examples....did you for example know why the metre gauge in railways is such a weird length? That's because that was the width that horse carriage wheels used to be ! Well, that's not such a bad idea, but more how frameworks get adopted blindly even when platforms (no pun intended ;-)) get changed !

APQC Assessment Surveys

Bill Ives says that APQC is offering a free KM Assessment Survey. And it's online.

APQC is providing an online assessment survey to help you benchmark your organization’s knowledge management efforts. There is no charge. If you complete the following survey you get a performance report that compares your organization’s KM program to top performers and other survey respondents.

And it's not just KM, there are similar assessments for other functions like Supply Chain, Finance & Accounting, Human Resources, Information Technology, Knowledge Management and Facilities
Go ahead, see where you stack up !

Leadership & clarity

In his latest book “The One Thing You Need to Know... About Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success” Marcus Buckingham focuses on a few great leaders and examines how clarity has characterized their success. According to the author, all top leaders:

• Possess a clear vision of a better future that forces them to act and inspires confidence in staff
• Paint a vivid path to the future, reducing fear of the unknown
• Clearly state who will judge the company’s success
• Identify the company’s one key winning edge and focus on it
• Establish a simple way of scoring success
• Act both symbolically and systematically to change behavior patterns.

Carly Fiorina quits as HP CEO

I've refrained from commenting about HP on this blog, specially because I quit HP a little over a month ago (no, I assure you our departures are not related and purely co-incidental ;-)

But, yes, HP is at an interesting crossroads in its history....with a consumer business that tries to tap the burgeoning entertainment spending in consumers as well as enterprise services like IT outsourcing. The HP board seems to be in the mood to continue its earlier path. More here

I personally would favour a division in the reporting of these two groups, and the consumer business be led by Vyomesh Joshi and the enterprise group by Ann Livermore, and both should report to the board, effectively making HP a conglomerate. But the question remains on what should be done to the dollar draining server group (part of the group that Ann leads) and the PC group (now reporting to VJ).
And I really hope that Anthony and Michael get the assignment ! Hey canadian headhunters Cnet thinks both VJ and Ann could be HP's next CEO. Run through their list to start calling other prospective CEOs if you get that email ;-))

Business2Blog profiles a mail from BTS and says that maybe this is what Carly was missing...hmm..I know that BTS did quite a bit of (really expensive) training programmes for HP ! So there ! b2b also blogs about HP's break up value.

More reviews:

The Chair Shuffler is gone.
A satirical look

Seth Godin on the job finding slots

Seth focuses three posts on why the job hunting scenario is broken and that more growth is happening at small organizations where there are no "slots" anymore.

Most brilliant point : "Well, if the single-most-important thing a business can do is hire amazing people, why shouldn't that process be more flexible and be built around the people, not the slots ?"

Read them here, here and here.

Kind of resonates with my previous post on "people as resources", right? Seth is correct, the culture hasn't shifted....yet !

Comments?

People as resources

Chris Anderson has kept on writing about his Mumbai experience and obviously the fact of the number of human beings who are able to work has struck him deeply. (think a nation of more than 1 billion people, where a majority are below the age of 30 !)

Chris raises the question: Is India's key competitive advantage the ability to think of people not as individuals but as available resources, deployable in the millions? It may look that way from a Silicon Valley being depopulated by outsourcing, but I think the answer is actually no.
I imagine that somewhere in one of the planning ministries of New Deli there is a technocrat who is nevetheless thinking that way. But then I think of the call center workers I've met and, more importantly, their parents, who hold the managers of the operation accountable for the moral and professional integrity of their daughters.

Unfortunately I agree with Chris, we do tend to look at people as resources...how else do you justify the term "HR" (which Peter Block was quoted by HR.com as saying should be renamed to "HB" for "Human Beings" !), except one that devalues most of our emotions and objectifies us as "Resources"..in fact, we haven't moved forward too much from the times when people were referred to as "hands" , except now in the knowledge age we call them "talent" !

All this even while knowing that the ability to deploy that talent/skill is dependent on our more "human" faculties, like emotions which allow us to feel energized, motivated and alive !

Yes Chris, we are not transistors on whom Carver Mead' s theory will hold true.

Hiring mistakes

My answers to some questions a magazine posed me a couple of years ago...

· Do you think the good old face to face interview practice needs to be changed?

Yes it does have to change. It should remain face to face but be a lot more structured. HR departments need to be able to sense an interviewee’s behavioral preferences. They should use a lot of “what if…” :what would you do…?” “why?” questions rather than ask about “what” and “how” questions focused on the past and based on the CV.

· Why/why not and what are the options?

Companies could use a lot more case studies and group hiring techniques. They could also use ‘work one day on the job’ so that the interviewee gets a feel of the place, his boss and subordinates.

· Could you give an anecdote (not necessarily within your current company) in which a better evaluation technique could have helped avoid a hiring mistake?

Most hiring mistakes happen when both sides do not gauge the requirements of the other side. In one case a candidate with the requisite skills was hired into a fresh team of a company. Even though she had the competencies that the job demanded of her, there were two major differences that both the sides ignored putting any attention to , or to clarify. She had come in from a process oriented company where everyone knew of the field. Here she was going to be in a fresh team that was starting off and had to put processes in place. In the previous job her profile had been to interface and build business with external customers while in this job she had to interface with internal customers, which eventually led to her frustration and quitting the job in 4 months.

· Could you outline some best practises that will help avoid hiring mistakes?

Both sides need to clarify the job down to the last detail. The candidate should meet and spend some time with prospective peer group and boss. The prospect should also find out how critical is the job, who did it earlier, scope for growth and learning, how will performance be evaluated etc. Remember, most hirees leave on account of interpersonal problems with the team working already , or because what was promised and what was delivered wasn’t clear. Both sides need to explore and clarify their assumptions before they jump in to the joining. Costs of not doing so could be not just monetary but far worse like ill-feeling and a bad taste in the mouth.

Retailing issues

Last weekend we decided to buy a stroller for our baby and also decided to pickup a bigger suitcase.

For some reason, all the major malls in Bangalore were having a discount sale , which meant that they were packed with people.

First we decided to try Bangalore Central on Residency Road, as we remembered it to have a good suitcase collection. Uh-oh. Wrong decision. There were so many cars trying to get in that the line went on to the previous road ! The security guard told me , oh make that, commanded me to go round and come back after taking a 2 km detour.

I decided that Bangalore Central did not want to do business with me.

Driving down Commissariat road we reached Richmond Road where two other malls , Life Style and Globus are located. Since Richmond Road is a one way street, we could not park in Lifestyle, so we parked at Globus and promptly went ahead and shopped at LifeStyle !

Moral of the story: Growth of retailing and malls have not been kept up by infrastructre growth and basic amenities like parking space. Most of these places probably use some outdated ratio to calculate number of people coming in cars, and that ratio has itself changed in the last 3-4 years with the availability of auto finance and organizations leasing cars to employees as a tax saving measure. Unless these issues are solved...retailing's bane with continue to be lots of footfall and not enough sales !

Indibloggies sticker

Debashish says that as a nominee I get to use the IndiBloggies sticker too !

So there it is on the left hand column !