Khanna’s London holiday and the lessons for retailers in India

Mrs Khanna has returned with her family from a ten-day holiday in the UK. The Delhi-based homemaker had been to her sister’s in Huntington, suburban London. Throughout the trip, Mrs Khanna, the quality-conscious, open-minded shopper that she is, would insist on visiting various outlets of supermarket chains. Could not have enjoyed the holiday any better, she says. She is certain her London-based sister enjoys a better standard of living, thanks to some simple ways that retailers there adopt to make shopping useful, convenient and stress-free. To start with, Mrs Khanna’s young son, 9, got in London what he had been missing all his life. He has milk-specific lactose intolerance but is fine with yoghurt. He found 29 different varieties of yoghurt.He just feasted on multiple flavours with varying fat content. Mrs Khanna found signage in the supermarkets informative. For instance, thanks to signage, she learnt aout yoghurt made from milk of cattle reared on natural fodder. Why, she thought, could this product not be available in India? Is the Indian consumer not ready for the product? Most unlikely. She knew that in Delhi and other metros, consumers would lap it up. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Aggregated sales in yoghurt would be insufficient to entice any manufacturer to set up a large factory. Sure, demand exists in each home. But many questions arise. Who, in the form of a large supermarket, is to aggregate the demand? Even if there were a well-equipped supermarket, milk is always in short supply in summers in India. Should there be adequate supply, would the retailer buy state-of-the-art chillers to maintain the quality of yoghurt? How minutely can Indian retailers understand the consumers to be able to adapt a category in store to influence the consumer? How well is the store staff trained to display appropriate signage? Do they have the right paraphernalia to display signage or will they simply use adhesive tape to stick the signage on the wall? Will retailers switch off the chillers at night? If yes, won’t the yoghurt spoil? During her holiday, Mrs Khanna could find all sorts of safe foods and beverages - rice, pulses, jams, condiments, you name it — for her diabetic husband. Again, in-store signage was a big help. Come to think of it, India is home to a large number of diabetics. She wished Indian supermarkets offered similar options for diabetics. Mr Khanna would probably be healthier and a lot less grumpy. To be fair, retailers in India did attempt to encourage vendors to manufacture or import products for diabetic consumers. But the supplies have always been inconsistent. Shelves earmarked for diabetic foods have remained empty. Even rice for diabetics is not available at all supermarkets. Be that as it may. Mrs Khanna was delighted to find an amazing range of hair-colour products at London’s retailers. Each variant had a thick strand of hair coloured in it. She could feel the hair and see actually how it would look in that particular colour. Similarly, in the lighting section, she saw glowing bulbs that indicated to her the amount of brightness in each category (20W, 100W, so on). Is all this difficult to do in India? Or is it that FMCG companies don’t have the will to do what the retailer is asking for? Or is it that the retailer is not focused on categories of products, but instead merely wants promotional events at the next weekend? It looks as though retailers have identified the consumer’s needs in various categories. But FMCG companies, whether Indian or multinational, have not been able to provide solutions. To be sure, category management in India is very nascent. Retailers employ buyer-managers, not category-managers. What transforms a buyer-manager into a category-manager is the ability to understand the evolving needs, buying patterns and habits of the consumer. What is crucial is the ability to source products category-wise to meet the consumer’s demand, arrange them neatly on the shop floor, display appropriate signage and build a supply chain for fresh merchandise. For example, failure to develop a temperature-controlled supply chain has deprived the Indian consumer of good chocolates. Instead, confectioners found it easier to reformulate and make hard, biscuit-like chocolates that don’t melt in Indian conditions. That way, they don’t even have to advertise the goodness of chocolates that melt, a new category for the Indian consumer. It is evident that understanding categories is of paramount importance. Retailers and manufactures should get together to meet the needs of London-returned Mrs Khanna. She is ready with her list of value-added products. By the way, they can offer high margins to the retailer.

Tomorrow’s CEOs Will Come from HR and PR!!!

