Developing winning products for emerging markets 06-08

Developing winning products for emerging markets

To master the extremes of a fast-changing competitive landscape, challenge your company’s assumptions about designing, developing, and manufacturing  products for these regions.

bySauri Gudlavalleti, Shivanshu Gupta, and Ananth Narayanan

A large automaker designed, developed, and—with appropriate fanfare—launched a commercial truck in India’s burgeoning and highly competitive market. The vehicle was engineered to let owners in a range of emerging markets run the trucks longer and faster, and at a relatively low operating cost. Higher asset utilization, company leaders believed, would improve profits for truck owners and, ultimately, the automaker.

The truck was a disappointment. The company hadn’t adequately accounted for India’s poor roads and infrastructure, which often prevent vehicles from maintaining the most efficient operating speeds. Even though the truck’s price was competitive against local offerings—and half that of a comparable vehicle in developed markets—in the buyers’ eyes the potentially higher utilization wasn’t worth the expense.

Think this was a ham-fisted multinational dabbling in a market it didn’t fully understand? Think again: the automaker was based in India. To be sure, multinationals tend to suffer such setbacks more often than local players do, but this company’s example underscores the difficulty of understanding customer needs in fast-changing emerging markets.

Indeed, around the same time, another domestic competitor suffered a similar fate. That company’s commercial vehicle, offered at an even lower price, was also tailored for India; it featured a lower-capacity, low-cost engine well-suited to run efficiently on the country’s grid-locked roads. Yet it too proved a letdown. The cause: an unfairly earned reputation for unreliability that the company ultimately attributed to owner–operators who, to maximize profits, overloaded the trucks far beyond recommended weight limits. Within a couple of years, the overloaded engines began to malfunction, customers became angry, and the vehicle’s sales plummeted.

Such cases underscore the challenges of designing, developing, and manufacturing products for fast-changing emerging markets—environments where customers are both extremely price conscious and demanding. Against this backdrop, a growing number of companies find that they must reexamine their traditional approaches to product development and tailor them to these realities. We call this process “design to value.” In some cases, designing to value means applying traditional tools in new ways, in others adopting a new mind-set about what customers want and how to deliver it.

It’s still early days in this space, and no organization has yet mastered the challenges. But a look at the practices that leading product developers use offers at least three lessons for companies wrestling with the extremes of competition in emerging markets. The urgency to adapt will only increase as consumption in these markets contributes a growing share of global economic growth in the decade ahead.¹

1. Shake up your thinking

The combination of rapid change and heightened competition in emerging markets puts a premium on useful customer insights, even as they become harder to get. Indeed, poor infrastructure, vast distances, and fast-changing customer segments make traditional fact-gathering approaches (such as ethnographic research or even focus groups) expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, top companies don’t pass up any opportunity, however modest, to sharpen their understanding of customer needs.

Collision workshops—which might include customers but primarily convene suppliers, marketers, product engineers, and other company representatives— can help. They offer a low-tech way of quickly generating and discussing customer insights and a forum to identify hypotheses that companies can later test more traditionally. To some extent, these meetings represent a cheaper and more flexible way of generating the kinds of insights that R&D pioneers such as Bell Labs and IBM’s Watson Research Group achieved through formal, multidisciplinary R&D labs. As with these venerable examples, an important goal of collision workshops is to challenge ingrained habits of thought by pulling together representatives from functional groups that normally don’t interact.²

The resulting insights can be quite useful. An automotive-parts manufacturer in a fast-growing Asian market used a collision workshop to identify a new niche in its wheel business. During a discussion about products for passenger vehicles, a marketer mentioned that the company’s wheels were heavy—an observation he’d heard from a customer. This comment, made in passing, intrigued the engineers in the room, who went on to sketch out a counterintuitive proposal that the company ultimately refined and adopted: using a slightly higher grade of steel to make wheels lighter and more fuel efficient. Even though the new steel was more expensive, the company lowered its total costs because the wheels now required less steel than they had before.

