this one's the first draft(raw) of the first article from my prospective domain, KUDOS to the people who led me thru....yeah, m still just a super-excited aspirant...so its a 'chote mu badi baat' kinda thing but just like it if you like it...cheers!
it is really ironic that there are people in india who are intellectually capable enough and adept to cater to high profile businesses based outside our country and sell them some useful solutions as vendors which alas are of no use to india. the fact is when such a scenario began to morph, indian industry was not mature enough to handle such products or services as we dearly call them. it can also be said that there wasn't any need to do it, india was a growing economy, the kind of place US would have been in 1960s, and so, no services especially major analytics works, data evaluation and crunch & insight was needed at all. but what is ironic is the fact that even when we didn't require such products, indians could come out with them, i believe this is one of the basic irrefutable known factor in the inequality of the populace. grandfather companies like tata sons, itc too ventured out in search of the plebian customers in the eighties when the higher segment got ripe enough to be plucked out without much effort. but no effort had been taken where the actual consumer base in the country lied. now, we commend HUL to so meticulously be devoted towards its rural consumer base. rightly, 70 percent of the fmcg sales by the company is made to the middle whose 50 percent resides in the villages but what about the next rung of the pyramid as we are going down. there too, leaving out the aspiring segment which will not have an equivalent buying power in the next 5 years, there is a huge populace which will enter the middle class thanks to growth. the fact is in the last 5 years, when the urban customer base smoothed, the demand steadied and the some phenomenon will be seen in the segment which is already in the buying zone. but, unlike the urban share of buys which have come down to 29% from 52%, the growth trajectory on the rural scene will still be bullish, the reason being the upcoming rural populace that'll single-handedly double the sales figures. A country where more than a third of entire population still awaits to enter the buying proposition, where the rural penetration still hovers around 2%, we indeed have not been able to come up with models to pump up that section while we have happy to make for some quick bucks by vending few back end jobs for other countries.
i don't want to stray away from the point i was trying to make; when indians are capable enough to hold out the forts for the best on the planet and snatch businesses from their own companies, develop software for them or perhaps offer them advice on their own tax laws, then with a huge economy that's going from strength to strength, why are we not being helped by it. there are people like vikram akula who come to this country when they sniff an oppurtunity and structure a cliched, worn out, concept of microfinance in a new wrapper and present it back to us. though the perception of the grand old scheme hasn't changed at a superficial level but the impact can be seen from a social auditing perspective. India has this old habit of imitating the best things that have happened to others. You talk about liberalization in china, 5-year plans in Russia, talk whatever, we have been lacking the initiative to doing the right things before-hand. Very recently, a 60 something guy called mohammed younus shook the world with a book, The Social Business. Well! The concept is outstanding, as we all know, he’s just trying to divert the demand that roots out from the prosperity that is also a by-product of micro-finance in Bangladesh towards causes that are of-course for the health of the society. He has struck the right chord by not only utilizing the manpower available, the brand name and the demand that has risen to develop an entire social business ecosystem that is sustainable and constantly scaling itself without a lot of hue and cry.
Younus is an economist but gandhi was no economist, then too, he could sense that cottage industry was the best available business model that could work wonders for india. true to the theory, it would not only provide employment to numerous people but also it would directly fulfill the demand that, of course small enough to be satisfied in the process. Today when we feel proud in connecting a farmer, that too at a vicarious level, to the available technologies but just imagine we are trying to do this in a country where customer experience sharing portals like apnaguide had to close down their shops, we are trying to make an uneducated farmer believe a voice or an analyst or a agri-expert sitting 100 miles away. Firms will of-course will be able to make money out of it but, to me, it really sounds ironic and too futuristic.
sometimes i find, administration is like music. when we differenciate between styles and genres we lose its purity, we basically demute them and stop them to intermingle and evolve together to form a new melody of their own. Its seems romantic, I know, but it has some really direct application on the management principles, where again we, while dividing roles and functions, forget that a holistic approach is required and therefore the various facets get so alienated from each other that we totally forget why did we start doing what we are doing or rather what are we doing.
People brand it the MYOPIA but it is just the same phenomenon of how we get so involved in reading a chapter that we forget that there’s an entire book to be read and we forget the chapterwe had read and perhaps aren’t able to connect it to the next one;I know I am going too far in stating that. Precisely, this is the situation out there in b-schools and that may be a reason why budding managers are and should be taught a general management course for an entire year. The intricacies of management can just be functionally segregated but everything under the sun should be known to an ideal manager. India today needs such managers who share a complete view of status and scope of what india stands as of now, or mom and pop companies would probably continue to do what we have been doing out there in theirs. MR analytics anyone??
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