HR should stop doing politics – D Shivakumar

Excerpts from the Q & A session between Pankaj Bansal, Co-Founder & CEO, People Strong and D Shivakumar, Group Executive President – Corporate Strategy & Business Development, Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd at AIMA’s 15th National HRM Summit 2017.

D Shivakumar, Group Executive President - Corporate Strategy & Business Development, Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd. at AIMA's 15th National HRM Summit.

D Shivakumar, Group Executive President – Corporate Strategy & Business Development, Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd. at AIMA’s 15th National HRM Summit.

When we reimagine HR, what do you think should HR stop doing?

I think HR is very important and should evolve with the times. I talk to a number of people across the industry, and I would say that in many organizations, HR is seen as a political unit. Why do people feel that? First HRs should rid themselves of politics. HR has a lot of confidential information, HR should not trade in that. The HR department should be staffed with people who can maintain high confidentiality. The biggest problem in every company is that people say HR people blabber, and hence they do not trust them. So the dividing line between a good performer who needs to be promoted and somebody who doesn’t need to be promoted etc. is becoming a problem.

Continue reading

Share Button

Indestructible Brands – D Shivakumar at 2nd National Leadership Conclave

Below is an excerpt from the speech of Mr. D Shivakumar, Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd at AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave on the theme “Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption”.

D Shivakumar at AIMA's 2nd NLC

D Shivakumar addressing AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave

A digital society changes the way we live work, relate to brands and to each other. We become far more horizontal in the way we work, end of the chain. It’s not a vertical society anymore. India has for a long been a vertical society. Hierarchy somebody orders somebody to do it. And then we follow their order. That’s not true in a digital society. Almost every activity and transaction is horizontal and not vertical. That’s the first point I want to make. The second point I want to make is if you look at the top 10 populations of the world for the last 10 years, Facebook has 1.5 billion subscribers or users and 70% of them come back almost every day. WhatsApp has a billion people. Twitter has 600 million people. Instagram has 400 million people. Now we are conversing individual to individual, group to group, completely on the social network, completely digital. This is what we are seeing right now. Continue reading

Share Button

42nd National Management Convention: Disruptive Innovation

Excerpt from an insightful speech by D Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO – India Region, PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd at AIMA’s 42nd National Management Convention held on 30th September – 1st October 2015 at Hotel Taj Palace, New Delhi. The theme for this session was “Disruptive Innovation: Winning By Changing The Rules”.

“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. It’s always a pleasure to come for an AIMA National Management Convention. My experience of disruptive innovation is from my own career, working in Hindustan lever when we tried to make accessible and affordable categories like shampoo, face cream, detergent, baby care products etc, for the bottom of the pyramid. Then in Nokia, we made technology which was completely new to the world and accessible in a country like India, we went from something like 80 million subscribers to 900 million subscribers. That was the fundamental shift and now on the new journey of health and wellness platform. So what is disruptive innovation? What examples have we seen over the last decade of disruptive innovation and what we’ll see in the future?

D Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO - PepsiCo India addressing AIMA's 42nd NMC

D Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO – PepsiCo India addressing AIMA’s 42nd NMC

Disruptive Innovation is about creating new value! You can create new value through new price point, new quality point, a time dimension, so fundamentally creating new value in any market is a disruptive innovation. You create new market itself. Mobile phones created a new market; tablets are creating a new market, a market which did not exist before. Suddenly you bring something which is a new to the market. Most of the disruptive innovation is led by technology that’s what we have seen and when new entrants come into the market, they do not have old cost. The old costs of legacy players are completely disrupted by these new people with new business models. We have seen this in steel and every other industry. New players tend to have cost structure which is significantly lower and hence their business models are different. Then in the technology world, we see the concept of freemium, everything goes free but they make money somewhere else. So what do you do? How do you compete with something which is free? That is the disruptive innovation.

Continue reading

Share Button