Stairs are the best chairs

There was this simple thought that came up at a Services Marketing Class, as to the kind of seats that we sat in. Typically if you look at an MBA classroom it is a horse-shoe-type setting, where there's a professor who teaches by standing at something called a melting-pot. Keeping the jargons aside, he basically facilitates the shooting of ideas from one corner of the class to the other. In fact b-schools like HBS and Wharton take pride in having horse-shoe classes! I really don't find it to be a big deal. Some arguments in an MBA are really without reason at times. It reminds me of the saying; All fart and no shit.!

Anyways, so that was one setting. But what I'm trying to say is that these settings were meticulously 'made' and were given proper thought when being constructed. But a setting that so intuitively got into our system was something that was never meant to be a seat in the first place. I'm talking about the stairs.

Stairs is perhaps one of those places where you just go and sit. In a classroom, you decide which end to sit, whereas when it comes to stairs, you never really decide do you? You just go there and sit.

Steps/stairs give you all the benefits that a normal chair does not. You can alter height, decide how much you wanna stretch yourself, use other stairs as table-tops, sit at different levels on the steps and surprisingly, you can see everyone even though you sit at different levels.

Stairs don't have cushions, they don't have a back rest, they don't have pneumatic bars to increase/decrease height, yet most students find them the best places to sit and chat. And believe me, they are excellent places to work on your laptops as well.

Now the question is what has all this got to do with the whole MBA setting? Think about it like this… Having swanky classrooms isn't just the only way to make a b-school experience great. Or having great dormitories isn't the only way a hostel life can be improved.

Think… Why can't people put power points near staircases so that we can use our laptops on AC power? Why can't you have vending machines at staircases and not near the canteen? There've been a million times when my batch mates would want a can of Coke while smoking at the staircases. But they were too lazy to go and get one from the vending machine which was 4 floors below.

It's quite surprising that neither the architects, nor the civil engineers nor the deans or directors of educational institutes got this bonding between stairs and students.

I save my a$$ when in trouble, I don't care about you

Did you ever realize how paranoid banks are when sending out money? And also on the other hand, we as customers too are lousy enough not to care about how the banks treat us.

Take the example of a cheque vs. a pay-in slip. Banks use extensive methods to make sure that when money goes out of the bank, it goes to whom it’s meant for. But when the cash comes in, it really doesn’t matter to them who’s depositing the cash and into whose account.

The instruments banks use are pretty much evidence to that effect. A typical cheque from any bank is printed on thick paper, which is printed using special ink, and also contains watermarks to ensure that the cheque is genuine. Then we have the MICR letters, or the letters that you find towards the bottom of the cheque. These weird looking numbers with dots and dashes are called the MICR fonts, which are printed using magnetic ink, and are directly machine read, and not human read to prevent error. And the entire printing is done by a 4 color Heidelberg Printing Machine applying a 2-ton weight on each paper to ensure that the paper completely absorbs all the ink and there’s no washout.

And above and beyond that, all the cheques are properly arranged, are gum and thread bound, are perfectly perforated so that they don’t tear improperly, have enough space to write the ‘amount’ and have the account number and the account holder’s name printed.

Now take another instrument, which sits towards the other side of the spectrum; the pay-in slip. This lousy little piece of paper is printed on a paper that’s probably recycled for the nth time, which has pathetic printing, which has virtually no perforation to tear away the slip, which has no thread or gum binding, and have very little space to type in the amount that you want to deposit.

You run a complete financial check on the person who writes the cheque. Why doesn’t a bank ever verify whether the right person is depositing the money or not? Yeah I know it’s a cranky thought (who would ever deposit their hard earned money in your account just like that?!). But think of it like this: I’m a businessman who doesn’t want to give a contract to company X. Now a guy from that company, who’s hell bent on taking revenge, goes to my bank, deposits Rs.100000 and then sues me on grounds of bribery! I’m finished!

Over and above that, in a cheque, you need to write the amount in words and numbers only once, while in a pay-in slip you need to do that twice, plus also specify the combinations of the denominations used at the back of the pay-in slip!

Why do I need to go through all that torture? Why have MICR letters and nicely printed paper for yourselves and a lousy ‘tissue-paper’ish paper with no space to write anything for me?!
A cheque is a symbol of how a bank treats itself, and a pay-in slip is a symbol of how a bank treats its customer.

If you want a cheque cleared today, you need to give it to the bank before 11 a.m. But the bank will most certainly take 1 day to deposit your amount into the bank, regardless of whether you give it in the morning or evening.

If I lose a debit/credit card, I really have no way to tell the bank that I lost my debit/credit card, except to call up my friends or relative to either give me the phone number to the bank’s hotline or ask them to do the needful. But if I ever call them up to ask about a few services, they’ll run a full check to make sure that it’s me!

