Workforce Strategies

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/jobs/workplace-look-beyond-change-instead-of-resisting-it/articleshow/8545581.cms

Tough times breed good leaders

Probably, the world outside India is still passing through one of the toughest times of our lifetime. Trillions of dollars are getting eroded, the wealthiest of nations are going bankrupt and the leaders whom we thought to be the greatest of our times are proving that there is indeed only a single step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Tough times breed good leaders. This is quite contrary to the boom time, where every other corporate manager appears like a leader, despite real competencies, because people are caught up in the momentum of high growth and easy success. History has demonstrated time and again that effective leaders—, who can mobilize people, tackle tough problems and can spot opportunities in crises — are most apparent in times of great stress, change and uncertainty. As former Mayor of New York city Rudolph Giuliani said, “It is of times of crisis that good leaders emerge”. The greatest testimony to this is Giuliani himself, who was once a lame duck philandering husband but went on to be the embodiment of an indomitable spirit in a time of great crisis. Another good example is Barun Kumar “Bicky” Chakraborty, who as a student arrived in Sweden and started tinkering around with his entrepreneurship dreams. He was soon caught up in a slowing economy. But Bicky decided to get going as the going got tougher. He mobilised some resources to start a pub, because he realised that during recession time professionals did not like to be seen at upmarket restaurants. “I opened pubs when the economy was slow and gloomy. I cashed in on the gloom”, he says. Today, he has 30 pubs, owns Sweden’s most popular chain of budget hotels and pubs and is one of the richest men in Scandinavia. According to consulting firm McKinsey, almost 40% of the leading US industrial companies toppled from the first quartile of their sectors during the 2000-01 recessions. A third of leading US banks met the same fate. Ironically, during the same time, 15% of companies that were not industry leaders prior to the recession, vaulted into that position. Bad times are good times for people who have the resolve to emerge leaders. Leadership Takeaway: The Chinese character for “crisis” consists of two symbols. One means “danger,” the other “opportunity.” Every bad time hides an opportunity in it. It would be visible only to those people who really want it to see it. Use the current recession to your advantage to hone your leadership skills and to elevate your team to the next level.

Bisleri boss Ramesh Chauhan plots new rags-to-riches story

 Dear students

 Good example of  Social responsibility and   Tapping a  Business  opportunity.

 Gautam Bansal

MUMBAI: Early this year, a bunch of unlikely ‘business associates’ trooped into the Andheri, Mumbai office of Bisleri International chairman, Ramesh Chauhan. As they cast nervous, furtive glances, it was evident they were uncomfortable in the classy confines of the headquarters. After all, they were more familiar with Mumbai’s streets that they scour for many hours daily. They were rag pickers. They had come to meet Mr Chauhan to review the progress of a ‘business alliance’ that the chairman-and-rag-picker combine had co-created a couple of years ago.

Mr Chauhan, the diminutive, yet feisty entrepreneur, had initiated this partnership to tackle an environmental hazard — over 3 lakh tonnes of PET containers are used and discarded every year. Polyethylene Terephthalate, popularly known as PET, is a non-biodegradable plastic used to package drinking water, carbonated drinks and juices.

Till recently, PET scrap was considered worthless even by rag pickers. Hardly anyone in India’s vibrant raddi market would buy it, leaving the unsightly garbage littered all over. So, Mr Chauhan stepped in and built a partnership with rag pickers, announced attractive prices for PET garbage, commissioned collection centres, purchased about 5000 kg every month, processed it and sold it to companies like Reliance Industries. His intervention birthed an entire PET recycling ecosystem that now collects about 1,200 tonnes of PET waste from Mumbai’s streets every day, according to industry estimates. Another 700 tonnes are collected from the rest of Maharashtra.

Mr Chauhan’s review meeting with the rag pickers that day was to take stock of how profitable the whole initiative was for them.

Rag pickers get other jobs

“Look,” says Mr Chauhan, “rag pickers are no invention by Bisleri. We only tapped the community to recycle PET scrap. And this is a business transaction — the focus is to make it a viable venture for the rag pickers.”

After the success of this pilot project, Mr Chauhan is now replicating it nationally. He has charged his army of 1,500 distributors and 2,300 odd sales staff across the country with the responsibility of seeding and setting up similar PET waste recycling ecosystems in their geographies.

