Showing posts with label IIPM BEST MBA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IIPM BEST MBA. Show all posts

Monday, October 08, 2012

G8 SUMMIT: SWISS ALPS, DISNEYLAND TOUR ALSO OPTIONS...

The summit will also include paragliding, water sports, bungee lessons

Evian, France, 2003: “Iraq has WMDs! And everybody better contribute to kill that damn nuke-bomber Saddam!” We told you, Bush churns out gas better!
Georgia, USA, 2004: Main agenda: Extending the controversial Heavily In-debt Poor Countries [HIPC] initiative for debt-relief and to vaccines development. Achieved: Magnanimous relief to Iraq’s $120 billion debt on US insistence.
Gleneagles, Scotland, 2005: This summit, like all years before, was again aimed to provide $50 billion debt-relief to Africa [Nothing new! Nothing achieved!].

Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2006: For the first time in recent history, the G8 leaders proactively agreed on energy security, fighting diseases and encouraging education. Oh yes, it didn’t at all mention them providing any financial assistance!
Heiligendamm, Germany, 2007: Top agenda: Africa! Promises made in 2005 [in Scotland] of $50 billion aid to Africa: More or less overlooked! Creditably, developed nations in all have donated around $2.5 trillion since 1960 to LDCs. However, official estimates confirm that even this falls short of the required – and so called ‘promised’ – aid amount by a mammoth $3.5 trillion. As per the World Bank, it will cost developed countries just 2.8 cents per person per week to meet the promise. But we believe the first world still hasn’t understood the cheapness of life’s existence for the poor.

Having said that, we have a strategy for poor beleaguered Nick. We suggest that instead of being uselessly exposed to global criticism year after year, the G8 should officially confirm that leaders would meet simply to have a good time. After that, hand over the event management to our team [please, we insist]! Disneyland, Star Cruise, bungee lessons, paragliding, you name it guys, we’ll have that for you. And what about least developed countries? Goddamn those Africans...


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Monday, September 10, 2012

P. R. Somasundaram, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Lakshmi Vilas Bank (LVB)

In a tête-à-tête with B&E’s Mona Mehta, P. R. Somasundaram, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Lakshmi Vilas Bank (LVB) speaks about the growing importance of retail banking in the Country and the bank’s expansion plans to exploit the opportunities coming its way.

B&E: What are the new marketing initiatives that you are focusing on to increase your customer base in the retail banking arena?
PRS: LVB is an 83 year-old private bank with 1.64 million satisfied customers. In order to increase the base further we are concentrating on wealth management by offering related products and services. We are looking at steady growth in the retail lending space through secured lending measures like mortgage lending. However, as a policy of the bank, we have temporarily restrained ourselves from the unsecured categories like credit cards and personal loans.

B&E: With the number of participants increasing, competition in the Indian banking sector has moved up to a different level altogether. Banks are now competing to reach out to the huge unbanked population. How is LVB planning to deal with the situation?
PRS: The new management’s focus is to reposition LVB as a new generation bank and make it a top performer in terms of customer service, efficiency, productivity and profitability in the next 3 years. And to achieve it we are planning to start a housing finance company, increase our national presence, and leverage on our expertise in the IT domain. We have also tied up with LIC and Bajaj for life and non-life insurance distribution. The insurance venture is taking off really well for us. Apart from the centralised plans, we are also looking at drafting a town-wise strategy soon, particularly for the semi urban areas where we currently have 105 branches.

B&E: You have only 180 ATMs of your own. Don’t you think this will be a big roadblock in your retail dreams?
PRS: It’s true that we have only 180 ATMs, but at the same time we are also linked to other banks. So our customers can actually use 54,000 other ATMs belonging to various banks. Nevertheless, we are adding more ATMs every month and expect that our own ATM network will cross the 300 mark in the next 2-3 years.

B&E: Apart from CASA, how is LVB planning to strengthen its portfolio in areas like housing loan, auto loan et al?
PRS: Talking about auto loans, we do not intend to enter the 4-wheeler or 2-wheeler segment any time soon as these have collection challenges that may not be ideal in our current set up. However, we do have a presence, though small, in the transport vehicles segment. And we have plans to take it further. So, we are currently piloting a project that is expected to create a mid size opportunity for us in the segment. In the housing segment, we already have sizable portfolio and intend to grow it significantly through alliances; preferably through a Housing Finance Company. Apart from these, our new management team is now focusing aggressively on growing all business verticals of the bank and retail banking products. We have also included loans to MSME sector among our focus areas.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Digest this!