I am often asked by college and university students, “Where will tomorrow’s CEO come from?” As requirements vary between industries or business, it is difficult to make an accurate prediction. But if you were to ask me to hazard a guess or make an educated inference, my opinion will not impress most. I am in the minority. Most will say finance, marketing, sales, business development, engineering, production or information technology, but at the risk of being proven wrong, I put my money on Public Relations (PR) or Human Resources (HR). My inexplicable sixth sense tells me that by 2025, a number of big and medium sized companies will have CEOs from the PR or HR domain.

With talent management, social responsibility, image management, ethics and corporate governance becoming increasingly important factors for stakeholders (including investors and customers) in an organization, I can envision a future where PR and HR will be treated on par with perhaps, two of the most important (widely regarded) present day functions of businesses– marketing and finance.

People make iconic companies and perception makes them credible. HR and PR epitomize these aspects better than any other management function. You can hire the experts i.e. the best CFO to create more wealth, the ablest CTO to develop the most innovative hi-tech solutions, and the smartest CMO to be the trailblazer for cutting-edge, innovative and customized products and services, but for an uncertain, evanescent and fast evolving world, you require a ‘change manager and sagacious human capital specialist’ as a CEO, which to my mind would be best provided by an HR specialist or expert.

In a competitive world where discerning individuals decide which organizations to work for based on its environmental friendly policies and customers buy from companies that have adopted social responsibility goals as a belief system, the public relations czar too would be a great choice for the CEO role.

It is a fallacy to continue to assume that marketing and finance people know best how to run companies. If this were true, why did the economic crisis of 2008-09 touted as the biggest financial wreckage in decades mar the fortunes of some of the most renowned or iconic companies across the world? Apparent reasons—greed and wrong decisions. Veneered reasons—Lack of visionary leadership and image management skills. Marketing may be my first child and public relations the second offspring, but at the cost of speaking out of turn or shooting myself in the foot, I do feel that future CEOs will come from public relations and human resources domain.

It is imperative to demolish stereotypes—‘PR and HR is a soft skill or meant for the weaker sex.’ PR cannot be defined merely as publicity and HR as hiring or recruitment managers. The major components of PR include media relations, investor relations, corporate social responsibility, image management, new media, internal branding and employee communications, crisis communications, issues management and speechwriting.

Human Resources go beyond recruitment and selection. It includes, among others, organizational development and leadership, diversity, talent management, training and development, career customization, succession planning, employee appraisals, change management, international HR, and compensation and benefits.

I would exhort, every young mind to spend adequate time understanding the nuances of public relations and human resources. Whether you work in the mainstream or non mainstream realm, you will need public relations and human resources skills at some point in time. Irrespective of whether you take the self-employment or the salaried employee route, you will need new age PR and HR skills to build your own brand, your organization’s profile, and augment the development of your establishment’s human capital.

Young Minds, HR and PR are getting hotter by the day. You are requested to remember a cardinal principle—you cannot create an iconic brand without strategic PR and you cannot create a great organization without adept HR. Please remember this equation:

The fear factor

Fear is a great disconnector. It is rampant in modern organisations. We have grown so accustomed to fear that we hardly notice it, be it fear provoked by an announcement, say, your company is implementing new HR rules to check employee performance, or a rumour that it is going to slash jobs. Not managed correctly, fear can hold your employees back more than any other single force. In this extract from the book Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People, author Edward M Hallowell explains what employees fear and how organisations should deal with it.

Many employees are afraid to make a mistake. Some of their fear may be due to their genetic makeup — research has shown that toxic worrying can be carried in one’s genes. But some of their fear may also be due to their manager’s style. Worrying that their job is in jeopardy, these workers play it safe. They play not to lose, rather than to win, which leads them to fall far short of what they could do.

What they fear varies. It may be disapproval, a poor result, criticism, looking stupid, going beyond their comfort zone, making others look bad — they may even fear making themselves look good! Oddly enough, some people feel that to stand out even by excelling is to court rejection, so they consciously or unconsciously perform below their abilities. A mob mentality can preserve mediocrity by punishing those who achieve excellence.

