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Tag: Business

Start 2019 Right with These Business Books

Posted on by Penguin India

Nothing says a fresh start like the New Year. Whether your is business is booming, could do with a little push, or is yet to take off, we’ve got books that are sure to pique your interest.

Take a look at our business bookshelf for the month, and tell us which book you’re going to pick up first!

Get Better at Getting Better

To achieve extraordinary success, you need something other than core capabilities like analytical skills, people skills, conceptual and intuitive skills, hard work and hunger for success. Chandramouli Venkatesan identifies this as developing the capability to succeed and continuously improve that capability. He calls this the Get Better Model, or GBM-your model to continuously improve how good you are.

 

The Age of Awakening

The Age of Awakening tells India’s economic story since the country gained independence. It unfolds a tale of titanic figures, colossal failures, triumphant breakthroughs and great moral shortcomings. Weaving together vivid history and economic analysis, this book makes for a gripping narrative.

 

Game India

The book aims to unearth India’s strategic advantages; explore what has been done (or not done) to exploit them; what potential they hold out for people; and how they could redefine the game for this country.

Very well-researched, backed by personal anecdotes and industry lore which Bhaskar has been privy to for many years, Game India is essential reading for every Indian looking ahead.

Seven Examples From ‘Crash’ In Which Your Emotional Competence Affects Your Work Life

Posted on by Penguin India

While many people talk about the path to the top of organizations, very few are honest about how difficult it is to stay at that position. Filled with anecdotes, analysis of various situations CEOs may find themselves in and unconventional advice to help them, Crash: Lessons from the Entry and Exit of CEOs is for veteran leaders as well as for those who aspire to start their own ventures.

Here are some crucial examples from the book that you should make note of –

“It is a common trap for us to overestimate our strengths and to underestimate our weaknesses. This is the root cause of indignation on being passed over for a promotion, and it also triggers the perception that the boss is giving you less attention when compared to a colleague. It is a universal bonsai trap. Associated with this basic trap are a number of other traps: arrogance, insensitivity, envy and many more. A deep sense of self-realization is required to appreciate your weaknesses. You learn about your behavioural bonsai traps (when a person ceases to grow mentally and experientially) all by yourself. Nobody tells you about them.”

∼

“Unfortunately successful and ambitious business leaders feel convinced that they have no competent successor. Even if they don’t feel so, sycophants persuade them to believe it. Management academics point out that this is the result of that ambitious leader’s failure. To quote two academics, James Champy and Nitin Nohria, ‘To feel threatened by one’s successor is a futile but remarkably common reaction to inevitable departure.’”

∼

“To be successful, a CEO requires cognitive intelligence as well as an intuitive emotional intelligence—which means he or she must have a responsive sense of empathy for the views of various stakeholders. In my experience, once a person gets into a leadership role, there are forces that cause his or her emotional intelligence or sense of empathy to shrink. This poses the real and hidden challenge.”

∼

“Leaders tend to be self-assured, they need to be so if they have to lead their people, and the line that divides self-assuredness and overconfidence is a thin one. The leader’s confidence can be rooted in logic and data, or it can be rooted in feelings and emotions. If his/her confidence is based on the best-available data, then the leader comes across as authentic. It is a positive form of self-confidence. If the leader’s confidence is not data-based, the leader may seem impetuous or someone who is not rooted in reality.”

∼

“Differences will always come up in an organization. If the boss has consulted many and taken a different course of action than the one suggested by a person, he is likely to feel ignored. Ignoring some colleagues is unavoidable when the boss has to choose from differing viewpoints. Though this might lead to differences, leaders should not let them linger or persist. They should patch up so that the difference is an anecdote of history, much like tiffs between couples.”

∼

“Any rising leader is prone to the dangers of hubris, ego and loss of emotional intelligence. This danger applies not only to CEOs, but also to chairmen and independent directors. These dangers are called derailers.Everybody has his or her set of derailers, distinctive and peculiarly individual. Our individual derailers are visible day in and day out to colleagues, observers and those close to the leader, but not to the leader. In fact, more often than not, the person might not be aware of the fact that the derailers exist in his or her personality and manifest in his or her behaviour; for example, egotism, excessive pride, arrogance, shifting the blame, poor communication skills and so on.”

∼

“The ‘software of skills’ refers to the skills required to be effective. It’s just not the operating leader who undergoes brain damage but also the chairman and the board members, who too occupy important positions of power, who experience it. The fault may be with the candidate or the system in which he or she is operating. The cracks widen and develop a shape and size of their own. In many cases, the relationship between the newly appointed leader and the system in which he operates—directors, colleagues, shareholders—suffers irreparable tears, resulting in a parting of ways.”

