Management Lessons 3

Most of us have watched street corner Cricket, school/College Cricket, College Football and many other such games available at our door step and enjoyed it to the hilt!! Some of the games had all the thrills and drama of world cup, personal achievements etc as we experience in Wimbledon or World Cup. We remember these games for life! Yet, we find that some among the players aim for the big, practise hard and one day attain the top position in these games, doing all of us proud! But, there are these sometimes, when a local match has more thrill and drama than a Wimbledon or a world cup final, though the talent and experience exhibited may be no match to the top games.

Starting an enterprise is something similar! Once we start an enterprise, we have to cross the initial hiccups and hurdles, make it sustain through hard work, intelligent inputs, focus and motivation, reach the break even point, and then move on to profits, which is akin to winning a trophy in a local game! Then the enterprise aims for bigger things and bigger profits, aims for the international arena, and one fine day, it becomes a name in the international market to reckon with!

To grow further and further for the enterprise is not wrong, and in fact it is a welcome thing for the nation. The enterprise may one day become a billion dollar company; It may acquire the majority market share for its product;

My only humble request is to follow some ethics in the process. some of them are:

1. Do not produce anything if it is not needed. examples: a) GM Foods are not welcome in India. May be someday, it may make grade and may be accepted by Indian public, but, as on today, GM Foods are perceived as harmful for health. b) Cars; when the stress is on saving fuel and on saving valuable resources, we, both the people and the Government encourage ownership of cars and two wheelers by individuals, whereas countries like Singapore discourage driving a car by a single individual and promote Public Transport in general. The emphasis of this article is more on improving Public Transport Systems and make them attractive to general public so that more and more people opt for the public transport.

2. Do not invest heavily in capital goods. Bad example: a) Every hospital worth its name goes for costly diagnostic equipments and having invested huge money, the hospital tries to recover the cost by recommending scans and other tests for patients to undergo, when they are not actually required. Good examples: Some of the factory sheds are shared by different manufacturers of the same product. Car manufacturers share factory sheds; Some white goods are manufactured by some companies and supplied to the big brand owners to be sold in their brand names; Mobile phone companies share towers;

3. Pay the employees well and be fair to them. IT companies have shown the way! Even big corporates pay well; A recent phenominon worries me: In chennai the construction labour costs have risen quite much that the builders and promoters are bringing labour force from other states like Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Bihar, and they are using these people in the construction activities, paying them far less; Thus, doing injustice to the labourers from both Tamilnadu and other states. These buildings constructed serve mostly the high end class, who can afford the price difference! These days, the labourers want to send their children to schools, and also expect a minimum standard of living commensurate with what is shown in TV programmes and that includes probably, a low end two wheeler, colour TV, cell phone and may be a fridge. These command a daily wage of say Rs500/-, which sums upto Rs12000/- a month for a specialized labourer like mason or carpenter. whereas, the high end people like IT employees, who already earn Rs60000/- plus per month, get these buildings cheaper and also save money on tax concessions on loan repayments. The labourers from other states are paid as low as Rs8000/-. A similar scene prevails in hotel industry.

4. Use recycling where it is possible; The building industry needs to go for the building parts which can be disassembled, taken out and reused elsewhere, if the entire building is to be taken off; We waste a lot of precious materials which go into the building by demolishing a building. the materials extracted from a demolished building are used just for filling up and raising lower areas.

5.Proper recycling also addresses the concerns of pollution and environmental degradation to some extent. It is imperative that the pollution and environmental degradation issues are addressed totally.

6. Adopt the latest in technology, wherever possible; Example: Nowatimes, building a wall with glass is considered as an alternative for brick or concrete walls.

7. Serve well the community around. After all, they have shared the land with you, and are sharing the resources and energy like water, electricity. Sometimes they are the immediate market for you!

Most of these have been covered by my earlier two topics on the same subject, though! They have been repeated because of the importnce of the subject and the theme. Here are some action plans:
1) The labourers in our country are quite casual about their work; We have to teach and train them constantly to work focussed and motivated for long hours and deliver efficient and intelligent outputs. The workers must be coerced to be upto date in their field of work.
2) May be, six day schedules all through the year not necessary for all the labourers.
3) We have to educate the public that alcoholism is an addiction, we have to compulsarily get rid of.
4) We have to understand that five or six years of experience as a specialized labourer entitles the labourer to be treated as a graduate.
In general, any labourer is to be paid decently for his/her living.
5) Batches and batches of educated people come out of schools and graduates come out of colleges. It is time to involve them in studies and researches so that we get to know what we want for our country, how to go about it economically and efficiently, and how to finance the schemes. Many new ideas and directions may get thrown up; For example, the best possible routes in a city are identified for transport buses to ply, we can identify and address passanger concerns, and we can draw a master execution plan, which is periodically reviewed. Normally, the employees tend to treat the surveys casually, and rather try to complete the job in hand than do a quality job out of it. Thus, guidance and supervision are imperative.
6. The Government can team up with the willing enterpreneurs and help them pool their resources to buy equipments and machinery needed for various industries and also cater to these industries for some income. This way we can avoid duplicating of the investment in these equipments and prevent from these equipments remaining idle. If for example, an MRI or CT SCAN equipment can be installed on a wheel, it can be taken to different hospitals as per the hospitals' requirements. And we avoid the risk of a patient travelling in an ambulance.
7. Most important, our equipment and machinery shall be the state of art, and this needs constant updating of the equipment and machinery. How do we go about it? We have to salvage the maximum benefit out of the old and the new investments. This needs a lot of study and research, good bit of recycling, and selling the outdated to the best price possible.
8. Thus, in our every enterprise we shall orient not just for very profitable business, but to strike an optimum in satisfying the needs of the people spending the resources in an efficient manner, employing a good lot of people in the process and paying them well and entitling the enterpreneur for a deserving profit, thus building a strong nation that is bereft of environmental problems

what has been provided here is only a basic premise. There are more ideas, action plans, and schemes possible to achieve more on these lines. It is worthwhile for us the educated lot to build on this premise.