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Organic growth in organizations

From 'The Hindu' ..Must read article .....

Staff alone can drive organic growth in organisations

Organic growth is the mantra companies are willing to follow these days going by the increased global competition. In their bid to find new ways of increasing profits they are looking beyond mergers and acquisitions.

Organic growth refers to growth of the core of the company and for this growth internal resources are used and the main resource are the people of the organizations. Mergers and acquisitions are not considered part of organic growth, it is the profit generated within the company through increased output and sales that truly indicate such growth.

Edward Hess in his book The road to organic growth defines organic growth as, “Growth achieved through a commitment to customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and core profitability—organic growth—is a smart long-term strategy for any company. Organic growth represents the underlying strength and vitality of the core business.”

Further he identified six common factors in companies that have shown such significant growth. One of them is the people in the organisation whom he defines as, “Employees in these companies ‘own’ their results and their careers, and most even own part of the company. Management teams of these organisations are frequently home grown, with long tenures.” Another interesting observation by Hess is that these companies typically have an entrepreneurial spirit where the employees feel a sense of responsibility to the customer, feel accountable for results and also share the credit for those results.

The main initiators for organic growth are the employees. Many companies have people who are the main catalysts for organic growth of the company and contribute in improving customer satisfaction.

A study found that these employees usually belong to the middle management level and have certain common characteristics and use certain identical strategies to make a significant contribution to the growth of their organisation.

These growth managers as they are called have usually had a varied experience early in their career. They explore areas unrelated to their career more out of interest and enthusiasm to gain additional knowledge and experience. This knowledge allows them to innovate.

Even though these employees may belong to a specific background they acquire knowledge in other areas so that they can identify opportunities or come up with solutions to any kind of problem in the organisation.

These managers also have a strong belief in their abilities and the confidence to meet fresh challenges. They are constantly looking for learning opportunities, love challenges and are willing to take action. These traits allow them to approach uncertainties in a positive manner. This in turn leads to seeking opportunities for growth.

Such employees also have an entrepreneurial bent of mind. They are unlike the typical managers who follow the guidance provided by the head office and cannot think beyond. They predict and plan based on known facts. This is not conducive for growth because the ability to visualise the unanticipated is far more important, which is a quality growth managers display. They do not solely rely on data to determine plans but their power to intuit where the business will go forms the basis of their decisions. They show initiative and usually start out with small ideas that are later expanded and prove to be profitable ventures.

When these managers undertake new projects they try to do it with minimum risk.

Their ventures are not started typically by calculating the ROI but by calculating the loss they could incur and so they do not invest more than they can afford to lose. This also allows them to pursue interesting business ideas without incurring loss.

The success of such ventures is based on their deep understanding of the customer as an individual. This understanding helps them to design products or services that are closely linked to customer needs.

Such managers insist on having a team where every member is accountable and at the same time they are able to inspire them to work passionately and collectively for new ventures. They are careful about hiring members who have the right aptitude and put them in roles where their talents can be fully utilised. At the same time they do not hesitate to remove those who are found unfit or lacking.

Corporate rules and regulations do not act as obstacles to these managers because they have support from their bosses who encourage their ventures and remove any limitations.

Companies that want to maximise organic growth should identify such employees in their organisation and give them the necessary resources, support and encouragement. This will lead to greater success.

Good Bye XP

Today, XP will spell eXPiry. Microsoft will stop selling the XP version to retailers and PC manufacturers from June 30. They have been asked to stop preloading XP on their products from that date. There is a small exception made for low cost platforms, which will be able to continue loading the stripped down ‘home’ version of XP for another 6 months.

So what next.... Windows7 is planned to release on 2009..... Also, few bloggers and XP fans are against this as they claim XP is better than the Vista....

Kavari(pulli) Maan - Spotted Deer

In my school day, my grand maa used to tell me stories. She often uses a King or Jungle as her story base. When ever she starts to narrate a story about Jungle, c often uses Rabbit, Deer, Wolf and Lion as the main characters.. Also, all those Jungle animals had the capacity to speak to each other ....

