Dossier orporateC

There are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else at MasterCard, there’s Raja Rajamannar, the 53-year-old soft-

spoken Hyderabadi Chief Marketing Officer bent on changing the way money talks. At the 48-year-old multinational financial services company, Rajamannar is the go-to man for new initiatives strad-dling the blurring lines between the physi-cal and digital landscape. He’s also a res-urrection artist of sorts breathing new life to the 18-year-old ‘Priceless’ campaign.

When Rajamannar signed up with MasterCard in 2009, the going was good and the ‘Priceless’ campaign held on to its iconic tag. “When the ‘Priceless’ campaign was launched, there was no social media, no digital, no EDM,” recalls Cincinnati-based Rajamannar, who makes it a point to visit India every year. Well, it was another era. Rajamannar got restless. As he became CMO of the $9.4 billion corporation in 2013, Rajamannar decided it was time to change without losing the essence of a campaign that had sustained and knitted the brand across the world for so long. “It remained an ad campaign for long and we decided to move it to the overall marketing space involving the 4Ps of marketing,” says Rajamannar.

A new brand promise emerged from celebrating priceless moments to creat-ing and enabling priceless experiences through a bevy of digital and physical tools. It gave Rajamannar & Co. permis-

sion to play in the whole experiences space as opposed to just doing payments. That translated into four actionable platforms—Priceless Cities, Priceless Surprises, Priceless Causes and Priceless Specials.

Priceless Cities as a proposition is up and running in 42 cities across the globe and by year end, will touch 55, including cities in India, claims Rajamannar. “It’s about creating extraordinary experi-ences,” he says. Take, for instance, the city of Istanbul. Now three Bond movies were shot there and so was Dan Brown’s Inferno.So MasterCard came up with a ‘Bond ver-sus Brown’ theme wherein MasterCard members can see locations where the

films were shot complete with a historian thrown in to curate such experiences.

Priceless Surprises was launched last year and is today probably the most successful campaign for MasterCard. An example would be customers getting spontaneous treats, beginning with a surprise Justin Timberlake appearance, when the campaign launched. Or, for that matter, the ‘Priceless Surprises Vending Machine’ at the last French Open. When a customer swipes his MasterCard in the machine, it quickly tries to pick up info on the customer based on three questions.

The machine tries to gauge consumer behavior via the responses and then dispenses a small gift, a surprise, to the user—a small cardboard box with a mes-sage. In the context of French Open, it could be anything ranging from three sets of games with Bjorn Borg or a signed ten-nis ball from Djokovic or Rafael Nadal, or

just two bottles of soda from the nearest counter. At the tennis extravaganza last year, the Priceless machines were the hot favorite after the game itself. “We’re cre-ating a series of these kinds of machines with different capabilities at the intersec-tion of the digital and physical realms,” points out Rajamannar.

As far as Priceless Causes goes, as the name suggests, the stress is on philan-thropy. Launched in Manhattan, the company contributed 1 cent to the ‘Stand up to Cancer Foundation’ whenever a MasterCard was swiped at a restaurant in the neighborhood. So far, MasterCard has generated $30 million for the cause.

Of course, causes galore but MasterCard’s Nigerian experiment, which was not a part of the Priceless Causes campaign, shows that the com-pany can do well by doing good just as well. When MasterCard went to Nigeria, it found crime to be such a social menace that it convinced the government to cre-ate a cashless society. Crime was being funded by anonymous sources and cash provided that anonymity. In fact, even government dole was unsafe as the social security amount was either being misused

or snatched away by miscreants once it was doled out. So MasterCard suggested the government make the entire system electronic establishing clear audit trails. Today, ID cards of Nigerians come with a MasterCard logo on them.

The final brand pillar that Rajamannar carved revolved around ‘Specials’. Simply put, the card offers privileges, discounts, rewards, offers—all rolled into one. For instance, on any given day, the Scenarium restaurant in downtown Rio has a mile-long queue. But with MasterCard, the user can march straight in.

As Rajamannar rolls up his sleeves to take the four platforms global in the next 12 months, he’s also scouting for the right talent to make a dent in the intersection of the physical and digital spaces. The Pricing Surprises vending machine is a result of that endeavor.

