Author Archives: Team AIMA

Innovation in healthcare industry – Shivinder Singh, Executive Vice Chairman, Fortis Healthcare

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Mr. Shivinder Singh, Executive Vice Chairman, Fortis Healthcare

I want to share my thoughts for a business that is not traditionally organised, not just in India but in most countries of Asia. Healthcare is not a business that is seen as an industry or something that people are excited about. Many people tell me that we make money when people fall sick and we make joy out of other people’s distress and sickness. Unlike many other business which are consumer facing like FMCG business & hotels where customers chose the products and services they like, but in 99.9% of cases, people come to us when they have no choice left. They don’t want to come to us; they don’t want to be in situation where they have to consult a doctor or visit a hospital.

Unfortunately the biggest challenge for us is that the minimum expectation from the people who visit us is our best outcome. The expectations from a customer who is coming in to the hospital is that he leaves well or perfect. Therefore we battle with the minimum expectation of our customer to be our best outcome always. So our challenge is that with this context how you will make a patient happy when he leaves the hospital after recovering from his illness. So, we want people to say that if I fall sick I would come to Fortis rather than going anywhere else. Continue reading →

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Importance of Reforms in process & governance for growth – Shri Kamal Nath, Minister for Urban Development & Poverty Alleviation

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Mr. Kamal Nath, Minister for Urban Development & Poverty Alleviation

In India we have developed a psyche to believe that what is not boom is gloom. I have seen the growth of auto sector at 34% and this is the moment of rejoice and celebration as we are growing and all auto manufacturers in other countries envy us for growing at such a pace, but still there is a feeling of gloom.

We should look at the future with the perspective of national growth in comparison to other countries. “Reforms” has become a buzz word and we do need reforms as they will become the strength in future. I must share with you that after the events that happened in 2008-2009 in UK & USA, we were concerned which model will be most suitable for India with the best reforms for the growth of our country. The bankers from the western world teach and preach us for the reforms that we need to do in financial sectors for many years but we have to understand that our priorities and needs are different and we have to act in a different way to achieve our goals. Reforms in process and governance are most important as they affect growth the most.  We have to put our heads together and work together to provide these reforms for our country. Continue reading →

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Employee Empowerment: Key to create a culture of Innovation [Aditya Ghosh, President, Indigo Airlines]

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Aditya Ghosh, President, Indigo Airlines

We are in a business that’s been here for around 100 years. Even in India, we are often called the sunrise industry. I am the youngest CEO of the youngest airline which is only 6 years old.  Clearly the opportunity is actually staring at us. India has gone from being an oppressed colony to the next superpower. India is seen as the next engine of growth for the world. Irrespective of which area you are in and what are the economic troubles in that area, these troubles open certain opportunities. During the 2nd world war many companies got devastated and businesses were shut down and then some people built tanks, weapons, ships & jeeps and they made a lot of money from that. In every era including this we have to deal with the problems by seeking out an opportunity in each of those problems.

India is a country with population of over billion people but there are less than 500 commercial planes. There’s something wrong in this equation.  USA is a country which is 1/3rd in size to India in terms of population but it has around 13000 commercial planes. India is therefore one of the under- penetrated aircraft market in the world. Less than 1% of rail traffic in India flies by Air, that means if we can convert 1% of rail traffic into air, we will need double the size of airlines in business that exists in India today. That is the opportunity we are chasing at Indigo. But like we all know that life is not perfect and it is never meant to be easy. There are few challenges that we face. We are aware of the economy slowdown and also concerned about the crazy fuel prices. Continue reading →

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Forecasting Future: A key to deal with change [Sudhir Vasudeva, CMD, ONGC]

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Mr. Sudhir Vasudeva, CMD, ONGC

Change being the important component of the ecosphere, clearly the challenges in front of us multiply. I have spent 36 years of my life as an oil man. A variety of factors contribute to the pricing of gasoline in the Unites States. These factors include world-wide supply, demand & competition in crude oil industry, taxes, regional differences in access to gasoline supplies and environmental regulations. The other factors are: speculations in oil futures, geopolitical risks, technology premium, pressure from competing fuel and other soft issues like human rights, ethical labor practices, responsible investments and anti-corruption practices.

How to deal with the uncertainty & the change in the economy? One way is to look at the past trends and get ready for the future. Another way is to use a lot of algorithms and work on a model for the problem with variety of inputs that produce probability based outcomes. This needs a lot of number crunching and supercomputers can be used for that. Another concept uses fuzzy logic. Continue reading →

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Strategies to deal with Uncertainty [Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt Ltd]

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Mr. Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt Ltd

Uncertainty is the new norm and I want to share with you the four strategies which Microsoft has adopted and helped us in uncertain times. The volatility that we are seeing today is not just a passing phenomenon, it is going to be a fact of life and all of us should start getting used to it. No industry, country or company is immune from it. If you look at the technology industry, India has moved from fixed line phones to pagers to mobile phones. We have moved from rise of emails to decline of emails to the growth of social networks. We have seen adoption of internet widely. We have seen the financial crisis in 2008. In India we have had our own self-inflicted injuries which have caused us grievous concerns in many ways. All this has happened in last 15 years. We have to start managing this kind of changing environment. I have been quite happy to work in these uncertain times as it is in uncertain times that the good gets better and the average decline. If you want to increase your market share, make use of these uncertain times.

