The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

In 1991, as an engineering student on vacation to my parent’s place in Delhi, I remember my stunned mother telling me about Rajiv Gandhi’s demise at the hands of an assassin. She was finding it hard to control her tears. He was regaining popularity that time, and one believed, he was all set to come back to power.

While driving back from Vellore few days back, we decided to stop at the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial at Sriperumbudur. This is at the same spot where he lived his last. The memorial is built over a large area on the Chennai Bangalore highway.

Mrs. Indira Gandhi statue at the traffic island near the Rajiv Gandhi memorial. The inscription at the memorial reads that Rajiv Gandhi had just garlanded this statue and moved on the meeting venue when the incident happened.

 

 

 

Sriperumbudur has a positive claim to fame, which is that it is the birth place or the great mathematician, Srinivas Ramanujam.

 

 

 

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I stand at the entrance of the memorial. It is written as Rajiv Gandhi Ninaivakam. Whoever designed it had great aesthetic sense indeed.

 

 

 

 

We had reached some time before the sunset when the national flag was being lowered down for the day with the respect it deserves. That’s my daughter watching it with attention. The flag is indeed huge in size. I estimate it to be about 20 feet width. The staff holding it is also almost a feet in diameter at the base.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The inscription at the memorial, that I read several times. It is written in English, Hindi and Tamil. I read it in English and Hindi.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the path on which Rajiv Gandhi took his last walk. The white box in the center represents the place where his end came. The columns are high and strong, as if protecting someone in the center. No two columns are alike, yet, like the diversity of India, they stand united on common purpose. Very touching.

 

 

As I watched this, the missus was somewhere else. Lost deep in contemplation, actually.

The mural represented India.I liked it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we left the place, we were quite stirred. There was silence in the car for quite some time.

Salute to the fallen leader.

I happened to be at a lecture cum interaction by none other than the CEO of Nissan-Renault Alliance, Carlos Ghosn in Chennai on 18th March 2010. Having read a lot about him and having read his book ‘The Shift’ way back in 2006, I was really very keen to see and hear the great man himself. One of the boons of living in IIT Madras campus.

True to expectation, the ‘Cost Cutter’ did not disappoint anyone.  He was witty, sharp and fully there.

I had read earlier that he was very good with numbers and he gave a vivid demonstration of the that by rattling back whatever the Director of IIT Madras, Dr Ananth had told him few minutes back(So many lakhs sat in JEE, only so many got selected, so many boys, so many girls etc). Some samples from the Q&A.

 

Q: You have so many alliances in India? What is the strategy behind them? It seems to be so confusing!

A: All the alliances have a specific purpose which is different from another. The Indian market is so much unlike any other market. We are learning from all our partners and it is like having so many teachers teaching you different you aspects of the market. Like you have a teacher to teach you physics and another to teach you math and so on. Do you get confused by having so many teachers?

Q. The Indian government is not giving subsidy on electric cars..

A: The fact is that vehicle type adoption is largely governed by what the governments want to let happen in their markets. That’s why you have diesel vehicles in Europe and none in US and Japan. I would expect the electric cars to take market first in USA, EU and Japan. Remember, we are talking the same about just 10 % electric vehicles market after 20 years. That leaves out 90% and there is tremendous scope for evolution of technology.

 

On the whole, it was a great event. The only disappointment was NDTV’s Siddharth, who was looking very handsome indeed, but that’s about it.

Helpful Link: My review of Mr. Ghosn’s book ‘The Shift’.

This post is largely an outcome of my real life experiences as a nouveau Airtel mobile service customer. Sorry, a short lived customer and an ex-customer at present.

It just so happened that after relocating back to Chennai recently ( and having heard the very impressive group CIO of Bharti group, Jai Menon in Delhi recently), I decided to take a mobile connection from Airtel this time. I filled out an application form and handed over to a dealer’s representative, who had paid me a visit to my office to collect the documentation.

Sure enough, the connection started working in a day’s time. I logged into the Airtel portal out of curiosity, and found my name written as ‘Rajesh Kumar S’. I thought I should point out the typo and called them on March 6th, which they promised by an SMS to revert by March 9th. In the next couple of days or so, I happened to receive a ‘welcome letter’ from someone called Aidtya Chile, (GM KTN – go figure out) that had exactly the same error in my name.