Rajamannar, a chemical engineer from Osmania University, Hyderabad, and an MBA from IIM Bangalore (batch of 1985) has clearly come a long way from his first job at Asian Paints. But what he fondly remembers is his seven-year stint at Hindustan Unilever where the legend-ary Shunu Sen was his mentor. From there, he moved to Citigroup and a couple of other companies before making his way to MasterCard. “The best marketing coaching that I ever had was at Levers and all that learning happened on the job.” In one word, his seven years at Hindustan Unilever were priceless. CD

moinak.mitra@timesgroup.com

THEECONOMICTIMES

Reinventing Priceless

strategy

trends

How MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar resurrected the iconic

Priceless campaign that still resonates 18 years on By Moinak Mitra ASH

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PAL

We’re trying to encourage experiments

faster... We constantly learn from each other

Nikhil Arora VP & MD,

Intuit India

Whenever there is a solid business case around a product, you need an environment where you want to develop the product line at a rapid pace unshackling it from the rest of the processes that exist in very large companiesAmit Phadnis President, Engineering, Cisco India

We must be able to admit on messing up, otherwise it leads to fear of failureAnil Valluri President, NetApp India

Goliaths sometimes need to act like Davids. Here’s how tech giants are rekindling their entrepreneurial zeal By Moinak Mitra ART OF STAYING NIMBLE

Intuit

Two Pizzas OnlyIt may be a $4.5 billion financial and tax preparation software company, but Intuit pretty much relies on decisions by experiment rather than by Powerpoint, or bureaucracy. The India ops of the California-headquartered company has adopted what Intuit India VP & MD Nikhil Arora calls ‘lean experimentation’. Employees are urged to come up with a hypothesis through testing, and given six weeks to come up with results. “We’re trying to encourage experi-ments faster,” says Arora. Of course, nine out of ten experiments fail but like the other big tech firms, Arora “celebrates failure” as the learning curve gets lengthened.

In fact, the size of each team too strictly mimics the startup pat-tern in what the company dubs the ‘2 pizza team’—it cannot be larger than 6-8 people, like startups in their incubation phase.With 1,000-odd employees in India, Intuit also throws in a ‘brainstorm’ initiative in a casual environment, like a cafeteria, for employees to come up with ideas. These are then posted in-house for other employees to further debate or build. Finally, a leader challenges or sponsors the idea. The company has so far used 300 ideas via the Brainstorm sessions.

Moreover, the company regularly works and partners with start-ups. Two years ago, it even hosted an event, Intuit Super Angels, in which it engaged with a network of startups with employees mentor-ing and reverse mentoring the startup community. “We constantly learn from each other,” says Arora. It surely fell into place last year when Intuit acquired the Jaipur-based KDK, a tax filing software startup, as Arora admittedly spent a lot of time with its founder.

Cisco

Fail FastWith over $47 billion in revenues and 11,000 employees in India, the word nimble doesn’t spring to mind when you think of Cisco. The company’s leadership begs to differ. Cisco is focusing on building smaller, high-impact teams. Even on complex products, the compa-ny is trying to build nimble teams that are virtually self-sufficient: comprising developers, hardware engineers, software engineers, product managers, go-to market members and a customer repre-sentative. Amit Phadnis, President Engineering of Cisco India, believes it is ideal for such teams to scale up very fast, typically mirroring the first phase of a startup’s growth trajectory.

A company the size of Cisco is bound to have large software and hardware teams. But recently, they’ve been merged into a single en-tity. The logic is to bring software engineers, the test guys and devel-opers on a single platform while cracking a product. “It’s all about how quickly such teams can be brought together,” says Phadnis.

The idea is to create structures that allow people to fail fast. The company generates some 75-100 workable ideas every 4-6 months across the Cisco network worldwide. About 50-60% of them fail very early. The ones that remain are evaluated for the product phase in 3-6 months.

But perhaps what takes the cake is the concept of spin-ins, which basically empowers a team to such an extent that a separate com-pany can take root outside of Cisco even though the latter pumps in all the resources. “Whenever there is a solid business case around a product, you need an environment where you want to develop the product line at a rapid pace unshackling it from the rest of the pro-cesses that exist in very large companies,” says Phadnis.

NetApp

Flat OutAnil Valluri, President of NetApp India proudly declares that his company is a $6.3 billion startup with the founders still intact. Thanks largely to the flat structure within the organisation, NetApp has managed to remain nimble. The company has a three-layer hierarchy — global, regional and local — enabling the entire staff to have their ear to the ground.