A large telecommunications and data-services provider used a collision workshop to discuss how B2B customers in smaller, tier-two and -three cities differed from those in the largest urban areas. The “aha moment” came when marketing and pricing experts teamed up with product engineers to ask whether the company might offer price discounts to some customers in smaller cities in exchange for slightly lower network uptime than the near-100 percent guaranteed to commercial customers in major metropolitan areas. The company ultimately found it could lower its price for some customers in tier-two cities, making its offer highly competitive there, while slashing the cost to serve by a factor of four through the use of a different network architecture and a simpler, redesigned version of its standard network-switching equipment.

Another way companies shake up their thinking is to look beyond traditional competitors for design ideas. A low-cost appliance maker learned of a more high-tech approach for coating its fans by studying painting techniques developed in the automotive industry. The fan maker’s executives had always resisted technological solutions, preferring to substitute labor for capital because of low workforce costs. But after studying the automakers’ approach, which kept the thickness of each coat of paint to specified levels, the executives changed their minds. Ultimately, a 4 percent savings in paint costs more than offset the expense of new equipment.

Similarly, a global farm-equipment manufacturer looked to an adjacent vehicle category in which it didn’t compete to create a simpler, cheaper design for the claw mechanism in a new low-cost rice-transplanting machine. By applying this thinking to other products, the company also identified comparable improvements in a different low cost product line.

2. Start from scratch

By now, most companies recognize that trying to interest discerning emerging-market consumers in stripped-down, low-cost versions of the products they sell globally is a recipe for letdown. Yet many companies still aren’t fully aware of how far they must go to differentiate their products for these customers. Top companies, by contrast, are highly disciplined, even relentless, about setting priorities and putting aside existing assumptions. Leaders start by identifying the most important feature or two and focusing heavily on them (exhibit). This approach is quite different from the one that many companies tend to have: regarding all features as equally valuable and preferring more rather than fewer of them—an attitude deeply ingrained in some engineering cultures.

Exhibit

• Enlarge

The farm-equipment maker started with a feature that its analysis showed mattered most to small-scale farmers: the durability of tires. Farming in one region required considerable back-and-forth driving in mixed terrain (tar roads and soil). By redesigning tires to maximize their useful life, the company made its vehicle far more appealing to local customers. This company’s crucial willingness to challenge its assumptions ultimately led to a broader set of improvements.³

By contrast, companies that fail to reexamine the assumptions inherent in their product designs risk making ill-informed decisions. A global maker of electrical products learned this the hard way when it introduced a minicircuit-breaker system to offer customers in India better protection from the country’s frequent power fluctuations and brownouts. The product, adapted from a comparable developed-world model, was technically sound and arguably superior to the alternatives. Yet sales suffered as customers turned to products from competitors offering an older—and cheaper—“use and throw” fuse technology. Not until the company started over with a new design incorporating the older technology did the product became competitive.

A handful of leading companies extend this thinking further still, approaching their product portfolios with a “zero-based design” mentality. The benefits can be profound. A global consumer-products company, for example, was losing share in an important Asian market to a domestic competitor offering a lower price for a common personal-care product. Instead of responding with a marketing push or a price cut, the consumer-goods maker ran a head-to-head comparison of the two products—including a sophisticated analysis of chemical ingredients. This investigation showed that the low-cost company, using a formulation that was half as costly as the global player’s, was achieving the same levels of efficacy. What’s more, the rival’s pump bottle maximized margins by delivering 10 percent more “product per pump.” After receiving this wake-up call, the global company redesigned its product from the ground up, ultimately changing the formulation, packaging, and even design of its pump bottle. The rejuvenated product, vastly cheaper to produce and no less effective than its predecessor, generated a 40 percent margin improvement.

Similarly, the telecommunications and data-services provider recognized that its mobile-phone towers were overdesigned compared with those of its competitors. By starting over from scratch, the company lowered its cost to build each tower by almost 30 percent, while still meeting or exceeding local safety regulations.

3. Design for manufacturability

A final way top product makers separate themselves from the competition is to go on challenging their assumptions well into the manufacturing process. Surprisingly, perhaps, though most global companies have manufactured products in emerging markets for years, they typically don’t go as far as they could to design them with emerging-market customers and workers in mind. By contrast, clever product makers look for easy opportunities to tweak their products and processes further and thereby lower their capital costs. To be sure, this is good practice anyplace companies operate, but an especially important one in emerging markets given the fierce levels of competition there.

