Deadly “pressure-to-perform” claims another life

A 25 year old with technical and business degrees from IIT and IIM, the top Indian colleges and working for McKinsey, the world’s best consulting company. Everyone would say what an amazing guy. The mental pressure around the two statements is in itself unimaginable.

It is generally accepted that at least 3 years of work experience is required to take up an advanced or Master’s degree and in the case of an advanced business degree more experience is preferred. Academic institutions should assess the work experience and the candidate’s exposure and knowledge of the business side of things before granting admission for business degrees. The guy came straight out of IIT at 22 years and landed at IIM. What exposure does someone at 22 have of business and the ones who have will definitely not take up a business degree, not at 22 for sure. Out of IIM and straight into McKinsey. It is nothing less than maniacal.

It is clearly not just the work pressure that drove him to take his life. The deadly “pressure-to-perform” comes from downstream a long way back. Suicides among students preparing for entrance exam to get into the IITs and among students studying at IITs have been rising alarmingly over the years. That is 5 years of academic mental stress with the added stress of cracking the CAT exam to get into the IIMs and then 2 years of even more academic stress during the MBA program. When he joined for work, he had already spent 7 years of his life in the pressure cooker of intense academic stress.

Work pressure and micromanagement are common in most companies now but would depend largely on the ones managing the projects. Companies like McKinsey hire the best graduates from the top colleges and then the pressure to perform and the toxicity in the work culture is thrust upon them. Now the question everyone would have asked is, why didn’t he just quit and move on rather than drown himself in the mire? Because of social and peer pressure. Can’t someone who has gone through the grind of JEE, IIT, CAT and IIM absorb work pressure and continue performing at his peak? No one would have understood, not even his family. The problem with peak performance is, no one can stay at the peak forever and down the peak could become a free fall very easily and quickly. He was way too young to manage work pressure, push back micromanagement and survive office politics and toxicity.

It took me 10 years and enough exposure of working with international clients to understand how a MBA can add value to my profile and MBA from an international college would be the best to prop up my international work experience. With age and experience comes maturity and the ability to work smarter and manage all kinds of stress. Consulting is no easy job and consulting with McKinsey means working with the top companies in the world. It is impossible for anyone to live in sustained mental stress for a long time and the younger one is the more vulnerable they are to capitulating sooner.

From the time I heard the Dire Straits classic “Private Investigations”, a narrative of the daily life of the not so scrupulous private investigators, two lines have stuck with me.

“What have you got, at the end of the day

What have you got, to take away”

What we will all eventually take with us is knowledge and experiences and not the names of academic institutions where we studied, the names of companies where we worked and the expectations of people around us. Our well being is something only we understand the best. The stress and suicides created by pressure to perform will stop when we realize these simple facts.

Why employees quit jobs because of bad managers

LinkedIn has been inundated with posts about employees quitting jobs because of bad managers for quite some time. While this is true and I have done the same in my past jobs, a good amount of introspection coupled with plenty of reading has helped me understand my experiences better.

The origins of bad managers lies in the history of management itself. Industrial revolution gave rise to manufacturing and we started producing a myriad of items as our needs increased exponentially. Soon we realized that tasks are repetitive in manufacturing and we came up with processes to streamline the tasks. This in turn helped us to create documents which we call as manuals. Workers had to simply follow the steps mentioned in the manuals. This literally meant there was no work to be managed. When manager position was created it was to manage the workers and drive them to increase their efficiency and in turn the factory produce. Deming’s model or the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle embodies this culture of management.

When technology improved drastically and disrupted all industries it too adopted the same form of management, the best example of which is the waterfall methodology in software development. As technology matured it became evident that creating a software product and manufacturing nuts and bolts are as different as chalk and cheese. Also, unlike the erstwhile factory workers who were largely uneducated and followed the manuals and orders of their managers, technology professionals are educated, know what they are doing, have the ability to solve problems and can think out of the box. So the need changed to managing work and getting products out into the market as quickly as possible so that they can be monetized. This has given rise to the Agile methodology. One of the pillars of Agile methodology is self organizing teams that are absolutely clear about what and how much work can be completed in each sprint cycle. Such teams do not need managers, rather they need someone who can minimize/eliminate disruptions to work and can communicate clearly with the team members. In SCRUM, this is the role of Scrum Master.

