Posts Tagged Lessons

Don’t Leverage Social Media for Customer Service, if this is what you do!

It has become a “fashion” among Service Providers to use Social Media for Customer Service, or rather becoming an imperative. There’s no problem with the intent of leveraging “technology”, however, there are so many ways in which this goes horribly wrong. Couple of weeks back, I had a “temporary” issue in accessing certain websites through […]

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Five Paradoxes of building a successful Product Business

[I wrote this post on 27th Sep 2012, for ProductNation and Nasscom Product Conclave Blog] Building products is hard. Building a successful product organization is even harder. Start-up ecosystem is replete with ideas and prototypes. Few of them reach the market with a product and very few turn up as successful. And, a minuscule number of product businesses are […]

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Content Marketing Strategy in Implementation, from Coca-Cola

The new business landscape demands for a different marketing approach. I’m an advocate of Content Marketing strategy (where fit), and have been often asked to explain what it is, how is it different from other stuff the company may be doing, and most important, how does it translate into the difference in implementation in a daily life of the organization. Truth be told, the proof of the marketing Pudding is in the eating and no matter how many times it is explained, one has to go through the motions to understand the implications of a Content Strategy versus the traditional marketing approaches.

However, this video set with Jonathan Mildenhall – Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, is a terrific resource for anyone who wants to know What Content Strategy means, and how a conglomerate of the size of Coca Cola is translating the Content based Marketing Strategy into their plans. Worth every second of those 18 minutes!

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When Processes Are Broken, Fault Lies Elsewhere

When a business process culminates in a transaction that has the organization as the beneficiary, they will find a way or the other to keep track of it, and not let the ball drop. But, not so much otherwise. When you see a broken process, problem lies mostly with focus and priorities; not with their ability (technological or managerial) to manage processes.

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Systems Today, Culture Tomorrow. Don’t Tweak!

Not all organizations may realize that some of the tweaks in policies and systems actually end up as the key determinant of the longer term direction that “organizational culture” takes. When tweaking systems and policies for shorter term goals, do not lose sight of the longer term effects on culture and mindset of people working in the organization. Systems and Policies of today are the organizational culture of tomorrow!

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Do not treat Process Solutions as Applications

It’s very difficult for everyone involved to get out of the application mindset that has got deeply ingrained with years of training and repeated beating-in. I’m afraid this gets further legitimized with Rapid Application Development (RAD) and Composite Applications Development through BPMS gaining acceptance. But, if you actually want a process management solution, don’t treat it as an Application.

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Those Landlocks are no good

An interesting graph at Gapminder on economic growth of landlocked countries v/s those with coastlines shows that landlocked countries have bigger challenged on economic growth. Same is true for businesses except that countries cannot decide whether to be or not be landlocked, businesses can!

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Bridge Those Silos with Incentive Alignment and KPIs

Silos within the organizations boil down to plain WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?), the way organizations measure performance and the type of behaviors they encourage. There’s a relationship among KPIs, Objectives, Expectations, Inspection, and Incentives. We can bridge the silos by understanding this, and effectively using the technology and tools available to us once we know what needs to be done.

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Lessons in business from a street hawker

[tweetmeme source=”ashish_bhagwat” only_single=false] We already know from Ram Charan how much a street peddler knows about the turnover and running a business. But, from what I saw today tells me he knows much more than just that… I live in Dwarka (not the one made famous by Lord Krishna, this one is one of the […]

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