Month: June 2007
Twelve Steps to Raise Your Self Esteem
DETERMINATION
Do you recall small brands?
Fevicol did it and how. Its advertising established it as a a household name and a generic for the category and won the agency O&M tonnes of awards. Other brands in low involvement categories like plywood, pens, glass are now following suit. So, why are agencies and advertisers getting so involved with these brands?
Plywood – now how many people are really excited about this product category? Chances are that very few don’t even know that there are atleast a 100 brands in the market. A majority of these brands don’t invest in any form of advertising. But market leaders Greenply and Century Ply want consumers to remember just their brand names. And they are doing this by creating some simple yet eye- catching advertising. Advertising that is winning awards like the Greenply film that won an Abby Gold early this year or the Century Ply ad which is getting talked about within days of its launch. This film took a year from conception to execution and finally hit television channels only in December. The brief given to the agency was just to create an interesting ad with a single-minded proposition!
Deputy MD, Century Ply, Sanjay Agarwal , “There have been certain failures as far as certain creatives are concerned in the past. But this time, it has to be good. We are trying to reach the masses. Plywood maybe low interest category but when you make your house, you are spending 15% of your expenditure on plywood.”
“This is a lot of money and if the name Century Ply is in your mind and if we can convert even 3%-4% of people from other brands – that’s a big development for me. It’s a Rs 10,000 crore market and a small shift for us. Another reason is we are into plywood but diversifying into cement and the agri business, and for that we have to create a brand and Century Ply is the brand that will go to the masses.”
It’s every brand’s attempt to reach out to the masses, even if they are not going to directly buy your product. Brands that have very low consumer involvment tend to make the mistake of focusing on what they think is their USP. The trick actually according to other brands like Camlin is, to forget about product applications and focus on creating a high involvment emotional product that will eventually deliver sales.
Executive Director, Camlin, Shriram Dandekar says, “Any soft sell ad will never give you direct information on the number of units sold or the number of units picked up but we believe that over a period of time in a continuity, when people see this ad, it will have good recall value – the theme will have a record and will leave an impression that Camlin has created a good ad and that means Camlin has a good product.”
Group Creative Director, Lowe, Preeti Nair explains, “Unlike a detergent or a soap, your involvment is very clear, these are the categories you don’t care what you are buying, therefore what name remains salient is what you will ask for. Saliency will happen only if you are memorable. A brand gets registered – it’s not because of how often the brand name comes, it’s at what time it comes, so if you take a single-minded benefit and do a commercial they’ll remember, you’ll get saliency on the brands. Brands like Fevicol, Greenply have done it.”
Such advertising has a definate advantage in terms of longer shelf life over advertising campaigns in the FMCG space. For most such brands, there is greater emphasis on the creative idea rather than the media plans. Most of these brands don’t spend more than Rs 3 crore annually on advertising, but definitely get a lot more bang for their buck!
Mentoring The Mentors
Mentoring The Mentors
Recent research by geneticists in the University of Chicago has thrown up the surprising finding that the human brain was evolving as recently as 5,800 years ago. This was well after the rise of the modern man 200,000 years ago. More importantly, the finding points out that our brains may still be evolving.
A lot of it is linked to the way our lives have changed fundamentally in the intervening millennia. When art, music and tool-making were emerging 37,000 years ago, our brains responded significantly to this change. The development of written language, the spread of agriculture and development of cities kicked in another important change-and another phase of evolution of the human brain.
With changes in patterns of everyday existence, our brains too evolved to accommodate these complexities. The evolution of our brains has also transformed the way humans deal with one another and develop a new set of leadership skills in each era of history.
In the case of the brain, luckily for us, the change occurs on its own. But for leaders, the onus of change is thrust on them. So, in a fast-changing corporate world, a manager must change and evolve his leadership style moves up in the hierarchy.
Mentoring, at its core, is about helping your people with advice on leading and managing in a new role. If they were not mentored at the time they moved to this role, they need it even more. They might have inadvertently picked up habits that could be holding them back from being more effective.
