HOW TO SHUT SHOP GRACEFULLY

It’s probably for the first time that I read a newspaper piece on how to close your business correctly and ‘gracefully’ as the headline proclaimed. The case being studied was that of one of Mumbai’s oldest mobile service providers which has one million customers.

The opinions of business owners, professors and industry executives converged on the following: 1) Being fair to all stakeholders- company management, promoters and employees. 2) Being fair to vendors and customers. 3) Transparent and honest communication with every one of the above 4) Placement of assets- both physical and human- in other companies.

So while it worries about its own reputation, does a company have to think of all this too? Why? That’s because, as one commentator says, lenders do not forget. How you close shop is indicative of how you manage and can adversely affect the fortunes of the other companies of the promoter or promoting group.

While all the above speak of the business side of the story, there is also the business of honour, the ‘right thing to do’. They suggest: Distribute the remaining funds among the stakeholders so no one feels cheated or short-changed. For the same reason, they say, give good reference letters to employees, absolving them of the responsibility for the shutdown.

The ‘right thing to do’ mostly means that stuff that won’t bring you down legally but you will think about it when you introspect.

I can remember over a decade back the debacle of ABCL, the Amitabh Bachchan-promoted entertainment company that became a basket case, taking down with it many people’s money and reputation. He was clearly safe legally and the company could have easily filed under BIFR and saved itself a lot of bother. But Mr. Bachchan felt that he was morally obliged to returning people’s money because he was the big reason they had invested. He went back to work- starting with KBC- and returned every paisa. So the story goes.

On the other side, around the same time, were innumerable cases where companies that weren’t doing well wanting to shut down. Promoters were forcing Voluntary Retirement Schemes down employees’ throats, making a joke of the purpose of the schemes. There were companies where employees agitated and cases may still be stuck in courts all over. Labour unions were fighting battles for them but I am not sure how many got resolved.

How to behave with grace when the chips are down always makes for an inspiring tale. And most often, it is led by character, not law.

SOCIAL NETWORKING WORKS BUT.....

Almost hundred years ago, Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy, based his short story called Chains on what can today be recognised as the power of social networking. The story works on the premise that a person like you or me can be in touch with any other person among the 1.5 billion that inhabit this Earth through a chain of five people, each person using only his social contacts. This means I may be only four people away from Barack Obama or Roger Federer.

It’s an interesting thought though nobody has tried it out. And it is pertinent in this era of growing social networking. How far does social networking take you or work for you? Everyone has many more friends on Facebook than they’ve ever had in real life. Just a personal observation- albeit with no formal data to back up- is that people who are more reclusive in real life seem to have many more FB friends. If I only look around, the most effervescent and social extroverts I know have limited FB activity but some quiet mouse may have a surprising number of ‘friends’. So does such a platform give you a chance to build relationships which can have a long-lasting, positive effect? If I think back, I have made friends online but I have never tested those ‘friendships’ for anything so far.

Or let’s look offline. Social networks- be they school and college alumni organisations or professional ones- seem to have something for us to gain and share. We share experiences and some people seem to have the acumen to get business from such fora too. If nothing else, you always feel a sense of belonging, a context for your existence. It’s always encouraging to learn that there are others who may be interested in how you do a training session or what the hurdles in writing code or selling medicines in remote areas are. You also learn from other people and they get to know you.

But there’s a short side to it. Social networks can put a pressure on you to be like everybody else. Groups can lead to ‘groupism’. You may feel the obligation to conform.

Again, the white-collared workers, the managers and the executives, don’t seem to network to negotiate the best business as we see in say, taxi and factory unions or the village groups haggling for higher returns on their land the government wants to buy.

So is the kinship of this bracket only skin deep? Does it not perceive power in group strength? What do you think?

Thank You for Calling

Last week I called my credit card company. I had been charged for a late payment and I wanted to get that reversed. The gentleman who answered my call told me that I had been charged because my payment came in late. “But I dropped my cheque in before the due date!” I protested. His answer was nothing I expected.

His answer: “The payment should reach us by the due date, not your cheque. A bank takes three to four days to clear a cheque is something everybody knows. So you should have dropped your cheque in accordingly.” This was delivered in a condescending, soft tone after which he told me that he could do nothing about reversing the charges.

