Worth Reading ………Very Intersting article by IIM B prof. Y. L. R. MOORTHI
GOOD NEWS: WE CAN NEVER GIVE UP. THERE IS ALWAYS AND OPPURTUNITY HIDING ROUND THE CORNER.
Read below to learn from History that’s happening right before our eyes.
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"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!"
By Y. L. R. MOORTHI
[Management Views from IIMB is an exclusive column written every two weeks for india.wsj.com by faculty members of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.]
Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.
Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.
Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).
Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.
Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?
The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"
Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."
In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?"
The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.
In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware.
Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!
India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.
Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.
One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!
On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.
—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore.
From India, Bangalore
4GOOD NEWS: WE CAN NEVER GIVE UP. THERE IS ALWAYS AND OPPURTUNITY HIDING ROUND THE CORNER.
Read below to learn from History that’s happening right before our eyes.
-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//-------------//
"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!"
By Y. L. R. MOORTHI
[Management Views from IIMB is an exclusive column written every two weeks for india.wsj.com by faculty members of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.]
Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.
Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.
Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).
Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.
Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?
The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"
Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."
In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?"
The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.
In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware.
Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!
India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.
Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.
One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!
On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.
—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore.
From India, Bangalore
WOW.... a real eye opener, i surely do not want to be breakfast... i want to have breakfact
From India, Delhi
From India, Delhi
sir i am dr.g.vanishree i would like to know the way iim's teach management how does your teachings differ from other management collages how iim's work for teaching management as i am faculty for management i want to learn more and more bout teachingmanagement subjects
From India, Hyderabad
From India, Hyderabad
Dear Dr. G. Vanishree
As the saying goes, "Leaders don’t do different things, they just do things differently". Ask any IIM alumni or Prof. and they will tell you that they have the same system of pedagogy as in any good B-school; namely - a mix of Theory, Case Studies, Assignments - Group/Individual, Quizzes -Surprise/announced, Class Participation, Projects, Mid-Term, end-Term exams etc.
What differentiates them is, first, their intake - the best and enthusiastic talents available in India; and secondly, their Academic Faculties - the best and those motivated by the love of "teaching".
It has been my personal experience that at IIM, the Profs. do not just actually "teach"; more than that they simply "facilitate" learning by pointing out the ways and means; it is the eager students who run up the trail competing with each other.
For instance, the contents of the article cited here would figure in the very first session of Marketing Management; after all if you do not have competition, there is (almost) no purpose of "marketing"; and how one should avoid having Marketing Myopia, which is the mistake of paying more attention to products that a company offers, rather than to benefits and experience the product offers to the user.
If you have read the path-breaking original article by Theodore Levitt (courtesy : Harvard business Review); you"ll notice that the article under consideration, is an update of the theme. The title "Have Breakfast... Or Be Breakfast" is in fact, related to the story posted by ACT (Jacob) :
Every Morning in the African Jungle a Lion gets up and says ' I must run faster than the slowest deer or I will go hungry'
Every morning in the African Jungle a Deer gets up and says "I must run faster than the fastest lion or I will be dead meat".
Lest I omit to mention another characteristic of IIM Profs. - they keep themselves updated and networked with the latest developments and universities across the world.
Hope you will find the above useful in benchmarking yourself and your institution.
Warm regards.
From India, Delhi
As the saying goes, "Leaders don’t do different things, they just do things differently". Ask any IIM alumni or Prof. and they will tell you that they have the same system of pedagogy as in any good B-school; namely - a mix of Theory, Case Studies, Assignments - Group/Individual, Quizzes -Surprise/announced, Class Participation, Projects, Mid-Term, end-Term exams etc.
What differentiates them is, first, their intake - the best and enthusiastic talents available in India; and secondly, their Academic Faculties - the best and those motivated by the love of "teaching".
It has been my personal experience that at IIM, the Profs. do not just actually "teach"; more than that they simply "facilitate" learning by pointing out the ways and means; it is the eager students who run up the trail competing with each other.
For instance, the contents of the article cited here would figure in the very first session of Marketing Management; after all if you do not have competition, there is (almost) no purpose of "marketing"; and how one should avoid having Marketing Myopia, which is the mistake of paying more attention to products that a company offers, rather than to benefits and experience the product offers to the user.
If you have read the path-breaking original article by Theodore Levitt (courtesy : Harvard business Review); you"ll notice that the article under consideration, is an update of the theme. The title "Have Breakfast... Or Be Breakfast" is in fact, related to the story posted by ACT (Jacob) :
Every Morning in the African Jungle a Lion gets up and says ' I must run faster than the slowest deer or I will go hungry'
Every morning in the African Jungle a Deer gets up and says "I must run faster than the fastest lion or I will be dead meat".
Lest I omit to mention another characteristic of IIM Profs. - they keep themselves updated and networked with the latest developments and universities across the world.
Hope you will find the above useful in benchmarking yourself and your institution.
Warm regards.
From India, Delhi
very very informative, writen in a way that ineterst reader, read more n more thnx for shring with us :) Regards
From Pakistan, Lahore
From Pakistan, Lahore
Excellent reading. The article gives insight into the need for maintaining the competitive edge. Regards, Anand
From India, Delhi
From India, Delhi
HEY REALLY IT IS WORTH READ........... mind-blowing, exemplary, very nice........thanx for sharing keep posting........luv to read such posts!!!!!!!!!!
From India, Delhi
From India, Delhi
Very informative and enlightening! Considering that breakfast is the best meal for the day it sets the tempo of your day everyone it is a must to have breakfast and not be breakfast!
Cheers to Dr. Moorthi
From Philippines, Makati
Cheers to Dr. Moorthi
From Philippines, Makati
Really an eye opener for all in todays competative world. We never know who might be our next competitor, for example we can see the E reader making impact on the publishing industry... also i heard that news broadcasting companies are going to charge the readers online...
Well the world's really changing and that too very fast....
Thanks for sharing such a great article...
From India
Well the world's really changing and that too very fast....
Thanks for sharing such a great article...
From India
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A nice thought and worth reading.zip
Worth Reading.doc