Have you moved to a new role recently? First, my congratulations! Now, to help you judge how well your style has evolved, here are two questions you can ask yourself:-
How many new habits have I adopted in response to the requirements of this role?
How many habits and activities have I discarded as not being relevant anymore?
Mentoring involves, first, helping leaders answer these two questions and, second, helping them through the much longer process of learning new habits and un-learning old ones.
Because management is a practice, it cannot really be taught in the classroom. At best the classroom can help us know the “What” and the “Why”. But what really matters is “How”. How to learn new habits, while also un-learning?
Also, the “How” would differ in each case-the differences being defined by the mentor and the mentee, their respective styles and temperament, the organisational culture, and the needs of the organisation.
The extremely outgoing leader will naturally have a way of mentoring that is different from another who prefers a more toned down style. Similarly, the way this leader with an outgoing personality is mentored will differ from the one who prefers a less flamboyant approach.
Cultural factors too play an important role. This was recently driven home to me quite forcefully while working with an executive team comprising members from Western Europe, South-East Asia and India. Their styles were influenced quite strongly by their respective cultural backgrounds. But more importantly, there were many common areas too. We used these commonalities in our mentoring programme to develop the foundation for achieving higher team performance.
An Acquired Skill
Though mentoring is an acquired skill (learnt only by doing), what is usually not mentioned is the fact that it involves a fairly steep learning curve. Rather than learn while naturally making mistakes, we prefer to a it as managers and leaders. But the more we make mistakes, the better we become.
Also, to clarify, mentoring is not the same as offering suggestions. At best, suggestions-for example, “always do this while talking to a vendor”, or, “never do this in a client meeting”-qualify as suggestions.
It takes time, persistent and conscious effort to become an effective mentor. But it becomes far easier to learn, while making fewer mistakes, by watching others do it first. By having role models.
“GE’s training works because of a thousand different things, most of which have nothing to do with training”, declares GE’s Chief Learning Officer Rober Corcoran. He adds that 20 per cent of leadership development is a result of mentoring, coaching and role models.
[To know more about the other 80%, see The Leadership Factory (Part I) and The Leadership Factory (Part II) ]
Leadership, and by extension, mentoring, are learnt best by a process of apprenticeship, where we first observe someone doing it, before attempting it ourselves. Carl Bass, COO of Autodesk the US $1.5 billion software company, is candid. “As an executive, you’re always being watched by employees,” he says, “and everything you say gets magnified-so you teach a lot by how you conduct yourself.”
Mentoring, often, is “taught” to the leaders in the middle-rung of the organisations first. But what gets in the way of their becoming effective mentors is the fact that they don’t have any role models to observe and learn from. A few try and muddle through. The majority simply follow the path of least resistance, and leave the learning behind in the classroom or their notepads.
On the other hand, if these skills are first learnt at the top, the senior executives then act as the role models. They then disseminate these skills to the next level of leaders. In effect, mentoring skills flow down the organisation chart. Mentoring, like leadership development, exhibits a trickle-down effect-what gets to the bottom depends on the quantity poured at the top.
It goes without saying that not all that trickles down will ever reach the base. So, the more I pour, the more reaches the last level. In any mentoring programme, mentoring the mentors is the important activity. Everything else follows naturally. And leadership styles throughout the organisation evolve much easily, like our brain does.
American leaders studying the Gita
American leaders studying the Gita
The concept of the crucible and the spark that sets off the alchemy was lucidly explained by a young man who had set his heart on conquering India. Alexander the Great, when 16 years old, told his secretary, Eumenes, “The gods put dreams in the hearts of men; dreams that are often much bigger than they are. The greatness of a man lies in that painful discrepancy between the goal he sets himself and the strength that nature granted him when he came into the world.”