Valluri doesn’t have a cabin and neither does Tom Georgens, the global CEO. It allows for an open environment with people expressing ideas freely. For in-stance, in the ‘Brown Bag’ sessions, people hold impromptu conversations to carve out ideas.Once these take root, teams of 15-20 people work on each project with the technical directors and senior managers going through the entire pro-cess of ideation to prototype and marketability. If ideas fail, team members owe up to the responsibility. “We must be able to admit on messing up, otherwise it leads to fear of failure.” He adds that the intent is very important, and messing up with the wrong intent can have dire consequence

Every company begins as a startup – full of enthusiasm, bursting with ideas and entrepreneurial zeal. With growth comes the need to organ-ise and professionally manage. Then come more managers, ironically, to manage managers. Layer upon layer is added till the organisation becomes a large Kafkaesque bureaucracy. In the end, the once nimble

startup becomes a large, rigid corporate engine that maximises profits and minimises risk.

Can that process be reversed? Can large billion dollar companies turn back the clock and mimic what upstarts are doing? Can they create a culture of innovation that startups so specialise in fostering? Apparently, yes. That’s exactly what a handful of tech companies are attempting in India. While some are building lean “two pizza teams” to focus on innovation, others are actively seeking entrepreneurial ideas from their employees and stakeholders.

Mimicking... continued on pg2

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In the Sama Veda, all the hymns of the Rig Veda are given melodies. These melodies are classified into two: the grama-geya-gana, that which must be sung in settlements, and aranya-geya-

gana, that which must be sung in forests. The former is more accessible and popular while the latter is complex and distant, considered to be much more powerful. The settlement refers to familiar, predict-able, domesticated spaces. But the forest evokes mystery, fear and the unknown. Corporations are settlements, function-ing to a rhythm and a goal. Startups function outside corporations, in the forest, with no guarantee of success: it is a space of anxiety, and innovation.

Startups can turn into large corpo-rations but can corporations create ecosystems that breed innovation? Corporations want to: the upside is great. But the shareholder is wary: for the down-side is much greater. How much do you invest? In whom do you invest? When do you decide enough is enough? When do you close shop? How do you measure success?

In a start-up, the risk is taken by an individual or perhaps a bunch of individu-als, who stake their career and comfort to take a risk and are answerable to no one but themselves. In a corporation, there is a whole bunch of shareholders who want quarter by quarter success, and have hawk-eyed auditors and regulators check-ing if their investment is safe. The two ecosystems are very different. How does one create a forest within the settlement? Is it possible? Or will the forest turn out to be just another garden, well maintained by the management that expects predict-able results?

We are always told successful stories of startups and innovators. No one really

tells us the failure rates, the hundreds and thousands of ‘garage enterprises’ that failed despite promising starts and great investments. We are charmed by the ‘suc-cess’ of innovation, but few are warned of the failures of experimentation. Startups

can handle the failure. But in cor-porations, someone needs to be held

responsible for the loss of shareholder money. Who will it be? The CEO? Will he

sacrifice his bonus if the innovations do not manifest, or fail to deliver a promise?

An innovator usually innovates so that he can benefit from the innovation,

all talk of helping the market and provid-ing customer value notwithstanding. He is spellbound by the glamour associated with innovation: the millions of dollars, the invitation to give talks at entrepreneur summits, the standard talk of hard work and risk taking and perseverance, and the denial of luck as a factor, which meets with standing ovation! In a corporation, who will benefit from the innovation? The individual, the team, or will they get just a sliver of the profit with the larger lions share going to the investor-shareholder?

In India, the ‘brahmin’ was expected to stay poor in the pursuit of knowledge, and the ‘trader was expected to stay rich in the pursuit of wealth. However, in the new world order, every brahmin functions like a trader and every trader functions like a brahmin. The lines are blurred. Innovation is not its own reward; the money matters. And the developer is constantly afraid if the large corporation will appropriate his idea and he will be left with the scraps. It's a real fear that makes many smart developers want to leave and start their own start-ups.