Coming to Kavari Maan(Spotted Deer), it is soft charactered used to play with her kids and often spend time in grass lands..It would always advice her kids not to get into deep forest, 'dont let out of my eye sites'.. One fine morning the kids would get into deep jungle and got life threat by some Wolf and finally got rescued by little cleaver Rabbit. Also, she add saying those Deers wants to spend their time together with their frnds and relatives, more sensitive in nature. They had a peculiar character like, whenever a human or some other animal approaches it and touches its hair means it will die at the spot...

Stories apart... Today i read The Hindu paper dated 25th May page-5 under the heading 'Rescue bid costs deer life'. The animal which was spotted by the Villagers in the morning was brought by the villagers in morning, was brought alive to the police station where it succumbed to injuries. Shortly after post-mor-tem was performed. Dr said the three-year-old male deer, which sustained head injury, died of heart failure owing to excess secretion of adrenaline and testosterone. According to him, the spotted deer, bearing the zoological name 'Axis axis', is the most sensitive animal, which prefers to live in the grass-lands rather than thick jungles, as it helps them to easily locate the predators.

The ''safe-distance" in the case if this species is very less. Even tranquilizers could not be used to rescue the animal in view of its sensitive nature. Secretion of adrenaline and testosterone would have increased manifold, thereby shooting up its blood pressure and heartbeat when a group of persons attempted to capture it.

Now i started wondering how come my grand ma knows all about it, most of her comment about deer is true.

• It lives in grass lands, wont prefer to get into deep forest
  
• Will die if some one try approaching it
• More sensitive
  

Thanks grand maa... i will tell this storied to my kids......

MicroSoft Withdraws Yahoo bid :-(

Its definitely a Good time for Google.... Yahoo-Microsoft merger should have done few magic in the Adwords,SearhEngines ..... as a whole in Web 2.0 ....

I really wonder why yahoo has quoted for more price... Already it is loosing its Mail Market share to Gmail.. Also, there were so many new startups in the Web2.0 mail getting good amount of attention like http://zenbe.com , http://mail.zoho.com


Lez wait and C... Yahoo should pay the wages for this decision !!


Email was sent to all Microsoft employees from CEO Steve Ballmer .....

From: Steve Ballmer
Date: May 3, 2008 5:17:30 PM PDT
To: “Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)”
Subject: Withdrawal of Offer to Acquire Yahoo!

This afternoon I sent the attached letter [see update 2 here for letter to Yahoo] to Jerry Yang announcing that Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo. We proposed the deal in the belief that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would create a combined company with the resources and assets to win in the fast-growing market for advertising and online services.

Although the acquisition of Yahoo would have accelerated our ability to deliver on our strategy in advertising and online services, I remain confident that we can achieve our goals without Yahoo. We have a strategy in place to do so and we will continue to expand on this strategy and accelerate our progress.

Our strategy has three components:

· Deliver on the basics. We will continue to improve search relevance and build out our ad platform.

· Change the game through innovation. We will expand investments in engineering and deliver transformative tools and Web experiences.

· Expand our global scale and focus. We will pursue partnerships and investments to realize the competitive advantages that come with scale.

At the heart of our strategy is a commitment to bring the benefits of competition, choice, and innovation to everyone who uses the Internet—from consumers to content creators to advertisers.

We are 100 percent focused on executing on this strategy and we have made good progress in a very short time. We’ve improved search relevance dramatically, introduced compelling new search verticals, successfully integrated aQuantive, and added nearly 100 new publishers to our ad platform. In the last couple of months we’ve rolled out new versions of key products including Internet Explorer and Silverlight, and introduced new technologies like Live Mesh. We now have over 430 million active users of our Windows Live services worldwide. And we continue to add new technologies with acquisitions such as YaData, which brings leading-edge behavioral targeting technology, and Caligari, which gives us advanced 3D modeling capabilities that will help us continue to improve Virtual Earth.

Ultimately, our goal is to build the industry-leading business in search, online advertising, media, and social networking.

We are absolutely committed to being the leader in each of these areas. Now is the time to do what we have always done best—be tenacious, focus on the long term, innovate, and keep working hard.

I want to thank all of you for your patience during this process and for your dedication and hard work across all of our businesses. We asked that you remain focused on our goals through these cycles, and you have done this extremely well. We are committed to making the investments that will enable us to compete and, ultimately, lead in the online services and advertising businesses. Together, I know we will succeed.

