When brands fight it out amongst themselves, the fight is all about capturing market share and toppling competition. And when they do it on TV, it is all about grabbing eyeballs by making the cheekiest of ads and taking potshots at the competitor.

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While Happy Women's Day is trending on Twitter, amidst the din in the Upper House of Indian Parliament there is a Women's Reservation Bill is being tabled to give 33% quota to women in Parliament and assemblies. Both seem to be mere symbolic gestures to salute the fairer sex while the situation on the ground remains unchanged. There is still no light at the end of the tunnel for millions of women in small towns and villages. They work on fields, in factories and homes only to be marginalized and paid much less than their male counterparts.

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Last weekend I got myself tickets for a movie called Up in the Air. A typical American drama film directed by Jason Reitman and co-written by Reitman and Sheldon Turner, the film is an adaptation of the 2001 novel of the same name, written by Walter Kirn. Apart from the fact that the film stars the ever charming George Clooney, what all the more interested me was a brief review that I read which mentioned that the story is about a corporate downsizer and his travels.

Corporate downsizing? For those who thought laying off or firing employees is a HR executive's prerogative, here's food for thought. While introducing his character Ryan Bingham, Clooney says that for every boss who finds the whole act of firing people and that too in bulk quite ghastly and thinks he isn't that professionally equipped to do so, there's people like him - the corporate downsizer. And so the smooth talking Bingham goes about with his business, traveling across the length and breadth of the USA and firing hundreds and sometimes multiples of hundreds in a matter of few days. Interestingly, he prefers an isolated life and spends 90 per cent of the days in a year traveling by air. He is a loyalty program addict and one of his long term and most cherished goals is to collect 10 million air miles!

Coming back to downsizing, before the economic reforms stepped into India, Indian companies and their employees mostly believed in lifetime employment. Taking up my father's example who has spent all his life in the private sector, his last 30 years of employment were spent in one single company! However, with the Indian economy making its presence felt in the global scenario and with competition between companies heating up, top bosses were forced to take notice and go for some amount of pruning. What came of this were schemes like voluntary retirement schemes (VRS), deferred recruitments and benching of people. However, there still exists limited knowledge and expertise in mass downsizing in the sub-continent.

Said that and given a situation which now isn't as lucrative as the recent slowdown but yet is laden with whiffs of caution - how about considering a job or starting off a firm that offers expert services of corporate downsizing?



 

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Every time there is an India - Pakistan standoff, my mind goes back to that evening in Dubai.

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A lot has been talked about My Name Is Khan and the FUD surrounding the topic. I had a rather unique experience this evening in Nasik - and let me be very clear that it has no direct connection with the movie. I had walked into a Belmonte (a brand under the umbrella of S. Kumars Nationwide Limited) showroom to check out some suits. While at the shop, I noticed a strange thing across the store - all the blow-ups of Shah Rukh Khan had a newspaper stuck upon it, covering the face of him. I thought maybe SRK has stopped endorsing the brand, and maybe some other ambassador was already in place and the blowups of the latest celebrity was yet to come in, and so on. But then, I had to ask and confirm. The store manager made a peculiar face and replied, "It's simply a precaution to keep our store from getting vandalized." It made sense now. This showroom, made entirely of huge glass panes, with tens of huge blowups of Shah Rukh Khan, would be an open invitation for the activists to come and smash it all.

Multiplexes  refusing to screen the movie got the assurances of the ministers that they will be provided security to avoid any untoward incident from happening. Now who would've imagined that the issue in hand would make apparel showroom owners potential targets too. "Who'll provide us security," asked the manager. I must say, I was left speechless.

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Recently I met a group of entrepreneurs in Nashik, who under partnership, have decided to set up a business in the BPO space. Now, it has been only couple of years since Nasik saw BPOs being set up in the city. Naturally, there was this sudden surge of BPOs in the city. Having said that, one of the many problems that these entrepreneurs mentioned is ‘there is just too many of us who do exactly the same kind of work for the same pool of clients’.

Such is the dilemma of a lot of entrepreneurs in various segment of business. What one does not realize is the fact that the real problem is the ‘mindset’ of the entrepreneurs. Professor Philip Anderson of INSEAD in his column ‘How to Zig When Others Zag’ has beautifully penned on how to deal with this mindset problem. “Entrepreneurs can often become trapped by their own definition of who is my customer, what is my business model, and what is my value proposition,” said Professor Anderson.

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Not long ago in 2009 it was mayhem in the gems and jewellery units across the country with shutters going down on many small manufacturing shops and workers losing jobs. The major export markets of US and Europe, which have been traditional strongholds of Indian companies for long were in chaos due to the economic slowdown. With people going on recession diets, there was surely no money to buy the luxuries of life such as gems and jewellery.

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Rs 30,000 crore is an alarming figure. And this is not the size of a scam or the allocation the government is making to any of its social sector schemes. If industry chamber FICCI is to be believed, Rs 30,000 crore worth of fruits and vegetables are wasted annually due to glaring holes in the supply chain and storage facilities. Only around 2% of fruits and vegetables are processed, and the figure stands at 26% for marine, 6% for poultry and 20% for buffalo meat, as against 60-70% of the overall food production in developed countries.

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In our line of business, we happen to contact several entrepreneurs who have not interacted

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The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, if works out as planned, could turn out to be the UPA government's flagship initiative just like the National Rural Employment Generation (NREGA) scheme.  Among the various initiatives aimed at giving a fresh impetus to the renewable energy sector, three are noteworthy: Allowing large scale domestic manufacture, a long-term policy to purchase power; and R&D support to reduce material consumption and improve efficiency. The solar mission is among the 8 national missions that comprise the National Action Plan on Climate Change.

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