The general expectation from every employee is that they need to be at their maximum efficiency during their work timings. Employees have to be fully focused on their work for 8 hours. What this means is, employees have to turn off all other aspects of their lives in their minds as soon as they step into their offices. We know this is far from reality. Our professional and personal lives are not mutually exclusive rather they are intricately interconnected. When employees reach office their minds are filled with thoughts about different aspects of their personal lives and it takes time for them to start focusing on work. The exact reverse happens when they reach home after work. All body functions are performed using blood so when we have food blood is required for digestion. Depending on the amount of food we eat some part of blood from the brain is also utilized in the digestion process. This is why we feel sleepy after a heavy meal. Add to this all the conversations, meetings and other distractions. Taking all of these into account, out of the 8 hours, it is unrealistic to expect anyone to be fully productive for more than 5 hours.

Now, let me narrate why I quit two of my previous jobs.

I wanted to do MBA from my engineering days but didn’t have a substantial reason to embark on it. In a previous job, I joined a customer support project which had a security management system which I had to learn on my own to support and maintain it. In 2 1/2 years, I became an expert on it. After I was sent on an onsite assignment I won contracts for my company to upgrade the security management systems for two of its clients. The IT head of one client was a German and he put me through 3 hours of grueling technical session on the product. I also learned a lot about the businesses in different domains and business aspects of outsourcing in those years so finally I knew why I wanted to do MBA. I wanted to move into roles where I would be engaging with clients, solving business problems and making businesses streamlined and efficient. Meanwhile, a promotion would have made me manager and as the management sat for 5 years twiddling its thumbs contemplating if I should be promoted, they made two glaring mistakes. 1) They never asked me what I wanted 2) They did not define a career path for me in spite of seeing my capabilities and strengths so clearly. In the last project I did for the company, I went for knowledge acquisition to the client’s location which was outsourcing its IT operations for the first time and returned to India to set up an IT support team. The initial days were hard as the client needed support during non-office hours as well. I became sleep deprived and was on the edge of insomnia when I went to a friend’s place one evening after work and passed out after having a can of beer. Then, having beer to sleep started getting repetitive. It was at this point that I fell out with my managers. After working for 10 straight years without a break I realized I had to go do something else and the MBA was staring right at my face.

In another job, the company was known to provide work from home facility to most of its employees. My dad was not well at that time, my work location was far away from my hometown and dad was in no position to be relocated to a new place. Work from home was important so I didn’t mind joining at a lower salary. Precisely at this juncture, company changed its work from home policy, started forcing all employees to return to office and put a blanket ban on work from home for new joiners. The first two months I was on bench and had nothing much to do, third month I was assigned to a project, fifth month the manager changed and in another month the new manager had messed up the project. To add to this he targeted me and put me on Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) in just under two months after starting to manage the project which is unheard of.

In both cases, I did not quit those jobs because managers created adverse situations. They created the triggers which led me to decide to move on. My decisions to look ahead were not because I didn’t want to continue in those jobs or I couldn’t handle those managers and bad management. I already had enough to handle in my life, didn’t want to spend any of my time and energy suffering bad managers and had no stomach to fight to hold on to a job. I simply pulled myself out of the toxic environments they had created. Quitting jobs because of bad managers essentially means out of all the relationships and situations employees have to handle every day, a toxic manager is the easiest and least important one to get rid of. What is interesting though is, on the flip side, employees will brave every odds if they know they have managers with whom they can communicate openly and place their trust. Companies believe all employees can be retained by dangling the carrots of promotions and salary hikes before them. There will come a time in everyone’s career where mental health will assume greater significance than all other incentives.

These managers carry the legacy of factory management in their corporate genes where they revel in imposing themselves on employees and torture them in the name of micromanagement. Companies also believe employees cannot think for themselves, do not know what they want out of their careers and which career path to take so managers are assigned to decide for the employees. This is how employees get stuck in the promotion cycles and become disgruntled when they are passed on for promotions.

There are multitudes of causes and effects behind every employee’s decision to quit their jobs. Managers just light the match stick which results in the fire. Changing the factory worker management mindset is the most important step. Moving from people to work management is another crucial one. Employees spend 8 hours and more 5 days a week in office so they need someone who can manage their work load and be there for them to talk to. Manager mindset and management practices haven’t evolved with time which is what is required to control employee attrition because of bad managers and poor management.

