Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Enterprise agile from Prashanth Madhavan Narasimhan

Consumer Vs Enterprise Every time there is a consumer use product, we see that the enterprise comes up with a very customized version so that the enterprise does not have to adapt. This is with good reason. Enterprise is an entity that is too complex and having it to change would mean a disruption to the business  - something that the stakeholders are not very happy about. For example, take the iPhone and Blackberry. iPhone is a consumer centric product while Blackberry is a very enterprise centric product. However, iPhone introduced major disruptions to the way the enterprise security functions and forced enterprises to be more flexible with the way they allow employees to view email. This increased productivity since employees could view their emails at home or anywhere on the move and respond more quickly. Another example is Microsoft word Vs Google docs. The days when a simple document would have to go through multiple revisions with the whole track changes turn...

One of the biggest things to happen in a long time in the Indian retail scene is Nilgiris acquisition by Future Group. Nilgiris is one of the few retailers in south India that has been very successful for a long time and also has been going through ownership changes for some time now. We do hope that Future group would provide good support for Nilgiris. Having had a chance to work with Nilgiris just once and understanding the dynamics of the Indian retail scene, there are several opportunities and challenges for all the parties involved - Future Group, Nilgiris and the Franchisees. Opportunities for Future group Working with a franchise network Nilgiris is one of the biggest Franchisee network and Future group can learn a lot from them. Better product mix management for various segments Nilgiri's strong point is that it has got the right product mix for every customer segment and the right kind of store for the location More complicated vendor management ...

I am a socialist by education and a capitalist by profession. I am hence very confused by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan for Clean India Campaign . The Campaign has all the similarities of a typical silicon valley startup dream campaign. Market gap Healthy ecosystem Consumer need Very large market segment with similar need All these should be driving plenty of companies to have taken advantage of this campaign and started making money. Delving deeper , I see some issues that could be learnings and also a few opportunities. #1 - Public-Private cooperation This is a very abused word right now in the Indian governance. It rarely helps the normal citizen. I am not sure how it helps the private players. It does help the bureaucrats shift the blame though. Public-Private cooperation will not work for India with such a small concentration of urban space and will lead to skewed demand and supply that will make the issue worse. What we should instead look at is h...

How does a retailer scale and turn itself to profitability?? There have been several cases of online retailers that have struggled to balance scaling at the cost of profitability. The founders / promoters are at the cross roads on the need for more capital - that cedes control - to expand aggressively. They struggle with the need to attain profitability quickly. Their mentors are also not effective at advising them since there is no proper precedent for one approach over other. Looking at Myntra ’s case - a leading online retailer - It proves that it is never too late to get on the path of profitability irrespective of whether you want to grow aggressively ( Reference here ). All promoters would appreciate that. This case is strengthened by Zappos - an US online shoes retailers - as well that has been profitable right from day one. Myntra’s steps to attain profitability is well renowned and the slew of online retailers can gain a lot of insights from Myntra’s case. Pri...

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...