It’s all about respect for Nicholas Cage. He has recently confessed that he eats only those animals whose sex lives he respects. Nicholas believes that birds and fish mate ‘respectably’ and thus he chooses to eat fowl and fish, but pigs on the other hand are spared from becoming his dinner as their sexual pursuits are not dignified enough! One mad hatter, that. We advise Nicholas Cage to keep further details on how he hogs to himself!


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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Marketing mantras

Hrithik Roshan is busy promoting his home production Kites, and everyone is going ga ga about how hot this blue-eyed boy is looking and the smouldering chemistry he shares with his co-star Barbara Mori. Hrithik though feels that he needs marketing lessons from Shahrukh Khan and Aamir Khan! But considering all the hype around his co-star Mori to the edited 90-minute version of the film in English, Hrithik we bet, is just trying to being modest!


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Saturday, August 11, 2012

Meet the break-up agent!

If the romance is long over and you’re struggling to decide how to break-up, here’s someone who’ll do the dirty work for you!

Breaking up with your partner is hard, we know that. The thought of a break-up is not on one’s mind when getting into a relationship (at least not for most of us). Even the term ‘break-up’ can send a shiver down our spine. But what else can one do when one realises that the girl or guy they’re seeing is great, but you two just don’t click? Or worse, you realise the person you are dating is nothing but a loser and on second thoughts you wouldn’t even wish to see your enemy with him/her! How does one tell him that it is just not meant to be, without having to go through the pain of confrontation and the resultant drama and heartache! Well, the days of drama are behind us and now all one has to do is to pay a modest sum and the dirty work would be done by an expert!

Bernd Dressler, a businessman in Germany, started the project ‘Separation Agency’ in 2006 after he stumbled upon this idea on eBay. His job description is basically that if someone wants to break-up and doesn’t have the guts to do it themselves, then all they need to do is get in touch with a break-up artist who would end the relationship on your behalf. In short, it’s the work that actress Britney Brooks does in the film “The Break-Up Artist”.

“I have four packages for the service. The first service is ‘phone call’ in which they remain friends and it is very friendly. The second is a phone call again but it is more direct and that there will be no contact any more. The third is to write a letter, but this service is not booked very often. The fourth option is a personal visit. The normal phone call is around 29.95 Euros and the personal visit costs 65 Euros. The most common service is a phone call for ‘let’s just be friends,’” reveals Dressler.

Agreed, it is tough to break-up and confront your partner, but why involve a third party? “People have a problem because nobody knows what to do. We, as a separation agency, think that we only have a task of sending a message from one person to the other.


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Friday, August 10, 2012

One out of every five!

Obama made several promises during his campaign days, but precious few seem to have been realised. Will America and the world cherish his presidency the same way they had welcomed it? For that to happen, Obama will have to live up to expectations that could be well beyond his reach.

It is quite normal for elected candidates to bear the burden of expectations. What makes Obama peculiar is the scale and magnitude of expectations that he carries. That has in part to do with the symbolism of his election. But that’s a small part, as a majority has to do with all the promises of change he made. Contrary to the expectations of 75,000 supporters and 365 electoral votes, the P.O.T.U.S [President of the United States] Barack Obama has not delivered the change that they could believe in.

Ironically, a person whose campaign was all about “Yes, we can,” hasn’t accomplished much of what he promised. His stimulus package creditably prevented a probable catastrophic financial crash. Yes, it hasn’t nudged the unemployment figures by much, something Obama accepts now. Obama’s flagship agenda of the health care bill is still awaiting its time in the sun. The same goes for his much hyped climate change bill. In his recent State-of-the-Union speech on 27 January, 2010, Obama promised something that is quite the opposite of what he had stood for in his campaign days. Instead of talking about green jobs and climate change policy, he discussed his plans on nuclear power, oil, gas, coal and bio-fuels! That’s change indeed!

The major blows for his supporters so far has been his failure in closing the Guantanamo Bay prison and also in providing relief for illegal immigrants, which he promised and initiated in the initial period of his presidency. Even after a year, Gitmo is active and no concrete policy has been designed for illegal migrants. What is most surprising is that his promises of closing Gitmo and solving other human rights issues were part of the parcel that won him the coveted Nobel Peace Prize. The leading entity PolitiFact found that Obama has kept around 91 of his promises... out of 500! But Obama’s fall from grace is perfectly well in line with his predecessors. History bears testimony to the fact that not one President of the United States has been able to meet any kind of unrealistic deadlines or unrealistic promises.