Moonlighting – Necessity born out of poor governance and toxic corporate culture

Rishad Premji, son of Wipro founder chairman Azim Premji recently commented that moonlighting or working in multiple jobs simultaneously is unethical and amounts to cheating. Question to ask here is, why do employees in India moonlight? There are several reasons:-
1) The most important one – monetary needs driven by inflation, taxes, medical needs, supporting aged parents and children, paying loans and a ton of other reasons and salary increments companies give that do not even remotely match the ever increasing needs brought on by the above mentioned factors.
2) Dissatisfaction in their current full time jobs because of poor management and bad managers, poor salaries and salary hikes and work that is monotonous, nothing to learn from and devoid of challenges.
3) Taboo imposed by hiring managers and recruiters who look down upon employees who switch jobs frequently.
4) For younger professionals looking to grow, moonlighting gives them the opportunity to learn more quickly and compete better in the job market.

Rishad Premji can say what he wants from his position of inheritance and privilege. Company owners, CEOs and other top executives who take paychecks that are 100 to 1000 times of the peanuts doled out to regular employees will not have the need to moonlight. Only if he is in the shoes of someone who is moonlighting will he truly understand why employees do one full time job, come home exhausted and compromise on their health, well being and family time to work more.

Tax collectors in Delhi were colluding with businesses to help them cheat on their taxes. In 2015, the new Delhi state government started providing tax collectors with bikes to travel, paid their fuel bills and gave them laptops, mobiles and incentives on tax collection. Revenue generated from tax collection jumped exponentially in a year’s time because tax collectors felt guilty about cheating the government that was taking so much care of them. This is a great example for companies who are complaining about moonlighting employees to learn from and start taking care of their employees so that they don’t feel the need to moonlight.

A Year On After Her Suicide Toxic Work Culture Continues To Haunt Swapna

Swapna was an alumnus of the engineering college where I studied. She was forced to take her own life last year after she was unable to bear the work pressure she had to endure at Canara Bank where she was working. A friend and another alumnus of the college informed me of her demise and after almost a month I got to know that she was the elder sister of the wife of a doctor whom I befriended during my morning walk and is a good friend now.  

Indian banks set unrealistic expectations about their yearly revenue generation and the entire hierarchy of employees is under constant pressure to meet and exceed the targets given to them. But branch managers are the ones that suffer the most. It is the employees of the branches that deal with customers every day so they are the ones expected to generate revenue by selling insurance etc. Loans are also disbursed from the branches so branch managers are responsible for repayment and NPAs pile on more pressure on them. The catch here is, authorization for large business loans comes from higher management of the banks and when business owners stall and evade payment due to bad investments or market downturns those loans become NPAs. Banks mostly run into losses because large sums of money gets stuck in business loans. Then the pressure is on the branch managers to close NPAs of as many loans of individuals as they can regardless of whether they are unable to repay due to genuine reasons.  

Swapna’s husband passed away 3 years back and she was a single parent raising up her two kids. No mother will take her own life knowing fully well that her kids will be orphaned and they will become the responsibility of her immediate family. So it is amply clear that what she was being made to endure at her work place was insufferable.   Swapna had taken a housing loan from the bank for building a house. Her immediate family has rightly put the blame on the bank for her suicide because it is the toxic work culture of the bank that has claimed her life. All they have asked is that the bank take responsibility of the loan and close it. The bank is still considering this largely because of the fear that if more such incidents happen they will have to close more such loans. Ironically taking responsibility of such loans seems to be more important to the bank than improving its toxic work culture and preventing more suicides of its employees.

Swapna’s death should not be allowed to be swept under the carpet and should serve as a deterrent and warning to all banks to treat their employees as human beings and not revenue generating robots.  

Couple of weeks back, the bank sent a recovery notice to her family and they approached the print media. That the bank is continuing to haunt her a year after her death was published as news item in all leading Malayalam newspapers. The Kerala GM of Canara Bank subsequently called her family to apologize for sending the recovery notice and blamed it as human error when it is abundantly clear that the bank was testing the water to see if her family’s wrath has mellowed with time. 

There has been national outrage over her suicide all over the media and whatever the bank does to avoid taking responsibility of her death will only dent their image further in the public’s eye. Their sole way of redemption is to take responsibility of the loan and go to her family with the offer to assist her children in every possible way till they finish their education. This will go a long way in regaining at least some of the credibility they have lost in the last one year.

