The Inspiration Next Door

This pandemic has taught us a lot from being more sensitive towards the society, being inclusive, being resilient or tech-savvy and also made us realize what actually is a necessity while all the un-necessities been given up. We usually get inspired from people who have achieved a lot and appear on news magazines, TV interviews or other media outlets whether they are stars , large entrepreneurs, comedians or other public figures.

                                                  

This pandemic has given us the opportunity to connect with our neighbours, family and old-lost friends. This communication changed the way i looked at inspirations when recently i had about an hour long chat with my neighbour over the balcony. 

The conversation started with a discussion about how his business was doing amidst this lockdown and he ended up in an hour long conversation about his journey so far. Mr. Raghu is a factory owner who builds rings for steel pipes? Nothing special right but wait what if i told it this way a person who used to be a labour at a factory ended up owing a 60 lac factory, interested now? So he is story goes as

Raghu passed his 12th and started working in a factory due to lack of interest in studies and his newly found interest in operating heavy machinery. Years passed by now he got married and now he realized the job was not enough to satisfy his financial needs so being a marwari business was the only choice but he knew nothing except operating machines. One day when is manager asked him to visit a factory to get some equipments from the manager, he went to the factory and his curiosity in machinery took him inside where he saw pipes being manufactured and rings being assembled in them, he looked at the ring a small round disc which was necessary for manufacturing pipes and immediately decided to make an attempt to make it, so he slided the ring in his pocket in took home. He went home and looked at it for a while and then kept it aside. After an year he went with his brother in law to sonipat for some factory related work while the brother in law went to speak to manager, he started exploring the factory and too his curiosity he found a ring being manufacture the ring that he had at home. He memorised the operations and machines required went home borrowed the money and to get equipments and made his first ring. He was very satisfied after he made his first ring but what to do with it who will buy it??So then he went to the factory from where he had taken that ring and asked them where they got th rings from and how much did it costs, he found that they bought the rings from maharsthra and he could produce that at much less cost so he got his first order of 20 rings that day. The journey thus began from working at factory at day to working for own firm at night. After a year of work he had some name and hired two workers. But now the market was saturated so he had to do something to grow so he startd visiting factories in nearby states giving his samples and asking them to try the product. His startegy worked but now he could not operated from home with the light machinery and the new equipment demand 40-50 workers but here is experience came into play where he bought the machine and did some minor changes and optimized the process in such a way that now the work required just 8 workers and they produced the rings that even chinese were not making, he had his usp now and started getting orders. The success was such that within a few years he had his own factories and 15 workers, but the lockdown hit the business what was interesting was the way he tackled the situation. He noticed his children using FB and Whatsapp every day so he asked how it worked and did the most marwari thing ever, he started looking for keywords like pipes and steel and using profile picture filtering like those who had a picture of machinery in the DP, he started sending friends requests to them and started networking and asking for their superiors number and then sending them his catalogue which he had made with his phone, such a simple thing but so rare he used social media to build his market. Using this startegy he got  a bulk order from Mittal steels in these tough times and his ship sailed.Today he has a group of 2000 workers on FB connected with him so he is updated with industry and workers requirement.   

                       

His story made me realize that there is inspiration all around us and how a person with no formal business education was able to use almost all of verticals like operations, marketing and finance to manage a business successfully, We can learn from people like him to make opportunities out of no-where and build something of our own.

Mindful or Pocketful

                                        Mindful Meditation

                           

The word meditation implies not only the brain concentrating on a certain subject but also a great deal of attention. But primarily meditation means to measure. The whole question of becoming is involved in it, which is to measure: I am this, I will be that. I am greedy, but I will gradually become non-greedy, which is a form of measurement, which is a form of becoming. Both becoming in the affairs of the world and psychologically becoming. Measurement is comparison, to compare what is with what should be, the fact and the ideal, the fact becoming the ideal. All this is implied in the word. Indian gurus have brought this word into the West and made a lot of money out of it.

There have been various studies all over the world explaining importance of meditation not only in terms of focus, but also on the mental health and overall performance of individuals and organisation.

As we are living in the era of consumption even mindful meditation or what is known as vipasna in our texts is now being turned into a business opportunity by west. So in next section we will look at the market. 

                                                        The Market

Meditation market is expected to gain market growth in the forecast period of 2020 to 2027. Data Bridge Market Research analyses the market to account to USD 9.0 billion by 2027 growing at a CAGR of 10.40% in the above-mentioned forecast period. The growing awareness amongst the individual and world population about the hidden power of meditation and its unconventional outcomes for the health benefits to lead a healthy life is driving the market growth exponentially in the forecast period of 2020 to 2027.
 Manners and channels driving the germination of mediation market are, with the progressing pace of anxiety and mental strain and narrowing ratio of concentration, customers are actively relying on the measures provided by the meditation market. The up-and-coming tradition of thoughtful awareness is serving in inclination of organizations endeavoring mindfulness meditation. The swelling predominance of subconscious health dysfunctions, such as mood complications and anxiety troubles, over multiple age assemblies are rising in an extensive shift to the meditation market, during the forecast period of 2020 to 2027.
Some of the factors may act as the restrain for the meditation market growth is dearth of familiarity among the people and low penetration of the meditation market in the emerging economies. In coming future the heightening level of work and personal life stress will act as catalyst to maintain the equilibrium of market growth. 