In ancient India, in many villages, there were sacred groves of the snake-goddess. The idea, we now realize, was to ensure biodiversity in the region, a place where the forest thrives, for the forest is where

all seeds, not just profitable ones, can ger-minate without being discarded as weed. These were outside the settlement, not inside. Aranya is always outside, not inside the grama. So perhaps corporations can use a share of their wealth to support start-ups outside their controlled ecosystem. To support forests inside the settlement requires a great deal of courage. Google is striding forth in that direction, and Apple too, though some people have doubts, de-spite rich profit-harvests. But it requires courage on the part of the shareholders, and the willingness to gamble, and even fail. Failure is something few boards would approve. CD

management mythos

Devdutt Pattanaik writes and lectures on relevance of mythology in management. He is the author of Business Sutra: an Indian approach to managementHe may be contacted at devdutt@devdutt.com

Corporations are settlements, functioning to a rhythm and a goal. Startups function outside corporations, in the forest, with no guarantee of success: it is a space of anxiety, and innovation

Innovating in Forests and Fields Who benefits from the innovation is a question few really ask By Devdutt Pattanaik

Mimicking Startups

An innovator usually innovates so that he can benefi t from the innovation, all talk of helping the market and providing customer value notwithstanding. He is spellbound by the glamour associated with innovation

We are always told successful stories of startups and innovators. No one really tells us the failure rates, the hundreds and thousands of ‘garage enterprises’ that failed

In the new world order, every brahmin functions like a trader and every trader functions like a brahmin. The lines are blurred. Innovation is not its own reward; the money matters

Art of Staying... continued from pg1

Autodesk

Inviting PartnersFor the $2.5 billion Autodesk, the best way to seek out innovation and remain agile is through partner-ships. “We look for innovation by incorporating our external environ-ment,” says Pradeep Nair, MD of Autodesk India.

Autodesk is a global leader in 3D printing, a globally disrup-tive phenomenon helping consumers to do manufactur-ing. The company has set up a ‘Spark’ innovation fund last year with a $100 million kitty for startups to come up with break-throughs in 3D printing, thereby acting as a venture capitalist. It’s the same in partnering with universities and labs globally.

Autodesk has had a long partner-ship with the National Institute of Design to establish three Centers of Excellence for Innovative Design at its campuses in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Bangalore in India. These design labs are equipped with cutting-edge 3D design software from Autodesk. “We also work with institutions like Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology on knowledge sharing and facilitating connections with top institutions in US, like MIT,” says Nair.

The idea of partnering with in-dustry and academia has also been stretched to tech networks at large. Now the company has something called an Autodesk Lab, aligned to the office of the Chief Technology Officer. When the product develop-ment team within Autodesk comes up with an idea, the Autodesk Lab makes it available to the commu-nity at large. “The products evolve around a lot of user feedback and also weeds out those which may not have much traction,” says Nair.

Tata Communications

Curious CaseIn 2013, Tata Communications launched its ‘Shape the Future’ initiative, wherein employees were encouraged to take risks. The pro-gram invited people to submit ideas that have the potential to become

a $200-million business within ten years and touch 200 million people; select the best ones, and then coach the teams set up to imple-ment them.

Again, in early 2014, Tata Communications launched an initiative for fostering innovation and futuristic thinking called ‘Moonwalk’. Five teams were assigned five differ-ent subjects (unrelated to the company) and asked to explore each of them. “It encourages intellectual curios-ity,” says Julie Woods-Moss, CMO & CEO of NextGen Business, Tata Communications.

Apart from fostering a culture of innovation akin to startups, Woods-Moss is open to innovations happening outside the company. A

hackathon is held every year with a prize purse of $50,000 thrown open to external candidates. “The winning

team can come and work for us for 90 days but we will have the right to take it (in-novation) to the market,” she says. “Startups learn from our product managers and we learn from them.”

Interestingly, the flat structure of the company enables fast decision-mak-ing, which has resulted in something called ‘virtual

board’ that meets every Friday. The job of this body is to approve capital for funding of ideas. “Elsewhere, capital boards meet in three months and it gets stressful as projects get delayed,” says Woods-Moss. CD

moinak.mitra@timesgroup.com

Startups learn from our product managers and we learn from themJulie Woods-Moss CMO & CEO, NextGen Business, Tata Communications

We look for innovation by incorporating our external environmentPradeep Nair MD, Autodesk India

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Japanese companies have moved into India faster than they have done any-where else in the world, including China. In the

past 10 years, they have invested a capital of $300 billion (including re-invested capital), for what each of the groups call long-term India play. There are as many as 1500 Japanese companies which are op-erational in India. The car compa-nies of Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan and Honda tell only half the story.