Few days later, a representative of Airtel, dropped in at my residence for address verification, and was about to leave after asking me my name, when I saw that the copy of the application form carried by him did not have my signature. I took it in my hand, and then found out it was some other handwriting, and interestingly, instead of my photo, it had someone else’s picture. My name as written as Rajesh Kumar S. On my own insistence on noting this down on the form, he handed me the form. I recorded that the picture & signature were not mine, and mine and my father’s name were only partially correct. Happy that I have set the ball rolling for a correction to happen and waiting to hear back from Airtel, I got on. About a week down on a Saturday evening, I received an sms saying my connection may be cut and I should talk to my dealer. Worried that the line would be disconnected, I frantically looked for the dealer’s number, I realized I had left it in the office. I decided to approach the Airtel outlet in Shastri Nagar with a copy of the id and address proofs. I was told that I must approach the dealer only and they cannot do anything to help me. Finally, when I spoke to the dealer, he promised to take care of ‘everything’ on Monday and call back by Monday evening to confirm.  To be sure, I also called 121 customer care to ask them the matter and they said they need to reverify my address, which they would do in the next two working days and then everything would be alright. I was relieved mentally.

But, as one would expect, the call from the dealer did not materialize on Monday or Tuesday. Not even Wednesday. Nor did anyone come for re-verification. Thursday morning, my phone refused to pick up my emails or connect any calls. I could place the problem and approached 121, which is the customer care. I asked them the matter.

“Sir, we have a negative address and id verification. The signature and photos do not match, the name is a partial match only. Therefore we have decided to disconnect the outgoing line”. I explained that actually that is my issue against them, not vice versa. In my anger, I asked him the address of Mr. Aditya Chile to be able to share the details with him. I was refused. I took out the letter that came from Aditya Chile to locate his address and phone number. That masterpiece of a letter did not have one. So much for being a customer friendly organization. I asked the customer care what it took to cancel the connection. Pat came the reply,”Don’t bother sir, we are doing so from our side”. The phone outgoing is cut and probably anytime now, the incoming calls would stop too.

Next:

1. I wrote a letter to Aditya Chile, and sent to Airtel’s office in T Nagar, which I could locate by chance. Not sure if the letter reached him or if he cared to think much over it.
2. I asked Aircel to send their rep to my house and Tuesday onwards, expect me to be on Aircel, my 8 old trusted brand.

From Airtel perspective it was operation successful, patient dead. So much for a brand that paints the town read! RIP 80560 38888!!!

It is not that Indian companies stay completely away from the reality of brand management in social media.  I even received a response from ICICI Bank one day, when I tweeted about some issues on their website.  It took them a day to come back-  in digital world, a day can be too late.

Vijay in this post has published a nice presentation on a particular incident that had the potential to hurt Cafe Coffee Day’s digital reputation. CCD reacted on the same platform and came up with quick remedies to the situation. The wonderful presentation tells you what happened, and how CCD came into the picture and then how it went about the whole issue.

 

How Cafe Coffee Day Handled Their Online Crisis

View more presentations from Vijay Rayapati.

The point is, it is currently easier for smaller companies to react quickly as CCD did, in this case. Multi division companies, even if they have all the right intentions, may not have the same speed of reaction, when there is an incident on the web like this one. Speed and decisiveness may remain the key to making or breaking a reputation.

Nevertheless, companies are taking the right baby steps in this direction. Daksh has compiled an excellent presentation on Indian companies on Twitter that is worth a serious look.

PS: Blogging will me more frequent now.

It is not easy to find Dr Jagdish Sheth’s time, even if it is just one minute. On the sidelines of Milagrow World SME Conference,  I succeeded in getting more than a minute. Last I heard him was at Madras Management Association, couple of years back.

 

Then I actually succeeded in persuading Prof Anil Gupta to pose for this picture. Those of us who have the propensity to use the term ‘innovation’ a dozen times a day would do well to listen to a lecture of Prof Gupta to figure out what innovation actually is. 

These are my jewel moments at the World SME Conference 2009, which I shall cherish for several years.

A great conference shapes up, inch-by-inch, and reaches close to the D-Day. I am refering to Milagrow World SME Conference coming week in New Delhi ( Dec 16-17, 2009 actually). Incidentally, my alma-mater IMT Ghaziabad is an academic partner at this conference and we have done some amazing amount of work together at Milagrow IMT Ghaziabad MSME Center of Excellence. Makes me feel good.