 

In Crash: Lessons from the Entry and Exit of CEOs , the author shows that great leaders continue to excel not just because of their skills and intelligence but also by connecting with others using emotional competencies like empathy and self-awareness.

 

 

 

Facts on the Formative Years of the Most Powerful Corporation in the History of the World

Posted on by Penguin India

The East India Company controlled half of the world’s trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers at home and abroad. Yet the story of the Company’s beginnings in its formative years remains largely untold.
In A Business of State, Rupali Mishra offers critical insights into the rise of the early modern English state and the expansion and development of its nascent empire.
Here are some interesting facts about the Company’s inception, the way it maintained secrecy and access to information and how it managed its reputation in its initial years:
The formation






 
Secrecy and Access




Reputation


Drawing on a host of overlooked and underutilized sources, Rupali Mishra’s account of the East India Company reconstructs the inner life of the Company, laying bare the era’s fierce struggles to define the difference between public and private interests and the use and abuse of power. Available Now.
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4 Brands that Won Customers’ Hearts

Posted on by Penguin India

‘Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning’ – Bill Gates

Games Customers Play by Ramesh Dorairaj deep dives into how reaching out to end consumers can give brands actionable insights. Such insights can then be translated into some change in the brand’s product design or delivery or service management, which makes their product or service more desirable.
Here are case studies of successful brands we all love, that gained customer affinity by reaching out to end consumers in innovative ways:
Asian Paints

Asian Paints did something different: it reached out to the end consumer. The house or building owner did not want to manage multiple vendors to get his house or office painted. Sensing this, Asian Paints co-opted upcoming interior design consultants who went to a potential buyer’s location and photographed his house or office rooms. They then loaded it into a software running on their laptops and showed the owner how different colours would look when applied.
Asian Paints also hired painters who would take those colours and paint the house.
P&G

Fast-moving consumer goods manufacturers like P&G and Unilever compete to get premium retail space. P&G chose a path of consumer-focused innovation.
P&G designed a programme called Living It, where its employees lived with potential customer for several days. A.G. Lafley, its former CEO, cites an example of how Living It helped reach out to the end customer. The Living It team studied the laundry activities of women from lower-middle-class families in Mexico and realized that hard water was a real problem. Softeners were needed, but softeners meant multiple rinses. This meant quite a lot of water, not available in abundance in the semi-urban and rural areas of the country. Figuring out the solution to this problem resulted in the launch of Downey Single Rinse.
Johnson & Johnson
Trust increases the perceived switching costs in a buyer. Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and healthcare products, finds a place in Barron’s list of the world’s most respected companies, almost every year. It ranked first in 2016 and in 2017 it was seventh in the list. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson had to recall 31 million bottles of Tylenol (an over-the-counter drug for mild fever and the like) as some deranged person had put 65 mg of cyanide into capsules of Tylenol on some store shelves, leading to the death of seven people in the Chicago area. They had to spend about $100 million to recall all Tylenol capsules.

Such actions improve customer faith that even when things go bad, the seller is capable and willing to rectify the situation without considering the cost of such remedial action.
YouTube star Lily Singh aka | | SuperWoman | |
Consider the case of Lily Singh, a Canadian of Indian origin. Her YouTube channel username is | | SuperWoman | | . From 2010, she started publishing videos of skits that have three characters: father, mother and daughter. All three roles are played by her.

By 2016, her YouTube videos had been viewed more than two billion times and her channel had twelve million subscribers. The twenty-seven-year-old is a UNICEF Global Goodwill ambassador and has been named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. She undertook a tour of places with a significant Indian, and Punjabi, diaspora. She visited India in 2017. Singh reached audiences directly using YouTube, eliminating the middlemen of the entertainment industry.
———–
Games Customers Play, a thought-provoking book by Ramesh Dorairaj, shares valuable perspectives on what drives buyer-seller relationships. Available Now!

