Q&A with Mr. Harish Manwani, HLL President & Chairman for Asia and Africa - appeared in Hindustan Times Jan 19 2008
The Q&A heading reads - strategic clarity, every day great execution. I remember reading a book which also was talking about brutal focus and execution. Now is it really possible to have the clarity on the strategy in this changing world where the customer behavior/needs are changing every day. Having said that no one is saying one shouldn’t be changing the strategy every day, but if you change then will it remain as strategy? Anyway, the execution is the most important piece for the organization sucess. So if the great strategy just remains on the paper and it doesn’t executed, then what is the use? So if an organization has set out having a strategy for the customer satisfaction and if the implementation of this strategy doesn’t have a great execution, then even if the company has a great product, it will not be able to break through in the market.
As he says great companies have the capability to continuously build strategies for long term while ensuring profitability and growth in the short term. Now this is tricky; this could only be possible if the company create its product portfolio in such a way that there is a balance between the products created for future and the ones that are contributing for the profitability in short term (may be using GE matrix or BCG matrix). Now many a times it becomes problem in identifying parameters that should be used while creating the portfolio. Here the capability to read the market and identifying the parameters for creation of such a product portfolio is absolutely essential. Now how does the professional managers of the companies acquire such skills? Will it be based on their experience and the consumer behavior trends? Also how about the experience of others which is written in books/articles? However according to Mr. Harish, they attain the above by investing in strong brands and uniform organizational value across the globe. He says 95% localization but still keeping the same organizational value is the key. But I wonder how organizational values can be made uniform across different offices in the globe and yet have such a high localization? Would it be achieved through the strong processes that is created within the organization wherein every business decisions go through a defined set of steps, also would it have been achieved through strong knowledge storage system that captures the learnings/results of each business decisions taken and how it impacts the existing process? I presume most of the companies would be eager to adopt such a model but they fail to balance between the headquarter control and locals liberty in making decisions.
He puts the success formula as:
- hardware - ability of the business to have foresight - point of view about the future, startegic clarity - ability to make sharp choice, operational excellency - every day great execution
- software - leadership who are bifocal - long-term vision, while ensuring sustained performance in short term
This is a nice way of saying that there has to be some qualities that have to be built in the organization through organizational value which should have systems in place to facilitate having that foresight and strategic clarity. If this is coupled with leadership that effectively utilizes this, then success for the business is a sure shot.
According to Mr. Harish FMCG is more immune to cyclical changes in the economics. This is a fair assesment as there are some consumer goods that are absolutely assential for human consumption be it a better or bad economic conditions. But again this is not true for all kinds of goods, so again having a sound product portfolio and diversification definitely help in such conditions.