For example, a large producer of engines and industrial equipment recognized that by making straightforward design changes to one of its drive-shaft assemblies, it could reduce the complexity of the machines needed to build them. Just allowing for more generous radii and bends in a few key spots would make it possible to produce the components with hot forging hammers, a cheaper technology than the high-speed cold-forging machines the company used at home. The changes helped reduce costs for materials by 10 percent, in part by enabling the company to source more goods and equipment from local suppliers.

The farm-equipment maker lowered its costs in a similar fashion by identifying places where its frontline workers could replace expensive fasteners with cheaper welds during product assembly. This reduced not only the company’s manufacturing costs but also the cost of maintenance for farmers, who otherwise had to replace the fasteners as they fell off.

Traditional approaches to product development are coming under strain as emerging markets start to dominate the global economy. Companies that learn to shake up their thinking and effectively challenge the assumptions about how they design, develop, and manufacture products are more likely to master the extremes of this new competitive landscape.

View at the original source

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy 06-07

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy

The relentless parade of new technologies is unfolding on many fronts. Almost every advance is billed as a breakthrough, and the list of “next big things” grows ever longer. Not every emerging technology will alter the business or social landscape—but some truly do have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange value pools. It is therefore critical that business and policy leaders understand which technologies will matter to them and prepare accordingly.

Podcast

Disruptive technologies

Download

MGI's Michael Chui discusses the most economically disruptive technologies that will transform business and life in next decade.

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond.

We estimate that, together, applications of the 12 technologies discussed in the report could have a potential economic impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025. This estimate is neither predictive nor comprehensive. It is based on an in-depth analysis of key potential applications and the value they could create in a number of ways, including the consumer surplus that arises from better products, lower prices, a cleaner environment, and better health.

Some technologies detailed in the report have been gestating for years and thus will be familiar. Others are more surprising. Examples of the 12 disruptive technologies include:

Advanced robotics—that is, increasingly capable robots or robotic tools, with enhanced “senses,” dexterity, and intelligence—can take on tasks once thought too delicate or uneconomical to automate. These technologies can also generate significant societal benefits, including robotic surgical systems that make procedures less invasive, as well as robotic prosthetics and “exoskeletons” that restore functions of amputees and the elderly.

Slideshow

A gallery of disruptive technologies

• Pop out

Next-generation genomics marries the science used for imaging nucleotide base pairs (the units that make up DNA) with rapidly advancing computational and analytic capabilities. As our understanding of the genomic makeup of humans increases, so does the ability to manipulate genes and improve health diagnostics and treatments. Next-generation genomics will offer similar advances in our understanding of plants and animals, potentially creating opportunities to improve the performance of agriculture and to create high-value substances—for instance, ethanol and biodiesel—from ordinary organisms, such as E. coli bacteria.

Energy-storage devices or physical systems store energy for later use. These technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells, already power electric and hybrid vehicles, along with billions of portable consumer electronics. Over the coming decade, advancing energy-storage technology could make electric vehicles cost competitive, bring electricity to remote areas of developing countries, and improve the efficiency of the utility grid.

The potential benefits of the technologies discussed in the report are tremendous—but so are the challenges of preparing for their impact. If business and government leaders wait until these technologies are exerting their full influence on the economy, it will be too late to capture the benefits or react to the consequences. While the appropriate responses will vary by stakeholder and technology, we find that certain guiding principles can help businesses and governments as they plan for the effects of disruptive technologies.