I reeled under this bolt of “customer service” for some time. After I recovered from it, I realised I had to understand two issues about the customer-seller relationship: 1) How much can/ should a seller expect a customer to know? 2) If the customer is at fault technically, who should pay for it?

1) How much should be expected of a customer in this case, for instance? Can a customer not confuse “due date” with last date for deposit of cheque rather than receipt of payment? We always tend to look at the story from our side. So a customer feels he has already “paid” when he drops off the cheque. I think a seller should take the trouble to understand this and issue the ‘due date’ accordingly. Holding a customer responsible like this, almost chiding him for being as stupid as to not know even this much about simple banking rules can only make him go away, not come to you. And can’t such a slip happen easily? Instead, just issue the due date four days earlier. To presume that your customer knows what is common knowledge to you, can be potentially dangerous. Doctors do this often. They presume you know when the pills should be had. I can recall a doctor I went to once saying that I should’ve known that if I felt nauseous, I could  have had a Domstal! It was my mistake- the patient’s mistake- to have not known it. Not his to have actually forgotten to write it.

2) The second part is trickier. In this case, how much does it cost to ignore this claimed error? And up to what point should a seller absorb the implied cost or loss? I had to tell this young man that I had been issuing cheques and dropping them off just the same way for over ten years that I held the card. Nobody had said this to me before him. He still did not feel the need to get politer. He only transferred me to Marketing.  The next gentleman calmed my ruffled feathers, quickly sorted the matter out and deleted the charges. He probably checked out that I had a clear history of payment for over a decade. He also probably knew I had, like any customer of my profile, another three or four cards in my wallet.

Letting a customer get the benefit of doubt and requesting him to issue the cheque a little earlier would have gone a long way, I think. His training should include this customer empathy. His training should include the learning that he has his job because customers pay their bills mostly on time. The polished pronunciation and accent is less important. Training should include teaching him not to make a conversation into an argument. His success lies in concluding the chat as quickly as possible, not proving to the customer that he is a fool.

Listening to a customer gives you the direction of progress. If he had listened to me then he would have heard that his bank had no drop box anywhere close to where I lived. If he had probed further, he would’ve heard that I now use another card more frequently because it allows me to make online payment transfers. But he wasn’t interested.

So end result: I use this card very rarely now. And I wasn’t surprised to learn that this big, international bank has had a tough run globally over the past few years with business slipping away. Maybe many others have been left disgruntled before me too.

Make a Left or Take a left?

My colleague, Charubala, who steers the language division of our little company, can talk endlessly on language. Her interest in observing how English is used by people of different generations, nationalities, backgrounds is very engaging. I will share a few nuggets with you here today.

One trend she observes in American users- people who like to simplify English and bring more logic to its confusing syntax, grammar and sentence structure- are the most forward in ‘verbing’. In our language programmes we encourage people to use verb forms of words to shorten sentences. The American users have taken it way forwards and made verbs of nouns that never existed when English for us meant British English. We all already know and often use ourselves, words like ‘access’ and ‘extract’ as verbs, even though they continue to shock classical users. So we now say, “I can access this data easily.” The classical use would be “I can have access to this data easily.” When I was in school I was taught that ‘extract’ could be a verb when talking of say, juice. You can extract juice from sugarcane but you couldn’t say that a poem is ‘extracted’ from a book. You had to say, “This poem is an extract from the book…” That’s obviously changed. Younger people may even be surprised to hear about such ‘primitive’ uses of words.

Some of the newer verbs she has been reading about are ‘helm’, ‘chagrin’, and strangely, ‘reverence’. So sentences from American publications and newsletters can read like “He helms this company.”/ “I was chagrined to hear about the delay.” / Today is reverenced as SuperBowl Day.

So then is there anything like wrong English? Languages undergo changes with changing social scenarios and shifting economic power. If the language is used alternately by an economic superpower, it is seen and recorded as a ‘change’ in the language. So we recognise American English as different from British English and then there’s Australian. The spelling too varies and an Indian language professional needs to know both the variants. But Americans can barely recognise British spelling and British users don’t enjoy American spelling. They like to use ‘programme’ and ‘colour’ and ‘manoeuvre’ among a myriad other words. Indian English, with its sheer growth and significance, has established itself in the literary world though business place English in India is largely American. But in India we tend to use a mix of British and American spelling, quite unknowingly. So most Indian users prefer ‘program’ but yet choose to use ‘neighbour’ instead of ‘neighbor’. We use ‘forward’ instead of the British ‘forwards’ but interestingly we use ‘backwards’ like the British do. So an Indian speaker will say, “Let’s take this discussion forward.” But he is most likely to say, “Let’s not move backwards.”

