ADIVA L. Pvt. Ltd. ( fka Master Sun Consulting)

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What they don't teach you at IIM. MBA model of producing arm chair thinkers

July 31, 2008

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Make it dumb & simple. Or forget about scaling up a business idea

Make it ‘dumb and simple’. It is something that I spend a lot of time on; convincing the CEO to think from the customer standpoint, talking to the department head about what will deliver results at the frontlines. It requires a lot of thinking to make something ‘dumb’ and it is never simple to make anything ‘simple’. Companies are often caught in a situation where they are terribly excited about a slew of product launches or service upgrades which they think is going to be terribly exciting to the customer. The customer may indeed be excited, only if somebody told him about it or better still answered all his queries. Our client, a travel company, launched a few options through which air ticketing could be done. This included the GDS option, tie up with a wholesaler & an alliance with an OTA. These competitive options would enable the client & his franchisees to offer the best deals and a variety of options to their customers for a specific route say Mumbai-Bangalore. T...

Takeover- Why Akbar is Relevant

Akbar, was a really powerful king. He had an empire that extended from the mountains of Hindu-Kush to the Bay of Bengal. As an emperor he had the sheer might to crush his opponents, to smash their kingdom into rubble. Like they do ‘a hostile’ (takeover) these days. Akbar, however, preferred to integrate. He married into the Rajputs , his fiercest & most tenacious opponents. His favoured queen was a Rajput queen Jodhabai. He gave Rajputs a lot of respect, important jobs in the army and bestowed on them a lot of honours. It was a wise thing to do. While Akbar was an uncontested Emperor, the Rajputs remained kings of their small kingdoms. So while Akbar had a vast empire he saved a lot of his time from martial pursuits. Instead he worked on pursuits of a different kind like ideating about a new religion. History teaches us that takeovers in the Indian context are never clean. It is not as if somebody is selling his company, because the company will be better off with ...

Everybody loves to hate the Islamic Brotherhood of Egypt. Why we must learn from its incredible success

First it was the British, the Suez Canal & Egyptian Nationalism. Then it was a creation of Israel carved from Palestinian homeland. This was followed by the humiliating peace treaty between Egypt & Israel. Thereafter, the fight against Soviet occupation against Afghanistan. The Islamic brotherhood fought for one lofty theme after another. It was 7/11 when the world came to terms with the transforming power of Islamic brotherhood that started in Egypt as a battle for national pride. With that single strike, Al Qaida an offshoot of Egyptian brotherhood, had transformed the way the world looked at itself. While it did not lose its fundamental characteristic of a fight for self-esteem & avenging the wrong done against innocent Muslims, the brotherhood transformed itself from a small political movement to a scalable, aligned and very focused organization. These and many such other transformation programmes undertaken by various religious sects and movements have compelli...

Chris Hood of Google on API as Application People Interface. The Need to Build API as an Asset

What is an API First strategy and how does it help marketer deliver unique, engaging and connected experiences to customers? What are the opportunities to monetize data through APIs for businesses ? Chris Hood is the Head of Business Innovation & Strategy at Google. In this conversation on Jagged with Jasravee he answers the above mentioned questions and many more. API as Application People Interface Chris argues that those who believe that API's are nothing but integrators, will be the first people who are going to go out of business ! It is important to look at APIs as Application People Interface because that's what they do. They're not just an interface between a technology and technology. But when we look at it from a business lens, and we say things like “I'm driving down the street, and I want to connect directly with my grocery store, so that I can get my Ben and Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream” that's a people connector. The API is p...

Before Finalizing a Process, Build Enough Room for Exceptions/Violations

One of the key insights behind defining the processes and ensuring their successful execution in India is to first and foremost, define what exceptions to the process will be and how will exceptions be made. There is so much anxiety amongst Indian managers about the process, of it being some kind of a bureaucracy..... designed to curb their independence or restrict their agility or decision making. This contributes to a lot of inertia toward adopting processes and ensuring compliance. It reminds everyone of the Indian bureaucratic red tape uses the processes and policies to harass them and extract bribes/delay work. So for example, if you are defining a loan approval process in a bank... the loan processing team has to do the following due diligence to process a loan...you also need to define which criteria maybe waived off if the seniors approved it, or which criteria can be waived off for a certain type of client.... SME Clients often boast off the fact that their chequ...

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