• Business leaders should keep their organizational strategies updated in the face of continually evolving technologies, ensure that their organizations continue to look ahead, and use technologies to improve internal performance. Disruptive technologies can change the game for businesses, creating entirely new products and services, as well as shifting pools of value between producers or from producers to consumers. Organizations will often need to use business-model innovations to capture some of that value. Leaders need to plan for a range of scenarios, abandoning assumptions about where competition and risk could come from, and not be afraid to look beyond long-established models. Organizations will also need to keep their employees’ skills up-to-date and balance the potential benefits of emerging technologies with the risks they sometimes pose.
• Policy makers can use advanced technology to address their own operational challenges (for example, by deploying the Internet of Things to improve infrastructure management). The nature of work will continue to change, and that will require strong education and retraining programs. To address challenges that the new technologies themselves will bring, policy makers can use some of those very technologies—for example, by creating new educational and training systems with the mobile Internet, which can also help address an ever-increasing productivity imperative to deliver public services more efficiently and effectively. To develop a more nuanced and useful view of technology’s impact, governments may also want to consider new metrics that capture more than GDP effects. This approach can help policy makers balance the need to encourage growth with their responsibility to look out for the public welfare as new technologies reshape economies and lives.

View at the original source

Connecting everything: A conversation with Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior 06-07

Connecting everything: A conversation with Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior

Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer describes how the exponential growth of connectivity between people and devices, both mobile and network, will change commerce, business systems, and individual behavior.

Despite two decades of increasing connectivity between people and devices over high-tech networks, only 1 percent of what could be connected in the world actually is, argues Padmasree Warrior, Cisco Systems’ chief technology and strategy officer. As the level of connection swells over mobile and other platforms during the next decade, she expects sweeping changes in how consumers shop, businesses handle data, and individuals grapple with the data available about themselves. This interview was conducted by McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland in Davos, Switzerland. What follows is an edited version of Warrior’s remarks.

Interview transcript

Connecting everything

We believe that today only 1 percent of what can be connected in the world is actually connected. As an industry, it took us about 20 years to connect 1 percent of the world. And in the next ten years, we believe that number will go up dramatically. We’ll make significant progress in connecting the 99 percent that’s still unconnected. That will be people, that will be devices, and that will be a lot more information on the network.

So when we say “the Internet of Everything,” we mean an intelligent way to connect processes with data and things. Not just the Internet of Things, not just connecting the devices onto the network, but how can you use the information that’s being collected to drive better processes, better decision making for businesses, and better lifestyles for users and consumers? And we mean more efficient ways to analyze that data through analytics from the network—which is our expertise—to make every single vertical (manufacturing, retail, transportation) significantly different than what it is today.

So if I drill deeper into this, one of the things that I think we find to be inevitable is that there will be a lot more connectivity, and there will be two kinds of connectivity. One kind of connectivity will deliver very rich media experiences to us, through video. Video will be much more prevalent than it is today.

There will be another set of data or implications, which is all of these sensors that will connect— not necessarily high bandwidth data, but low bandwidth data, continuous streaming of low bit-rate data. And the patterns in these two kinds of data and applications are going to be very different.

Think about retail, for example, how people shop today. Now, that’s dramatically changed with the mobile platform and the e-commerce platform in the first evolution of the Internet. In the last 20 years, with the Internet, and now more recently with tablets, the data actually now says that people shop more on a tablet than they do on a smartphone or on a PC. And so the commerce and how we make purchases and the shopping experience in the entire retail vertical has changed, and it will continue to change. And how might it change? This is perhaps an example of the “Internet of Things.”

If we can enable location for people, when you walk into the store, we will know which aisle you are going to. We know you were in this aisle, but you didn’t purchase something. And so if we can analyze that data and tell you when there’s a sale going on, that benefits you as a user as well as the retailer. And so that could be an example where there may be sensors. There will be sensors for indoor location (think of it as GPS for indoor location) and knowledge of your preferences.

So it’s really a combination of a recommendation engine, or a preference engine, of a coupon or a discount engine, and a loyalty program, combined with indoor location. So it’s a combination of all these things—which today are very discreet applications—that will make retail a very different experience in the future.

Changing IT

We think IT in the future will really be a different IT industry than it has been in the past. The first differential is what I call the experience differential, and that’s actually being driven by consumers. We did a survey recently of people between the ages of 18 and 32 across multiple countries, multiple geographies.

The interesting thing in that data is that two out of five kids, or young people, basically said they would take a lower-paying job than work for a company that doesn’t allow them to bring their own device or allow them access to their favorite social network. They think the Internet is more important than having a car. So it’s just a very different workforce that we will see. They demand a very different experience. It’s the consumer experience that you want in the enterprise.

