Of Storefronts and Kitchens

This clever management book I read long ago talked about three attributes for a business to succeed. Location, Location and Location; it proclaimed. But that was a long time ago.  

Looking at some of the successful businesses that I buy from today, I count Flipkart, Amazon, Bookmyshow, BigBasket among the prominent ones. I know nothing about their Location. Yet they deliver me books, movie tickets, groceries and all the trivia I need. I get to see a variety of the offerings, compare prices and have everything at my doorstep too.  Satisfaction is no less than the one I had visiting stores in old days.  The way we buy has changed substantially and permanently. A brick and mortar storefront looks no longer necessary.

The virtual storefront that’s somewhere-out-there looks as pretty, as appealing to our buying senses, and is as complete in its presentation on the browser. Nothing is left wanting. A tangible real estate expensively done-up looks no longer in vogue.

So let's see where this could go.

Urbanization a few decades ago and going the the traditional way, had placed a lot of emphasis on real estate.  Starting 70s, Real Estate became the focal point of businesses; large and small. While the Location Location & Location phrase traces its origins to 1920s, it was starting four decades ago, that its impact was felt as never before. What assumes a focal importance also naturally attracts speculators. Speculation perception of the times led to the asking price and rental of commercial Real Estate blow out of proportion.  The mere viability of businesses was then precariously perched on the real estate bill.  A startup business of those times had no leeway for growing-up misadventures, nor a support to condone the early mistakes a startup would make.

As we stand in the present times, hopefully the shift of focus from the material to the virtual storefront may take away the undue stress on the geographical location and infrastructure. The diminished importance of Commercial Real Estate would in turn drive out speculation, and the economics of balanced supply could kick in. Businesses can now become viable without having to worry about the Real Estate monster consuming a major part of the resources.

Bringing in this ease of buying to our rather crowded lives, have we humans lost out on a few things? A major criticism I have come across is that the tangible sense where people go outdoors, see each other and do business one-to-one is lost. Matters become too virtual, impersonal and confined to the indoors. What happens also to the vibrant urban space where humans talk, walk and laugh together?

Hopefully the reduced Real Estate price pressure will make those tiny business nooks you used to see around the corner viable again. The tea shack and the quaint little bakery will blossom again, serve people, and do well. There will only be a few of them around however, with majority of the big business moving online.

Having fewer shops and establishments in the neighborhood is a welcome thought. This way, commercial establishments will not crowd the living and breathing space so dearly required by an urban human to move outdoors and meet other humans at length, leisure and peace.

With the changing perspective of businesses, a business owner's focus is shifting from the storefront to the proverbial kitchen. Logistics, supply chains, lean management is already the talk in consumer businesses as much as in the non-consumer ones. I hope to write about it on another day as a sequel to this post. 

Travails of an Amateurish Manager

It was almost 30 years ago. Interning with Mahindra Tractors as an apprentice, I was getting my first taste of the industry, trying to learn the ropes of real engineering. We were a bunch of newbies each in our early 20s going around the factory, feeling important and giving an onlooker the impression that it was we who really made the tractors roll.

The progressive Mahindra management decided to put us all through a 10-day Management Development program, where we would take classes in an on-campus seminar room. Experienced honchos from the organization would come to lecture us on various aspects of management.

One of the sessions of those times has lingered with me, and keeps making an impact time and again.

A manager who came to teach us leadership qualities had devised a game. Three teams would compete to assemble a disheveled bunch of loose papers into three neatly ordered books, each identified and serialized by page numbers. 

Eager to get into action, I volunteered to be the leader of one of the teams. The teams were given 10 minutes to discuss and plan their strategy. The competition took off at the whistle, and sheets of paper rustled around in a frenzy. One by one the teams submitted their three organized books.

To my dismay, my team finished last, taking almost twice the amount of time as the second slowest team.

What had gone wrong?

The other teams had put one team-member in charge of each book. The sheets would be handed over by all to the respective book owner, who would quickly organize his book serially.

I had however led my team on a horrendously inefficient path. I the leader took upon myself to personally assemble every book. The rest of the team had to just stand by hand me the sheets of paper. The process went on and on and on.

The management gurus were nice people. No one branded me a failed leader.

Piecing together the events of the day, the differences between our team and the others stood out stark.

Other teams planned together. Five heads put together spawned the plan and made it work. Our team plan was the chief's plan alone. Others needed to follow suit.

The other teams split the work; each intelligent member in charge of assembling his book. All books got ready concurrently. Our team leader trusted only himself to do all the work. 

Other teams took up the challenge as a team. For our team the whole thing was the leader’s baby, the leader’s making; and as it turned out eventually, the leader’s debacle :)

Three decades since, as I sit through the many planning sessions that happen in the office, I look at those awesome youngsters on our team with admiration. Each young man and woman capable of thought, plan and innovation. 'Oh just leave it to them', I say to myself. They will do it. Clearly, the team stands out a lot more capable than each member in isolation. The leader needs to play merely a support role.

Those loose sheets of paper taught me a lesson of teamwork that I will cherish.

I quietly smile at the wet-behind-the-ears, 20 something boy from not so long ago.

But Measure you must!!

Lord Kelvin is the guy responsible for telling me whether I have a high fever or low. He invented the temperature measuring scale.

Lord Kelvin said over a hundred years ago:

 "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind..."

Expressed in modern day English, it simply means "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it'.