While withdrawing money from an ATM I need to enter a pin number and there’s also a miniature camera on the front if you’ve noticed for security sake. But if I use a debit/credit card at a Visa POS, nobody ever verifies the signature, nobody ever asks whether I’m Bhushir Mankad or some Mr.Chagan Ghelphadiya.

Where’s the security? Where’s the assurance? There’s no consistency in any of the instruments used; be it cheques, pay-in slips, debit cards, credit cards, anything.

This is what happens when the Citi never sleeps – this was what my professor said to the whole debacle. (For the ones who didn’t get the joke… forget it…)

(inspired from the Service Marketing class which I took as an extra credit course, but wasn't granted one eventually!)

I Miss...

It has been like half a month in this city-state-country, and there are many things that I miss about Dubai.

I miss the mini-kitchen of my hostel room, I miss the refrigerator where I used to stock a crate full of coke or cartons of low-fat milk using which I made coffee everyday to fill my Starbucks sipper! J

I miss my ipod which was hooked to my ears for almost all the time except for when I was in class.

I miss Al Ain Centre and Jumbo which were like my gateway to the electronics world.

I miss the DragonMart (which was normally called as ChinkiMart) which virtually stored nothing of our use.

I miss the wide ocean near the Burj Al Arab, or even the crystal blue beach of Abu Dhabi.

I miss the mid-night birthday parties where the entire floor used to ransack one room to give a hell of a birthday bash, so much that even macho dudes used to end up crying like sissies.

I so very much miss Carrefour! It was like the citadel of hypermarkets for me.

I miss all the places that I couldn't visit simply because I was underage! (I'm referring to discotheques. The minimum age barrier was 21. And I am 20! L )

I miss Music Room, where I did get a chance to get in, and where they played perhaps the best Live Rock I've ever heard.

I miss WLAN, which was popularly known as 'chori ka net' before we got our own net connection in place.

I miss QDs which was like a slick lounge bar near the ocean shore and where I perhaps had the best sheesha till now!

I miss www.dubizzle.com which is like the best place to get used goods in Dubai at freaking low prices.

I miss the 3Dhs puff at the Chill Out Zone which had mayonnaise and coriander leaves on both the ends.

I miss the unlimited coke at the Internet City Subway outlet

I miss the mallu cab guy! Well, kinda.!

I miss the Shiekh Zayed where I hitch hiked for like 6 hours.

I miss many other things! Its just not easy to describe a nation where you barged in and left within a span of 6 months. There was too much of influx. And it takes time to settle in.

From Carrefour to Dena Bank

There are some vital pointers that you learn when in a business school. And especially when you are in a b-school that’s ever so evolving you really get to know the stuff that really matter to the current world. That’s one good thing about SPJCM. They are always open to improve themselves, to the extent that they ask us on a periodic basis about how to improve and what to do. Not many b-schools take the student’s suggestions so seriously.

Anyways, so I was talking about pointers. And one such piece of advice that I learned, is that business is not about doing business in a business-like way! People from venture capital derive newer business practices from the way a mother divides a cake between her 2 siblings! It sounds funny but it’s true. So to do your business in a better way, it’s necessary to understand how someone else does business and then borrow ideas from other fields as well.

One such syllogism which I felt would be really cool is the barcode reader at a Carrefour aisle. To give you a bit of a background, Carrefour is the second largest retail chain in the world, with a very large presence in Dubai, where I was for like 6 months. Now, at any of the Carrefour hypermarkets you find a simple barcode reader at the end of every aisle. Dubai surprisingly has no MRP system in place (so they can charge anywhere from 1dhs to 5dhs for a can of coke). Thus, the price tags at Carrefour for each product are printed at the edge of the shelf where a product is placed. Now if you can’t find the price tag for whatever reasons, you can just go to the barcode reader, point the barcode of the product towards the scanner, the scanner immediately scans the barcode, consults the main system and displays the ‘Carrefour price’ for the product (since there’s no MRP). The entire process takes less than 5 seconds to complete (if you exclude the time taken to walk to one of the barcode readers that is).

Typically what you are doing is asking the customer to do the job instead some attendant assisting him/her.

Now let’s keep Carrefour away for a while and talk about Dena Bank. Like any nationalised bank, Dena Bank too has its own set of drawbacks when it comes to service. Its true many nationalised banks are now providing services that are at par or even better than what the private banks do, but sadly Dena Bank isn’t one of them. Now my home town is a shanty old place which virtually hasn’t changed at all since a long...long time. And that town has a Dena Bank where I have an account.

