Corporate Governance

There is this corporate governance question rasied all the time if CEO and Chairman position should be held by the same person or different persons.

Different posts can hinder decisionmaking speed but gives the much needed perspectives to decision making.

But then how do actual people handle these processes. According to a survey about 80% of all organisations have only 1 person handling the same post and they also have 5% higher sales figure.

So if you want better performance better have one person as Chairman and CEO.

Importance of Succession Planning

Succession Planning is important in politics as well in Business. WE come across so many public spats in Business and politics alike about rebellions.

Well to avoid that there are various strategies that can be used by leaders. Delegation of authority and sharing of power and decision making can keep the squabbles at bay.

In a conglomerate it becomes easy to share power between generations by making each son in charge of a separate division or companies or group of companies.

So if you don't want your son or daughter to make a public disgrace of the family business make plan as soon as your son is 25 or daughter is 21.

How To Save Your Job in a Recession

Just like companies have their strategies for recession beating individuals should themselves come up with their own strategies to beat the recession blues.

Strategies have to be adopted to keep one self alluring enough in Job scenario's.

1. Multi Skill your self : Add new skill's to your resume through e-learning or self learning using computer and internet at home or through self help books or friends.

2. Accept More Responsibility : Don't shirk responsibility in recession as it may even cost you your job.

3. Be Team Oriented : Individualistic achievements may do in the normal times but hard times require networking and aligning individual goals to organizational goals and team play to synergise and increase effective goal achievement.

4. Don't spread rumors : Spreading rumors at such times may invite flak from management.

New Age Media Vehicles

With coming of a new era , comes the opportunities of new Advertising Vehicles.
1. Malls : Malls are used increasingly to target hip and young crowds who are out there to hang out or watch a movie in a multiplex.

2. Cyber Cafes : A survey shows that 50% of Cyber Cafe goers are students and rest 50% are grad's and PG's , these profiles are decision makers and hence can be targetted by advertising solutions used by Cyber Cafes. Using geo tagging you can create tactical advt.s instead of just generic ads.

3. Road Shows : Road shows can be used to create a hype around the product.

4. Mobiles : Mobile advt can be used to reach your potential customer in a cost effective way.

5. Painting Trains and Buses : Painting trains and buses could also get you requisite mind share and high brand recall.

So what are you waiting for go for that new media.

Used Car Market Downfalls due to Nano

How categories of products are intertwined is displayed aptly by the Nano Car launch. The prices of used car is down up to 15-20%. And so is demand. If one can get a new car in around 1.25 lakhs then why go for a expensive car without guarantee.

So here you are with a car competing with the used car market. But then a car for common man at last, with security for the pillion riders as endorsed by the Tata himself.

Even the rates of entry level small car markets are down by 40,000 to 50,000. Now this is some car creating ripples in the Car Market.

Bravo Tata you did some thing commendable.

9XM and Innovative Programming

9XM is a new channel but in its relatively short sting of operation it has seen undue success. That is all due to clutter breaking programming model.

All channels play the same videos. So how can you distinguish your content. 9XM did so by animated propriety content of its own.

Its jocular mascot "Bheegi Billi" and "Chote Bade" jokes are now very much popular with the audiences.

So its up to the programming department to go about menial tasks or think out of the box and make disruptive programming content around its core business.

Who knows some day they may come up with a cartoon channel leveraging the equity created in the core channel.

Now that is some business Acumen, what do you say?

Getting a Job in Recession

IIM Indore records a 15-20% decrease in salary offered to student placements, although more number of companies participate in recruitment.

This shows the job scene in recession. So if you are thinking of getting a job, you are likely to get that job by quoting a lower than expected salary figure. The demand of people is there , more so of multi skilled people.

So the best strategy to have for getting a job at this time is to hop on to the company and wait for the recession to pass sway and then demand your worth.

Now , why wait for your dream job.

Growing Business Through Joint Ventures and Partnerships

Recently Naukri created a application for GTalk customers to add naukri as Friend and search for jobs from GTalk without leaving GTalk.

So millions of GTalk users become potential customers for Naukri.

No referrals, no leads, no followups,

Just pure marketing Nirvana.

If you think out of the box, ready made businesses of the type mentioned above await you. So in this age of recession its more important to Co-opt than compete.

Joint ventures and partnerships are tools to achieve the above.

In joint ventures you have the advantages of market knowledge and insights , plus ready made customer bouquet. One can easily cross sell products to each others customers in a Partnership, or charge a small amount for every business conversion for one way partnerships.

Organisational Replenishment - 20%-70%-10%

Keep you organization vital at all the times, and how can you do that.