Exposing the blatant misuse of inspirational quotes

Inspirational quotes are being increasingly short sold and aspiring professionals are getting misguided by the interpretations of the self proclaimed experts, motivational speakers and career coaches. Below are two I have come across.

Confucius said choose a job we would love doing and not to make our passion our profession which clearly do not mean the same. We do jobs for money which helps us to meet our physical needs. Doing what we are passionate about leads to our mental and emotional fulfilment. Because we have to barter more of our time to earn more money we are fooling ourselves by finding mental and emotional fulfilment in the objects we buy for our physical needs. Monetizing our passion is never a good idea because passion releases our mind from the stress of meeting our physical needs and money suppresses our emotional quotient which means we stop getting emotional fulfilment from our passion. Moreover money creates competition and that is where value for money trumps our emotional needs.

Someone told me about a motivational speaker who tells his audience “work like a dog live like a king”. For one, animals do not “work” like us. The only time they work is for food and there is a better word for it. Hunt. If work like a dog means tire ourselves out to complete exhaustion then there is no time and nothing left in us to live like a king. Commonsense and human anatomy goes out of the window. Its hilarious. Constantin Brancusi said work like a slave, command like a king which means when we work, work hard and when we become a leader be a strong one. Also, command like a king is not the same as live like a king.

English is a quirky language so it is being shamelessly arm twisted and maligned by some among us for their own benefits with scant regard for the negative impact they are creating on the people who look up to them.

Understanding the Better.com layoff fiasco

A lot is being said and written about the layoffs at better.com and people I know are mortified by the way the CEO terminated the employees over a video call. When we hear such news, our natural response is to assess them with our emotions.

Business is all about revenue generation, profits and financial statements. Money and emotional quotient (EQ) never goes hand-in-hand. When business goes down, it is not the matter of if the business will bounce back. It is all about time. How long can a company sustain itself before business picks up again or it is forced to consolidate its finances is the burning question. Reducing the workforce is one of the ways to reduce the company’s expenses. Hire and fire is not the way to manage people but is a very efficient way to run businesses especially when the supply of people far exceeds the demand for them in the market.

It is not really lack of empathy on the CEO’s part, just that emotions cannot come in the way of doing business which is why he says in the video that he cried the last time he fired his employees and he hopes to be stronger this time. Termination over video call is undoubtedly terrible but it helps to keep the emotions out unlike in a physical meeting. If his job is to make the company profitable, consolidation is also his call. The timing is also not so bad I suppose because companies open up for recruitment in January.

This isn’t a one-off case, IBM closed down business units and terminated 15,000 employees globally in 2014 and WeWork reduced 20% of its workforce in 2020. We are not used to seeing layoffs in the traditional businesses but in the startup ecosystem we can expect to see a lot because its all about investment and ROI and companies are accountable to its investors for everything it does and doesn’t do.

The company receiving a cash infusion and supposedly going public according to this article is irrelevant in the context. An external cash injection is not necessarily the sign of a company bouncing back as exemplified by how a consortium of banks kept on infusing cash flow into the now defunct Indian airline Kingfisher when its business floundered and showed no signs of picking up. IPO is just an eyewash to cover the investments of the company’s investors and help them reap profits as this post about Zomato’s IPO journey illustrates.

So irrespective of all the backlash, after the global market devastation caused by COVID, expect this to become a precedent if market conditions do not improve.

Does our jobs match our personality?

This is the analysis about the jobs we do and our personality I have searched for many years. The classifications Jordan Peterson has made are quite simple but the underlying factors are extremely complex. From the business/corporate perspective, entrepreneurial/creative types have a synonym. Innovators. The problem with innovation though is, it can only be a continual and not a continuous process. So there will be time periods between innovation when management becomes crucial. The best example is Apple and its products. Every time Apple releases a new version of its products into the market, the focus shifts towards maximizing sales. What he says about innovative people starting a company and then the company getting swamped with manager type people is absolutely correct and there is a reason for it. Any innovation ultimately leads to revenue generation (or cost saving) which happens through projects for which managers are required for project and people management. Then there will be finance management, facility management, etc. Problem arises when the company’s focus shifts entirely towards revenue and profits. This is why Apple has a pipeline for new versions of its products and Bose apparently spends 60% of its profits on R & D. These are conscious attempts to maintain innovation at the heart of these companies.