But the auto industry is just the more visible part of the Japanese industry in India. Today, Japanese companies are building power plants, SEZs, freight corridors, metro rails in the infra side and have considerable market share in consumer, automotive and electron-ics products. They are the second largest foreign employer in India with a rough estimate of 2,00,000 employees on the payroll and

temporary staff together. There is hardly a firm or an individual who hasn’t encountered a Japanese ven-dor or a customer and learnt their basic operating parameters of dis-cipline, timeliness and precision in communication. So, what is it like to work with the Japanese? Here are some observations:

They love an India posting: Unlike some expa-triates from elsewhere in the world, Japanese executives love to be posted in India. They don’t count their time spent here to hit the 3-year time-lim-

it and eject out, immediately after. In fact, senior executives who get posted here are handpicked from US & European circuits because of their English speaking abilities. Not once, either in the open or in the backroom, do they pass comments on the condition of Indian roads, traffic, pollution or for that matter Indian regulation. They assume they are on a mission to support Indian infra growth. Engaging in a conversation with them about the prospects of Indian infra de-velopment will be refreshing and inspiring for an Indian associate or a partner.

The principle of Genchi Genbutsu:Even in this digital age, Japanese believe in personal meetings by visiting the place of action. If you are in discussions with

them for an M&A or any transac-tion even of revenue nature, they travel to India or expect their future partner to travel to Japan, many times over and often, in droves. Genchi Genbutsu means ‘go and see’. We encountered a strange incident while hiring a business manager for a Japanese client. A candidate, who was to join, backed out at the nth minute, which sur-prised them (and not us!). They did not respond to our mails offering to find a replacement for about four weeks, after which they restarted the process all over again. In the intervening time, the India CEO of Japanese company had to travel to Asia Pacific headquarters to ex-plain to his boss about the incident personally, who in turn travelled to Tokyo to clarify things. For matters of critical importance, they travel.

Less noise & more ef-ficiency: This isn’t a reference to a car design pa-rameter. It’s their operating DNA. In the prelude to any internal or external meet-

ing, they don’t believe in verbose PowerPoints. They want meetings and PowerPoints to focus on cur-rent status of a project and future plans boiled down to time-lines and action-points with responsibility affixed. Their presentation format is not bullets in English. Their presentation is data interlinked with arrows and block diagrams depicting the work-flow and captur-ing responsibilities. They listen in carefully to a presentation and sometimes don’t ask questions, not even ‘nod’ to convey their ac-ceptance. As a business partner or an internal executive, you should move on assuming you will have to progress as per plan. There is no ex-plicit compliment or comment.

Data and growth-oriented budgets are sacrosanct: It is said jovi-ally that Japanese don’t read a spreadsheet – they instead suck the data from it. Such is

their obsession for data. They don’t like statistics, which according to them is ‘past processed data.’ They like real time operational data which emanates from the market or the shop floor. Then there are no managers or vendors in a Japanese system who don’t carry KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Everybody is measured by a set of KPIs on a monthly basis. Their faith is : if the company identifies right KPIs and the executive hits the KPI targets, the final financial outcomes are taken care of. Even in market-sensitive consumer products, they first fix their supply side through KPIs. As far as an executive’s stand-ing in the corporate, no matter how eloquent you are, you are as good as your last performance against the budget. Their budgets assume a minimum of 25% to 30% growth and they work backwards on how to achieve it.

Patience is their middle name: They may like your proposal but they would still spend a lot of time to come to a decision. They will examine system-wide consequences of selecting you as their partner

or an associate. They will relay the contractual obligations to their legal teams all over, internation-ally before securing a go-ahead. They will not compromise on their systemic requirements whatever be the urgency or importance of a

local issue. They will not misrep-resent the facts to their internal departments. If you stand their due-diligence processes and come out successful, then they will target long-term partnership and gener-ally have a win-win approach.

Centralised deci-sion making: Indian management boxes are

generally staffed ‘2’ in a box. Often, Japanese companies will employ an Indian procure-ment manager, treasurer or a

sales director but team him with a Japanese expert in the same position. They believe the Indian manager will function with local insights and the expat will convert all the operating data into an inter-nally more palatable Japanese ver-sion, mail the packets to HQ and await decisions from the HQ. The expat in the box is an intermediary between Japan and Indian market, which causes delay in decision ap-provals but so be it as they still do not believe in decentralized local decision making.