We all set goals for ourselves and hope to excel at achieving these. I realize that I think of too many important matters in mere Qualitative terms and then hope to do better at them. With qualitative descriptors, my thinking gets muddled up.

-          Am I more punctual in responding to people than I was before?

-          Is my track running performance better than it was last year?

-          Am I playing my favorite musical instrument better now that I have practiced for a year?

-          Am I communicating better in the foreign language that I learnt, than when I began?

I am aware that we all measure these goals in some number formats or other. However to make any kind of judgment about ourselves we need more than just isolated numbers.
 
If I measure my performance on a 100 meter track on 20 days, the stopwatch tells me that I am good on some days and not good on others. Does it mean that the workout schedule I follow has had a positive impact? I am not sure. To be certain, I will need to compare measures across two horizons of time in the following terms:

1.       Shift in baseline of the performance measure.

2.       Consistency of performance across measures.

To measure performance, I need a single number that will tell me in no uncertain terms that improvement has taken place.

What I write about personal goals applies to corporate goals too, and a single number that gives you a clear mandate on improvement would be of great value, in performance measures, appraisals et al.

A few years ago I had studied the work done by Genichi Taguchi, the eminent Japanese engineer and statistician. His metric of Signal-to-Noise Ratio seems to be the single number that I am looking for. I am going to write about how the S/N ratio metric could be used to gauge sports performance improvement. Watch this space.

Measure you may more correctly than others, measure you may not so correctly, but measure you must!

Selling a Fridge to an Eskimo

Having spent over 25 years running a business, the importance of good selling keeps coming back every day, stronger than ever. Clichéd phrases abound, highlighting the fact that a business becomes robust only if it is able to sell.

There is one cliché that has been flying around for a long time that I can’t somehow relate to. The one about Ace Salesmen being able to sell a Fridge to an Eskimo.

It stinks of gimmicks, of lies and of deception.

So consider the scenario where an Eskimo does get sweet talked into buying your refrigerator. The next day he realizes that he has been taken for a ride by your salesmanship. The customer gets upset. The word goes around, and soon no Eskimo wants to have anything to do with you; fridge or no fridge.

I have read that the justification of this story is to sell of possibility thinking. It narrates how the Eskimo’s wife would be better off that she doesn’t have to bury reindeer meat in the snow any longer. I wonder whether the people who came up with this believe the story themselves.
 
Sales, the way I would like to look at means- think deep, scratch below the surface, honestly find how your products and services would benefit a customer, and then go painstakingly about finding those customers.

An honest way of selling…takes your wares a long way!

Say Goodbye to the Typewriter

An inevitable news:

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/godrej-to-shut-typewriter-unit-production-with-diminishing-demand/1/137323.html

Saying goodbye to the typewriter era makes me nostalgic.

I joined Godrej in 1983 as a Service Engineer, and among other things was responsible for Typewriter service for the Pune branch. Being trained in the plant at Vikhroli, I found that a Typewriter was a mechanical marvel. A complex chain of linkages operated in coherence to make that letter impression on paper. We had an army of mechanics who went around the region and maintained typewriters. Typists from large corporate offices (especially the charming young variety) were the most difficult creatures to deal with. They would raise a ruckus over trivial snags, and expect the service gang to fall in line immediately. Needless to say we obliged :). As sales people, we used to go on the scent of a new typewriter customer enquiry, always wanting to beat Facit and Remington at the game. A sale of 55 Godrej typewriters to TELCO in a single lot made us virtual heros in the Godrej clan.

To popularize the product, Godrej used to organize Speed-Typing contests. Hoards of typing enthusiasts used to attend and show off their speed and accuracy. The fastest finger was given generous awards. Those ten days, everyone on the Godrej team remotely associated with typewriter sales and service was pressed into service to manage the event. Looking around me I see many of the typewriter sales executives of those days become successful event managers in later years.

Post Godrej days when we started our business, our first asset was an old Underwood portable typewriter. I recall the fun we had sitting through the night devouring cups of tea, and hammering out letters on the typewriter, typing with one finger. Later on, we gained typing expertise and started churning out our early business letters much faster than before.

As the article cited above points out, word processers and computers eventually came in, and the good old rat-a-tat machine went into oblivion.

Old technology must move-on to make way for the modern. Yet I will cherish these old noisy machines in the nostalgic corner of my mind for years to come.

Inspiration

An entrepreneur's obsession goes often with following inspirational thoughts of stalwarts in business and industry. There are many that are interesting and yet many others over which your eyes just glaze over.
Rarely have I come across a clear thinking, powerful message as the one given by J C Bamford, the founder of JCB. I quote Bamford on 'A Sense of Urgency'.
--------------------------------------
A Sense of Urgency
Montreux, Switzerland 2nd June 1993
I was once ask as a founder of JCB, What is took to succeed. "The same thing it took to get started", I said, "a sense of URGENCY about getting things done". The people who make things move in this world share this same sense of URGENCY. No matter how intelligent or able you may be, if you don't have this sense of URGENCY,now is the time to start developing it. The world is full of very competent people who honestly intend to do things tomorrow or as soon as they can get around to it. Their accomplishments, however, seldom match those of the less talented who are blessed with a sense of the importance of GETTING STARTED NOW.
-Joseph Cyril Bamford (1916-2001 )
Founder of JCB
----------------------------------------