The difference between entrepreneurial/creative and managerial types have blurred in recent times because of the advent of startup culture and venture capital funding. Entrepreneurial/creative people have always been risk takers but investments were hard to find in the past. Now, with investments readily available, it has become possible for even managerial type people to become entrepreneurs. Moreover people with managerial background get hired or elevated into top executive posts because companies focus largely on revenue and profit generation. The corporate mindset of not changing what is working fine led to the demise of companies like Kodak. Companies getting filled with managerial type people is the reason why there is always a gap between any form of innovation (that includes corporate restructuring and changes in business strategy) & management which needs to be addressed through change management processes.

What he doesn’t talk about though is at the individual level, whether individuals are doing jobs that match their personality. In the past, every profession was important in a community so a blacksmith’s son was raised to become a blacksmith. Now, education, job, social status, even marriage is associated with money. So very few people get the opportunity to evaluate themselves and choose their professions. The academic ecosystem smothers our creative side and prepares us to become good employees in the corporate world but not good leaders. Working for a few years in a particular role in a company is not a yardstick to become eligible for promotions but that is the culture companies follow. So corporate employees are majorly neither entrepreneurial/creative nor managerial types and this is why their careers stagnate and another important reason why companies stop being innovative.

Corporate employees are largely under the illusion that spending time equally in the office and at home is what leads to work-life balance. Our lives are so intricately interconnected that it is impossible to separate our professional and personal lives and here also the common denominator is money. We have to go to office to work to earn money with which we meet the needs and commitments of our personal lives. Doing what truly interests us and we are passionate about is the key to finding the balance between our professional and personal lives. The other important aspect is to have an engagement, activity or hobby that provides us gratification in our personal lives and the confidence we gain from it will spill over and improve our professional lives.

Deconstructing the hype around digital transformation

There has been fervent buzz around digital transformation in the past decade. Using technology to improve and transform businesses was already on the ascension when I took a break from the IT industry to pursue a MBA degree because I had felt that with my background in technology a better understanding of businesses will help me add more value to the work I was doing. But in the intervening period between 2011-2012 when I was in the MBA program, technology itself underwent radical transformation. AI, Robotics, SMAC, IoT, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, Agile, even software programming has undergone drastic changes from that time.

As I started understanding all the new jargons, it became increasingly evident that most of what has been projected as new and disruptive innovation is only incremental innovation. My engineering college project 23 years back was based on AI so theoretically AI has been existing for a very long time. It was just a matter of how it was going to be integrated into existing technologies. Many companies were using virtual servers created using software like VMWare so it was only a matter of faster and reliable internet services to be available for virtual servers and applications to be provided over the internet thus kickstarting the Cloud phenomenon. There was humongous amount of data generated from users through their various interactions with the businesses so it was just a matter of time before businesses decided to sift through all that data and find out what users like and dislike and how customer engagement can be improved and increased. Thus analytics was born. Rudimentary social media was born when we started sending and receiving emails and messages from our mobile phones. Orkut demonstrated that a digital social media platform is possible. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like had to just piggyback on that experience. We have been using computers with operating systems and software applications for decades now so once we developed mobile phones creating sophisticated operating systems and applications for phones was only a matter of improvements in hardware technologies. What I do find disruptive though is the use of robots in industries and especially the use of drones for commercial purposes.

What I have understood from digital transformation is the exponential use of technology to manage and run businesses, solve business problems and improve and scale business environments. Managing and scaling businesses is possible but can technology solve all business problems? I was leading a transition team for the outsourcing of the IT infrastructure of a retail giant in the UK to India when one day I curiously asked the IT head of the client what problems did he see and face in the retail sector. I was expecting an answer but what I got from him was a question which changed my perception about business entirely and helped me understand why I need to take up a MBA program. After they embraced eCommerce and integrated it into their website, their customer size had increased but customers visiting their brick and mortar stores had dwindled. Their stores have amazing ambience and are primed to provide great shopping experience to customers so the question he asked was how to bring the customers back into the stores. There was no way to coax people to choose buying from stores over buying from their website. It was a business problem technological transformation couldn’t solve. One suggestion I gave him was to set up video cameras inside the stores and enable video sessions from their website so that customers can do in-store shopping virtually and interact with the customer executives at the stores. This would give customers greater understanding and control over what they are buying.