The second differential is a velocity differential, and that’s actually driving the shift to cloud computing. Businesses now demand a much faster way to bring up IT infrastructure applications to be delivered, for capacity to be provisioned. They’re not going to wait. You, as a businessperson, will not wait a year for a data center to come up and for the capacity to be delivered. You would rather consume that as a service. And this is where companies like Amazon and others are making forays. So that’s creating, for the IT organization, a velocity differential that has to be solved in the future.

And the third differential is a data differential. And that goes to the fact that there will be more and more things getting connected, and so we have to deal with the question of “What do we do with this data?” It’s not just enough to store all the data; we have to use the data. People talk about this in the context of big data, but it’s the analytics. It’s not just the analytics, actually, but how do you apply the analytics to make the business process a better process? That is the third problem that the IT company of the future has to solve.

Opting in, opting out

The scale of change, even in the next five years, will be dramatic. And I think everyone has to get ready for it, and I think we as users have to get ready for it. I’m a technologist, and I have to get ready for it because a lot of things will happen that we don’t even anticipate today.

In the next three to five years, as users we’ll actually lean forward to use technology more versus what we had done in the past, where technology was just coming at us. That will change everything, right? It will change health care; it could even change farming. There are new companies thinking about how you can farm differently using technology; sensors connected that use water more efficiently, use light, sunlight, more efficiently.

So I think there are multiple aspects of the human life that will be touched by how dramatic this change will be. I mean, who knows what we’ll see in the next ten years. But at least we can see somewhat into the changes that will happen in the next five years.

Data. Usage of data. Do we opt in? There’s a lot of discussion about, let’s say, the data that is available about you. Today you don’t even know what data is about you. If it can predict and prevent some illness that I may be getting because of my gene analysis, and I don’t know about it, then I can’t do anything about it. In that case, I’d actually like for that data to be used in a constructive fashion in a health-care situation. But if it’s being used in such a way that it’s going to drive my insurance higher, then I have an issue with that. I’d like to know about that.

So far, we’ve focused around data on, “Do you opt in or opt out?” In the future, there’s going to be a lot more work that has to be done that gives me a choice on, “When do I opt in, when do I opt out?” And I may want to change my mind. I may opt in at the beginning but as I find what that data is being used for, I may opt out. So all of this requires very sophisticated analytics—a different way to present that data. Again, up until now, it has not been the problem most creative people have been handling.

Until now, we’ve mostly been creatively centered around the user experience. Just the experience of how information is moving, not how it’s being presented back to you. So I think there’s going to be lots of shifts in the way we deal with technology in the next three to five years.

About the authors

Padmasree Warrior is the chief technology and strategy officer of Cisco Systems. This interview was conducted by McKinsey Publishing’s Rik Kirkland.

View at the original source

Former Bangladesh Sweatshop Worker To Billionaire Walton Family: Use Your Wal-Mart Fortune To Stop Worker Deaths 06-07

Former Bangladesh Sweatshop Worker To Billionaire Walton Family: Use Your Wal-Mart Fortune To Stop Worker Deaths

Clare O'Connor

The multi-million dollar dog and pony show that is Wal-Mart’s Annual Meeting started off on its usual celebratory note on Friday morning with 14,000 workers and shareholders cheering and whooping along with host Hugh Jackman, the Hollywood star, and musical interludes by such luminaries as John Legend and Kelly Clarkson.

Billionaire Walton family scion and company chair S. Robson ‘Rob’ Walton repeatedly invoked the memory of his father, Wal-Mart founder Sam, to cheers of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

21 images

“Dad would get such a kick out of this celebration,” said Walton, the 9th richest person in America. His entire extended family, including brother Jim Walton and the country’s richest women, sister Alice Walton and sister-in-law Christy Walton, sat beaming as the camera panned their way.

The jubilant atmosphere at the aptly named Bud Walton Arena at the University of Arkansas was punctured an hour into the program, however. The otherwise excitable crowd grew silent as Kalpona Akter, a former sweatshop worker from Bangladesh, stood to officially call on Wal-Mart to address workplace safety in the wake of tragedies at Tazreen Fashions, where a deadly fire killed at least 117 workers in November, and Rana Plaza, which collapsed in April killing 1,127.

