http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/special-videos/leadership-awards-cos-must-adapt-evolve-to-changesbiz_607312.html
Rajiv Bajaj, MD, Bajaj Auto, Shanker Annaswamy, MD, IBM India, Vinita Bali, CEO & MD, Britannia and Manish Sabharwal, CEO, TeamLease Service talk about the transformational changes their businesses make as they push their companies to become leaders in their respective fields.
Below is an edited transcript of their interview with CNBC-TV18’s Suresh Venkat. Watch the accompanying videos for more.
Q: Scooters to motorcycles from India to China to Africa. What is the next transition for Bajaj?
Bajaj: I personally don’t like the word transformation very much because I find it very discontinuous. Organisations do best when they evolve and they respond to evolution and they adapt to what is changing. All we did when we moved from scooters to motorcycles was to adapt to certain changes in the environment of our industry and when we got that adaptation right it worked for us.
Q: How do you see transformation? When is an industry ripe for transformative change?
Annaswamy: Taking an example from what we went through in IBM India particularly in 2004. I joined in July and in November, the PC business gets sold to Lenovo and a large chunk of business goes away. Here is an expectation from the management that India will continue to be a growth engine because our size is not that big but it is known for its growth engine. So we had to transform and we went through the Bharti deal which is pretty transformative.
Here is an entrepreneur like Sunil Bharti Mittal puts all his bets on IBM and a very different business model was refined by both of us. Thrusting that, along with the growth of Bharti IBM grew and it helped us to completely transform our product centric business to services and software centric business to the telecom business.
One very specific innovation which is being leveraged in our India research lab is where the World Wide Web space is used by people who know how to enter data. But if you can use voice instead of electronic inputting and bring in a large people who don’t know how to understand computer technology or English this is called spoken web.
That has been launched with the Karnataka government where we brought in people who are looking for jobs, for employers like us and the companies which provide coaching. And all these three have been brought together on one platform. This spoken web where the research initiative has been largely done out of India is going to be a big transformation.
Q: You took your company from a growth rate of 9% to about 22%. Do you remember one specific moment when you said that is my transformative moment?
Bali: There were many moments of transformation. One of the questions we asked ourselves is what do we have to do to change a biscuit. Or what do we have to do I have to make a teenager buy a product from a grocery section that my mother buys. So, this question led us to saying there are BPOs which are 24x7 opportunities, there are interstate bus terminals, there are railway platforms and the list is endless and then we said we don’t have to sell biscuits in large packs, we have to sell biscuits in packs which are two-three biscuits.
It starts with a question which says what is it that I need to do differently. So to that extent it’s not a revolution but it enables you to say Britannia is a 90 year old brand.
Q: You are someone who hires a person every five minutes. Does that make you India’s fastest employer?
Sabharwal: We have hired somebody every five minutes of five years but we have only hired 5% of kids who came to us for a job. We haven’t hired 40,000 kids every month. There was nothing wrong with them, they went to the college and their parents told them to, they went to the school they were suppose to. Yes, we have hired somebody pretty fast but it could be much faster if un-employability wasn’t a bigger problem.
Q: You can actually manufacture employees?
Sabharwal: We are at the agony and ecstasy of India’s labour market. The ecstasy is I had a telecom client shouting at me saying I need a pair of hands I don’t care if a brain comes attached, so we can fill those positions quickly. We had a job mela in Jaipur in association with the government and 35,000 people showed up in one day. I met 800 of them and I can guarantee that if they were born in Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore they would have had a job but they were born in rural Rajasthan. If India’s demand side is much ahead of the supply side, it is a very immediate and very finite problem that can be solved.
Rajiv Bajaj, MD, Bajaj Auto, Shanker Annaswamy, MD, IBM India, Vinita Bali, CEO & MD, Britannia and Manish Sabharwal, CEO, TeamLease Service talk about the transformational changes their businesses make as they push their companies to become leaders in their respective fields.
Below is an edited transcript of their interview with CNBC-TV18’s Suresh Venkat. Watch the accompanying videos for more.
Q: Scooters to motorcycles from India to China to Africa. What is the next transition for Bajaj?
Bajaj: I personally don’t like the word transformation very much because I find it very discontinuous. Organisations do best when they evolve and they respond to evolution and they adapt to what is changing. All we did when we moved from scooters to motorcycles was to adapt to certain changes in the environment of our industry and when we got that adaptation right it worked for us.
Q: How do you see transformation? When is an industry ripe for transformative change?
Annaswamy: Taking an example from what we went through in IBM India particularly in 2004. I joined in July and in November, the PC business gets sold to Lenovo and a large chunk of business goes away. Here is an expectation from the management that India will continue to be a growth engine because our size is not that big but it is known for its growth engine. So we had to transform and we went through the Bharti deal which is pretty transformative.
Here is an entrepreneur like Sunil Bharti Mittal puts all his bets on IBM and a very different business model was refined by both of us. Thrusting that, along with the growth of Bharti IBM grew and it helped us to completely transform our product centric business to services and software centric business to the telecom business.
One very specific innovation which is being leveraged in our India research lab is where the World Wide Web space is used by people who know how to enter data. But if you can use voice instead of electronic inputting and bring in a large people who don’t know how to understand computer technology or English this is called spoken web.
That has been launched with the Karnataka government where we brought in people who are looking for jobs, for employers like us and the companies which provide coaching. And all these three have been brought together on one platform. This spoken web where the research initiative has been largely done out of India is going to be a big transformation.
Q: You took your company from a growth rate of 9% to about 22%. Do you remember one specific moment when you said that is my transformative moment?
Bali: There were many moments of transformation. One of the questions we asked ourselves is what do we have to do to change a biscuit. Or what do we have to do I have to make a teenager buy a product from a grocery section that my mother buys. So, this question led us to saying there are BPOs which are 24x7 opportunities, there are interstate bus terminals, there are railway platforms and the list is endless and then we said we don’t have to sell biscuits in large packs, we have to sell biscuits in packs which are two-three biscuits.
It starts with a question which says what is it that I need to do differently. So to that extent it’s not a revolution but it enables you to say Britannia is a 90 year old brand.
Q: You are someone who hires a person every five minutes. Does that make you India’s fastest employer?
Sabharwal: We have hired somebody every five minutes of five years but we have only hired 5% of kids who came to us for a job. We haven’t hired 40,000 kids every month. There was nothing wrong with them, they went to the college and their parents told them to, they went to the school they were suppose to. Yes, we have hired somebody pretty fast but it could be much faster if un-employability wasn’t a bigger problem.
Q: You can actually manufacture employees?
Sabharwal: We are at the agony and ecstasy of India’s labour market. The ecstasy is I had a telecom client shouting at me saying I need a pair of hands I don’t care if a brain comes attached, so we can fill those positions quickly. We had a job mela in Jaipur in association with the government and 35,000 people showed up in one day. I met 800 of them and I can guarantee that if they were born in Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore they would have had a job but they were born in rural Rajasthan. If India’s demand side is much ahead of the supply side, it is a very immediate and very finite problem that can be solved.
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