For the above purpose you need to understand that there are three classes of workers in any organization

1. Top Performers ( 20%)
2. Mediocre Performers ( 70%)
3. Non -Performers (10 %)

So you need a performance appraisal or measurement system which can measure and classify employees into the above three classes. It is very important for you to be transparent in this process as any attempt to include a sycophant in a above category than deserved will certainly not get unnoticed.

After classifying the people according to their capabilities you have to take necessary action to increase the vitality of the organization.

The above percentages are average. So it should be your endeavor to increase the percentage of performers, reduce the percentage of non-performers and take necessary measures to send the mediocre performers into the performers category by training and motivational techniques.

You know that performers can be ticked off by equity treatment and need differentiated treatment. That's where you need to be bold and carve out a strategy to retain the best at the cost of non-performers.

But non-performers and mediocre may take this to be inequity at workplace so you need to device ways of retaining top performers, like offering secret joining bonus to a top-performer joiner and ask him to keep shut about the whole affair.

So it is totally up to you how you use HR to invigorate your organisations DNA to a performance oriented from a clunky mediocre performence based.

Trust and the Workplace

Trust is very important in workplace. Trust results in a cohesive team at work place which results in enhanced productivity and performance. All these lead to greater degree of goal attainment by a team.

Trust results in better cohesion and better workplace relationships with lesser degree of workplace dysfunctional politics. This will result in lesser lost productive man hours.

Trust at workplace results in better employee retention as employees have greater satisfaction working in such places. They are also likely to recommend the work place to other friends and relatives resulting in better employer branding.

Trust between management and workers result in better Industrial Climate and more peace between labor and management.

Traps in Decision Making

There are various traps which one needs to avoid while making decisions. These are likely to make you take wrong decisions.

1. Misleading experiences

2. Misleading prejudgments

3. Inappropriate self interests

4. Inappropriate attachments

5. Hurrying through a decision

Finding One's Voice

Speaking about motivation. Maslow defined five levels of motivators, self actualization being the top most. Stephan R. Covey went a step further to define a meaningful way in which you can obtain self actualization.

In his book the Eighth habit, Stephan stresses on the idea of finding ones voice, finding ones voice is knowing ones purpose and speaking and expressing about self. The Man always had a voice in the Global Society, in west women found voice, In India women are still struggling to find voice.

This voice should be guided by your values and beliefs. Stephan further adds that after finding your voice you need to help others to find their voice. That is the best existence.

I would say that your voice should be such that it creates harmony in the world. It should create friendliness and peace in the world.

What say guys?

Reverse Migration

With recession hitting Europe and US many Chinese and Indians are thinking of returning to their nations. Tens of thousands of employees already left, and in next 6- 12 months about 1 lakh people are likely to return back.
So the domestic markets of China and India are likely to see improvement, and US market is likely to suffer.
Asian market has 33% dependence on US and Europe for GDP, hence it is likely that a prolonged recession in US and Europe would hurt the Asian Economies.
Indonesia has already received 35 billion dollars from World bank. The IMF and the World bank are likely to gain in this period with increased loan disbursals.
India has already seen its Public Debt of upto 80% of GDP and lowerred GDP growth of 5.3 % this fiscal.
The coming months would reveal how chronic is going to be the global recession.

Focus Areas In Recession

There are four areas in which you can concentrate at the time of Recession. They are

1. New Product development and Innovation : You are likely to capture more mind space if you create a new product or add on feature during recession. Customers are likely to feel that you are a sound company unaffected by the Business Cycles.

2. Competition : Focus on Competition, this is the time when you can twist the arms of weak businesses and send them out of business or gain a competitive edge over them.

3. Consumers : Start new programs for consumers, focus on retaining the more capable of consumer with deeper pockets. Cross sell and up sell to these consumers.

4. Communication : This is perhaps as important as all the other facets of focus areas. Communicate warm messages which are likely to be reassuring to the customers and make them spend whatever money is at disposal to them on your products when given a choice to spend.

Leadership Through Innovation

This is recession time, even if its not recession time, Innovation helps. Innovation helps in staying ahead of people in Businesses. The more you innovate the more you are different from the me-too products. The more the differentiation the more the Brand following. You can be shaped by the market or you could shape the market, leaders are the later category.

Let me give you two examples.

1. Sony has started a smile shutter. A multi smile detection shutter which shuts automatically when all smile. So a step ahead of multi face detection and focus. Now that is some innovation for the consumers to talk about.

2. Motortola uses funky names for its cell phone models, ROKR was a huge hit, the latest model they have is Aura. How about that for some innovation.