 

Government representatives representing policy makers component of the MSME ecosystem, academicians who matter, and industry stalwarts who have seen it all. That, incidentally includes my CEO, Rajeev Karwal, who feels very strongly on MSME issues, and is always full of data and softer inputs in an argument that it is difficult to win from him! Besides, there is Anu Aga, Raman Roy, Rajesh Jain, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, SMB Nation’s Harry Brelsford, Prof Jagdish Sheth(I could’t take his autograph on his book in Chennai, let me try again!), Prof Anil Gupta of IIM A who is synonymous with the grassroots innovation movement in India. Besides, journalists such as Manvi Dhillon, Shereen Bhan, Chetan Sharma and so on.

My colleague Nishant put this presentation up on SlideShare. Should you be interested in knowing more about this conference, please feel free to the event microsite www.wsme.in – I rather feel you should – even if you are thousands of miles away from Delhi, where we are hosting this edition of the conference.

Especially, when it happens to be about how organisations are getting affected. This one is from McKinsey Quarterly and answers questions on social media that managements would like want to know about. And in line with the state of things, the ‘ground bottom’ of the organisations know much more about what is being spoken in this video and, neither even care about some of the points here. But if you are the ‘management’ layer, do hit the play button to listen to MIT’s Andrew McAfee.

Well, if you cannot see the video, sorry, I am doing what McKinsey asked me to do. So what if the result is not there!

Just see the picture below and think if you ever saw a bigger discount before. I had not, till I saw this in Gurgaon few days back. This is one of the busy malls at MG Road. However, the large discount seem to attract no footfalls.

In fact, the attendants inside were busy chatting as there was no customer inside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning: Never discount your brand like this, won’t get you any customers.

Let me admit this – I never heard of Pranav Mistry before. However, the simplicity with which he presented his Sixth Sense technology at TEDIndia recently is an absolute stunner. Someone forwarded me this link and I watched this several times already. There are many people with several disruptive ideas and innovations, however, demonstrating their relevance to everyday touch-points is something to be truly seen and felt via this presentation. Due to Youtube duration limitations, the presentation is in two parts. Total duration is less than 15 minutes and you must watch this, even if you know nothing about technology.

 

The technology is called Sixth Sense, and in Pranav’s words, connects the real to the digital. It has some pretty amazing applications already.

 

Pranav, your presentation has left a promise.We wait for it to be fulfilled soon. And by the way, you rock!

It is daily that one finds car companies comparing their upcoming car and ‘any other thing on wheels’. It is also a common occurrence to find soap and shampoo manufacturers comparing their product and ‘any other ordinary’ product . People in my generation recall the ad with the line ‘adha kilo surf kisi aur sadharan powder ke ke ek kilo barabar hota hai’. Bike companies in India have long done feature-to-feature competition with competition products for ages.

It is one thing to call your competition as ‘any other’ or common (‘sadharan’ in Hindi). Basically the objective in such communications is three fold. One, to show product superiority. Two, to show that the competition as a commodity. Three, not to allow competition any visibility at your cost.

But to call your competition fake?! I find it rather strange that an purported original, which actually came into being (or purported prominence) after the purported original (rumoured or alleged), reportedly calls the purported fake as fake?! Leaves you clueless?

It is quite a known fact that Zoho is among the most promising and closely watched SAAS based service provider for desktop services(and elements of enterprise services, just a bit of it). It is also among those that came into being before even Google Docs was launched. But it is being called fake! The purported original, to the best of my understanding, largely existed in a much different form and shape, though at one level they do compete for the same space. How about calling the pizza fake because the corn exists! And Microsoft’s pizza, though fresh and nice smelling, came after Zoho’s office productivity suite had celebrated its birthdays. So it is what, a fake based on another fake’s success, or a fake based on the implied original?

Some someone invented a writing instrument, say, a pencil. And another one invented another, entirely different in concept and ideas, let’s say, a pen. So, by the above logic, the pen is a fake pencil. And the guy who invented the computer printer is an absolute thief!Wow!!

Sridhar Vembu of Zoho is understandably ballistic. And look at Zoho’s creative (and humorous response to Microsoft). FakeOffice.org.