One fine day I was standing in the queue for cheque deposits. More than half of the people in the queue were there to get their account balance checked. The people who were with me in the queue were somewhere in the bottom of the pyramid segment. These people earn not more than $3 a day. Their account balances would never cross the Rs.10,000 threshold. For these people, owning an ATM card that has a yearly fee of Rs.299, and carries a penalty cost for having a lower balance is out of question. And that’s the reason why they keep pestering the teller guy by giving him their pass books and asking for the account balance. That’s the reason why more than half the people in my queue were not there to deposit a cheque. What I also saw while I was waiting for my turn were the ‘Target 2000 cr’ tags dangling from the ceilings. Apparently Dena Bank seems to have initiated a target to achieve a pan-India bank deposit of Rs.2000 crores by 2008 I think.

Now get a load of this: The teller guy, who’s one small entity in this ‘target’ of achieving Rs.2000 crores of deposits by 2008 wastes more than half of his time in just checking account balances! And there must be innumerable such teller guys throughout India who must be wasting some part of their time just checking balances only! If that guy is too busy checking balances when will he accept cheques that directly help him in his objective of getting more deposits?

Can’t the ‘balance checking’ activity be deskilled? So that even the customer can check the balance without the need of having an ATM card?

Can’t we help the teller guy by allowing him to do what he’s really supposed to do?

Can’t we bring the barcode readers from Carrefour and install them in Dena Bank?

That gadget will occupy less than 12 square inch on the wall but will do a lot of things. It will de-skill the job of balance checking. You are co-creating value along with the customer without having to invest in large ATM machines and plastic cards. All you need is a normal passbook with an embedded unique barcode. If the bank doesn’t have a centralised banking system it’s ok to implement this system even on a local scale. You are removing all the unproductive work done by the teller guy. The barcode reader empowers the customer, it gives more productive time to the teller guy and it decreases clutter.

The system is scalable (since it can be implemented on a large-scale basis if required. All you need is to hook up all the barcode readers with the mainframe)

The system is robust and can work under harsh environments (since a barcode reader doesn’t involve any moving parts. It just has a laser scanner and an LCD display screen)

The system is fool-proof (obviously you don’t expect someone to hack into the mainframe using a barcode reader do you?)

The system does deliver a better price-performance relationship (because by charging somewhere around Rs.20 from the customer as a onetime payment for getting an embedded barcode, I’m giving the customer an opportunity to check his balance as many times as he wants till the time he no longer remains the bank’s customer)

This is how Dena Bank can derive learning from Carrefour.

This is how the teller guy can do what he’s actually meant to do (i.e. to deposit cheques)

This is how Dena Bank can achieve its pan-India ‘Rs.2000 crore by 2008’ target.

What say?

The tale of the 2 cab drivers

The final few days in Dubai are like the first few days in Dubai. There's a renewed spirit in the air and all that aura crap! You tend to look at things quite differently. Suddenly you start looking at people as if they are not 'just there', but 'why' they are 'there'? Which brings us to the point of the discussion: the two cab drivers.

Apparently, we were on our way to a little bit of outing late in the evening. It had been a long time since we could call ourselves as 'free' in real sense, and we wanted to freak out sort of. So we called for Sudhir – the guy who transports people to their destinations at half of what it would cost in a normal cab. We waited for 2 hours for that dimwit to arrive, and he didn't as luck would have it.

So finally we decided to get into a legal cab. We got hold of some guy, who was last in the line of cabs, but somehow got to us first and we sat in without realising that its ethically wrong to do that, and realised only after there was a barrage of words (abusive quite naturally) hurling back and forth between the cab driver and the rest of the cab drivers.

Of course, nobody can sue him or something, since there's no written rule, but whatever! The point is he broke an understanding in the community (ever seen how the rickshaw drivers at a rickshaw stand collectively decide who goes first and all? So this was like one of those times when a rickshaw driver broke the norm.)

And to clarify, we live in International City (though there's nothing so international about it; except the fact that you've got buildings named after countries and flags of different colours fluttering on the road dividers) and International City is quite far from the main city (i.e. Dubai). And even cab drivers do have this tendency to get lost in the pursuit of getting to the main land given the fact that there are so many 'round-abouts'. (round-abouts are pesky little places and are the 'only' places where you can take a U-turn on the road or move into some other direction; else the road runs straight as long as it can)

So this guy messed up in taking round-abouts (which means we travelled more distance since the road runs straight) and the bill was shot up by 100%.! And the fact that he had messed up was quite apparent on his face, since he had stopped blabbering something about we being 'sharif' people which he had begun right from the moment we got into the cab.

So what do we do? It said 90 on the cab meter while ideally it shouldn't have gone more than 45 dhs (dirhams – UAE currency)! So we zonked that guy's brain out regarding the road signs and the fact that the bill doubled. We eventually only paid 45 dhs, since that's what it ideally costs. Somehow I was happy about what happened to the cab driver since the way he bypassed those dutiful and ethical cab drivers and got to us first, this was what he rightfully deserved in the end.