They will do what Mr Chauhan did in Mumbai — establish such ecosystems, buy scrap from rag pickers through an elaborate distribution chain, identify users for the scrap, and gradually pull out once a self-sustaining cycle has kicked-in. Like Mr Chauhan does now, they too will continue to oversee this ecosystem ensuring it works smoothly.

The total organised bottled water market is estimated to be about `3,000 crore and is growing at 30% annually. Bisleri has a 60% market share. It’s a `10,000-crore market, including the unorganised sector.

“Of course, there are other competitors (who also generate PET waste). But as the largest corporate player, the responsibility rested with us,” says Mr Chauhan. Bisleri encourages rag pickers to pick up any PET bottles, including that of competitors.

PET waste can be recycled into carpets, car parts, fabrics, Fiberfil (for products like pillows and jackets), and also for roads where the recycled plastic is mixed with asphalt. The PET powder enhances the bonding ability of asphalt which strengthens the roads.

Stitching together a partnership with rag pickers wasn’t easy. They are a close-knit community that’s driven by trust and fear. Each rag picker has his turf marked out and no one ventures outside it without the leader’s permission. And if one of the members violates the unwritten code, the whole fraternity disowns him or her.

To begin with, a couple of Bisleri employees gingerly made contact with a few rag pickers in Dharavi. “We requested them to help us clean up the environment by working out a profitable model for them. We spent hours explaining everything,” says Ms Joyce Fernandes, a senior Bisleri executive closely associated with the entire project. Mr Chauhan, who once built iconic brands like Goldspot, Thums Up, Limca and Maaza (he sold these to Coca-Cola in 1993) then roped in the Indian Education Society’s management and research centre’s student body called RHYTHM. It studied 56 rag pickers and 38 scrap dealers (bhangarwallas ) and found that the rag-picking community chose PVC waste over PET. The former was easier to recycle and re-mould. PET scrap, on the other hand, had no buyers.

GENDER PAY GAP GETTING WORSE, NOT BETTER: STUDY

A casual conversation at a party in 2004 was the moment of conception for founders of HummimgBird, Vivek Madappa and Vinod Thimayya's nest-egg. "A senior vice-president of a large company was lamenting about exorbitant hotel tariffs impacting his bottom line. “I realised a market opportunity that night," says founder-CEO of Madappa, on how HummingBird Suites, the country’s largest corporate stay solutions company, was born. HummingBird provides corporates comfortable, intimate and affordable homes. Its offering is superior to a hotel or a service apartment, he says. Among other things, it offers stays for less than a month as well as solutions for recruitment training, meetings and conferences for large groups. The brothers started the company in 2005, and have grown to having over 750 customers, including IBM, Accenture, JP Morgan and Wipro. Today, HummingBird runs 285 suites in 25 properties across the metros. The company projects revenues of Rs 35 crore this year. Thimayya says the firm broke even in the first year itself. Madappa and Thimayya had to take a leap into the unknown, as neither had any experience in hospitality. Both quit their jobs—Madappa as a marketing executive with Tata Tetley, and Thimayya as a business development executive at Countrywide—to start HummingBird at the age of 38. The world, of course, thought they had lost it. Banks didn’t give them money because they had no idea who they were and what market they were entering. "When you become an entrepreneur, you are a nobody, a faceless entity,” says Madappa. To condition himself for what seemed like an ‘impossible’ challenge, Madappa went on a 100-kilometre Himalayan trek. "Like a trek in harsh conditions, you somehow complete the journey along the way," he says. The brothers pumped in their savings, which amounted to a princely sum of Rs 3 lakh. They had no choice but to follow an "asset light" strategy. Instead of acquiring properties, Madappa decided to lease second and third homes from tenant-weary owners. The duo initially rented some apartments in central Bangalore. They then approached Philips with an offer it couldn’t refuse: Rs 4,500-5,000 per night for a fully furnished apartment, compared to the Rs 10,000 that service apartments charged. "We were cash strapped, so we offered Philips a discount in exchange for a cash advance. This gave us our initial push," says Madappa. At the end of the first year, the company had earned Rs 1.5 crore in revenues and made a profit, says Madappa. In 2008, HummingBird posted revenues of Rs 11 crore. Along the way, it expanded to Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai and Gurgaon, while setting up more locations in Bangalore. However, the brothers kept coming up against funding walls. Most venture capital funds said they were bit players, that there was no reference model for the business. "But we were eventually noticed, because we were the only player in a virgin market," says Madappa. In 2008, Bangalore-based venture capital firm, Helion Venture Partners, invested $4 million in Hummingbird, acquiring a 30% stake. The firm saw a good opportunity in the business: Mid-to-low-end corporate employees had no accommodation available for their price, says Kanwaljit Singh of Helion. Earlier this year, the brothers launched operations in Ahmedabad and Madurai. Madappa believes the value-for-money model took them places. At no point were they in competition with hotels. “It’s a long-term partnership between us and our corporate clients,” says Madappa.