                                

                                                        Opportunity

There are companies like mindspace in this space that are becoming extremely popular, it is time for us now to take the opportunity of "Atmanirbhar Bharat' and make these solutions available for the market which were developed in India. It can also be used for accelerated learning which some countries in west have started adopting. If we as Indians wont  grab the opportunity west might take our tradition , rename it and brand it as a new development as they have already started calling vipasna as mindful meditation and also whether it be sanskrit for linguistics or taking away the credit for algebra.

Future Of Retail

                                               

                                      RETAIL SECTOR

When we hear the word retail, the nearby kirana store or retail chains like Big Bazzar etc come to mind ,all part of physical retail channel the one which we have seen traditionally, but is the retail space the same like the one we used to see a few years back where we had to go out to shop? Maybe for some high end products but with advent of internet and e-commerce we have seen major shift in shopping patterns not just in urban areas now due corona induced lockdowns and internet penetration even rural population is shopping from the comfort of home at the click of a button. According to IBEF reports India is the fastest growing e-commerce market and is expected to grow at 1200 percent to 200 billion USD by 2026. The physical retail stores have not only seen a decline in footfall but also during lockdown the retail sector  faced losses of about 90,000 crores. But is this temporary?, is retail going to bounce back?

The pandemic has made people adjust to the new digital shopping routine and now what change was expected to come about in 5 years we are probably noticing now.There are various online platform delivering grocery to furniture and recently even automobile manufacturers have started selling online.

Competing with online retailers is not the only challenge but with Reliance retail, walmart and other retail aggregators coming into picture, the retailers will have to fight to keep their customers like never before.

Physical form of shopping may not become extinct in near future but with virtual reality and other technologies coming into picture the physical shopping may decline and online aggregators are able to provide low costs due to aggregation.

Looking at all of above conditions does not create a pretty picture for retail but there are a few things to consider-

1. There are some products like vehicles, clothes and some other high end items that people prefer to buy in store.
2. People in india still like to go out to shop.
3. Reliance, Walmart, etc are heavily investing in the retail market as they have realized there is still a lot of untapped potential in the indian retail market.
4. With advent of omnichannel distribution the almost everyone is benefited-

              Retailers - With increase in orders, recently when myntra started its omnichannel distribution the retail stores saw about 20-30 percent of increase in sales.

             Customers - Customers can get products on the same day of delivery and can easily track stores from where their order was delivered.

             Online platforms - They have seen reduction in transportation costs and increase in revenues due to improved service times and the returnability is also improved and becomes less expensive.

                    

We have seen how retail is affected by the technological and pandemic disruptions and it looks like omni channel is going to be the way forward and also the retailers will have to become more responsive and enhance the shopping experience in order to attract customers to the stores.

Shopping in future is going to be a experience and not a chore.                        

Business Communication 101

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Business communication is everywhere around us from hawkers outcries to Billboards on roads so we will try to understand basics of business communication and move on to personal branding. 

History Of Communication

Human communication was revolutionized with the origin of speech approximately 500,000 BCE. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago. The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol.

The oldest known symbols created for the purpose of communication were cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic age. The oldest known cave painting is located within Chauvet cavet, dated to around 30,000 BC.

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Business communication is essentially using the media to communicate the vision, product portfolio and services to potential customers. Organisations do it through marketing, customer relations, advertising and many other ways.In a recent session in NITIE by our alumnus Nikhil Kulkarni, co-founder Darwin Travel Tech we were taught about how one can successfully communicate business solution through the Pyramid Principle which is the simplest way to structure a documentin three parts i.e. Introduction, Main Body and Conclusion. He emphasized on the need to find answers to four basic questions before structuring the document -

1. What is the objective?
2. Who is the audience?
3. What is the context in which content will be consumed?

He also mentioned his formula to make documents, presentations and solutions professional and attractive -

1. Visual Content .
2. The MECE concept that states that sub-parts of Business communication document should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

                                

PERSONAL BRANDING

Personal branding is something that attracts companies, colleagues and sub-ordinates or for the matter of fact any unknown will want to work with you. In these commodity times people too are brands and it is essential to have a brand that would attract people or organisations to work with you. In his session Nikhil Sir mentioned the importance of personal branding and how can one create a personal brand for themselves, he gave examples of very famous celebrities like Dhoni and even people working in the IT or Banking how had created a brand for themselves. Mr Nikhil himself is a well known brand in the consulting industry with eleven years of experience in consulting and he left as associate director from their to start his own entrepreneurial journey. He has a blog since 2004 and encouraged all of us to start something on the digital platform to have a footprint and if all works out even influence. He suggested following -

• Start a Blog on medium (preferably)
• Start a Youtube channel( Can be about anything)
• Make a twitter account and post opinions.
• Use social media platforms like facebook and instagram to create content and be visible.

So we have discovered that business communication is required not just for businesses to be successfull but even for individuals. I would like to thank Nikhil sir for the session and allowing us to use his content to have our own visibility, I have attached his blog, have a look if you haven't yet,