Akter worked in a garment factory from age 12, toiling for $6 a month (and 450 hours a month) for eight years. Now the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, Akter was flown in thanks to a grassroots campaign by labor activists Making Change at Wal-Mart, who raised $9000 on fundraising site Indiegogo. She traveled to Arkansas with Sumi Abedin, a survivor of the Tazreen Factory fire.

Akter delivered a shareholder proposal — one of five on the schedule — on behalf of activist shareholder Jim McRitchie. If passed, McRitchie’s Proposal No. 5 will allow Wal-Mart shareholders who own 10% of shares to call for a special meeting on key issues of corporate governance. “Shareowner input on the timing of shareowner meetings is especially important when events unfold quickly and issues may become moot by the next annual meeting,” McRitchie said in a statement. These events include tragedies caused by poor workplace safety standards, Akter explained.

“Wal-Mart executives say its production was placed in these buildings by unscrupulous suppliers, claims that strain credulity,” Akter said. “Even if true, this only proves that Wal-Mart’s supply chain is out of control. Worse, Wal-Mart commissioned labor rights audits at one of these factories, yet the hazards that ultimately killed workers were never addressed. Now Wal-Mart executives have stated the repairs needed to make our factories safe are too expensive, yet the costs would be just two tenths of 1 percent of the company’s profit last year, and just 1% of the dividends paid out last year to the Walton family heirs.”

Akter addressed the Walton family, who are worth $93 billion collectively, saying: “I would like to direct this to the chairman of the board, Mr. Rob Walton: I am sure you are aware that fixing these buildings would cost just a tiny fraction of your family’s wealth, so I implore you to please help us. You have the power to do this very easily. Don’t you agree that the factories where Wal-Mart products are made should be safe for the workers?”

She noted that 41 major retailers have recently signed an Accord on Fire and Building Safety. “Wal-Mart is one of only a few major importers refusing to sign,” she said. “Instead, Wal-Mart’s public relations officials have announced plans for an alternative to this landmark agreement, but so far not a single meaningful detail has been provided. Forgive me, but for years every time there’s a tragedy Wal-Mart officials have made promises to improve the terrible conditions in my country’s garment factories, yet the tragedies continue. With all due respect, the time for empty promises is over.”

Wal-Mart’s board has recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal, adding that its adoption “would not be in the best interests of our company or its shareholders.” The company added that holding a meeting at the behest of 10% of shareholders “would be a costly undertaking.”

View at the original source

Change the World and Get to Bed by 10:00 PM 06-07

Change the World and Get to Bed by 10:00

by Julia Kirby 

Let's say you believed deeply in the importance of sleep health, and you wanted to start a movement to change people's attitudes and behavior. Maybe, like Arianna Huffington, it's a personal crisis that convinces you. Or maybe it's a key piece of research or two that opens your eyes, as it were, to the dangers of too little sleep:

As a choice of cause, you could do a lot worse. Getting sufficient sleep is a need that every human on the planet shares. And for many people, the ability to do that is increasingly under assault, as daily rhythms are disrupted by the changing nature of work and always-on technology. Your arguments for that cause would be helped along by a mountain of evidence about the incidence andcosts of sleeplessness, and the efficacy of various interventions. 




You'd have the advantage of a solid and accumulating knowledge base regarding what works. Yet you'd still have the gratifying ability to move the needle dramatically with your efforts because, for most people, sleep health — their own, their employees', their communities' — hasn't yet become a top-of-mind issue. In the three-legged stool of good health, nutrition and exercise are constantly discussed, while sleep has so far come up short. Put all this together, and it's hard to imagine a cause that would offer you a greater chance to change so many lives for the better.

Even better, you'd have access to a pretty good playbook for how to start a movement. The precedents are out there, and some of the most inspiring of them have been in the realm of public health. We've seen movements succeed in getting people to quit smoking, getting health workers towash their hands, and getting people to register as organ donors. Smart people are working to codify the best approaches and tools for raising awareness, changing minds, and inciting action. Even if you don't have time to master the rules yourself, there is consulting expertise available for hire.