Steve

My Trip to The Capital

All of a sudden every thing got decided, and i had to attend the Meeting with MTNL people at Delhi..I had a affinity towards Delhi, as it is my Birth place.. I got my ticket on Wednesday evening 5:45pm, My Manager took the pain (paints) to book the ticket for me..... Also, i have few other technical issues to be sorted out before i start my packing for the trip, as it will be discussed as the part of Meeting agenda...... I finished all my work at 8:30pm and thought of leaving the office. Then Sreelesh(my Colleague) came and reminded me about the Formal dress code for the meeting... I was taken aback, because i don't even have formal Shoes, i cannot manage with my Adidas sports shoe for the official Meeting... I started running towards the shoe shop and purchased a formal cut-shoe branded Lee-Hooper(a costly one :-(, as i didn't have option to look for more shops, it was already 9:30pm).... Finally i reached my home and had my dinner, Idly and Takali Chatni(yammmmi). Whenever i write about my food, My dear dear lvly Mom needs a special mention, She cooks anything and everything delicious.. I'll never control my food intake if my Mom is my chef. Okay coming back to the journey, i read info about our company AdventNet, once when i opened the 'About Us' page in our www.adventnet.com website to know more about my company's berth's and depths... I was shocked to see the Mahathma Gandhi Quote and refund form welcomed me with smile(please refer )... I got pissed off and some how found the required information from the hidden(literally) PDF doc. Preparation got over and I checked the flight timings it was 6:45A.M, i set the alarm for 4:00AM, called & booked the Taxi to airport and went to sleep.. I didn't get a good sleep, may be tensed a bit, not sure....

Just before the Dawn, i woke up and saw my Mom sitting in the chair.. She seldom sleeps well, as every one says she is at her second child phase(old age), .. she sleeps in the morning and stays awake in the nights. Had bath and dressed-up with my only available formal dress and new Shoes :-)..... I reached the airport at 5:30AM and got the boarding pass and passed the security check... As this was my first flight journey after my childhood(Kinder-garden-hood), was a bit exited and didn't want to show to others that Im traveling for the first time.. Hence happily wandered around the boarding place and went for boarding into AirIndia flight at 6:15AM. I was taken from the airport to the flight with the help of a Bus(I cannot hold my criticism on that bus.. Simply It s**ks). Got the window seat and flight took off at the scheduled timings, my ears got little pain due to the pressure, but i left it unnoticed, as i was concentrating outside the window. It was a pleasant experience, i was taken just above the clouds,flew over the Bay Of Bengal for a while and then the flight reached the exact latitude.. Food was served by the AirHostes Aunty >:o (dont forget Im traveling in AirIndia.. Thx for my Manager's seemliness). Food was good and free(i mentioned free, 'coz it was charged in my return journey). At 9:15Am, flight reached the Indira Gandhi airport. I cannot even compare the Toilets in the airport of Chennai and Delhi with the Koyembed bus stand at chennai, because the domestic terminals Toilet are maintained like hell..

It is worth a separate blog to pen down my experience in the Meeting ....

The Looooooong Meeting got over in the evening, actually i planed for some shopping 4 my Mom(believe me pa..) and site seeing in the evening.. Again thanks for my Manager for his kindness in booking return ticket at 7:00Pm itself. I reached the Airport at 5:45pm, I was spell bound by looking at the Airhostes of Kingfisher airline.. Sema Kickuma... Red color birds flew all over the airport terminal and made me to hang my tongue out .. Suddenly i remembered the Aunty experience that i had in the morning in AirIndia, at once i prayed at least there should be someone looking good(rather Spicy :-)) in the SpiceJet. My prayers didnt go in vain, i was happy to see one Chubby , yammmy Girl sitting next to me in the Flight .... It was a cool travel, but i got shocked once they announce d bread sandwich Rs.70, mango drink Rs.40 and all.. Taz when i realised the truth about the low cost airlines. They are reducing the ticket cost, hence charging for the rest. Chuk....... pass ..... got a announcement then to tighten my seat belts as the weather was bad, i could feel the Jerk . Its the end of the story.. Will write the rest once i reach my home, as my laptop is crying due to low battery. Finally reached my home