When my parents decided to set up a cloud kitchen, we decided that it would be operational only during peak lunch and dinner hours as prior preparation takes time. Our focus shifted entirely from getting more customers to creating better customer experience and getting repeat customers. After a year of being operational and being through the trying times of the pandemic, our business volume is low but repeat customers are slowly on the rise. People are calling us to enquire about our food items. A repeat customer who couldn’t place his order on the delivery platform called us to place his order and came to our place to pick up the order himself.

Customer experience has always been the heart and soul and bread and butter of all businesses. New technology tools and platforms are enabling businesses to reach out and connect with customers. But technology does not necessarily help in creating better customer experience every time. Imagine a distress call to a helpline number of a hospital for medical assistance being received by an AI powered automated system which asks for the name, age, presently experiencing symptoms and prior medical history and then the system takes it’s own time to analyze the medical problem and find out if a relevant doctor is available before assigning an ambulance. The patient needs immediate attention from any qualified doctor. Detailed examination and treatment can be done after the patient is admitted in the hospital.

Consider online food delivery companies replacing their delivery executives with drones to deliver food and groceries to their customers. When it comes to human needs, especially the basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter, there are too many aspects involved. Neither the food outlets nor the customers will be able to have any interaction with the drones. During the peak time of the pandemic when there were many containment zones in my city and delivering food was not possible in many places, we used to speak to the delivery executives and understand the situation on the ground from them before deciding on opening our kitchen. Delivery executives have even bought our food items when they came to collect client orders. None of these would have been possible if drones are being used.

Over thousands of years of our existence, we have evolved and are hard wired to communicate in person with one another. Technology may alter our behavior but it is impossible to rewire us mentally and emotionally in the span of a few years. The introduction of emojis on social media platforms is the best indicator that no matter how we communicate, we need to express our emotions continuously. An AI powered chatbot or automated system can never replace the reassuring voice of a human being on the other side when we are reaching out for help.

Digital transformation may not be a complete fit for all organizations and all types of industries. Business transformation will have different meanings, objectives and outcomes for different organizations and digitalization can only contribute in varying degrees as part of the business transformation program. There will be areas in the business environments that can be automated and simplified using technology but technology will never be able to replace human interactions and interventions completely. Companies will have to do their due diligence and assessments thoroughly and weigh the pros and cons very carefully in every aspect of their business before they embark on their digital transformation journey.

So if digital transformation is not the next big thing what is? An invention on the scale of electricity, TV or mobile phone that caters to basic human needs or the internet that jump started and exploded technology. Improving technologies and adding new features to devices is incremental and not disruptive innovation. I believe human civilization will reach its zenith when we attain the potential and ability to use our minds for our different needs. Telepathy, telekinesis and remote viewing may sound like sci-fi now, but references to them in texts from ancient civilizations is a sign for us. Even if we are not ready to believe those texts, if we have the ability to create such sophisticated technologies and devices why can’t we use our mind to communicate and move objects? Sony is coming out with a camera that can be fixed on the eye and can shoot photos when we blink. We are already observing and recording information with our eyes so why can’t we just download those images from our mind on to devices? We will continue chasing technologies and devices till we realize the true potential of our minds if the technologies and devices we are creating do not lead us to self destruction and extinction.

Degrees of customer centricity in today’s business world

Born in the 70’s, “Customer is King” was the business mantra I grew up listening to. But it no longer seems to be the case. While the advent of Internet has been the biggest disruptive force to hit the world of business, there is a lot more behind the journey of the business world to where it is now.

There are two factors to be clearly understood and even wary about when driving a business enterprise to it’s success – acceptance and adoption. In the brick and mortar model of business, it is extremely difficult to foresee changing customer preferences or what factors would drive customers to change their preferences. A simple example is the Indian film industry. A commercially successful movie was supposed to have a certain number of action sequences, songs, dance scenes, emotional scenes and comedy. It was the blueprint for success in Bollywood (and still is in some regional film industries) until a first time director (Farhan Akhtar) shattered the stereotype in 2001. It was the fear of acceptance that had kept Bollywood from evolving out of the rut it got stuck in. Same was the case with the world of business as well. The same fear of acceptance kept Kodak from disrupting it’s own business model by embracing the digital camera before it was too late.

The increased adoption of technology in business made collection of data from business easier and software applications made it possible to collate data from different business segments, analyze them and understand what factors are driving businesses up and down. Adoption of the internet and the advent of eCommerce finally broke the fear of acceptance and adoption as online stores does not even cost a fraction of the brick and mortar ones.