8 Things they Don’t Tell you about Buyer-Seller Relationships

Posted on by Penguin India

Buyer-seller relationships develop over time and business has always been an endless series of games played by the two.
In Games Customers Play, author Ramesh Dorairaj shows you how to spot such games and change the rules to your advantage. So that it doesn’t matter what the deal is, you will always win!
Below we explore some facts about buyer-seller relationships, that you may not have known, from Dorairaj’s book Games Customers Play.Customers have learnt to use these myths to design practices and templates for how to interact with sellers and suppliers. Examples include elaborate procurement processes, reverse auctions, price bench-marking during a contract’s duration, renegotiating contracts much before expiry, feigning dissatisfaction to wangle discounts, and with holding payments for flimsy reasons.
The result is cognitive dissonance or mental discomfort arising from a disconnect in personal beliefs, ideas and values. This discomfort has negative consequences, like increased stress and irritability.
They have to do this consistently as millennials and post-millennials are joining the workforce and becoming customers.
Not all customers want to have a ‘close’ seller or service provider relationship. The same service or product can be viewed by different customers quite differently. Understanding this can help you position a product uniquely for various customers. Your product can be seen in a new light by different people within the same customer organization.
It is now possible not to speak of market segments but have marketing campaigns that are customized to individuals. Some firms use predictive algorithms to gauge a buyer’s future needs. But these algorithms do not consider the nature of the interaction that a customer prefers. Some prefer a quick, one-click purchase, while others will take time to visit, speak to a sales or customers service rep, explore alternatives and arrive at a decision.
A set of engagements makes a relationship. Thus, relationships are born when there are a number of engagements between the customer and the seller. One-off engagements don’t create a relationship.
The Get It stage is the first part of the engagement and has to do with the customer decision to purchase goods and services. This stage is about all the interactions that happen before the seller delivers the product of the service. The Use It stage is when the customer begins to use the product or experience the service. The Fix It stage is when the product or service does not work as planned and needs to be fixed.

Catalyst by Chandramouli Venkatesan – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Chandramouli Venkatesan is a corporate veteran with over twenty-six years of experience in the industry. He has worked with Asian Paints, Cadbury/Mondelez, Mirc Electronics/Onida and Pidilite. He has served in various senior capacities, including as CEO and managing director. He has conducted numerous speaking sessions, which have benefited over 1000 people, and mentored and guided many others to be successful in their careers. His book, Catalyst, will arm you with the right tools to succeed at your workplace and get the most out of every moment, every day.
Let’s read an excerpt from this life-transforming book.
————
In all my experiences and travels across the world, the one thing that stands out is the hunger for success that most people have and, in particular, Indians have. Often that hunger for success can be simplified by most people as success and growth in careers. That success in life is equal to success in careers is often the operating assumption of most people. In the latter portion of the book I do try to give a more holistic dimension to success in life to include values, character and other related aspects. However, in the first half of the book I focus primarily on giving what people want—the keys to success in careers.
I have a simple equation for career growth
Career growth   = Real Individual growth +_ Environmental aspects
What this equation tries to say is that career growth is driven by two factors—real individual growth and environmental aspects. Real Individual growth is the growth we experience in the duration of our careers; how much each one of us grow our knowledge, our skills, our judgement, our influence, our communication etc. The second factor is Environmental aspects, which covers things like buoyancy of the job market, industry related factors, relative availability of talent in your skill areas etc.
Let me first cover the impact of environmental aspects on career growth. Our careers are typically 40 years long, we start in our 20s and wind up in our 60s. During these 40 years we will have both environmental tailwinds and headwinds to our careers. An example of a tailwind would be the times in your careers where the job market is hyper hot for the skills you have, there is a shortage of the skills you bring and people tend to get jobs and salaries bigger than what they deserve, sometimes going all the way to bubbles. Another example of a tailwind is when your boss quits the company, you are not yet fully ready to take that role, but the company decides it would rather go with an insider and hence gives the job to you even when you are not yet fully ready. Such tailwinds are bound to support most of us at times in our careers.
Similarly, we have all experienced headwinds in our careers. There are times when the economy is dragging, the job market is weak and there are very few opportunities for people to grow. Another example of a headwind is when you have been steadily getting ready for a big job, equipping yourself with the right experiences, apprenticing under the right leaders and preparing yourself for the opportunity and when the opportunity comes the company in its wisdom decides it wants to drive change, wants new thinking and a change in strategy and hence prefers to hire an outsider into the role as opposed to promoting an insider. Nothing you did wrong, but the dice did not roll your way.
My experience is that in a 40-year career, the headwinds and the tailwinds balance each other out. You will have some headwinds in your career as well as some tailwinds. You have to be a very lucky person for the tailwinds over 40 years to be greater than the headwinds and similarly you have to be very unlucky for the headwinds over 40 years to be greater than the tailwinds. For most people the two does balance out. Hence going back to our career growth equation, it means that the environmental aspects will not be deciding factor in driving career growth.
The catalyst of career growth tends to be real Individual growth. Simply said, in your career you will experience as much career growth as you are able to grow yourself as an individual and as a professional, what I call real individual growth. If you manage to grow your skills, your knowledge, your decision making, your judgement, your influence on others, your communication etc. then you will experience career growth. Career growth is directly proportional to and is a function of the real individual growth. You experience career growth if you manage to grow yourself during your career, if you stop pushing yourself at any stage the career growth also comes to a screeching halt.
Hence the equation of career growth can be simplified to
Career growth   = Real Individual growth