Managing work force

Dear students 
Interesting learning regarding managing work force.

Gautam Bansal




 

Haste creates waste: No 'honking' at workplace please!

On A lazy Saturday afternoon, my wife and I were heading to Jahangir Art Gallery in town, to possibly acquire paintings for our newly house. The signal at Flore fountain had just turned red and I stopped. What I saw in the next 120 seconds, made me understand the rationale for why things often go wrong at the work place.

Traffic was smooth and people were waiting patiently for the light to turn green, when a BEST bus arrived from nowhere. The bus driver parked quietly in the leftmost lane and was sixth from the signal. For thirty seconds he did not do anything. He sat waiting for the signal to change. And then, he started honking. First, he honked once. The five cars in front of him and even those next to them, got ready to leave. Hands on gear shafts, the drivers positioned themselves to leave the moment the light turned green.

And then he honked again and again. He went on and on for the next thirty seconds. It was as if he wanted the five cars in front to move quickly so that his bus could pass. The guys in the front started getting a bit edgy. One car moved a few feet to the left, while the other moved a few metres in front. All the neighbouring cars followed suit.

And within no time, the entire place became a conglomerate of edgy car drivers trying to give way to the unbridled ambitions of the bus driver. Finally, the signal turned amber and then green. The bus driver started honking ever harder. But what was initially an ocean of calm, which had cars parked right behind each other waiting patiently, soon turned into a motley jam. A jam, which took over, five minutes to clear. And in those five minutes, the bus driver could do nothing, but just sit and watch.... And do what he was best at HONK!
The reality of life then stuck me hard. The bus driver, through his constant honking, had managed to convert a perfect situation into a chaotic one. How often do we do that at our workplace?

As managers how many of us, give directions and then keep hounding our people even when we know that things are progressing at the desired pace, or when we know that the people down below cannot do anything constructive about it. Often at the workplace we behave like the bus driver, by constantly honking for delivery or for results, without giving people direction and that results in chaos, wrong decisions, and incorrect execution. This invariably results in a jam like situation at the work place.

“My boss constantly kept screaming, that we need to cut costs beyond the realms of rationality, without really telling us how to. He kept constantly screaming and we came to a point where we started irrationally sacking people, cutting down essentials and eventually ended up cutting the muscle with the fat. In the process we lost the competitive advantage we once had,” laments Rajshekar, a business leader in an MNC bank.

Constant screaming and howling like the honking bus driver only creates chaos and panic in the ranks. This leads to a team doing all sorts of incorrect and short term oriented things which create so much damage that it takes more time and resources to set that right, than what the original problem itself would have consumed.

As business leaders, we must step back and introspect as to what do we want our teams to deliver, guide them, put them on the right track and monitor progress. Constant badgering as some leaders do, doesn’t add any value. It only irritates people and sets them on the wrong track. Haven’t you heard of the age old saying, “Haste creates waste”? In certain extreme circumstances it even creates fear in the minds of subordinates, and no one ever achieved anything by generating this emotion.

Whatever be the compulsion, stay away from the “Honking Driver” syndrome as such drivers are hated by the system, the teams and eventually their bosses too.

Ist Hourly Exam

Dear students Best Of Luck for your exams. Regards Gautam Bansal

Management Tips

Klick the links to know about Management Tips http://www.businessworld.in/bw/2010_08_21_Tatas_Value_System_Is_Its_Biggest_Strength.html http://www.businessworld.in/bw/2010_08_13_Focus_On_MidLevel_Managers.html