Posts

Can you pump life in a dead man?

Passion - that's one of the key element in a team for a product or service to succeed. So what happens when you are given "dead men walking" to lead? How do you ignite passion in them to make sure they feel the part of a group and make the product/service they work upon, a success. Try answering these 3 questions for them: 1. Where are we going? 2. Why are we going there? 3. What's in it for them? If you can answer these three questions for them, I can bet that you will have a team which can teach the whole world, real meaning of passion. But what if you, yourself don't know the answers of these questions? - I would then suggest that face the reality - you are also a dead man walking and before you can infuse passion in your team, you need the oxygen mask yourself. Remember the instructions, air hostess gives before flight!

Crazy Ideas

What you dismiss as a crazy idea, could be the next big product for your competition. So analyze with all the pragmatism of your competition (and not just yours), every "crazy" idea before you throw it out of your window.

Leadership

I truly believe that Leadership is a science which can be developed at any point in career. All you need is a laboratory (read workplace, peers, manager) which can provide strong yet at the same time, constructive feedbacks over your strengths and your areas of improvement!

Can you replace sweets from the sweetshop?

The answer is that somebody is already trying to do it! That somebody is Cadbury India, which, for their product, Dairy Milk Chocolate, has come up with a brilliant tag line - "Kuch meetha ho jai" which literally translates in English to, "Let's have something sweet" and which generally is used by Indians as a proposal to have sweets. What else is good about this strategy. It's the way Cadbury India has backed their tag line with their Marketing campaign, Advertising and Brand Positioning. But most importantly it's their distribution channel which has been making sure that Dairy Milk Chocolate is present by the side of Gulab Jamun and Barfi, at every sweetshop, no matter how deep you go into the rural areas . No wonder this specific chocolate alone holds 30% value share of the Indian chocolate market. Next time you hear organizations complaining about their Marketing Campaigns not producing desired results despite being brilliant, you know what they need

Is Talking same as Walking?

When established organizations enter into their competitive industry segment claiming that there is still a room for other players,why did their marketing defy their claims? So while the tag line of Tate DOCOMO says that you should "Do the New", Reliance GSM suggest you to "Go For it"; both trying to convince existing GSM subscribers to move away from their existing service providers. They don't realize that today's "smart" customer can see through the gap between what they preach and what they end up doing. Isn't it the time for organizations to walk their talk?

Competency

A thought came to my mind, thought of sharing it with you - In business or job, build competencies which are hard to build, because then they will be harder to compete, copy, match or excel. Serving people is one of them :)

Get Brilliant at Asking!

I am great at making commitments to myself but if it were not for my commitment buzzer, my wife Shweta, I would have missed at least a couple of them. so here I am visiting a shopping mall with my parents and brothers(who are visiting us) on the weekend and wife reminds me of my commitment to take them to a restaurant close which I love because of its innovative ambiance and its lovely food (I am a big foodie!) In one section of this restaurant there is this train coupe' which is the center attraction of this restaurant. The only glitch is that it serves only 4 people at a table. Now coming to this restaurant and not sitting in the coupe' on the same table with the whole family doesn't make sense. So what did I do? I went and asked the manager permission for all 6 of us to sit in the coupe’. I didn't push. I was polite. And I gave him the solution upfront so that he can think about it instead of thinking for the possible solution. And he agreed! But the brilliance