One way I like to state this is the expression, “you get what you deserve”. Far too often in our careers we focus on the getting part of it, we focus on getting the promotion, getting the new job and getting career growth. We do not focus on deserving more, increasing our capabilities, our skills etc. In a career, you get what you deserve. It is useful to remember what is in our hands—focusing on deserving more and driving our real individual growth.

Assessing the Prototypes

Posted on by Penguin India

Jennifer Riel is a strategic adviser to senior leaders at a number of Fortune 500 companies. Her book, Creating Great Choices is an insightful and instructive blend of storytelling, theory and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice. The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. 
 
Storytelling converts a possibility into a narrative— a tale of events that proceeds over time and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story lets you explain what happens within the possibility— the plot points of your new and better world. Narrative is an effective way to capture and explain a new idea because humans are naturally drawn to stories; stories are the way people have learned and shared critical information since our ancestors were crouched around a campfire.
Using stories lets you engage deeply with ideas, because you can fully picture the possibility in your mind’s eye. Once you do that, you will be able to communicate that picture to others. As screenwriting teacher Robert McKee puts it, “If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well- told story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of yawning and ignoring you.”
Our friend Claudia Kotchka, former head of design at P&G, is a master storyteller. To illustrate the impact of human- centered design to her peers at the sometimes- rigid consumer goods giant, she would tell a story about Altoids. Yes, the curiously strong mint introduced in the 1780s and now owned by Wrigley. Kotchka would illustrate the special appeal of Altoids by describing the process of looking at the cheerful metallic box with its nostalgic typeface and then opening the tin, hearing the liner paper crinkle, smelling the wafting scent of peppermint oil, and seeing the uneven little mints, seemingly hand-made, lying haphazardly within.
Kotchka would go on to describe what Altoids would look like if they’d been developed through P&G’s structured, rigorous, and highly reliable processes: perfect, uniform mints in a simple plastic container with a slightly garish sticker on the front. The “waste” of the liner paper and the expensive metal box would be eliminated. The “imperfection” of the varied mints would be remedied. The understated label design would be “livened up.” And voilà, all the distinctiveness of Altoids would disappear— along with the brand’s intense consumer loyalty and price premium.
Kotchka called her imaginary new product Proctoids, after the irreverent nickname sometimes applied to P&G employees. Her vivid and funny story hit home with audiences inside P&G and out, illustrating her point more clearly than reams of data on failed innovations.
Try This
Think back to the invention of the iPod. Craft a short narrative that would explain the core of the idea and the way it works to create new value for users and for Apple. Try the same for one of the possibilities you generated in chapter 7.
For each of your possibilities, think about the story you could tell about it, focusing on how each possibility would be experienced by real people. The story needn’t be long or obsessively detailed. The objective of the narrative should always be to help you, and others, understand the core value of the possibility.

 

Marketing

Posted on by Penguin India

Jeffrey Bussgang is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and professor at Harvard Business School. In his book, Entering StartUpLand you seek your ideal entry point into this popular, cutting-edge organizational paradigm. It is a practical, step-by-step guide that provides an insider’s analysis of various start-up roles and responsibilities. You’ll gain insight into how successful startups operate and learn to assess which ones you might want to join–or emulate.
 