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Monday, July 30, 2012

The shame of being a Maharaja & The pain of being a King

Air India is a Palaeolithic case study living shamefully on borrowed time and undeserved tax payers’ money. How did the rot start? What continues to weaken the airline’s operations today? what, if at all, can be a quick revival plan to save the airline? Also, is the youthful King of Good times following a similar pattern and slipping into a coma? Bottomline: Should the troubled titanics be allowed to sink? B&E provides the answers...

The ecosystem that has encouraged both the operational and financial breakdown of India’s national carrier did not grow out of vacuum. [To be fair, the Mallya-led private carrier Kingfisher Airlines is equally in trouble.] For AI, the merger of the-then profitable Indian Airline; (which had made Rs.1.60 billion in net profits between FY2003-04 & FY2005-06) and the deadweight-for-long Air India (in March 2007) played the trigger. The imagined post-merger synergies remained a reverie. Integration could not be completed, the fleet and route rationalisation process took forever, union issues killed flights, weakened the airline’s market share and cost more money because the erstwhile Indian employees demanded the “promised” equality and higher compensation (comparable to that received by the AI crew).

Numbers represent the murk well. As per Accenture, which was paid handsomely by the powers-that-be for consulting related to the AI-IA merger and beyond, the merger was expected to result in a bottomline gain of Rs.10 billion in the very first year. Reality check: In the first year post-merger (FY2007-08), the combine’s loss touched Rs.222.62 billion. The blotches grew bigger in the years that followed – Rs.719.08 billion in FY2008-09, Rs.555 billion in FY2009-10, and Rs.580 billion in FY2010-11. Add to this the accumulated losses of Rs.160 billion and you have the national carrier bleeding Rs.2236.70 billion ($49.28 billion) in the four years following the merger until FY2010-11. To say that AI is in losses is underestimating its potential for disaster. The airline is today the world’s highest loss-making entity in its industry. And if you add up the losses reported by the world’s five largest loss-making airlines in the world since 2007 (United-Continental, Delta-Northwest, American Airlines, US Airways and China Eastern Airlines), AI’s total loss shamefully adds up to 146.28% more! In terms of passenger count, AI is today Asia’s 16th largest carrier. It however is very different from the top 15 in one respect – no other large carrier of Asia (including the three-largest Chinese carriers China Eastern Airlines, Air China, China Southern Airlines and others like Taiwan’s China Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific et al) has recorded a single year of loss since FY2009. As for AI, the divide between glory & shame has only got wider.

Over the years, AI’s management has blamed its losses on either escalating fuel prices or intense price-wars that are rampant in the domestic airline circuit. Not hard to disbelieve, but is it only a practice of saving one’s face behind a cocoon of excuses? Going by the recent performance of Jet Airways, IndiGo & SpiceJet (which command 59% of the domestic traffic; as of June 2011), the answer is an obvious yes. The three private-run carriers have managed improved report cards over the years, marked with feathers of profits. While Jet managed a turnaround to make profits of Rs.96.90 million in FY2010-11, IndiGo managed a high Rs.5.5 billion & SpiceJet Rs.1.02 billion after making Rs.615 million in FY2009-10. Clearly, it is the very management that deserves the fat pointing finger at AI.

Over the years, the situation at AI has grown into that of a fish rotting from the head. The recent unceremonious ousting of CMD Arvind Jadhav (on August 12, 2011) is one of the fallouts of the turbulent state of affairs that has marred planning and execution in AI’s boardroom for over three years now. From his selection to the manner in which he handled issues at AI, Jadhav, a 1978 batch IAS officer with nil experience in the aviation sector before he took charge, perhaps rightly deserves criticism. When B&E spoke to sources in the government, the AI management and the airline’s union, many unsettling facts emerged. A year before he assumed office in May 2009, Jadhav (the-then CVO at GAIL) had been found unsuitable for the task of turning around the merged entity by a search committee appointed by the Cabinet Committee on Appointments (ACC). The panel thus chose Raghu Menon, a 1974 batch IAS officer – given his expertise in the domain – to handle the complex administrative issues in the areas of personnel and finance management arising out of the merger of the two airlines. A year later, the same panel submitted a list of three officers to the Centre for appointment to the post of CMD – one of whom was Arvind Jadhav. Subsequently, Jadhav was selected to handle an entity whose condition had worsened (with a loss of Rs.941.69 billion in the two years post merger). Jadhav was handed over the shotgun. He did the rest.

