To Transform your Organization, Give a Shit

One of the most difficult thing to do in a business as a CEO, is to successfully transform the business. The success rates of most of these transformation efforts show that most of these don’t succeed, which in my opinion is an understatement. Yet, a lot of CEO’s find themselves at a cross-roads, where they need to transform their organizations or see them remain a shadow of their past or in certain businesses, go out of business. There are a lot of industries that are going through such a transformational change. So, what would you do if you were a […]

Lessons from a Failed (Billion Dollar) Business Model Innovation Attempt

In May this year, Better Place, an auto tech company filed for bankruptcy, burning close to a billion dollars. They had a brilliant solution to a complex problem. Their idea was to replace fossil fuels with batteries – literally. What this meant was that as you re-fuel your cars with gasoline, you could get your batteries changed at a fuel station. This was in stark contrast to all the other start-ups in this space, who have been working on increasing the range of their batteries to go longer distances or increase the speed at which one could charge the batteries […]

Building an effective marketing strategy..

I am surprised at the lack of organizations with good marketing strategy. Doesn’t matter if they are  large MNC’s with millions of dollars of marketing budget or a start-up with minimal budget. I am sure that everyone in the marketing world understands the importance of having a solid strategy! Most marketing efforts fail in the face of unclear strategies. Good strategy can not only improve the effectiveness of your efforts but will help in reducing the total cost. But most importantly, it will help your customers to buy more from your sales teams. With the emergence of new media, more […]

Future of customer service in a social world

In the good old days, if we had to contact our bank or for that matter any business, we used to reach out to our phones and give them a call. The call would then be routed to a call center (usually, after about 10-15 minutes of listening to some music that would be played while we waited for an agent to get free and take our call). This, of course would be after having had to find our way through the maze of options (which used to be so complicated that it required us to be entirely focused on […]

The true potential of enterprise mobility

is when you re-think & re-design all your processes, work-flows for a world where everyone (yes, everyone) only uses a mobile device. How will all the processes (purchasing, invoicing, production planning, material handling, etc) change? How will the applications that you use change? How will your ERP system need to change? What will be the effect on how you manage production? How will you service your clients? How and where will your employees work from? What will your reporting change? Will you still require so many middle managers? Mobility offers you this possibility to re-wire, re-design and re-write the DNA of […]