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The Right To Grow
Corporate Governance

The Right To Grow

The Indian economy has been stress tested for the past year and a half, and we are now exhaling a collective but cautious sigh of relief. Yes, the economy has slowed down but we are still hanging in there at a 6.5+% growth, which is much better than what it was in 2000-2003. Also there do not appear to be any major cracks in the edifice of the global economic powerhouse that we are in the process of building. One must admit though that there is some merit to the often made argument that we have not been hit any less than everyone else, since the percentage decline in our GDP growth has been as severe as the economies in the world which have contracted. Hence, our slowdown is equivalent to their recession. However, we have had no collapse of institutions, and what’s more, consumer demand is up and about, […]

November 12, 2010
Ring in the New, Revel in the old
C'est La Vie

Ring in the New, Revel in the old

Diwali shopping, and finding the mecca of the modern Indian shopper I went to the mecca of modern shopping, the new temples of modern India, this weekend to check out what Diwali shopping was like and what modern Indian shoppers and shops were doing. Here’s my amateur anthropologist’s report. There were two X-ray arches to enter the Phoenix Mills complex of malls in Mumbai one for the uber-fancy Palladium Mall, with its shops housing high-end (mostly foreign) brands and hip restaurants; the other was the entrance to the more janta malls, relatively speaking of course. Sort of diwan-e-aam and Diwan-e-khas, but diwan-e-something for sure. The queue to enter the high-end mall was non-existent, and all of us headed purposefully towards the other entrance. In both places, there was not a soul inside the high-end shops be it cosmetic, apparel, footwear, branded accessories, western jewellery, music equipment or toy stores. Not […]

October 31, 2010
Learning to Read Social Change
India My Land

Learning to Read Social Change

For example, how did consumption patterns change after World War II when the men came back to a changed and unfamiliar world, and the women had the upper hand because they had coped independently through the war? What were the consumption behaviour changes when women’s participation in the workplace became the norm in America? Shared responsibility was forced on the men, and when men went to shop for the home or for the children, they did it quite differently from women. It struck me that in India, we have a lot of business strategy discussions in which social, demographic and lifestyle changes are listed. We, however, are yet to sharply define and quantify them, and then relentlessly push for the “so whats” that could be in a variety of areas. In middle-class urban India, with heavy traffic and great distances between home and workplace in big cities, many kids are […]

October 16, 2010
The Magic Ingredient
Corporate Governance

The Magic Ingredient

The assumption that a big-name bank with a set of smaller local partners, yoked together by technology, will automatically win over the local money lenders or the informal financial sector needs to be challenged. “Biometrics” and ATMs are not consumer value propositions, they are the supply side story. The local pawn broker who is usurious is also culturally sensitive. He knows that the mangalsutra mortgaged to him needs to appear on the bride’s neck at the time of a wedding and that is part of his idea of customer service. He will wait behind the venue, both to hand it over and take it back. A friend whose family is in the business tells the story of how it offered the service of making artificial jewellery in exactly the same pattern as the items mortgaged by customers – a winning proposition for both sides. Similarly, in urban slums people talk […]

September 18, 2010
Let’s be Fair
Corporate Governance

Let’s be Fair

When cinema theatres catch fire and it is known that they violated safety norms and yet received municipal approvals, who is the non-executive chairman of the approvals-granting body that has not been taken to task? So why is it considered acceptable to go after the non-executive chairman of a corporate entity where a really disastrous malfunction occurred the likes of which we have just discussed? Is it because the corporate world is seen to be more deliberately callous, more wilfully destructive, more malafide in its intentions than every other sector of society? Yes of course the legal system must do its job and the wheels of law are turning in the cases file against the non-executive chairman of Union Carbide at the time when the Bhopal tragedy occurred.( Interestingly, no proceedings seem to have been instituted against the rest of the non-executive board at that time. Who are they, and […]

