ISB T-Shirts

There is going to be a photo session today for our whole AMP class. We have got black ISB t-shirts which everyone is wearing today and looking smart.

Leadership by Prof. Roger Lehman

Prof. Roger Lehman comes from INSEAD, a reputed business school near Paris. We tried recover our lost energy with generous breaks and outdoor activities related to leadership and team building.

Funny part was the blind folded triangle forming exercise in which my group failed miserably. But some groups could make a perfect triangle blindfolded.

I think that our impact as leaders should be underestimated. Things that we may find trivial such as greeting other or responding to the greetings of our subordinates may send strong signals about us in our organisations.

2-Basic Principals to Survive (Excel) as a Manager

• Commitment to your boss’ success
• Ownership of the outcome on projects and tasks.

and one absolute No-No.

Never make your boss look stupid or incompetent, regardless of how incompetent or stupid he or she may be.

I.M.A.G. E. US

We all seem to be tired today. Just two days and we can fly back home. Yesterday afternoon saw some heated exchange among few participants over a case study about a french firm called I.M.A.G.E. US. It was really the low point of our AMP.

The case is about a sales director Reynolds who spends money in the benefits and perks to his sales team such as free vacations to Italy, expensive corporate newletter and conventions at golf resort where people do little business and play more.

The questions were:

• How would you like to work for him?
• How would you like to be his boss?

The most participants wanted to work for him but very few wanted to be his boss. Prof. Sinha explained very clearly that the perks and benefits were actually well designed to address the needs of different individuals. Individual needs are:

1. Survival
2. Social Affiliation
3. Achievement
4. Power
5. Ego Gratification

This is a good framework to evaluate the compensation and benefits plan in your company.

Sales Drivers

Prof Sinha talks about the drivers:

1. Market Strategy
2. Sales Process and Structures
3. People
4. Execution

To analyze the performance of sales force, you should consider all four of them.

Building a Winning Sales Organisation

During breakfast this morning I had a word with Prof. Prabhakant Sinha who will doing the Sales Force training today. He comes from Chicago. He has setup a Sales consulting organization having offices in 11 countries. They provide consulting on how to design the sales process. They have an office in Pune, India. Their existing team size is about 130 people.

Cable TV at Executive Housing

Cable TV in the Executive Housing has not worked since past two days. It seems that they have some serious technical problem. We are getting bored in our rooms on daily basis.

Eight Approaches to Delivering Services

In our Market and Customers session yesterday we discussed eight approaches that can be be used to design your services. It will be difficult to centre your services around all eight approaches but most likely you would like to combine two or three approaches.

The approaches are:

1. Employee focused design
2. Service quality focused design
3. Customer experience focused design
4. Process flow focused design
5. Time target focused design
6. Drama focused design
7. Physical environment focused design
8. Efficiency focused design

Culture of Innovation

Prof. Sridhar showed a small movie on a company based in California that designs innovative products. The company looks like a hierarchy free, self organizing society. In this company people hang their bicycles on the roof and their workplaces are full of toys and weird things such as a wing of a real airplane.

The company designs new products. They do not care which product. They have a product development process that can be applied to any product.

In the product development process they cultivate several ideas in a free atmosphere but at a certain stage (usually when the deadline approaches) the ideas converge and the end product emerges.

Positioning of a High-Tech Product

Today Prof. Sridhar used the Tivo case to explain how the positioning and the price of a product should be modifed as the market matures. He used the example of bell curve discussed in the famous book ‘Crossing the Chasm’ to explain why Tivo was not able to penetrate the mainstream market. As a high technology product becomes mainstream its positioning should be changed to suite mainstream market of less tech savvy people. It should become simpler to use, cheaper and user friendly.

He used the following matrix to analyze the positioning of a product.

Positioning

Segment

Market Mix

Product

Price

Place

Promotion (Advertising)

The Important lesson learned is:

Analyse the positioning first and do not jump to solutions quickly.

Perceptual Map

This tool can be used to understand the positioning of a product.

http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~rbh8900/