Indian economy is growing in all spheres – Shri Pranab Mukherjee, President of India

Shri Pranab Mukherjee, President of India

At the very outset, I would like to take the opportunity of congratulating all the award winners. I am happy to join you on this happy occasion – Managing India Awards 2013. These are prestigious corporate awards that recognize outstanding contribution of individuals and organizations to Indian business management. Our country today has corporate leaders who can manage the development of Indian business into models of excellence. Indian managers are recognized all over the world for their managerial capacity. Many global business giants are headed by Indian managers and technocrats today.

Philip Kotler, the acclaimed expert on Marketing had once observed and I quote: “Today you have to run faster to stay in place” (unquote). We have set upon us a challenge to make India count amongst the top few nations in the world. To mark India’s growing stature, management principles should find application not only in our business and industry, but also in other important processes such as social change and governance. How change is managed will determine our progress. This is a need that the Managing India Awards denote, and is also a reality epitomized by this year’s award winners. Continue reading

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How To Address Negative Comments on Social Media

Social Media is a great place to be for your Business / Brand. Everyone is talking about it and most of the Business Houses are already on this Platform.

There are lots of parameters that one has to take care of when one is looking at marketing and promoting via the Social Media. The parameters would be to understand Audience Mindset, understanding the Social Media Platform and so on. Along with these is one of the most important criteria; how to Address Negative Comments. This gets answered when you start to answer another question: how to address ‘any’ comment on your Brand / Business Page. Continue reading

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Merging NGO world with the corporate world – Kiran Bedi, Ramon Magsaysay Awardee

 

Kiran Bedi, Ramon Magsaysay Awardee

I had set up Navjyoti India Foundation in 1986. This foundation was first of its kind as it wasset up by a serving police officer at that time. The foundation just happened by coincidence. Slums in area of Yamuna Bank were a hub of crime, drug pedaling, prostitution, garbage picking, and children in burglar groups. It was the area in my beat for crime prevention. Policing for me stands for prevention than for detection. That is why when the December 2012 Delhi gang rape happened, I kept on shouting at the top of my voice that this was a preventable crime. According to me prevention can be so intensive that a lot can be achieved through it. I have always questioned myself for why should I not work on prevention before detection of crime?

From the belief in this power of prevention my foundation Navjyoti was born.  I set up drug addiction treatment centers in Delhi Police Stations. We called it Navjyoti as it was new hope for people who actually needed help.  We started off with 8 drug abuse treatment centers in Delhi Police Stations. We set up vocational schools for women in drug pedaling, we set up primary schools for children to prevent them from begging. The foundation started in 1986 and it moved on with me. 16 other serving police officers became the founders of Navjyoti as we all believed in the power of prevention. I believe that we all are in a position to give out some time for community service and we all can volunteer for a cause that has an impact on the growth of our country. Continue reading

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The Difference Between B To C & B To B Social Media Execution

Most of the corporate these days are looking at Social Media. It does not matter if you are B To C or B To B. As long as your customer is on the Social Media Platform it will be a good idea that your business / brand also lands on the same platform. Meeting on familiar and favorite ground is a good way to reach out and connect.

You are aware that the communication for B To C and B To B is different. The channel and methods are also different. For example many a times direct selling works much better with B To B than B To C. You also know that the way to Communicate for B-C and the B-B Audiences is different. Not that any should be non-creative thinking. Continue reading

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Media is Media as long as it engages consumers – Shefalika Saxena, CMO, Microsoft India

Shefalika Saxena, CMO, Microsoft India

Do you remember when newspapers were black and white and red all over; when radios were family affair and everyone watched television together. Remember the days when time ticked slowly, when 5 minutes were not instantly as old as five years ago. Today an average smart phone user checks his/her phone 150 times a day. 98% of SMS are opened within a minute of receiving them. Real time is right now, everything else is history. Time today has lost its linearity. Remember when clouds belong to the sky, tweets were bird, avatars belong to Vishnu and Pandora unleashed mayhem instead of music.

IT crowd changed the rule of the game quite completely by introducing a sticky new communication landscape, a highly addictive one and most of us are probably hooked to it. IT crowd gave a digital mega phone to around 2 billion people around the world and that smashed boundaries with respect to content creation, consumption and advocacy. Today you can’t just read an encyclopedia, you can write one. 90% of all data that exist in the world today from the start of recorded history was created in the last two years. Data volume and Data velocity are both increasing exponentially. We have 4 questions in relation to data which are: How should I get that information? How would I understand that information? How do I action that information? & how would I protect that information? Continue reading

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Traits of a Collaborative Leader – Part 1

 Being in a band is always a compromise. Provided that the balance is good, what you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration. —Mike Rutherford

At the core of being an effective leader is ability to analyze the situation and then lead in the most appropriate manner which is best suited for that situation. A leader knows that there is no single optimal style to lead everything. Experts have defined this as “situational leadership.”

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More reasons to be on Facebook

Are you still wondering if your business and brand requires to be on the Social Media platform? With the recent political and cultural influence across the world via Facebook there should not be any doubt. Add to this, Facebook has recently announced that it is launching their proprietary search engine. This is called ‘Graph Search’.

You may think that if there is Google already in existence then this might be just one more search engine. Well, the Facebook search engine is two steps ahead. It is not only going to throw up the regular search results but it will go by popularity. The algorithms at Facebook will churn the data in such a way that the results that are thrown up to you would be a combination of the ‘Likes’of your network!  Continue reading

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Indispensable Traits of a Collaborative Leader

 The Foundation of Collaborative Leadership

In an industrial age, people went to factories and worked together to produce the outcomes. When required, they collaborated in person. Supervisors commanded and controlled others and leadership was often equated with “taking power”. Factories depended heavily on rigid top-down hierarchies and people were viewed simply as dispensable workers.

With technological advances, our world of work changed dramatically. Today, we seldom do anything alone. With rise in knowledge oriented work, people in small and geographically distributed groups work together to create value through their expertise and creativity. There is no raw material, there are only people. Continue reading

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Neglecting your social media page is equivalent to neglecting your brand.

Many a times business houses are keen to get onto the Social Media landscape. The unfortunate part is that since others are on this platform the business house also hopes to jump in. Usually the business houses would have their website online. This site would have been there since couple of years without being updated and enhanced. This becomes their benchmark. This makes the business houses think that maintenance is not a problem with the social media platform. They feel they will manage it.

Social media requires much more maintenance than what a regular website would require. If you as a business house build a Page on the net remember you need to have fresh content on a consistent basis. This goes for any Page, be it a Blog, Facebook Business Page, Twitter and other Social Media sites. Continue reading

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Putting ‘social’ into business

Are you still wondering if you should have ‘social’ in your business? Your business works in an environment and not in isolation. You need to be where your customers are. If your customers are online and on the various social media platforms then you need to reach out to them and meet them there. The social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Blogs can be looked upon as great open opportunities. Opportunities that can enhance your business and brand.

Social Media is just not for marketing. It is useful in practically all of your departments right from creating strategy, to recruitment, to information sharing and spreading and so on. Continue reading

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