And amidst all this, how do we look at it if users of non-English speaking countries use English differently? Well, that certainly is counted as a mistake. Don’t you agree?

English, our Friend or Foe?

Excitement has taken over at least some parts of the country with the victory of the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi. People are joining it in droves because they see hope of a new world. But it may not be such an easy path to beat. The ‘old world’ will always pull the strings backwards. Just recently, a leading UP politician again brought up an issue that gets flogged intermittently- English and its use in India.

Mr Politician vows that he won’t allow English to be used in Parliament. He rakes up again the language-is-culture issue. Through the berating of English, he hopes to come across as patriotic and supportive of the great Indian culture. I think that many people would agree with a few things: Beating up English proves nothing of your patriotic credentials; allowing English in the work place or school in no way means doing away with India’s beautiful, varied culture of a myriad languages; English is the language of the world.

If the argument against English is that all parliamentarians don’t speak it then probably someone needs to tell us which one language can bind Indians together. The truth is that if we favour Hindi or any other Indian language there’s enough reason for others to fight for their mother tongues to get that status. But English is as close to, or distant from, any part of India. It is for us to decide whether to make it our friend or foe.

A recent study by the NCAER threw up results that most of us would know instinctively. It said that people fluent in English earn 30 per cent more. Yet, only about 25 per cent of students get their higher education in English medium schools in UP, Bihar as compared to 75 per cent in the southern states. Currently only 20 per cent of Indians speak English of which four per cent could be considered fluent. The author of the study says, “Politicians who don’t like English are captains of a sinking ship. Higher education in English helps us get better integrated into the globalised, organised labour market.”

I can vet this. In the training I have done over these years I have had several people say to me that their lack of fluency in English makes them less confident. They say that travelling to other countries for this one reason makes them nervous. I can recall a case where this gentleman- with very sound credentials- refusing a promotion because it entailed going abroad and working in English.

Not surprising then that a country like China is pumping in big money to get its people fluent in English. A few years back, I remember, the Maharashtra government schools had started a course to teach English to its teachers.

We have a historical strength as we have a base in English already. We have plenty of trainable resource here. We just need to support, and build on it.

GIVING AND RECEIVING

Does generosity beget generosity? And does experiencing generosity of others make you more generous?

A bright bubble was burst recently by a study conducted by the Economics department of the Mumbai University when it concluded that it may not be so.

People in the model villages of Ralegaon Siddhi and Hiware Bazaar- led by Anna Hazare and Popatrao Pawar- were studied for their behaviour through experimental games and exercises. These villages have transformed from regular, drought-ridden poor hamlets of the ‘70 to models of co-operative success.

According to economic theory, people are usually self-involved. But prolonged campaigns of cooperativeness can make people more pro-social. These villages have been studies for people from all over the world and have received many awards for successful development.

However, the present experiment showed that while people in these villages had lived through the benefits of co-operative living, they showed a trend of contributing less to the community pool of resources (evidenced in the games they played in this experiment), especially when they had the chance to do so anonymously. The study concluded that a history of experience may not yet produce ‘unconditional cooperation’ in an individual’s value system. To produce results, there had to be a system of monitoring and punishment in place.

That’s sad news.

But then, it’s easy to advise someone else to be generous but we may find very strong reasons not to be so ourselves. How much of our income or time, for instance, do we contribute to public good? How much is ‘enough’ before we start giving to society at large? And do we want at least a ‘reward’ of recognition?

Personal wealth or comfort may not have so much to do with this. A field study of altruistic behaviour in the Netherlands- a wealthy nation- showed that only 5.7% of people under this game-based exercise, donated money that they won as a reward. Here again, the researcher observed, that anonymity of giving, lowered the generosity.

Some religions have charity embedded in their learning and practices. It can be easily observed that people of those religions always feel obliged- and delivered- when they give.

To give is to believe in abundance- that you will not be poorer without that money or time or whatever resource. And to believe in abundance and to live with that feeling is a boon in itself.

Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist, writer and blogger writes, “Generosity is a key element of emotional health and abundance. Generosity accelerates the free flow of everything positive in your life. Of course, when it comes to finances, a good job, smart investments and saving wisely are important. But beyond these essentials, the secret is to be generous, whatever your net worth.

Generosity is an expansive energy. You receive as you give. But you have to expend energy to get energy. Electricity happens from rubbing two wires together. Stinginess is constrictive. If you're on the cheap side, don't worry. But wake up! Realize it's a huge drawback; take contrary action. How? If someone gives you a nickel, give them a dime. Gradually, try to let go of the tit-for-tat mentality, a small-minded approach that sabotages abundance. Be the bigger person -- that's generosity. Also, help people out. Charities, tithing, donations. Give what you can; it doesn't have to be a lot. Feel the growing sense of abundance it produces, an energy which circulates far and wide. It'll find its way back to you. Maybe you'll win a jackpot, or perhaps you'll just feel better about yourself. However generosity plays out, you can't lose.”

So let us start or increase whatever we were doing so far. And not underestimate the giving of time. Maybe I’ll tip that good waiter a bit more and spend a few more minutes listening to my old neighbour’s stories. I will pop more notes into those donation boxes at stores where I shop and renew all the student support charities that fell through because the organisation in question never got back.

I wish you a great year ahead of generosity and abundance. Let us give some more.

Butter Chicken and Organisational Change

What does a young heir of a strictly vegetarian business family do when there’s a minor uprising in his company because employees want to be served meat?

In a recent book titled Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower, an essay titled ‘Butter Chicken at Birla’, written by Aditya Birla Group chairman, Kumar Mangalam Birla answers this very question as he recounts how his group adapted with the times:

When I took over the company in 1996 at age twenty-nine, after the sudden death of my father, no meat was cooked in Birla cafeterias, no wine or whiskey was served at company functions. Seven years later, we bought a small copper mine in Australia. The deal wasn’t a huge one, worth only about $12.5 million, but it presented me with a unique challenge of the sort I had not yet faced as chairman. Our newest employees were understandably worried about how life might change under Indian ownership. Would they have to give up their Foster’s and barbecues at company events? Of course not, we assured them.

But then several of my Indian managers asked me why they should have to go meatless at parties if employees abroad did not. At Marwari business houses, including Birla, the top ranks of executives traditionally have been filled with other Marwaris. I had introduced some managers from other firms and communities, and they had raised a valid point. I was genuinely flustered. My lieutenants were relentless — I had never faced a situation where my own people felt so strongly about something. Yet, at the same time, I knew vegetarianism was a part of our values as a family and as a company — a core belief! I had broken a lot of family norms, but I thought this one was going to be multi-dimensionally disastrous for me.

Fortunately, my grandparents merely laughed when I approached them with my dilemma: They understood better that our company had to change with the times.

It is a great sign of maturity for an individual as well as a corporation to understand and accept change. And, above all that, to comprehend whether the impending change will be for the good, the bad or just not be significant enough. Well, the AB Group is today one of India’s “most globalised conglomerates with operations in thirty-six countries in five continents, employing 136,000 people”, as Birla describes it.

But can change always be induced so easily?

Look at this case of Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairman, SBI. The more observant of you must have made a mental note of my error in the previous statement and some of you may have smiled, thinking of how habitual terms don’t spare even the most careful. But I must insist that she has been officially appointed chairman, not chairwoman or the more gender-neutral chairperson. This is no gender bias. Very simply- and interestingly- The SBI Act of 1955 provides for ‘Chairman’ as the highest post in the Bank. To call her anything else would actually require an amendment in the act.

So should such a change be initiated? What sort of a change do you think this would be? A major or a minor change? Something with immediate effect or a general adjustment for modern times? And would it impact Ms Bhattacharya’s position or standing in any way?

Your views are welcome.

I think that while it can be initiated just as a correction to accommodate modern realities. It doesn’t, really, adversely impact her position or that of women in general. It doesn’t belittle her in any way. In fact, I am quite sure, around the dinner table it may have provided just a bit of a chuckle. That women are in these positions, itself, speaks for the general trends in the business place.

So should we bring about change or not should be dependent on the expected impact and the cost of the change. We don’t need to sweat over the small stuff.