The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

I am breaking by blogging silence (hiatius, perhaps?) by doing what all sane minded folks should do. Let’s begin by saying that the Saturday blasts in Hyderabad and reported discovery of other terror devices out to be condemned in the highest terms. You do not get a good feel when anyone dies or gets hurt, least of all, when you learn that innocent folks who are enjoying an outdoor evening, including kids, failed to return home, because someone blasted a bomb.

The bombs would certainly not asked for anyone’s religion, ideology, age or profession before hitting them and that is the whole tragedy. While law enforcement is surely going to nail these faceless terrorists in due course, it is only a resolute public opinion that would perhaps deter such attacks.

My humble homage to all those who left us on Saturday, and remembrance to all those who have elsewhere died in terror violence in the past, either as innocent victims, or those who died fighting the terrorists, such as the security personnel on duty who defended the Indian Parliament House from the terrorist attack.

In earlier posts we discussed how communication has become conversational and flat. In yet another post, we discussed how cricket boards across the world such as Pakistan and Australia, have chosen to create their websites, and also those such as BCCI have, chosen not to have their websites.

The essential challenge is for organizations, cricket boards included, is to reach out to all key stakeholders via all available means of communication. The current unpopularity of BCCI is partly due to its inability to think of cricket lovers beyond just ticket buyers/ TV viewers. This has meant that cricket has been sold as a commodity, not as a well cultivated brand .

I hope folks at ICL will soon realize that a great communication advantage awaits them, if they choose to engage cricket lovers via the web.

That essentially means, get an ICL website up very soon. A website that breathes and lives. This is no rocket science wisdom, but merely common sense. The engagement possibilities remain practically limitless, if this happens.

And would not be surprised, if BCCI too reacts by getting a website up. Great for cricket. Let’s see.

In my post titled Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid – What I liked and what I didn’t I wrote about my impressions on Dr CK Prahalad’s work titled ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid‘.

Frankly when I read the book, I did not come out fully convinced.It all sounded very nice, but not very pursuasive. My curiousity led me to search a bit more on this debate. I came across a paper by Prof. Aneel Karnani published in California Management Review. The paper titled Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid: A Mirage comes out hard on the BOP concept as enunciated in Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by Dr Prahalad.

While Dr Prahalad’s work focusses on how corporations can make money selling even to the marginal wage earner, Dr Karnani questions the viability of such a proposition, even talks on issues such as affordability of this segment of consumers. He even questions the suitability of the cases used to substantiate the BOP proposition (such as Annapurna salt).Frankly anyone who has been to countryside markets where many of India’s marginal earners live and seen the buying behaviour would tend to agree to Dr Karnani’s paper. I would recommend that you read Dr. Karnani’s paper in entirety.

Dr Karnani’s paper also comes down hard on the facts and figures quoted in this book.If one were to believe the BOP work, an Indian housewife send an average of 60 text messages a day(Page 43, paperback edition) on their mobile phones. Frankly, I am not an expert on numbers but find this quite ridiculously high. A tenth of this number would have sounded more convincing.

The good thing is that the debate talks about a segment that is not SEC A which is where most of the strategic thinking generally remains focused. Followers of the BOP school have created a site to carry on the argument and it is interesting to watch this debate growing. Dr. Prahalad’s arguments for a change sound defensive, quite indicated by the Ads in Google if you run a search on ‘CK Prahalad’ which read ‘Learn about Prahalad‘s BOP strategy and his response to criticism‘.

Interesting!