An interesting article about a rural foray by a behemoth that is being talked about and generating good money. A rediff article : Why ICICI's rural foray thrived?
Some highlights:
How many people join a non-profit organisation after graduating from the money-showering portals of IIM-Ahmedabad? How many go on to join a bank - and then make the best of their learning experiences?"We realised that the model wherein banks lend directly to SHGs was not viable for us, and we felt that we must work with community-based organisations who are more aware of the needs of customers."
And so ICICI Bank signed up micro-finance institutions as intermediaries for micro lending. Their key strength "is not their ability to manage capital and assume risk, but their intricate knowledge of clients and the geography in which to operate", says Mor, convinced that such a twin-tier structure is the way ahead.
ICICI Bank recently lent Rs 175 crore (Rs 1.75 billion) for a rural roads project in Madhya Pradesh, for example, and the big beneficiary is the local mandi (so the loan is serviced by the mandi cess, collected in an escrow account).
"The mandi will now tell us which road to build," says Mor, with satisfaction.
The perils of developing a social science are perhaps best captured in the fault lines between theory and practice. Grand theories, broad in sweep and scope, often come a cropper when applied to complex, real life situations.Or, seemingly timeless insights turn out to be just transient truths. At best, they work in the particularities of a given situation and collapse like the proverbial deck of cards when external circumstances change.
It is to Peter Drucker's (1909-2005) enduring credit that he made management into, as he famously put it, a practice -- a set of purposeful tasks that can be organised, much like medicine or engineering. The father of modern management transformed it into a specific and systematic work based on an organised body of knowledge that is both teachable and learnable, rather than treating it as something esoteric and mysterious.
Drucker's insights can be of tremendous help to any management practitioner. But, they often ran contrary to what common sense advocated.
Drucker on Wikipedia.
Drucker on Career Moves.
We shall come back to Drucker a fair number of times over time on this blog. This blog essentially is about a few theorists trying to explain the real world. And there was no one who did it better than Drucker.
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Hope there are plenty of more innovations like this.
There is an interesting article written by Negroponte in WIRED magazine. This, titled Beyond Digital, says that the digital revolution is over....
"Face it - the Digital Revolution is over.
Yes, we are now in a digital age, to whatever degree our culture, infrastructure, and economy (in that order) allow us. But the really surprising changes will be elsewhere, in our lifestyle and how we collectively manage ourselves on this planet."
Are we ready for the digital age????
Seems to me, given your comments, that Apple has another strategic option: to focus on continuing to develop new markets with its proprietary, innovation-heavy approach, harvest them, and move on.
We have a case about this at Harvard [Business School], about when John Sculley was the CEO of Apple in the early 1990s. He actually had remarkably clear vision about where the industry was heading. He had three priorities.
First, he felt the company needed to get its price down to $1,000, from $3,000 or $4,000 at the time. The second thing was to open up the architecture, by selling the OS. And the third was that handheld devices were going to be big. He was right on all three, but the culture of Apple was just so strong that Sculley just couldn't change the direction of the ship.
So I always ask the students, "What would you do if you were on Apple's board?" And they always say the same thing: "Crucify him, and bring in a good manager."
"So who would you bring in?" I ask. And they say: "Bring in someone really strong, who can make those decisions." So what did Apple do? They brought in Michael Spindler -- a strong general manager type who was known for his operations ability. Well, that didn't work out.
So I ask, "What would you do next?" And they say: "Bring in a good manager -- someone who can turn the company around." Well, they brought in Gil Amelio, who had turned around National Semiconductor. But he only lasted 18 months or so.
So then they bring Jobs back. And why did the company prosper under Jobs? The students' instinct is to say, because he's a good manager. I think the reason is that he stopped trying to change the company. He wanted them to do what they had always wanted to do: make cool products, based on proprietary architectures.
"Mahatma Gandhi once said: 'at first, they ignore you'; these were the times when I was being ignored."
"It's important that at this stage you be ignored. Because spotlight at an early time of your lifecycle does not give you any extra advantage but certainly puts you at a great disadvantage."
"Gandhiji said: 'then they laugh at you.'
In 1992, Mittal said he applied for mobile licence -- India's first attempt to provide mobile telephone services.
"I felt we had the passion to deliver India's first mobile phone services. Many thought otherwise. We threw our hat in the ring."
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"Then the juggernaut (Bharti) started rolling," he said. "Then they fight you. Then the big fight erupted in the telecom arena. They had ignored us, they had laughed at us and the fight had begun. And we were willing to fight this battle out because it was truly the mother of all battles."
Mittal said the company believed that "if the business is about people and customers and not about money and technology, it thought it can win the war."
"After three years of fight, we came out fairly successful out of this. As Gandhiji said, those who try hard with lot of passion, eventually win."
It was a perfect idea. In impoverished Bihar state, where many areas lack power supplies, the cheap battery-powered transistor remains the most popular source of entertainment.The station is a rage with listeners in the area
"It took a long time to come up with the idea and make the kit which could transmit my programmes at a fixed radio frequency. The kit cost me 50 rupees (just over $1)," says Raghav.
The transmission kit is fitted on to an antenna attached to a bamboo pole on a neighbouring three-storey hospital.
A long wire connects the contraption to a creaky, old homemade stereo cassette player in Raghav's radio shack. Three other rusty, locally made battery-powered tape recorders are connected to it with colourful wires and a cordless microphone.
The shack has some 200 tapes of local Bhojpuri, Bollywood and devotional songs which Raghav plays for his listeners.
The radio station is a repair shop and studio rolled into one