This simple and profound statement points to three eternal truths about the essence of leaders. A leader has a passionately desired goal in his or her mind. A leader has the honesty and courage to admit a personal incapacity to reach that goal. Nevertheless, he strives to improve himself to obtain the goal and thus emerges as the leader we recognise.
Gandhi and Alexander, bot h great leaders , were very different persons: one a man of peace, the other a hero of war. Gandhi was a small man with a big dream. Like Alexander, he also had a goal he pursued relentlessly — though unlike Alexander’s his goal was to throw off a conqueror of India. His autobiography My Experiments with Truth recounts his lifelong efforts to find a better way to reach his goal and acquire the personal strength necessary.
We need more leaders in India in many walks of life. Our young people need appropriate role models, not all of whom may be powerful or wealthy. Moreover, any movement to develop leaders in India should hark back to some eternal truths. To become leaders, young people need opportunities to reflect deeply on the context in which they must lead and to ignite the spark within themselves. Because, to become leaders, they need much more than the style of leaders: they must care for others, have commitment to a cause, and the courage to take the first, difficult steps — the wisdom that Krishna gave to Arjun.
The skills leaders need are inseparable from the context in which they must lead. Sun Tzu will remain a good source of wisdom to win a war. But the Gita may provide better lessons for living in harmony with the world and with one’s conscience too. Therefore, in the drive to teach leadership through books and seminars, we must offer models that fit the needs of our times.
CEOs that create great wealth for their shareholders are good models for running a company. But they may not be appropriate models for many vital issues that must be addressed in the world today. Disillusioned by a spate of corporate scandals and by the macho but mindless invasion of Iraq, Americans need new role models. In India too we need leaders who win by inclusion and who secure peace and not merely win wars.
Therefore, the interest in the Gita in the US is encouraging, as well as the revival of Gandhi as a role model for Indian youth in a very enjoyable Bollywood movie, an idiom they can relate to more easily than erudite discussions of his philosophy.
MANY leadership summits that showcase powerful and wealthy leaders and popular books on leadership fail to get to the heart of leadership. Books that present lists of the common traits of leaders expect that others will become leaders by applying these lists in their lives. Such lists may describe the management systems that leaders employ to get to their goals, but not the process of combustion within: they do not explain what makes leaders emerge.
In contrast to such lists, Warren Bennis , an authority on leadership, describes the process of emergence of leaders in his book, Geeks and Geezers. He says that while leaders may come in many forms and have very different trai ts; all leaders are born in a ‘crucible’ within which, through an intense alchemy, they acquire their leadership mettle.
The concept of the crucible and the spark that sets off the alchemy was lucidly explained by a young man who had set his heart on conquering India. Alexander the Great, when 16 years old, told his secretary, Eumenes, “The gods put dreams in the hearts of men; dreams that are often much bigger than they are. The greatness of a man lies in that painful discrepancy between the goal he sets himself and the strength that nature granted him when he came into the world.”
This simple and profound statement points to three eternal truths about the essence of leaders. A leader has a passionately desired goal in his or her mind. A leader has the honesty and courage to admit a personal incapacity to reach that goal. Nevertheless, he strives to improve himself to obtain the goal and thus emerges as the leader we recognise.
Gandhi and Alexander, both great leaders , were very different persons: one a man of peace, the other a hero of war. Gandhi was a small man with a big dream. Like Alexander, he also had a goal he pursued relentlessly — though unlike Alexander’s his goal was to throw off a conqueror of India. His autobiography My Experiments with Truth recounts his lifelong efforts to find a better way to reach his goal and acquire the personal strength necessary.
We need more leaders in India in many walks of life. Our young people need appropriate role models, not all of whom may be powerful or wealthy. Moreover, any movement to develop leaders in India should hark back to some eternal truths. To become leaders, young people need opportunities to reflect deeply on the context in which they must lead and to ignite the spark within themselves. Because, to become leaders, they need much more than the style of leaders: they must care for others, have commitment to a cause, and the courage to take the first, difficult steps — the wisdom that Krishna gave to Arjun.
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