the rise and the fall....

"Satyameva Jayate" (Sanskrit: "Truth Alone Triumphs") is the national motto of India. It is inscribed in Devanagari script at the base of the national emblem, which is an adaptation of the Lion Capital of Asoka at Sarnath, near Varanasi in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The origin of the motto is a well-known mantra from the mundaka Upanishad.


In context for the last few weeks the apparently senseless news channels are airing their views and presenting sensational (masaladar) takes on the whole event - the common man, the shareholders (well the smaller ones) and the employees are at their wit's end. So where is the truth? Are we actually surveying the real truth or have the so called perpetrators of truth and information decided that stirring up the fragmented pieces of information collected, in a melting pot with bad presentation and weird assumptions would lead to a better selling information piece and higher TRP ratings. And I thought that reporters and news houses were supposed to find and highlight the real truth – at least that’s what my uncle once told me a long time ago.


Well I will & refrain from commenting on the situation that one of the biggest IT vendors in India finds itself today, story but after careful scrutinizing and observing the proceedings I will but just present a spoiler in the making, drawing a hypothesis with the Enron story - one of the most tragic and sinister instances of corporate crime in American history. Well for starters the case of the above mentioned Indian player might be just up there in the Indian perspective.


I did not follow the story well when the news first broke in 2000-2001 but followed it closely in my fourth year of bachelors. By 2002 as far as I remember not only Enron but its accountancy firm Anderson Consulting went bankrupt and some investors of Merrill Lynch were indicted for fraudulent Enron-related business.

Well the story starts in 1985 with the foundation of Enron a traditional energy supply company, by the chairman Mr Lay (Can’t remember his first name !!!) – Enron grew into a "energy commodities” in the late 90’s under the then COO Jefferey Skilling. Under his famous but equally weird “hypothetical future value” policy, Enron started overlooking current losses and started booking non-existent future profits. For e.g. if you took a home loan of say 30 lakhs today in 2009 as a case of financial investment – normal balance statements should indicate today a debt of 30 lakhs. Suppose you sold this house in 2012 for 40 lakhs then Enron in this example would cite a profit of 10 lakhs and book it today i.e. in 2009 itself. (Any resemblance here to the Indian perspective).


One of Enron later CFO’s too played the cards well getting the top investment banks to invest big time in Enron citing false inflated balance sheets – and getting these huge sums to pay off Enron’s debts. Another way was to siphon off debts to sister concerns or subsidiaries or limited liability companies most of which were headed by the top management itself. So the game continued till 2001-02 when the govt. and the investors started taking the P&L sheets seriously and it was matter of time when the truth came out. The management went off with over 100 million USD in bonuses wheres the normal personal were left with 4000 USD as severance package and zero value 401k plans. It must be mentioned that within a short span of time most of top management who had huge shares in the company sold it off wheres the employee’s stock options plans were frozen. Yet another similarity here with the India story.


Well to put it in perspective the govt. put its weight behind Enron throughout – from the Bush presidency to higher circles within the Senate and California – huge projects, deregulation of the electric industry and manipulation of electricity charges – well this would not have been possible without the reality of red tape there. Cut to Hyderabad and Bangalore – huge projects including roadways, metro etc to a particular infrastructure company owned by the chairman could not have been possible without the govt. backing here. Well the apparent merger of the two companies could have fooled the people even more had it gone through smoothly– who knows.


So should we call this a blatant case of corporate “fraudalism” – or is it just a question of timing. Maybe, had the global markets not tanked the Indian corporate romantic story could have continued – this could have emerged even rosier with the kind of respect and market sentiment that the Indian player commanded both globally and in India. Another biggie in the petroleum and natural gas as well as telecommunications industry too commands equal respect though there have been innumerable instances of stories of frauds and corporate deceit surfacing every now and then but never enough to gain speed.


Well some will say that it was a case of actual deceit or simply bad luck. I am sure this is not the first nor will be the last to surface soon. (The news of Nortel tanking just came in….)


It’s said that we don't grow unless we take risks and that any successful company is riddled with failures. Well I hope and pray that that in the long run it does. Somehow my hope goes out to the 50000 odd people and their families that are/were associated in one way or the other with the company.


God bless.

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IT Services Marketing - Are we there yet?

