Some snippets from Nasscom Surge 2012.
C K Ranganathan of CavinKare, during the keynote was one of the best parts of NASSCOM Surge 2012. Here are some snippets from his speech.
On The Importance of Product Differentiation
- If you do not differentiate, you die
- Higher the differentiation, better the profit margin (85% for highly differentiated products vs 7% for marginally differentiated products in their portfolio)
On Hiring The Right People
- Recruiting is key
- Hire for attitude
- Find the right people for the right job
- Don’t get people who switch jobs every 2 or 3 years, since it takes 2-3 years for some one to learn the business and show results. If they leave in that time frame, how do you know whether they left on their own or found wanting. He was talking about manager level hires.
- Mr Ranganathan mentioned that careful hiring and development are the keys to innovation and differentiation
- At fhe end oc the day it is a talent war
On Investment and Continuous Innovation
Investment in R&D and relentless incremental innovation are key to differentiate your products from others. He talked about how they continued to talk to customers, find problems and come up with solutions. He mentioned how they worked hard on improving the shelf life (without refrigeration) of their milk product to 120 days without any preservatives. It was a process as well as product innovation.
On Leveraging Technology
He talked about leveraging technology to improve products. How they monitored, understood why milk goes bad. How they used GPRS to monitor temperatures in refrigerated vans and outlets and found that they switch off the refrigerators to save fuel/electricity.
He also talked about front end automation through PDAs, Sales automation, Ad savings through analytics. It takes 37 materials to make shampoo and said that he “Cant imagine doing business without IT”.
He had no fancy slides, no buzzwords, no cliches. He explained in simple language what it takes to hire the best, innovate and differentiate. It was a real treat.