WhatsApp and Google are Front-ending India’s UPI

Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov addressing on the theme ‘Reimagining the State: Government as Service’ at AIMA’s 4th National Leadership Conclave 2018. Read Excerpts –

Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov addressing AIMA's 4th National Leadership Conclave

Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov addressing AIMA’s 4th National Leadership Conclave

The whole concept of Government as a service is very new especially in a vast country like India, the learning from countries like Estonia with 1.3 million people and a few more million in Singapore are vast. But you know their digitization came before they tried to leapfrog into fourth industrial revolution. India didn’t have a choice, we are doing digitization and we are leaping into the fourth industrial revolution parallelly and in that parallel universe we have a citizen who is still not connected to the internet probably, has a basic mobile phone, lives in a remote corner of northeast, Rajasthan, Jammu & Kashmir or in Kerela but what has connected all of them is this unique thing that we talk about, Aadhar. Today almost 99% of the adult population has Aadhar. Now we can keep debating its issues on the privacy and the security and that’s in the national interest and that’s the right thing to do but it is really enabling us to deliver the government as a service.

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Shashi Tharoor speaks on India’s SoftPower

shashi tharoor speaking on India's Soft Power

shashi tharoor speaking on India’s Soft Power

Mr Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha and Chairman, Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs speaks on India’s SoftPower at AIMA’s 3rd National Leadership Conclave 2017.

Good morning to all of you here.  I can take a little bit of credit for having brought this issue (Soft Power) into the Indian context. In fact I was in the States and a fairly good friend of Joseph Nye, so I asked him do you mind if I try and apply your theories to India and he didn’t mind at all and so about 15 years ago I wrote a piece about India’s soft power and sent it to him and said what do you think and he was totally supportive and ever since I have sort of gone on a bit of a crusade in this country both before returning to it full time and then subsequently after my return to India delivering multiple lectures and it finally had the effect that the phrase ‘soft power’ entered into our lexicon and the ultimate gratification came when the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh started using this in his speeches.

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Importance of Creativity & Storytelling in a Digital Age – Rishi Jaitly, CEO, Times Global

Mr Rishi Jaitley, CEO – Times Global & Former Twitter India head sharing his top 5 insights on the topic ‘Strategies for a Data Economy’ at AIMA’s 3rd National Leadership Conclave 2017.

Rishi Jaitly at NLC 2017

Rishi Jaitly at NLC 2017

Hi everybody, it’s great to be here and particularly in a conference where we are not just talking about the data economy but I know the theme of the gathering is about Asia more generally and how we ought to be thinking about the next 10 years.

I am going to take a slightly different approach. What I want to talk about is that; we are existing in an economy that is increasingly data driven, where consumers are being asked to engage digitally and I think the question I would ask does it change how we as businesses, as nonprofits, as brands, as leaders interact with consumers and if so, how? And I guess what I’m going to suggest that in a data economy, creativity, storytelling, culture matter even more. So if you’re interested in reaching consumers in a noisy era where they are living on digital increasingly, where personalization is a turnkey service offered by vendors everywhere. I guess what I would poses and what I’m going to run through is the personality of your brand, the extent to which your product thinks about culture, behaves like a human and touches people emotively, emotionally matters even more in that economy. And so I’m going to run through five insights that I think might help guide how you think about going to market in this new world. And all of these issues, by the way, are particularly true in Asia and of course in India where I think consumers are in any case more likely to be moved by what I call culture storytelling and more.

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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

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Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption

A special session on “Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption” was held at AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave (NLC) on 3rd & 4th March 2016 at New Delhi.

Below is an excerpt of the Q & A between Ms Supriya Shrinate, Chief Editor-News at ET NOW and Mr Santosh Desai, Managing Director & CEO of Futurebrands India Ltd, Author, Columnist, Social Commentator.

Santosh Desai at AIMA's 2nd NLC

Santosh Desai addressing AIMA’s 2nd NLC

How has brand building changed in India and why are we so obsessed with disruption?

I think we live in a time where things are changing very fast and we have said this for a few decades now. You know there is a sense that things are changing but in the last seven or eight years, in particular, it’s not just the pace of change, It’s as if our foundational assumptions, the way we see the world itself has changed. And I think this creates a very interesting challenge at this particular point in time. I found the subject interesting, ‘indestructible brands: building brands to survive disruption’. Implicit in this articulation, It’s curious because there are certain assumptions that are built into this. It says building brands to survive disruption, not to create disruption. Brands are implicitly imagined as some sort of citadels, fortresses which do not create the new but which somehow must survive the new, which are not found in the source of change but they are under attack from change and they must protect themselves against disruption. This is very interesting. I just find this unconscious mental model of the brands as not being the source of change but being under threat. I also find it interesting that we are yearning for indestructibility. This idea that a brand is a permanent asset that you create once which stays for life and forever and forever, which survives attacks that marauders and invaders make on it and it stands there proud defined over millennia, this is an outdated idea. This yearning, this nostalgia for a permanent notion of a brand, It’s fundamentally at odds with the world that we live in.

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Building World Class Indian Brand – Rajiv Bajaj

Below is an excerpt from the speech of Mr. Rajeev Bajaj, Managing Director, Bajaj Auto Ltd on the theme ‘Building World Class Indian Brand’ at AIMA’s National Leadership Conclave.

Rajiv Bajaj at AIMA's NLC

Rajiv Bajaj at AIMA’s NLC

 “I would in the context of today’s discussion tell you a little story about my own self. This is about when I was in college in Pune. I passed out in 1988 and I must tell you I was the most popular student in college and let me tell you the reason why because in 1988 if you wanted to buy a scooter, you had to wait for one and half year. So every professor and student was my friend and whenever they wanted a pair of wheels they had to come to me and make a request. That was the glorious period of “Hamara Bajaj”. I joined Bajaj in 1990 and the financial year 2000 was thankfully the first and last year when the company didn’t make any money making two wheelers. That is how dramatically my world changed from  1990 to the year 2000.The scooter went from having a waiting period to being in a situation where nobody wanted to buy it anymore.

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‘Making Indian Cities Global Centers of Excellence’ with Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM

Excerpt from an insightful speech by Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India on “Making Indian Cities Global Centers of Excellence” at AIMA’s National Leadership Conclave 2015 held on 29th & 30th April 2015 at Hotel Le Meridien, New Delhi.

Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India addressing AIMA's NLC 2015

Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India addressing AIMA’s NLC 2015

“I feel honored and privileged to be on the same panel with Minister Naidu on a topic that has been close to my company’s beliefs and heart for a very long time. We coined the phrase smarter planet almost a decade ago and the smarter cities were a subset of the smarter planet and we didn’t at that point say it was going to be a smart planet, it was going to be a journey, it was going to be a continuous journey because a big part of a smarter planet or a smarter city is a sustainable model. A sustainable model that is ecological, financial, based on physical resources that can rejuvenate and also the human model. So we have talked about it a lot, we have heard about it a lot and I think the need for having a smart or smarter infrastructure is a given.

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