The process can work in the other direction as well. People can want so passionately to excel that they put too much pressure on themselves. This is one of the great paradoxes of peak performance: wanting too much to win can keep a person from winning. If employees believe everything is riding on the outcome of their performance, fear can freeze them up and lead them to perform poorly. Or, as a golf pro friend of mine put it, “The key to putting is not caring too much if the ball goes in the hole.”

Fear also can drive an employee to take on more than he can handle. He may feel obliged to do more than he can do. Feeling that his job, the success of the project, the making of the quarterly number, or his self-esteem is at stake, an employee may try to carry much more than he possibly can — leading to less-than-excellent, if not disastrous, performance.

Employees may fear that stating their limits will lead their manager to fire them, downgrade them, or, at best, think less of them. In my consulting work, this is one of the most common fears I address. “How can I tell my boss that he is making my job impossible? If I do, he’ll think I’m complaining or not gutting it out and doing what’s required. I can’t afford to lose my job or lose his respect.” This is why it makes sense for the manager to inquire, rather than wait to hear from the employee.

Not all fear, however, is detrimental. Some underlying anxiety can in fact sharpen performance. One of the best validated of all relationships in the behavioral sciences is the so-called performance-anxiety curve. It shows that as anxiety increases, performance improves, up to a certain point. Beyond that point, the curve starts a rapid decline, as performance deteriorates while anxiety continues to rise. Managers should try to keep employees off the descending slope of this curve. A bit of reassurance, some coaching, or, if possible, giving additional resources or education all can serve to reduce anxiety and pull a person back from that downward slope. If nothing else, simply joining the person in their worry can, interestingly enough, reduce the worry. One of my favorite and most useful maxims is: “Never worry alone.”

Among all the sources of fear discussed today in the business literature, perhaps the most common is simply change. The person who can’t manage a fear of change can’t win in today’s world. We all fear change at some level. It ties into our basic desire for security, even immortality. At an unconscious level, change represents the ultimate cause of human insecurity — the prospect of death. So it makes sense that all of us fear change, to some extent.

At a conscious level, change triggers our fear of the unknown. Because we don’t know what change will bring and can’t control it, we tend to fear it. Anything that threatens our feeling of being in control triggers fear — or anger — or both.

Much of a manager’s work is helping the people who work for him or her manage their fears of change and of the unknown, their feelings of insecurity and powerlessness. If a manager can turn that fear on its head so that it becomes excitement at the prospect of change, he will get enormously more out of his people. The great manager helps his people make this emotional flip, thus regaining the mental energy they would otherwise have lost to fear.

But how do you do this? One way to transform fear into confident action is by reframing the situation. Let’s say some people have been laid off, leaving those who remain fearful that they might be next. As you reframe the situation you have to be careful, because you don’t want to sound phony. However, you could honestly say, “The good news is that the people upstairs are going to look elsewhere for the next cuts, so we have some time to pull together and come up with some new ideas.” Or, “With fewer people, we need each other now more than ever. Let’s take this as a chance to create some super teamwork with one another.” You don’t deny the reality of the situation, but you work to see its realistically bright side. You work to instill rugged optimism in the culture of your place.
A word about optimism. It can jump-start peak performance. Often dismissed as Pollyanna-ish or unrealistic, the best kind of optimism looks disaster straight in the eye and says, “We’ll find a way to deal with you.” Such optimism is muscular and brave. And, it can be learned. As a manager, if you model an optimistic attitude, it becomes contagious. It fosters what Stanford psychologist Carol

Dweck calls a “growth mind-set,” one that welcomes challenges because the person believes he can learn whatever is needed to overcome whatever obstacles arise. The person who has what Dweck calls a “fixed mind-set” believes that talent, or lack thereof, limits outcome, and so shies away from what he doesn’t know how to do. Dweck’s copious and groundbreaking research shows that the most successful people are not necessarily the most talented but rather those who develop a growth mind-set. And the really good news is that, like optimism, a growth mind-set can be taught and can be learned — at any age.


How? Here is how Dweck put it:

I believe that managers can best communicate a growth mind-set to their people by conveying that the skills of the job are learned skills and that they, the managers, are there to teach and support employees in the learning of those skills.