Huge credence on softer values: They reject candi-dates because they are weak in EQ. An aggressive pre-senter or a tall-claim made

by a prospective partner will turn on an amber light in their minds. They tend to classify whoever they meet as ‘manager’ or a ‘clerk’ based on whether the individual is a heavy weight (thinker-doer) or a light weight (a plain-vanilla execu-tor or a mere talker). Once they tie-up or partner with an associate, they dramatically turnaround from being tough to being more trusting. They are highly focused on values of: humility, patience, trust and peace-loving. They avoid controversy and conflicts. They work 12 hours a day and want their time spent on productive work and not on conflict resolution. CD

The author is MD-India of RGF Executive Search.

The views expressed are the author’s

personal views

by invitation

Since its emergence in 1995, the con-vergence of fast communications, digitisation and globalisation has offered tremendous benefits to the

Indian technology services outsourcing community. Firms from the United States and Europe discovered that by leverag-ing lower-cost labour, they could shift the provision of routine tasks offshore, with results that dropped right to their bottom lines. Indian companies benefitted from this trend enormously, with growth rates that routinely exceeded the double digits, creating a boom mentality.

That boom, and those growth rates, are beginning to evoke nostalgia as executives in Indian companies come to grips with the dilemma that many of the advantages that created the earlier boom – relatively inexpensive labour, fast communications capabilities, English language fluency, some government policies, and an opening of an economy that had been fairly closed for some time – are not going to represent the seeds for future growth.

The core value proposition for many of the big IT services companies in India was that they could take care of tasks for their clients that were either not something their clients wanted to keep in-house, or that could be done more cost-effectively in a services center based in the country. That model is well on its way to competi-tive erosion.

Labour in India is no longer as inexpen-sive as it once was, and an increasingly as-pirational workforce has no compunction about leaving their employers for a better situation. Indeed, in 2013, the Hay Group reported that their analysis shows that 1 in 4 employees was likely to be defecting from their current employer. Other countries, moreover, can provide even less expensive labour than India can, and some, such as the Philippines, offer reasonably high lev-els of English fluency.

More importantly for the Indian IT Services sector, the competitive advan-tage of providing relatively inexpensive basic coders to firms in the United States and Europe has eroded. Tech budgets, which once grew by leaps and bounds have been pulled back. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, the Chief Operating

Officer of Infosys bemoaned this state of affairs. Companies “are not pouring incremental money,” into their IT infra-structure, said UB Pravin Rao, the chief operating officer of Infosys, at a leader-ship conference in Mumbai this month. “Earlier we used to see increases in tech-nology budgets. But today, it’s unheard of.”

To move up in the value equa-tion and avoid the downward pres-sures of commoditisation, Indian firms such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and others are looking at add-ing new capabilities in things like big data, analytics, cloud comput-ing, mobile services and social

networking. Such a dramatic shift in busi-ness models is not likely to be easy.

These firms will be competing for scarce top talent in these areas not only against each other, but also against both large firms not in their industries and en-trepreneurial startups, who can offer the

promise of less bureaucracy and a bigger payoff.

For another, the transition from a profitable and high growth business model to a more uncertain and potentially less profitable one is very difficult for most companies to make. Even a few quarters of slower growth and margin pressure

can lead to heavy criticism. Nasscom, the industry association, clearly recognises the challenge. Its web page not-so-subtly recognises the end of Business Process Outsourcing as a key source of competitive advantage. Instead, it suggests, the indus-try needs to be talking about “Business Process Management” as part of a trans-formational overhaul of a re-branded industry. Success at transformation is not, however, guaranteed – witness the lackluster outcomes of these firms’ efforts to get into consulting some years ago. That just didn’t work.

So what should the leaders of these companies be considering? Certainly, they will want to rigorously examine their portfolios of investments, preparing to invest in new options for future growth, as they are already doing. They will need to be courageous in disengaging from exhausted lines of business and services. They will need to be considering what new business models might prove to be attrac-tive. And they will have to make choices about how they will address significant shifts in the industry. The most obvious is to anticipate and prepare. A little more subtle is when companies can take advan-tage of second-order effects, as when new opportunities emerge because customers are changing. And most intriguing would be if one or more of these firms can be the spark of a new, high-growth disruption. CD

The author is a professor of Columbia Business School in NY

Indian IT needs a rebootThe competitive advantage of Indian IT majors has eroded – they now need new business models By Rita Guther McGrath

Tango with SumoJapanese are fun to work with provided you

understand a few intricacies. Here are seven unique things about Japanese work culture you need to

understand By R Suresh

KPIs

HQIS BOSS

Irecently attended a de-bate at a prestigious US university between two academics, one of them

an engineer, and the other a musicologist. The former was arguing that organisations increasingly need people with “soft skills”. Barely were the words out of his mouth when the musicologist interrupted, angrily pointing out that these “so-called” soft skills were in reality much “harder” than most people imagined. I could not agree with him more.