When I was head of Marketing at one of my startups, our sales director in Australia came to our annual sales meeting bearing a gift for me: a boomerang. He said it was because I always came back to him with answers to his questions when he was in the field chasing sales opportunities. I keep that boomerang in my office to this day and still think about how much field sales people appreciate it when the marketing team gets back to them in a timely, responsive fashion. For a marketing executive, being customer focused means paying attention to your internal customers as well as your external ones.
When entrepreneurs discuss with me the reasons they need to raise money for their startups, the focus is typically placed first on building the product and then selling it. The two most expensive functions at a startup are the product team and the sales team. Marketing profoundly affects them both: on one side, it heavily influences product design; on the other, it focuses and supports Sales. So the marketing function is like the productivity engine of the startup. When a startup has a great marketing function, the product and sales teams both look amazingly productive, and nobody knows why. Everybody typically credits the head of Sales and the head of Product, but behind the scenes, it’s Marketing that makes them look good.
Marketing, in other words, is the unsung hero of the startup.
Strangely, startups often hire marketing people too late. First they hire the team required to build the product—product managers or engineers. Then they hire one or two salespeople to sell the product. Remember the organization chart for my twelve-person startup in chapter 1 (figure 1-2)? There are zero marketing people. It’s a common mistake.
Typically, the first marketing person might get hired as employee number twenty or thirty, often after a startup hits a snag. Perhaps the sales force has become unproductive and is idling. So the startup scrambles to get a marketing function installed quickly to help. By then, though, it’s often too late. When a startup misses its sales numbers, the sales people get blamed. But the problem, typically, is not that the salespeople are incompetent; it’s that the startup lacks marketers who can generate leads and acquisitions for those salespeople. As a result, Sales is either getting bad leads or no leads at all. They’re lacking the good, competitive weapons that skilled marketers can provide, so they’re struggling to win.
That’s when the company needs Marketing. It needs Marketing to provide support for Sales.
Grab a copy of the book: Entering StartUpLand 

 

6 Statements from ‘Demonetization and Black Economy’ that are point on about demonetization

Posted on by Penguin India

Arun Kumar is the country’s leading authority on the black economy. In his recent book Demonetisation and the Black Economy he gives a lucid account of demonetization along with its effects on the economy.

Here are six statements by Prof Kumar which describe impacts and effects of demonetisation.






Competing on Analytics with External Processes

Posted on by Penguin India

Competing on Analytics provides the road map for becoming an analytical competitor, showing readers how to create new strategies for their organizations based on sophisticated analytics. Introducing a five-stage model of analytical competition, Davenport and Harris describe the typical behaviors, capabilities and challenges of each stage. It is the definitive guide for transforming your company’s fortunes in the age of analytics and big data.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of IT and Management at Babson College and a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Jeanne G. Harris is on the faculty at Columbia University, where she teaches Business Analytics Management.
 
The  great  challenge  for  brand  managers  in  the  current  age,  however, is developing a closed loop of analytics describing how customers interact with a brand across multiple channels. With this information, brands can learn not only what ads and promotions customers see, but how  they  react  in  terms  of click-throughs,  conversions,  and  service. Most  companies  find  it  difficult  to  marshal  all  this  data  and  make sense of it with analytics.
One company that does do it well, however, is Disney’s Parks and Resorts business unit. The business has long been highly analytical, optimizing hotel prices, ride times, and marketing offers. Now, however, due to a “vacation management” project called MyMagic+ that cost over $1 billion and began in 2008, it is able to close the loop on how all that marketing translates into a customer experience. The ambitious goal of MyMagic+ is to provide a more magical, immersive, seamless and personal experience for every single guest. From the beginning of planning a Disney park or hotels reservation, the customer is encouraged to register and to supply an email address. The customer can plan a family trip (and, at the same time, register all family members or friends participating in the trip) with the MyDisneyExperience website or app. Disney is then able to learn what activities the customer is considering and what web pages engage different family members. Customers are also encouraged to sign up for the FastPass+ service, which offers them shorter wait times; in exchange, they share information  about  the  park  attractions,  entertainment  options,  and  even greetings from Disney characters they intend to experience.
What really closes the loop for Disney, however, is the MagicBand. Rolled out in 2013, these wristbands are typically mailed to a family before its visit starts. From the customer’s standpoint, it allows access to the park and hotel rooms, FastPass+ entry to attractions at specific times,  and   in-park and hotel purchases. It also stores photos taken with  Disney  characters,  and  allows  the  characters  to  have  personalized  interactions  with  kids.  From  Disney’s  standpoint,  it  provides  a  goldmine  of  data,  including  customer  locations,  character  interactions, purchase histories, ride patterns, and much more. If customers opt in, Disney will send personalized offers to them during their stay and after they return home.
The  scale  and  expense  of  the  MyMagic+  system  is  reflective  of the fact that the ante has been raised for competing on analytics. It may  take  a  while  for  Disney  to  recoup  its  billion-dollar  investment in this closed loop system, but the company has already seen operational benefits in being able to admit more customers to parks on busy days. There is also a belief that the system will deter customers from visiting competitor parks. Key to the ultimate value of the program, however, will be extensive analytics on how marketing and branding programs translate into actual customer activity.
Find this book:- Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning 

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