August 21, 2010
The Business of Financial Inclusion
Consumer Trends

The Business of Financial Inclusion

The discussion on financial inclusion ought to focus a lot more on building an economically viable and consumer acceptable business model, with a specially designed regulatory ecosystem appropriate for that model. Evangelism or moral pressure to force banks to serve those not so far served by them cannot help square a circle. But a new tetrahedron that is superior to both the circle and the square can be built if we abandon orthodoxy and do not constrain the business model by saying: (a) Financial inclusion has to be driven by banks because we know how to regulate them, and should not be driven by a new ecosystem that does not have an existing bank as the lead; (b) it has to be offered below a particular price point which is defined either by some fuzzy-logic comfort level or by a mandated number based on somebody’s test of reasonableness (not the […]

July 17, 2010
Too Many Cooks Make The Broth Cost Effective
India My Land

Too Many Cooks Make The Broth Cost Effective

So for sixteen flats with probably a hundred people in them, there were twenty people involved in setting it up. Did it need that many people to do this? Well, everyone except the census people were doing this part time, each spending a tiny amount of time doing it, so it wasn’t that many man hours doing it, though it seems like it. More expensive than if it involved just one or two people? Not to the census bureau because they only paid for their person, while the rest of the activity costs were effectively shared by all of us who pay for the watchmen and the manager and our domestic staff. Cumbersome process? Not really, unless you stop to analyse it. It actually was all quite smooth and well oiled and got the job done smoothly. The fact is that we have lots and lots of people; and people […]

June 19, 2010
Anklets in the Boardroom
India My Land

Anklets in the Boardroom

Anyway, she made a reasonable presentation – not a spectacular one but an adequate one and then, before she left the room, she went around the table once and shook hands with all present. She was wearing payal (anklets) which made a rather loud tinkling sound that was very hard not to notice. She wasn’t doing it for effect. She just wore what she usually wore and was quite unspoilt and oblivious of her surroundings. I, however, cringed with every jangle that happened with every step, and felt that it wasn’t the professional woman thing to do. The chairman of the meeting, known for saying it like it is, sans finesse, looked up as she left the room and muttered loudly, “Where did she come from? Bharatnatyam class?” Some folks, including me, laughed, and the meeting proceeded. But it nagged me. Why did I cringe at the sound of anklets […]

June 1, 2010
An Encore from Dr Manmohan Singh
India My Land

An Encore from Dr Manmohan Singh

If that was Act-I, now it’s time for Act-II, i.e. to do the same in the sphere of education and develop a vibrant education ecosystem in India. As in the case of business, this has to evolve organically and democratically, and cannot be something the government dictates or even lays down the paradigms for. It will, no doubt, take another 20 years of tapasya of a whole lot of people, in quite the same manner that it took for the model for business to evolve; but in the end, it will be well worth it, and it will be sustainable. There are no short cuts to this and we have to spend time discussing the problem, rather than jumping to implement quick-fix solutions. The most important thing, however, is to recognise that the genesis of our new and modern business ecosystem was liberalisation. Liberalisation actually meant two things – allowing […]

April 17, 2010
Innovate India’s Way To Modernity
Consumer Trends

Innovate India’s Way To Modernity

In fact, the newer markets of the world often create a “champion’s disadvantage”, because most champion companies are prisoners of their past success formulae. They are far too deeply vested in every way in the religion and the ritual that they have built so far and the risk of change is real. The same applies to western academia, who have built knowledge based on the experiences of global businesses. Their predicaments are understandable. But it is puzzling why Indian business executives and thinkers, who do not carry any such baggage, don’t think differently and originally. Perhaps, we need to reflect on whether there is an incumbent advantage or disadvantage for reigning champions of the developed world. If they have an incumbent disadvantage, then the new kid on the block (Indian business) is not a challenger risking a bloody nose but a leading-edge innovator. It’s what CK Prahalad calls the “next […]

March 10, 2010
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