First, a little background. The terminology here dates back to the beginnings of busi-ness language, in late 1950s America. The rapid industrial and economic growth that followed the end of WWII had created a new profession: the manager. This role came about as a result of the need for supervisors with increasingly sophisticated abilities able to oversee the different activities of a company, from operations to sales, and finally, to create strategies to respond to the dynamics of the marketplace. The technician completed his studies, and reality converted him into a manager. Would it be possible to create these people at universities? How to give the profession of manag-ers the sheen of science? The first management schools answered these questions by putting their students through courses based on quantitative, “hard”, disciplines such as economics, mathematics, and behavioral psychology.

Soon, “scientific” manage-ment was not sufficient to deal with the vast range of problems managers faced. The role of people and the

importance of social interac-tion meant that the manager needed to complement a body of knowledge based purely on business with other skills: empathy; communication, self-awareness; influence, etc. Here we enter the world of the intangible, the so-called “soft” skills because they cannot be measured. That said, there are at least two reasons why these abilities are anything

but “soft”. In the first place, there are extremely difficult to acquire and develop, and certainly cannot be learned from books and blackboards; they come from continual reflection and a personal wish to improve one’s communica-tion skills. In second place, they are the essence of direct labor: what differentiates a technician from a manager is that the latter gets results from other people, a task where “hard” skills are of little use. Perhaps it’s about time we changed those labels round to recognise the real value of di-rect labor in today’s world. CD

The Author is a faculty of IE Business School, Spain.

The illustrations in this series are by Spanish artist

Miguel Panadero

management musings

It is time to change the old labels By Cristina Simon

Why soft skills are often the hardest to teach

WHAT DIFFERENTI-ATES A TECHNICIAN FROM A MANAGER IS THAT THE LATTER GETS RESULTS FROM OTHERPEOPLE, A TASK WHERE “HARD” SKILLS ARE OF LITTLE USE

TECH BUDGETS, WHICH ONCE GREW BY LEAPS AND BOUNDSHAVE BEENPULLED BACK

Rita Guther McGrath

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and finally

(Compiled by T V Mahalingam)

Edit & Desk : Dibeyendu Ganguly, Moinak Mitra, Priyanka Sangani, Dearton Thomas Hector and TV Mahalingam Design : Shubhra Dey, Sanjeev Raj Jain, Nitin Keer

:: wanderlust:: wanderlust:: crowdsource:: crowdsource

with son

Atharva at

Kappad

Beach,

Kozhikode

Far-out destination: La Jolla beach area, San Diego. The sight of the seals on the Pacific Rim is stunning Bon Vivant Moment: Watching the sunset from Victoria Peak, Hong Kong, as the city lights come on Outdoorsy activity: Snorkeling at Bat Island, GoaEmptied my pockets on: A Breitling watch during a US tripPanoramic views: Canacona beach in South GoaIndian Surprise: Rajma Chawal,topped with Desi ghee at Peerah, during a road trip from Jammu to SrinagarBest drive: From San Diego to Los Angeles and from Goa to Mangalore. Can’t choose which one is more exhilaratingGourmet Delights: TK’s at Hyatt Regency Delhi. Japanese food at its Indian bestStreet Food Surprises: Vada Pav at Worli, Mumbai, near the old pass-port office. The devil is in the red chutney inside Best Bar: Pete’s Bar overlooking the Pacific, San DiegoGoofy Traveller moment: A sound-cum-sign conversation with a short-on-English Chinese co-trav-eller on the 40-minute ferry ride from Shekou port to Hong Kong airport terminal Traveller Tips: Travel light. Golf bag doesn’t count as travel weight thoughInteresting stranger: An Israeli tourist I met while lounging in a Goan bar. Taught me unforgettable lessons on the meaning of family values and balance of life

Vishal SehgalCo-founder & Director, LAVA International

Who has more power in a start-up? A founder or a CEO?Be a founding CEO and there is no doubt, you have the most power...