Now the fun part starts when we are to go back to International City. For the ride back home, we found a cab dude from Pakistan. Very soft spoken, polite, but as most cab drivers, he too was quite a jabberwocky. And he talked about his experience when some white men hopped into his cab, all drunk, started abusing his nation and the people, and then declined even to pay for the transport. The complete opposite of what we had experienced while leaving International City.

And now starts the mindless introspection and comparison of the two drivers (when you're into something called an MBA, you become so increasingly analytical, that even cab drivers become a case study for you!) Right, so back to the cab drivers! Now firstly, both the cab drivers did what they had to, to earn money. Some use more aggressive and unaccepted ways (aka Cab driver 1) while some use the rightful path (aka Cab driver 2). And yet both get screwed in the end (Cab driver 1 got only 45 dhs instead of 90 cause he screwed up in the round-abouts, and cab driver 2 didn't get the pay from those 'white men' cause they were all drunk)

So who stands to gain in this whole 'ethical' and 'non-ethical' debate? I think none of them!

Now if you put the philosophical jargons aside and come to economics, there too, this behaviour has a lot to offer. Both of the drivers have come here to earn a living. If I am right, they fly back to their nations maybe once in a year, and drive cabs almost throughout the year. They must be living in a 1 room apartment or a 2 room apartment that must be shared by 6-7 people, since there's no chance that they can afford to rent an apartment alone.

Just think, they meet their families only 15 times or so during their lifetime, they have a living space of less than 7 cubic feet for the whole year, and their work space is again less than 7 cubic feet. With virtually no emotional outlet, the passengers are quite naturally a preferred source of venting their feelings.

Isn't it ironic? They give out their feelings to the people whom they might never see again in life! The only thing that holds them back from settling back in their country along with their family is the exchange rate of 1dhs = Rs.12.33

Such is the power the money wields on them. They hate the whites for being too discriminative when it comes to skin; they hate the fellow workers because they add competition and make them earn lesser; they hate their life since they can't be nearer to their families.

Yet, they deliver value at sustained levels; yet they are always soft spoken; yet they are always at the service of the customers, and yet they eventually stand to lose, whether they use ethical or unethical norms!

The tendency to believe

Sometimes, I feel we are really stupid people. Our heritage and culture system has taught a lot about respecting the elders, and giving due reverence. But as the days progress in this myriad of classes and field visits and case studies and all that's so very MBAish, there comes a realisation that most of the people who have succeeded are the ones who challenge the norm. We as duds accept what the elders have to say. The very thought of questioning what they say has never occurred to us. Perhaps that's why we never questioned the source of the data on the internet; perhaps that's why we never questioned what the eldest CEO sucker of any company suggested to do in a case study. Maybe that's why we even blindly listen to the professors as to what they say, without having an opinion of our own. And maybe, just maybe that's also the reason why we are so very confident of what the MNC's and other big companies are doing to our country. Maybe even more confident than the MNC's themselves!

There was this realisation that dawned upon me while shopping in Carrefour (the world's second largest chain of retail outlets after Wal-Mart), that while I was back home, every morning there used to be 2 bags of milk laid at my doorstep, freeing me from the trouble of buying milk; that at precisely 9 a.m. everyday a hawker selling vegetables used to pass through my house with fresh vegetables; that the local Kirana guy used to stock a few pieces of that special brand just because I used to buy from him; that the laundry guy used to come every alternate day on his skinny Kinetic Luna with BIG bundles of ironed clothes, and charging only Rs.1.5 per garment including the cost of the home delivery… and all of them, used to do this same mundane task, everyday with sustained delivery standards throughout the year. 24/7, 365 days a year.

And the lives of all these people are getting challenged because the MNCs suddenly realise that organised retail adds up to only 3% of the whole retail pie chart. And thus, they start setting up back end services, start having talks with Indian companies and everyone is all gaga over the influx of hypermarkets and all that stuff. The 'stuff' that's eventually going to get me a job once I get out of this value addition phase! And what upsets me even more is the fact that I'm going to be one of the catalysts in the process of the demise of these minions; these everyday people who have delivered value with such precision, on a regular basis for a long…long time. So much so that it has become like a well-oiled system, the absence of which puts you off entirely. Just recollect a day when the doodhwala didn't arrive, or the laundry guy didn't come making you to wear the previous day's shirt again or something. It puts you off to such a great extent.

And on the other side, when MNCs put up hypermarkets you go to those glittering places in your car along with the family for shopping! Earlier, the doodhwala used to come to your doorstep to deliver milk at HIS cost. And now, YOU are going to the doodhwala (hypermarkets for those who didn't get the metaphor) at his doorstep to buy milk at YOUR cost (obviously you must have used your car for the transport to the hyper mart you idiot!)

Now tell me who's a dud? The doodhwala, or you??