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Saibal

Innovation for none and best-practices for free

Recently I came across a series of articles on the downturn and how HR should be coping with it. It was all the usual canned stuff like “Communicate well”, “Go slow”, “Cut overheads and retain your best” and so on.

One man’s medicine can be another man’s poison. Its time to look at some root cause issues and apply some original thought to solve what I am convinced are unique problems in emerging economies like India.

The two biggest challenges faced by IT companies are right people in the wrong jobs and over dependency on process-driven products and services. It stifles innovation and makes them ill prepared to compete in the new economy of the connected world.

Put the right people in the right jobs: When NASSCOM and McKinsey said only 1 in 4 engineers are suitable for employment, no one questioned perhaps it’s the employability criteria that is a problem not the candidate. Lets rethink the hiring process.

Create knowledge-based services: Train middle management to innovate not emulate best practices. This will create new products and services. After all, in the last decade the SWITCH companies (Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS and HCL) have built respected relationships with thousands of global clients. It would be a shame to see that go to waste. Then it would be the real Dire Straits!

New skills for new Management Ideas

The current issue of Business Week talks about game changing business ideas that will shape the future.

Here are seven game changers with my comments in italics on its impact on professional services.

1. Personal Consulting Outsourcing: Employees at Pfizer wll be able to out task short research projects over an online system. The job gets routed over to Genpact in India. BPO and KPO professionals will need to brush up their client interaction skills.
   
2. Online Consulting: Accenture is offering direct interaction with their consultants to Microsoft through their internal platform. A novel way to grow business and optimize bench time. Faster turnaround times in small teams or individual contribution will need a different quality control mechanism.
   
3. Wikis for Client Input: A reader submitted an idea of companies setting up wikis for taping into client ideas. Get ready to understand how to analyze and interpret data.
   
4. Project based teams: Teams are put together dynamically for projects when needed. They are then taken apart when the project is over. Such contributors in the organization will need consultancy skills.
   
5. Trickle-up Innovation: GE has taken its low cost ECG machine which was developed in India and China for its local markets is being introduced in the US as a economical product. Expect to see R&D activity go up in emerging economies.
   
6. Global Classroom: IBM and Whirlpool is packing off their professionals to emerging economies. Ideas and innovations are expected to come out the field and not from ivory towers. Get ready to work in cross-cultural teams.
7. Instant and anonymous performance reviews: Twitter style performance reviews from peers. Since its anonymous, its likely to be very realistic. Now, everyone is watching you!
   

On our Seminar Series

I am getting many inquiries for more information on the seminars I will be hosting in different cities in March and April.

Below is some further details on each topics I plan to cover:

1. Consulting Industry Overview: What is consulting? Who is a consultant? Why will it be in demand in now and in the future?
   
2. Consulting Industry Tools & Methods: I will cover simple but powerful tools you can use for issue analysis and strategy formulation.
   
3. A Case Interview Simulation: How to use Frameworks and where to apply them? To demonstrate this in an interesting manner, we will invite 3 participants form the audience to solve a case. If you are applying for jobs in consulting or applying for B-Schools, you will find this very helpful.
   
4. A Consulting Quiz: We will host a mini-case quiz. All can participate in this fun and interactive quiz. The top three performers will be picked for the CASE Interview simulation above. So come and try out your true potential in consulting!
   
5. Jobs in Consulting and related fields: What skills are required and how to go about getting into consulting jobs. Consulting skills are also important if you will be in customer facing jobs or functions that requires innovation and strategy.
6. ZENESYS Consulting Certification: I will talk about how you can join our distance program to get certified by us. This is a unique way to learn by applying consulting tools we teach on live projects with friendly clients.
   

March 22nd - Mumbai
April 5th - Delhi NCR
April 26th - Bangalore
May 3rd - Hyderabad
May 10th - Kolkata

The seminar is not expected to last more than 3.5 to 4.0 hours. All dates are on Sunday afternoons. The xxact date and time will be communicated to all attendees who have registered on our website at http://www.zenesys.org/Events.html.

If you have already registered, you should receive a confirmation within 2/3 days time.
It is important to register on the events page as you will be sent reminders closer to date and also because pre-registerd candidates will be entitled to Rs 200 discount over the on-the-day rate of Rs 500.

ZENESYS has been conducting consulting skills workshops in INDIA for more than 2 years now. We have developed our own tools and methods that we beleive will be very useful for you to play in today's global marketplace. The seminars will share some of those learnings and will give you a chance to learn more about careers in consulting.

Some of our past ZENESYS Certified Consultants will be available to answer your questions.

If you have suggestions and comments, please reply to this blog.

Initial Hypothesis for Selling

The March issue of HBR carried an article on “Provocative Sales” technique and compared it with Solutions Selling. They also advocated that this might be a better way to sell in these recessionary times.

Some advantages:

1. No budget, no problem: You can sell even when the client does not have a budget to buy your services. For example, you should be able to sell to STAR Telecom who is suffering from declining market share. They also happe to have no budget for IT spend this year.
2. Reduces cost of sales: It reduces sales cycle by a considerable amount and that too at a time when the best resources in vendor organization is engaged in the sales cycle. For instance if STAR Telecom did have a budget, they would have asked the IT vendor to submit a proposal for a new CRM system. At this point the vendors is burning valuable resources in developing this proposal – at a time when they are not even sure if they are going to get the deal.
3. Sidestep the competition: The Provocative Sales technique closes the sale by changing the viewpoint of the buyer. This results in eliminating competition. Lets go back to the situation where STAR Telecom without a budget for IT. In the provocative sales model, the vendor points out the reason why STAR is losing market share and offers a CRM solution that can solve that problem.

The main premise in provocative selling is that the vendor needs to be sure of the root cause of the clients suffering. I can buy into this theory as in my years of experience, developing a proposal is way more expensive then conducting a root cause analysis study.

At ZENESYS we are teaching root cause analysis using initial hypothesis. See one of our older posts on how to use this simple and powerful tool. Or read another article I wrote on here on Pagalguy.com.