Let’s assume we are talking about a venture-backed startup, and you founded the company. Now the VCs recruit a CEO to run the company.

The CEO reports to the board and you report to the CEO, so the CEO has the power to fire you. That’s the way it works or should work.

That being said, you should get to participate in the hiring of the CEO, and your voice should be loudly heard.

Your thought process should be to win, and the CEO is the being brought in to help you, the team, and the investors win. That’s the way it should work, but many times it doesn’t.

Usually founders and CEOs clash because the wrong person was hired or you, the founder, are standing in the way of the com-pany’s progress. Let’s assume the CEO is good and you are obstruct-ing progress. The CEO should push you aside, and the board should support the CEO.

Hopefully you bought into bringing in a CEO, and the CEO is top-flight. Then, you, the team, and the board have an excellent chance of winning.Source: http://www.quora.com/Who-has-more-power-in-a-startup-A-founder-or-a-CEO

Brett FoxCEO, Hi-Tech Entrepreneur, Author, Mentor, and Business Builder

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Think Carlos Slim and Mukesh Ambani are rolling in money? Check out these super rich gents from the past

Yesteryear Zillionaires

GRAPHICA

HENRY FORDJULY 30, 1863 – APRIL 7, 1947

ANDREW CARNEGIENOV 25, 1835 – AUG 11, 1919

JOHN D ROCKEFELLERJULY 8, 1839 – MAY 23, 1937

OSMAN ALIKHAN, ASAF JAH VII6 APRIL 1886 – 24 FEBRUARY 1967

Henry did not invent the auto-mobile. Neither did he invent the assembly line. He built the first automobile that middle class Americans could afford. Ford also pioneered “the five dollar workday” where he dou-bled the minimum wages from $2.34 to $5 a day. As a result, the best mechanics flocked to Ford, raising productivity, and lowering training costs. At his peak, Ford was esti-mated worth over $190 billion (adjusted for inflation).

Mansa Musa, who? The emperor of Mali, according to some estimates, might

be the richest man to have ever lived. On the way to his pilgrimage to Mecca, Musa touched down to Cairo where chroniclers got a taste of Musa’s riches. Musa was ac-companied by a caravan of 60,000 men including 12,000 slaves dressed in brocade and silk. Musa had a baggage train of 80 camels, each carrying 300 pounds of gold. Musa’s generosity in Egypt had another consequence: Cairo was flooded with so much gold that prices remain depressed 12 years after his visit, observed a historian.

MANSA MUSA I1280 – 1337

At the age of 58, John Davidson Rockefeller Sr re-tired from the company he founded in 1870, Standard Oil. For the next forty years, till his death at the ripe age of 98, Rockefeller devoted his life to philanthropy. At his peak, Standard Oil controlled 90% of oil in the US, making him the first dollar billionaire in America. Adjusted to infla-tion, Rockefeller was worth about $336 billion in 1937.

The last Nizam of Hyderabad once made it to the cover of Time magazine as the richest man in the world. Estimates of his fortune vary but in the 1940s, he was estimated to be worth $2 billion – about 2% of the US economy. In 1947, the Nizam made a gift of diamond jewels, including a tiara and necklace, designed and made by Cartier, to Princess Elizabeth (now queen) on the occasion of her marriage. The Queen still wears it.

Carnegie’s parents were dirt poor and immigrated to America from Scotland in search of a better life. Carnegie started working as a telegrapher and went on to invest in railroads, bridges during the railroad boom in America. He went on to build Carnegie Steel Company which he sold to JP Morgan in 1901 for $480 million (in 2015, $13.6 billion). Adjusting for inflation, Carnegie would have been worth over $310 billion. In his lifetime, Carnegie gave away 90% of his fortune.

04 Corporate Dossier May 01-07, 2015

Regn. No. MAHENG/2002/6295 Volume 14 Issue No. 19“Published for the proprietors, Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. by R. Krishnamurthyat The Times Of India Building, Dr. D.N.Road, Mumbai 400001 Tel. (022) 6635 3535, 2273 3535, Fax-(022) 2273 1144 and printed by him at The Times of India Suburban Press, Akurli Road,Western Express Highway, Kandivli (E), Mumbai 400101. Tel No: (022) 28872324, 28872930, Fax No (022) 28874230 Navi Mumbai - 400708 and Plot No 4, MIDC, Digha Village, Thane Belapur Road, Airoli Tel. (022) 27609700 and Editor:

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