In that context, managers can also emphasize that they value passion and dedication (not just “natural talent”), that they value employees’ challenging and stretching themselves to tackle new things (rather than just remaining in their comfort zones), and that they value teamwork (over individual stardom).

My research has taught me one thing more than any other: People are tuned into what those around them value. If managers convey these growth mind-set values, their people will adopt them and live/grow by them.

The manager who rules by pressure and fear (who usually is ruled from above by superiors who also use pressure and fear) lobotomizes his people. Believing he is doing what must be done to bring out their best, he in fact renders them ineffective over time. Fear is a short-term motivator but a long-term disabler.

TVS Electronics Launches India’s First Keyboard with the new Indian Rupee Symbol

On the occasion of 63rd independence day of India, TVS Electronics Launches India’s First Keyboard with the new Indian Rupee Symbol.

The new Indian currency Rupee symbol has just come to existence and already there have been prominent talks as to who would be creating the technology to incorporate this new symbol both into software and hardware.

It seems TVS has played very intelligently and put its best foot forward to launch its new keyboard which includes the new Indian currency symbol.

The officials have already made the Rupee available on the internet where the people can download the same but now this new keyboard will facilitate an easy entry through the keyboard while tying.

The new keyboard launched by TVS is the first of its kind and gives you the option to use the new symbol easily and this is called the Gold Bharat. The officials at TVS were smart enough to launch this on the eve of an important day that is the 63rd independence day of India.

Seeking Mr Tata’s Replacement

There has been a growing buzz of CEO's retiring in INDIA these dayz.
Ratanji Tata,Narayanaji Murthy,and few others(not as big as both of them).
This sudden change might be dangerous for the economy as TATA and INFOSYS are major contributors in GDP.

History telling us What may be claim made by Tata and the media Tata will appoint his successor from his nearest relative.From many generation only nearest relative was appointed as a successor.

Last year, Tata Motors launched the world’s cheapest car, the $2,500 Nano. Most transformative has been the group’s acquisitive drive overseas, starting with Tetley Tea a decade ago.In 2007 it bought Corus, an Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, for $12 billion, constituting India’s biggest foreign splurge; a year later, it took Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) from Ford Motors for $2.3 billion.See what he do more for making his brand strong.....

There Are Thousands of Alternatives

Live Long TATA

I think it is wrong......child labour

This is what once said by......Todays Childrens are our future leaders

I really feel that generation after generation,but children shouldn’t work regularly until they’re of 18.

A child should not work until he or she is finished with his or her studies, (because)they’re only kids and they will have their whole life to work.

They should be made aware of the consequences of children being forced to work instead of going to school.

I know if they stop working then not only (the child), but also his family will be affected.Their family member should be given job by our government.

I think that it is okay if you are treated well and get a fair amount of money, but first education.The youth who are aware of such real truths should speak up.
Lets Join the hands against child labour...........

Why they throw and give Prashad (bread) in Gurudwara?

Your ego is hurt? Feel bad? Very good! Guru's door and on the ego? Why then you do the langar?
It's not that there's no burning stove or bread is not made! Then too you have come to the Gurdwara, and sitting at langar!
Little more ego that is left out, Guru will throw it out while giving Prashad!
Guru will hit you on your ego like a potter, then your pitcher will be made! He knows what he is doing!
It's a beautiful thing that many people, tend to drink the injuries quietly, do not oops! Without questions, they are speechless! Like without knowing how a a child wears Janeu!
Who did not ask, how can he learn? From who did not mind what she will like? The one who says, has learnt! Sikh happened! You asked, did you become a Sikhs ! You found knowledge of the ego in you and you were wise!

By understanding my answer from next time you will never feel bad while taking Prashad! Knowingly feel bad that you can go out of Guru's door, but you're in! Inside the door of Guru, within Guru's heart! Now you will not be deterred by hurt! You have to be compatible!

But the one who's throwing and giving the Prashad- his ego is like Himalayas. Try saying him, he will show you the way out! Ego at Guru's door? He do not even want to know what Guru is saying, he just wants to put a handkerchief on your head and give throwing Prashad! His duties have made him tough and hardcore! It's matter of thinking that who will feed him the Prashad and how?