A key piece of advice in that playbook would be to influence the influencers. Those include, for example, the entertainment industry: What would it take to get scriptwriters and directors to stop portraying people operating on no sleep as models of machismo and dedication? A second major set of influencers to influence would be the tech community. What new apps, for example, could they create to nudge people toward more healthful behavior? And then there are the healthcare and education sectors to influence. These are the trusted professionals with whom people already interact about health and informed behavior. What would it take to make sleep a topic of more of those interactions?

But also note that, on top of all those usual influencers, there is another sector that should be recruited into the movement for better sleep health. That would be the corporate sector — and the rationale for targeting it in particular has four parts:

• Selfish Interest. As the world's largest employers, big companies stand to benefit directly from a greater awareness of the importance of sleep. It makes all the difference to productivity (which is diminished by sleeplessness in the same way it is by drug use or drunkenness), and hits the bottom line, too, in lower healthcare costs.
• Substantial infrastructure. Companies have invaluable capabilities they can apply to a public health campaign, such as communication channels to get the word out and wellness programs to support good habits. They also have the power, through their policies, to change how employees work (and how managers encourage them to).
• Social Influence. As well as having internal, local influence over their own workers, large employers help to establish broader norms in society. It's important to get them focused on the importance of sleep health, because the expectations they create about the keys to good work and success spill over to other realms.
• Sense of Involvement. There's also the fact, perhaps obvious, that the work environments cultivated by many companies are the cause of many people's inadequate sleep. Whether it's a hypercompetitive culture encouraging ambitious employees to burn the midnight oil, or the anxiety of working for a bad boss causing insomnia, or a level of pressure that leaves decision-makers lying awake at night, companies contribute to people's sleep deficits. For some firms, that involvement might translate to a sense of obligation.

For all these reasons, it makes sense to pull more businesses into the movement to change attitudes and behaviors toward sleep. That's why HBR publishes books, interviews, articles, and blog posts on sleep research (and for that matter, tries to save its own staff from evening and weekend work). And it's why we're participating in the Corporate Leaders Summit being hosted this month by the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. (I'll be moderating a panel there.)

If you're a corporate leader, you're constantly being asked to pitch in on a cause or add power to the arm of some activist. This is one of those cases where your answer should be yes. You have the reasons and you have the means to change today's dysfunctional culture around sleep — and so many will rest easier when you do.

View at the original source

Silence Is Unceasing Eloquence 06-07

Silence Is Unceasing Eloquence

Solitude is an attitude. A man who adopts an attitude of detachment towards the external environment is always in solitude. It is possible that despite being involved in all sorts of worldly activity, a person may maintain perfect   equanimity.  That’s solitude. Another may stay on a hilltop, away from the hustle and bustle of city life, yet he may not be able to experience serenity of mind.  Therefore, even though this person is much better placed to experience peace of mind, solitude deludes him.   

Silence is the perennial flow of ‘language’. It is interrupted by speaking; for words obstruct this mute language. It is quite possible that lecturers may keep the audience involved and amused for hours without transforming them. Silence, on the other hand, is permanent and benefits entire humanity in a subtle manner. 

One may therefore conclude that true silence is unceasing eloquence -- it is a state when words cease and powerful thoughts of the sage begin to penetrate the depths of the seeker, bringing about a change in his thought patterns.

Thought moves with tremendous velocity. Those who entertain sublime and pious thoughts help others who are in the vicinity and at a distance also. 

A saint who has overpowered his mind through meditation sends out into the world thoughts of harmony and peace. They travel with lightening speed in all directions and enter the minds of persons and produce in them also similar thoughts of harmony and peace. 

Whereas a worldly man who harbours thoughts of jealousy, revenge and hatred sends out discordant thoughts which are like wireless messages broadcast in ether, and are received by those whose minds respond to such negative vibrations.

According to the Maharshi, preaching is simple communication of language; it can really be done in silence only. 

A man, who after listening to a religious sermon for an hour, might go away without being even marginally influenced; he has wasted his time.  In comparison, a man who sits in a holy presence and goes away after some time with his outlook on life radically changed, is much better off. Which is better, to preach loudly without effect or to sit silently sending out positive vibrations? 