Perhaps in his haste to be seen by the political class as the perpetrator of a low-cost vision, Jadhav chose to shoot from the hip at the first thing that moved. On May 4, 2009, his first day in office, Jadhav perplexingly cancelled the appointment of cabin crew who had been selected from five regions across the country – north, south, east, west and central. This marked the sudden end of a process that had been on for a year, and in many cases, where appointment letters had already been issued. Jadhav considered little the fact that the cabin crew were being selected to ensure minimal delays in the on-time operation of the new aircraft that were being inducted in the AI fleet. This single decision of Jadhav, says Rajiv Pratap Rudy, former Civil Aviation Minister to B&E, cost AI Rs.20 billion. During the eight months of delay in hiring cabin crew that resulted, hundreds of flights were either cancelled or delayed due to shortage of crew. Add to this the foxing fact that during the same time as fresh cabin crew appointments were cancelled, long leaves were sanctioned for the already short staffed cabin crew. The endemicity of Jadhav’s shotgun approach resulted in notable and unpardonable devil and the deep sea situations – one being when three Boeing 777-300ER, which Air India acquired at a total price of $852.30 million, could not be used for three full months just because AI did not take delivery of the aircraft!



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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Stratagem-MICROSOFT: SKYPE ACQUISITION

However, compared to prior target companies,   (apart from being cool and a verb for online voice and video calling) looks a lot more lucrative. As of 2010, the popular service has 663 million registered users out of which 170 million are connected. Impressively, Skype users made 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls in 2010. So far so good! But unfortunately the rosy picture just ends here – only 8.8 million of these users actually pay. That roughly boils down to 1.32% of the entire user base. Further, Skype incurred a loss of $7 million on revenues of $860 million in 2010. In short, the company still hasn’t figured out a way to make profits. What’s more? If one were to calculate Skype’s revenue per user, it would round up to just $1.3.

If these facts weren’t enough, then Microsoft should have at least learned a lesson or two from eBay’s Skype misadventure before taking the plunge. In 2005, the online auction portal paid $2.6 billion to acquire Skype. The idea was to integrate voice and video calling features into the auction process. But, after close to three years of failed attempts to derive synergies, eBay wrote off $1.4 billion from the value of Skype. It’s not that Skype is not growing, it’s growing; but only in terms of numbers that really don’t matter to Microsoft. Last year, its monthly users stood at 145 million implying an increase of 38%. Paid users were also up by 19%. However, if Microsoft wants a 10% annual ROI, paid users will have to grow 40 folds, which seems unlikely anytime soon.

Further, with the acquisition, Microsoft plans to embed Skype’s services across its offering. Potential combinations include linking the service to Outlook e-mail, Xbox game console, Windows mobile phone and corporate suite Lync. But, except for the Xbox and Outlook combinations, Skype’s services don’t fit anywhere else. Moreover, Skype significantly overlaps with Microsoft’s video chat, instant messaging and web conferencing tools. This could turn out to be a major hindrance in integrating Skype services with Windows Phone 7, a mobile operating system which is being developed by Microsoft in collaboration with Finnish telecom giant Nokia.

No doubt, Microsoft is sitting on $40 billion in cash, and that does make the Skype acquisition affordable. But this does not mean that it should be spending irrationally. The fate of all major M&A rests on execution and Microsoft is not an exception. Agrees Michael Hodel, the US based CFA at Morningstar as he tells B&E, “Microsoft will need flawless strategic and tactical execution over the coming months and years to keep its shareholders from losing money on this transaction.” However, the challenge in this case is to leverage the 663 million users without destroying what attracted so many people in the first place (the service is free). Well, we still wonder how Ballmer and team will pull this one off!

Read more.....

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

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Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management


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Monday, December 01, 2008

Oman, Muscat

IIPM Publication
The credit, for Muscat being a rather handsome city, undeniably goes to the present Sultan Qaboos bin Said. Apart from the great looking, low-lying urban landscape, the Grand Mosque near the international airport is worth visiting for its grand chandeliers, hand woven carpets and splendid interiors. And, visiting this area is incomplete if one doesn’t visit Istanbuli, a Lebanese food joint popular for chicken and beef shawarmas with a slightly tangy chick peas based dip – hommus.

While Muttrah and Ruwi are the core multi-ethnic districts of the city, nearby destinations such as Nakhal (popular for misty waterfall), Nizwa (to experience the real Omani culture and history), the centuries-old Muscat Souq (a centuries-old market) and Bahla (for pottery and witchcraft) must not be missed. And the cherry on the cake really is that you can see all of that at a very relaxed pace, just the way the Omanis prefer it! ...Continue

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