The concept of IT services marketing is definitely not new but the whole concept has definitely seen a paradigm shift and underwent numerous transitions particularly in India in the last decade or so. The Indian IT companies realized that if they were to beat the IBM’s and the EDS’s of the world in the “game” – they should get their act together. It not only meant the delivering the message to the end customer about the novelty of the services provided by a said vendor but also shrouding the message in a jazzy web so as to create maximum impact and customer recall value. While on one hand it meant the phasing out of a generation of delivery folks out of the marketing departments of the top tier IT companies – on the other the so called marketing whizkids of the FMCG and product companies moved in to fill in the “niche” within. So while the Wipro’s, Infosys’s and the HCL’s of the world got in the marketing guru’s to try and bridge the gap between the message sent out by them and that by the big 3. While in reality though the profit margins increased as did the sales of the Indian companies as they went further global – the big question is pertinent here: Are we there yet?

While the concept of IT services marketing tries in essence to differentiate itself in the sense that it the core strategy is built around influential marketing – much like the US political scenario. The messaging and the context as well as the services need to be flexible.

Boom!!! I said it again – in context is services marketing any different from product marketing. While purists will bay for blood if most modern day marketers try to bring down the holy-grail i.e. the 4P’s of marketing and try adding a different dimension of ‘people’ – in a whole, the context of the 5th P was always integrated within the economics of the world and that made services and not goods the core unit of business.

All businesses at the heart are services business – if we take the Dell model or even the model of a can of “desi ghee” – essentially each one of them follows the integral model of the services economy. In reality marketers try and approach the model from two opposite sides of the spectrum – e.g. our very own Tata with the ‘nano’ is not actually in the business of automobiles (believe it or not) but in the business of transportation services. Marketing of the ‘nano’ would not only revolve around the product marketing to spell success for the product but essentially incorporate the 5th P i.e. people if ultimate success is to be attained.

The Indian IT services arm has essentially not seen much action – but the scene is heating up. With margins shrinking and vendors essentially targeting similar geographical markets we are poised to see a sea-change in this business that will essentially differentiate the innovators from the followers.

The Wipro’s, Infosys’s and HCL’s of the world please stand up.

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reality bytes

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wordle.......rocks...

I just saw this post with an amazing tool called wordle that i came across using the stumble tool bar in Firefox...........and i had to use it. Not finding enough text (obviously as a lack of imagination on my part on a rainy tuesday morning), i dumped some content of my resume into it.

The end result was in fact quite stellar........

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analyze this.....

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managment perils....

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tech support.....

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bpm.....what was that again??

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doctor who....???

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ration of our times.....

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the clueless Indian...

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the great divide...

well taking classes on marketing in B-school apparently did not help many of my colleagues who are still plagued by the oddity of failing to differentiate between marketing & sales. Recently a friend of mine got into a conversation with me on this and I had to spend 30 minutes of valuable airtime trying to educate him on the nuances of the business world.

If I try to follow the idiom "Dummy's Guide to Sales & Marketing", then, net-net

Marketing is everything that you do to reach and persuade prospects.

Whereas

Sales is everything that you do to close the sale and get a signed agreement or contract.

Marketing consists of the measures you use to reach and persuade your prospects that you are the company for them. It's the message that prepares the prospect for the sales. It consists of advertising, public relations, brand marketing, viral marketing, and direct mail. To add a few lines for my friends interested in the IT services marketing area, a person handling a marketing area will be responsible for one or all of this for a particular service line or industry vertical.

The sales process on the other hand consists of interpersonal interaction. It is often done by a one-on-one meeting, cold calls, and networking. It's anything that engages you with the prospect or customer on a personal level rather than at a distance. The keyword here (for most of my friend interested in IT sales) is networking, networking and more networking.

It is interesting to note that without marketing an organization does not have prospects or leads to follow up with, but yet without a good sales technique and strategy the organization’s closing rate is usually depressing. Simply stated, marketing takes the long-term view of customer relationships, paving the way for sales to occur in the short-term. One feeds the other. At the end of the day, its about integration and collaboration of both expertise.

PS: This article is also influenced by the fact that apparently 90% on the people I came across & discussed my job profile earlier, had absolutely no clue what IT services marketing was.

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