 Again, how does speech arise?  

From abstract  knowledge  emanates the ego; this, in  turn,  gives rise to thought, and thought gives rise to the spoken word. So it would not be wrong to say that the word is the descendant of the original source.

 If the word can produce effect, consider how much more powerful must be preaching through silence?  

But most people do not understand this simple truth -- the truth of their everyday experience. Rather, they are eager to know what lies beyond, about heaven, hell and reincarnation. 

We may conclude with the following words of Ramana Maharshi: “Those who have discovered great truths have done so in the still depths of the Self. But really there are no others to be helped. For the realised being sees only the Self, just as the goldsmith sees only gold while valuing it in various jewels made of gold. When you identify yourself with the body, name and form are there. 

 But when you transcend body-consciousness, the ‘others’ also disappear. The realised one does not see the world as different from himself”. 

View at the original source

Innovation is a Mindset: Secrets to Successful Entrepreneurship 06-07

Innovation is a Mindset: Secrets to Successful Entrepreneurship

Innovation is a crucial part of business. But can anyone be an innovator?

Innovation is one of the most overused words in the business world today. Companies that are innovating are laying the foundation for future growth, while getting ahead of the competition. They are winning, which is why everyone is either innovating or desperately trying to.

But what’s the secret? Why can a company like Apple redefine the music industry, the mobile phone industry and the computer industry (for the second time, with the iPad) over the course of a decade, while other companies struggle to find their next big hit?

Some people argue either you have it or you don’t. I disagree.

The genius of people like Steve Jobs notwithstanding, I think that everyone can be an innovator. This is an especially powerful concept for entrepreneurs. By definition, you HAVE to be an innovator if you are going to successfully start your own business. Maybe you aren’t inventing the next iPad, but it can be as simple as designing a quicker way for customers to pay at your store.

What I’ve come to learn over the years, is that innovation is a mindset.

The definition of mindset is the following: “a habitual or characteristic mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations.” The really insightful word in that definition is “habitual.” And habits are developed and determined by regular practices.

So, if innovation is a mindset, and a mindset is defined by habits, then creating processes that encourage the right practices or habits can provide a powerful foundation for innovation.

This isn’t just my opinion. I’ve seen it work.

Using Trulia as an example, we have worked to make innovation one of the core cultural values of the company. Our goal is to constantly innovate across the company. We do this within the framework of our product roadmap on a daily basis, but also devote one week per quarter to build things outside the roadmap.

Just like your happiness may be tied to setting aside time to go to the gym, to worship or to take vacations, companies need to establish a regime around innovating. It takes discipline and focus.

To help employees think beyond our product roadmap during the week I referenced, we encourage employees to devote much of their time working on creative projects. The results speak for themselves. Dozens of these small innovation week ideas have become core elements of our product offering and the program continues to expand.

By dedicating time and resources to creating an innovation mindset at Trulia, we are building better products.

By establishing a baseline of innovation practices at your company, you will begin to see that innovation isn’t usually a light bulb turning on from thin air, but the result of consistent dedication to solving the problems at hand.

Innovation is about being honest with yourself and your team about what you are doing. Are you really serving customers as well as you can? What improvements can be made?

Innovation is about being exposed to the right ingredients for new ideas. Lots of innovation happens at the fringes, or the intersection between disciplines and industries. You can take advantage of this phenomenon by being well read on multiple subjects and maintaining a healthy network of contacts across multiple industries.

It’s about making and admitting mistakes. Maybe you invested a lot of money to go in the wrong direction. It’s better to come clean and change your strategy accordingly. Knowing the wrong direction provides important insight to innovators. Heck, it might even be a brilliantly insightful mistake over the long term.

It’s about lifting your gaze out of the weeds and thinking on a larger scale. If people love our apps so much, why are we spending more money building features for the Web?

It’s about making time to think about the bigger opportunities and challenges you are facing, outside of the daily hustle and bustle.

The great innovators are well known and some will even be remembered in history, but innovation is a mindset and thus something that each and every one of us can aspire to.

View at the original source