One fear gave way to a new one – customer support and satisfaction. As customers started adopting to technology and accepting new and radical products, it became imperative to measure and understand how satisfied the customers are. Back in 2004, my life was meandering through regular IT support jobs when I was hired for the project of a European client, at a time when I had no idea that IT support services were getting outsourced. One incident changed my professional life and helped me understand my way ahead. One of the client’s software applications had stopped working and it was reported to the support team I was part of. We worked on the issue as per the priority on which the issue was reported. When we informed the client that the issue was resolved, we got the feedback that what we worked on was an invoicing application and in the time we took to resolve the issue, they had lost a number of orders. The problems associated with it were manifold. Poor understanding of client’s business applications, wrong prioritization of their issues, all of these stemmed from the lack of understanding of client’s business environment and their requirements which led to the support team working on an issue with no understanding of its business impact.

In my next job, I worked on a product in a client’s environment for more than 2 years and was able to create a new system design for the product’s upgrade in a few hours, not merely because of my knowledge of the product but because of my understanding of the client’s business environment and the needs of its different business units. When I was sent to a client’s premise in the UK as the leader of a team for a large transition program, what was important to me was to understand the client’s business environment and what technical issues were currently affecting the client’s business. As the client’s entire IT activities were getting outsourced to the company I was working for, it was just commonsense for me to understand and resolve existing issues before owning the responsibility of the environment.

That was back in 2010 and technology has come a long way from that time. This is the age of AI and Analytics and putting them together has resulted in predictive analytics which is helping businesses to take informed decisions and make successful plans for their future. But how much of all of these have filtered down into the traditional brick and mortar stores? At home, we buy groceries on a monthly basis from a grocer we have been customer of for 15 years. For daily purchases, we go to a nearby supermarket store. There is a particular pattern to the items we buy from the supermarket store, like milk, eggs, bread, etc but more importantly there is a pattern to the items we do not buy, like cooking oils, pulses, rice, wheat, soap, etc. No one in the store has asked us yet where we buy these items from. To be successful in business in these times, companies have to be at the top of their game and continuously keep looking for opportunities to be innovative to not only attract new customers but to retain them as well.

I received a call from an aspiring startup’s co-founder some time back for advise. They were planning to create an online platform from where anyone could place an order for any item and they would deliver it. The word anyone was a concern for me. There is a very good reason why India will never be a completely digital market – people’s purchasing power or the lack of it. A big chunk of its population of people make their daily purchases on debt. The local grocers keep accounts of these purchases and people keep paying as and when they have money with them. Even the local restaurants in many places especially the smaller eateries do the same. This is a business model supermarket stores can never replicate and hence they can never erode the relevance of local grocers and small time traders.

This is an important reason why the India government’s decision to demonetize its currency notes has destroyed India’s economy as it has further weakened people’s buying ability. When I mentioned these aspects to the startup’s co-founder and asked him how he was going to tackle them in his business model, he had no answer. Borrowing or getting inspired by a business model in another country is fine, but there can be no excuse to not knowing about their own country’s business nuances.

As products and companies of all sizes throng the online market and jostle for space to find their feet, nothing is more valuable in business now than customer loyalty and repeat customers. One look at Amazon’s fulfillment center (https://gadgets.ndtv.com/videos/behind-the-scenes-at-an-amazon-fulfillment-centre-521443) is enough to understand the complexity of its customer-centric business model. More than the number of its business segments, what is mind boggling is the fact that an individual could be its customer in multiple business segments and would expect the same level of customer service across all business segments. Multiply this by the probability of doing business with a few thousands or a million such concurrent customers and maintaining the highest quality of service across business segments is beyond comprehension.

Is customer still the King or has business become the Emperor of the King?

India’s yearly budgets are a major driver for unbridled corruption from it’s grass root level

The Indian government has released its Union budget plan for the FY 2019-2020. The country’s economy has been in doldrums since demonetization delivered a knockout punch to it in 2016. Back at the helm of governance for a second term after general elections, all eyes are on the BJP government to see if and how it is going to pull up its straps and get the economy back on track.

Before doing an evaluation of the budget, it is important to understand what the budget is. In the scope of work of the government that gets elected in democracies or what we call as governance, there are a slew of areas that need development and maintenance, such as agriculture, defense, infrastructure development, etc. This is the reason why governments are empowered to levy taxes, control prices and manage money. Budgets help to create wealth and to allocate it to different sectors from where development schemes deliver the benefits to the people. This is the ideal situation but is a Utopian world for us.

