Entrepreneurship – Gururaj Deshpande

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/interviews/india-can-be-role-model-in-many-low-cost-innovations-gururaj-desh-deshpande/articleshow/7512382.cms

Particularly I liked about:

• Near-death experiences are important for one to grow and broaden your comfort zone. It increase one’s ability to take pain
• One should worry about doing things which excites them. They should know where to go next and what to do next. This is how an entrepreneur is born – I am not sure how easy it is to know where to go next and what to do next. Identifying what excites or ‘amazes’ one is hardest thing to figure out
• Necessity is the mother of invention. India can be a role model in many low-cost technology innovations; entrepreneurship in India these days is like street cricket, where any one can play and win a prize!

Challenges before New BT CEO

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2967201,flstry-1.cms

The article outlines some of the challenges that BT’s new CEO Mr. Ian Livingston faces as he takes on the reins from Mr. Ben Verwaayen. Some of the major points noted are:

- top line growth – how to increase top line growth of a “fixed only business”
- customer & services – evolve portfolio to suit its customers, not technology e.g., younger generation are compulsive communicators that uses direct (voice, email, IM) and indirect (social networking sites, on-line message boards, second-life etc). This kind of service is also required for new workers who enter college to workplace
- marketing – “central to achieve greater understanding of customer needs is marketing” – brand association with communication services
- networks and technology – whether spending billions of dollar for 21CN project and whether it is in the right direction
- strategy & structure – strategy of BT has been to defend traditional services, grow new wave and transform the business through 21CN and IT) – does it require any modification to see terms like customers, services and customer services. Also give equal importance for investing in people along with system & processes.

My observations:
- Fixed only business of BT – this would be a challenge for any of the fixed line operators. With declining trend in usage of the fixed line telephony it would be challenge for any fixed line operator to improve the top-line. However I guess new services like IPTV, content access over broadband, prepaid broadband service etc, should help BT to improve their top-line. But unless these service differentiates from the existing competiting services, how can they become popular? Looks like BT also ventured into mobile TV but not sure whether it became profitable
- Strategy for a company would have formed based on the feedback from what customers want. So is it necessary to have customer specific targets in the strategy or the technology that enables such a transformation?

Marketing Situation in Telecom

Excerpts from Mr. Gopal Vittal, Director Marketing & Communication, Bharti Airtel appeared in ET’s 11th March 2008 edition – Winning In Chaos: Just do, learn and do

Mr. Gopal talks about the nature of the telecom service provider business. He draws parallel between the FMCG & telecom service busines as these two industries have direct interaction with mass consumers. He notes that telecom service providing is totally different from FMCG in terms of compression of the planning cycle, value of speed, challenges of addressing diversity of consumers through a single brand, dramatic changes in the consumer profile as subscribers start discovering new ways of using mobile.

But I am not sure whether I agree with all these. First the compression of the planning cycle; now I guess even in FMCG industry the product management has to be really efficient to constantly updating or customizing the product according to end user tastes/lifestyle. Won’t this be similar to the telecom service consumption behavior of the end users, and will this behavior change so fast? But yes, the difference could be that there is no real product for consuming in telecom service business as it is only using of the voice network that is already in place. There is some difference in terms of content based service as there is a scope of defining real assets and also there is an option to bring in getting external parties to bring products under operator’s brand.

Now addressing diversity of of consumer through a single brand; again in telecom service also there are different products created to address different consumers. The segmentatation would obviously different for telecom service when compared to FMCG. But whether the telecom service provider can create a “brand” to address these segments or are they trying to address all these segments through the overall brand, say ‘Airtel’? Now isn’t Virgin Mobile trying to create a brand that targets only the teens?

However I like Mr. Vittal’s suggestion to handle the chaos. I can easily relate this to product management in an environment where consumer behavior/lifestyle is changing very fast. He mentions having a deep-rooted consumer centricity regarless of environment is the first cruicial factor that can work in managing, navigating and winning in a chaos environment. He gives how tracking consumer behavior (e.g., using mobile device to fill those ‘empty moments’) can help service provider to come out with products suiting such behavior. Now to understand that behavior one needs to keep track of the behavior and learn from the experiences of the previous product launches. For this it doesn’t matter whether you do an elaborate planning or just get on with a skeleton planning and keep improving.

CEO Talk: TTSL MD on Future Plan

http://www.telecomwatch.in/bnrs/08-03-03-tata/index.htm

Mr. Anil Sardana took over as TTSL MD after his assignment in NDPL where he was involved in transformation of the organization to focus on customer service. Here is the summary of his interview with Telecom watch on his plans for TTSL

- Customer care and service, benchmarking in various components of the business, with a special focus on the value-added services: customer care and service is mostly taken for granted in the mobile service industry as there is an explosion in the number of subscribers. But with brands like Virgin Mobile who have decided to focus on a particular segment, the customer care/service becomes a differentiating factor for subscribers to choose a particular mobile service providers. With mobile portability in force (and if the charges for owning a number is not high for the subscribers), there will be large scale migration of the subscribers to the service provider who provides a better service. But what is the meaning of benchmarking, is it that defining a goal for each business units like the one focusing on prepaid, enterprise etc in terms of business and service quality? Isn’t this a common practice to have such goals? Focus on value added service is something which everyone is talking about. But how can a service provider drive consumption of the value added services? Would it be through attractive tariff plans or through bundled packages or through customized handsets?

- CDMA focusing on data – this is something that I guess Reliance also agrees and are planning to do i.e., focus on the data transfer capability of CDMA and offer data services to SME sector. Looks like bundling data with different services like, sales force automation, mobile centrex, vehicle tracking, logistics could be one of the way to target the SME segment. Now if they have vertical specific solutions like vehicle tracking, logistics for the logistics/travel industry, mobile centrex and integration with the heal care system in health etc, then service providers would be able to offer targetted services to these SME segments i.e., communication enabled business processes will have to be targetted by the telecom service providers

Learning from Infenion CEO

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205800635
As per Infenion CEO Mr. Ziebart, only way for the companies whose products go inside some-one else’s products is to get into the deep technical level collaboration and should have specific market segment understanding. May be this is true for any of the B2B companies as the company which is playing the customer role in the B2B transaction would be actually having the customer information. Ziebart also mentions that the supplier in this transaction need not have a traditional marketing department that does study on the cluster of the demand and establishes product line to address them. Instead if there is a closer ties with the B2B customer, then with a free-wheeling business unit having technical level collaboration would be able to survive the competiton.

Other point that he notes is about creation of the local standards and how it hampers the growth in the technology. Takes example of the Japan initiative to build a 2G standard but left behind when the GSM is developed. But I am not sure whether this is a fair assesment as Japan had been always ahead of the communication technology and with its i-Mode kind of services, they are definitely ahead of rest of us.

He also says that in Japan the fab companies have the manufacturing know-how but don’t have the system level information which is locked with companies like Panasonic. If I can think of an analogy of this, then it is like you manufacture the hardware but the software is from someone else. So every time you are dependent on the software guy to provide the additional functionality…

According to Ziebart “synergy is priority #2, priority #1 is one should have sufficient returns. There are no strategic businesses in our company, only profitable and unprofitable ones”. This is quite a different opinion; because my understanding is you can not run a business profitable from day one as you will have to make initial investments. It depends on in what time you will turn profitable. So if you don’t invest in future then how are you going to have continued business?

HT Interview with Asia & Africa President HLL

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.