Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

One of the bigger challenges for e-tailers globally has been the last mile connectivity - delivering goods and managing returns. This is an area where the e-tailers have been innovating constantly has it is far better than it was in the early days of amazon back in the early 90's. Amazon has tried every trick in the trade on the last mile connectivity. Now with reports in India that Flipkart is going to try having collection centers for smaller towns, the debate on which method suits India is back out in the open. Flipkart's Collection Center concept Flipkart has always had a very good grip over what works for India - Cash on delivery being a brilliant example. They also started their own delivery service when they could not rely on the third part delivery vendors. With collection centers operated by Flipkart themselves, Flipkart seems to have come up with yet another innovation. What remains to be seen is if it will work since users are now used to getting their g...

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...

Tesco's missteps with its foray into United states of America and its accounting misadventures are unfortunate. Equally unofrtunate is the fact that the new CEO seems to focus on these negaitive events and fails to provide inspiration to the employees on the ground. Any large multi national corporattion would have to go through these challenges. However, it must be prepared to meet these challenges. It is very important for the leadership to handle this crisis without any impact to the operations of the organization. Employees need focus at a time of crisis so that they can keep the engine running. They do not need to know what went wrong in a part of the organization that they were not involved with. The leadership needs to provide the confidence that they can go past the crisis. The leadership also needs to bring the focus to the opportunities that lie ahead and abstract all the negativity around the crisis. In all this crisis, one interesting question that comes out is ...