A high level perspective of the budget reveals something important. Majority of the scope of the budget is intended to generate more wealth for the government. More national highways means more toll booths and consequently more toll charges. Increase in fuel prices means travel is going to get more expensive, not just for vehicle owners but for people in general. So the government is essentially acting like a financial institution which is lending out money with the objective of bringing in more money. In such a case, it becomes imperative that governments adhere to certain best practices followed in the corporate world.

First one is the Balanced Scorecard which looks at the 4 key aspects of financial performance, customer satisfaction, internal process and organizational growth. This can be easily translated into 1) how effectively the government is using the resources (wealth) at its disposal 2) Satisfaction levels of people (who are the government’s customers) 3) how the government’s internal process can be improved and 4) how the infrastructure and culture of government bodies can be improved. There is a very important model used across industries to help deliver better results from projects and it is known as the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) model. In the corporate, business strategies when executed as projects are what creates wealth. In governance, budgets are the government’s business strategies and when they are executed through development schemes and taxes generates wealth for the government. Projects are executed using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time bound) model and development schemes need to be executed using the same model.

But the most important of all is accountability. Where is the report card of last year’s budget with the details of the government’s performance in executing its development schemes and how much money was spent on them? How much money has been gained from taxes and other means? A high level report does not suffice when the country has been segmented into states, cities, corporations, municipalities and panchayats. From the level of panchayats, report cards need to be generated to understand what development schemes were implemented, how much money was spent and how successful are they. Such report cards have to be generated for every aspect of governance. Corporate uses what is called as metrics to measure success using parameters for measurements known as CSFs (Critical Success Factors). Metrics when measured for evaluating performance are known as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and when measured for understanding risk are known as KRIs (Key Risk Indicators). Insights from data obtained by using these parameters for one FY should be used to create the next FY’s budget.

And what do we have in our country? This FY, there is budgetary allocation of Rs. 65,837 crore and outlay for capital expenditure of Rs. 1.60 lakh crore for railways. Where exactly is all this money going to be used? The trains are still of the same old design, maintained just enough for them to run the intended distances and poor and unhygienic food services (vessels get washed inside train toilets which are themselves stinking dirty). I have heard several cases of people in states like UP, MP, Bihar etc where people muscle their way into A/c compartments, travel without tickets and even ticket examiners (TTs) getting thrown out of moving trains for trying to get such people out. During every year’s budget, a certain amount of money gets allocated to railways and on the ground almost everything remains the same which means governments simply want to keep running the shows with zero interest in improvements.

Stable fuel prices is a critical parameter for stable prices of commodities and maintaining lower inflation levels. We have continuously fluctuating fuel prices which is resulting in higher cost of commodities and higher inflation. Rs. 70,000 crore capital for PSU banks without a clear plan for recovering high value corporate loans that have defaulted to NPAs (Non-Performing Accounts) and stopping black money from getting hoarded continuously out of the country is insensible. In education, there are no schemes to improve government schools across the country and make education equally accessible to all sections of the society. As I have always known, equal education to all would be fatal to vote bank politics on which all political parties are thriving. What worries me is, there is not a word about nature conservation and sustainability which in turn gives corporate a free hand to use and destroy natural resources at their whims and fancies. No mention on air pollution, water conservation (wanton destruction of drinking water resources) and improving quality of living conditions. What value does governance have if it does not help in improving people’s lives?

Budgets without accountability is the chief contributor of corruption in our country. Only 20% of the allotted money for development schemes create value for people and the whopping 80% gets fed into bureaucratic red tape to get the 20% work done. A one nation one transport card has been proposed in the budget but it remains to be seen how long it will take to see the light of the day and we won’t even know how much money is going to get spent on it. We all know how the Aadhaar fiasco unraveled. Any tax breaks or incentives is only meant to cajole people into putting more of their money into the market or borrow more money from the market which in turn will create more wealth for the government. With burgeoning population, omnipresent corruption and very little of the resources getting used for development, it is no surprise that no one gets any benefits out of paying taxes and the entire country is in perpetual struggle for sustenance. Unless the entire system of governance is overhauled, yearly budgets have little effect on people’s lives except the ones who are licking their lips and waiting for their piece of the pie. What is growing is the demand for public sector jobs and career in politics and we all know why.