Search Results for: management

Business Model, Ideas, Innovation

Idea for a disruptive biz-model innovation for banks

There is a lot of discussions and activities around the revival of the good old ATM. Some are trying to make these machines more Customer-centric like Wells Fargo. Some are trying to improve the overall user experience of the ATM like Diebold. However, the true question should be the following: “Do we even need an ATM? Is there a better, easier, faster way to manage cash than via an ATM?” The first bank to figure out the answer to this question has the potential to truly disrupt the banking industry from a cash management perspective. One way that I think could be […]

Ideas

How do you innovate “Innovation” ..

A couple of days ago, I submitted my entry for the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize Challenge run by Management Exchange. This challenge is about “Innovating Innovation” and will be judged by some of the greatest thinkers in innovation. You can find below my submission for the challenge. If you like my thoughts, request you to vote for my submission here. SUMMARY Its not the lack of ideas that stops organizations from being innovative, but the way resources are allocated & employees rewarded that is the key. We need to change the way we set and manage KPI’s, the way we allocate funds (quarterly budgeting […]

Sales, transformation

The lure of large deals

If you are a sales leader, working in the software industry, you would know the importance that any organization places on the deal size. The bigger the deal size, the better it is for you. Right? WRONG! In my experience, really large deals (aka, multi-million dollar deals) rarely prove to be a success; for both the parties – buyer and seller. This sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but it really is true. When I think about why this is so, I came up with the following reasons because of which this is not good for the buyer: Typically, once such a deal […]

Customer Engagement

New endangered species – salesmen

“What can be digitised, will be digitised” – unknown The continuous growth of e-commerce and cloud solutions is creating a new problem of sorts – dwindling breed of salesman! Imagine the following scenarios: I can buy any books that I want to on Amazon.com without any talking to anyone at amazon. I can buy clothes or shoes or accessories from Zappos without talking to anyone. I can buy an insurance from ICICI Lombard General Insurance without talking to anyone. I can re-charge my mobile phone online without talking to anyone from the phone company. I can buy any consumer durable […]

Customer Engagement

Why Dan Pink’s radical prescription for sales could be misleading

In his blog on HBR, best selling author Dan Pink argues that paying commissions to sales people has  a counter-intuitive effect of undermining enterprise profitability. You can read his post @ http://hbr.org/2012/07/a-radical-prescription-for-sales/ar/1. I would agree with him on most of his arguments. However, as with most theories, this theory has its limitations as well. In my opinion, sales commissions work if the following conditions are true: The sales process is simple and involves only the sales person with no dependencies on any other colleague. There is no upper limit on the commissions that he/she can receive. Earnings via commissions (as a […]