How has Microsoft prospered in uncertain times? We are 38 years old and we continued to grow through this. We started with a vision of a PC in everyone’s home. Today we talk about our vision being how we can help individual, business & countries to realise their true potential through the magic of software and we are just about to modify that all over again as we believe time has changed. We have moved from the era of personal computers to the era of what we call personal computing. It is personal and you have the ability to access enormous amount of power with the computer now. The next phenomenon would be where all software becomes a service. We are moving to the era of connected devices. This requires a completely new type of computing & it changes the balance of power from the enterprise to the consumer and it is a huge change which requires a different type of coding, mentality & thinking. It also has huge challenges in many other areas like taxation, privacy & security; therefore it is something which as a nation we have to resolve. Continue reading →

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Young Generation: An asset for India – Shri Sachin Pilot, Corporate Affairs Minister

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Sachin Pilot is Minister of State in the Ministry of Communications and IT

 

In any company whether Indian or foreign, the lines are getting blurred as more and more foreign companies which have set up shop in India. Over the last decade foreign companies have tried to make themselves as Indian as possible to appeal to the large domestic market that we have and individuals like you who are working in these companies have done a commendable job in getting foreign companies to come here and establish themselves.

What is more remarkable now is that entrepreneurs and enterprises from within India have gathered enough strength, determination. And I think the resources were available in past perhaps but not to the extent of how much they are today. But what has taken companies and individuals across the political borders has been the fact that the kind of self confidence we have within our own system and economy is the reflection of kinds of investments and acquisitions Indian companies are making overseas. Continue reading →

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Women making it big in extreme sports

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Skydiving is known as an extreme sport and we enjoy it to the max. I remember one journalist who was literally dying to ask me: Are you normal? To him and all others who wanted me to comment on why women are getting into this bizarre phenomenon of adventurous extreme sport , I want to say “Take Wings my friends and fly and you will discover the magic called life.”

The lady who is No. 1 in competitive skydiving is almost 50 years old and there’s nobody to take away her number one spot in competitive skydiving. In skydiving, like is relevant in every other field, one has to take that first step, that first plunge into thin air, the first step to do something.  That’s when you find yourself sooner than later that you are really being reckoned in an elite group of path breakers like how I am standing out here in front of you. I have had a very short journey. I started skydiving in 2009. But October 8th 2011 was a big day for us because on the 79th anniversary of Indian Air Force we were launched as the first ever official women skydiving team of the Indian Air Force.

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Brand Leadership in Volatile Times – K. Ramakrishnan, President Marketing, Cafe Coffee Day

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“Someone once said, that coffee is a serious man’s drink.”

We, at Café Coffee Day believe that the café culture is inherent and so is the need for people to connect. We saw the opportunity to humanise the affair and that’s why we went ahead and added a smile to it. Talking about challenging conventional methods, we often hear people stating, “I have 25 years of experience”.

One needs to understand that what matters more is wisdom and not the number of years, unless things are done differently.

Talking about challenging conventional methods, Social Media has been a great revolution and we as a brand have adopted it in a big way. It has been the cause, catalyst and outcome of challenging convention. The core of this medium is that it catalyzes change and that’s the first step in challenging convention!

We believe that simplicity is of utmost importance and it is critical to ignore the noise around you. Further, it’s not necessary to re-invent the wheel all the time.

I would like to share some examples from our own experience back in 1996, when Café Coffee Day started its first CCD in Bangalore. People, at that time couldn’t imagine paying more than 3 rupees for a cup of coffee. When we launched, we started with a cup of coffee for 25 rupees and with the concept of providing cyber cafes where people can manage to carry on their work using free Internet while enjoying a cup of coffee.

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Managing Risk: New Approach to Sustainable Growth – Shri Kapil Sibal, Minister of Telecom and IT

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I think the greatest risk taker in life is a politician, because even when he detects the risk, the emerging risk, he cannot avert it, but embraces it, and then at the end attempts to manage it. So, I think if you were to do studies on the life of a politician, and how knowingly he embraces risks and manages them, it will be a great study for management institutes.

Every time in the morning you get up, you take a bus, you take a risk. You walk out on the street, you cross the road, you take a risk. You go out in a restaurant and eat; you take a risk,because there’s nothing that happens in life without a risk.

Knowing well that you are at risk all the time, you should constantly be conscious of the fact that you have to manage it if you want to survive, and that we try and do in our daily lives. But that’s of course at the individual level. When you get onto a plane for example, there is very little you can do, because you cannot manage that risk. There’s a machine that flies you, there’s a pilot who takes care of the machine and you are at the mercy of someone else. So, someone else is managing your risk, because he has to make sure that you actually reach the point where you want to go, without risking your life. So, in a sense, somebody else is managing your risk. Then, of course, when you go to larger entities like social structures: the state, the national and the global economy, there is nobody who is managing that risk for you.

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Future of Indian IT and Knowledge Industry – Pramod Bhasin, Non-Executive Vice Chairman and former President and CEO, Genpact

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Pramod Bhasin is the Non-Executive Vice Chairman and former President and CEO of Genpact.

Reshaping the IT and knowledge based professional services organizations of tomorrow is critical for us because that’s where we belong. Let me try and address it in a number of different ways as to where I think we can take this if we really take it to our full potential, both as a country and as an industry.

Firstly in my view, this industry has barely got off the blocks. I hope others on the panel will agree. But do you know that 15-20 years is very young for any industry; we have years to go ahead of us, we have miles, miles to go before we sleep and the range of opportunities and the range of potential types of businesses that we could is enormous. It is ours to take! Given our demographics, given our population, given where our country is sitting in terms of costs and as a developing country, still the opportunity to get beyond what we do in our industry today, is immense.

It may often seem choppy, it may often seem difficult because as the developed world, Europe and America and all those other places, goes through their ups and downs, we will always feel the heat. But the fact is that our industry grew and NASSCOM predictions talk about a 13 to 15% growth. These are astonishing growth rates for an industry that is large; a hundred billion dollars. A hundred billion dollar industry growing at about twenty per cent for the last ten years is an astonishing number by any standards.
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