Food for Thought!! Pieces from my mind...all my own, of course!!

Folks,

When I see our people flaunting their laptops and their PDA, Blackberry’s etc I am reminded of the yesteryears and honestly, we don’t have to look too far into the past. Sam Pitroda had not appeared in the domestic political scenario and we had an ancient and archaic telephone network that generally worked to your disadvantage. If you were extremely lucky and got through to hear the ringing tone at the other end it would invariably end up at the wrong number. The increased palpitation for having finally got through to the person would be short lived and the excitement would deflate like a punctured balloon. Such was the dependability of the so called wired telephony network.

I still distinctly remember the palpable excitement with which we, my sisters and I, observed the linesmen draw two sets of thin gauge GI wires from the nearest telephone pole to our home. Our joy new no bounds when the black telephone instrument manufactured by ITI out of Bakelite was finally connected to the set of wires. The instrument was pretty heavy and it took an effort to hold the handset for long. More often the shortest and the longest sentence used to be the word ‘Hello’ and nothing beyond. In our lives those days we must have chanted the word ‘Hello’ a million times or more, but each time the excitement would be fresh with an expectation of hearing another voice on the ear piece, but in vain. Both my sisters were lucky, though…they would talk for hours with their friends and my parents forever would be asking them to put the handset down, lest an important or an emergency call from the Plant would not get through to my dad. They had a huge number of friends, as Durgapur had attracted talent from all over the country.

Establishing a Steel Plant at Durgapur was the dream of Jawaharlal Nehru to make India self sufficient in basic infrastructure. He had adopted a socialistic pattern in building our nation and indeed that was the need at that point in time. Eminent Engineers and personalities from various walks of life had gathered in this distant village called Durgapur, a place selected by the then Chief Minister of Bengal Dr. B C Roy for starting an Industrial revolution on the banks of river Damodar. At one time, Durgapur with its sheer size and number of large and heavy industry was often called as the ‘Ruhr of India’. The Ruhr is an Urban area in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany with an Industry backdrop. With 4435 km² and a population of some 5.3 million, it is the largest urban agglomeration in Germany and 4^th largest in Europe after Moscow, London and Paris.

As the saying goes that Life goes on in circles…it was a full circle when I came back to Kolkata in 1982. After graduating from Durgapur in Higher Secondary, I went on to do my Chemical Engineering at Trichy, worked for a brief 9-month period at Bangalore, then at Mumbai for a year and half before heading home to Kolkata. Work life at Kolkata was quite eventful. I was part of the sales team within an SBU (Strategic Business Unit) selling air pollution control equipments like bag houses and electrostatic precipitators for Steel, Power and Cement industry. Project sales can be very different. The minimum price of the equipment we sold as a project from “Concept to Commissioning” – C2C was easily a Crore of Rupees and I am talking about circa 1980 to 1992. We would end up talking to Assistant Engineers, Procurement Engineers, and even to the Managing Director at the customers end to help them take a decision. Obviously the gestation time was huge from the first quote to getting or losing an order. It could even take a year and half for that final decision.

You can then imagine the sheer number of visits we made to talk to our customers. With phones virtually non-existent, the next best thing was a Face-to-Face (F2F) discussion. We were forever on the move!! Our brief case would be ever ready with the basics for survival. A hard box with a stainless steel band around it, the VIP or Aristocrat as it used to be called, God alone knows how many unknown Indians would have gone for a knee replacement because of these hard brief case. Perched neatly in our hands it would hit the onrushing and unsuspecting fellow human beings in a crowded bus or a train. Looking back at the past, the absence of telephones honestly made us talk to our customers more F2F and we spent quality time with them during office hours and if acceptable, outside office hours as well. We would get to know a number of people in their departments, knew how the hierarchy worked and who would eventually influence the decision makers.

Let me however, get back to the point…I am certainly digressing from my original thought process….in a lighter vein, did I have one?

I wanted to talk about the black-out of information in the family once we moved out of town on duty. Having a phone at home was a luxury we couldn’t afford as we were in the early days of building a career. It came as a shock, when I told my wife, just a week after marriage that I would be traveling out of town. First question was, “Where and how will you travel?” Her heart sank when I said I had to first go to Delhi by flight and then by a train to Chittorgarh, in Rajasthan. To her next question, “When will you return?” I did not have any clue! We were always given an open ticket, since it was impossible to gauge the requirement of time for a decision by the customer and secondly it would cost a bomb those days to change a flight option. The time span between ‘Bye Bye’ before starting and ‘Hi’ after returning was always a big question. The good part of the story is that we survived, and we ended up selling very well!!

Compare this to “Now”….I send an sms after reaching the airport – the speed at which our folks zip on the way to Devanahalli airport will prove the old adage right…..that there are more people dying on their way to the airport than those flying!! Then the sms after reaching destination, at the end of the day in case of a stay back or just after landing back….so on and so forth. In spite of an information overload, we tend to worry these days and less of talking happens.

All the gadgets in the world will not come anywhere near a F2F conversation and for building a rapport with customers. We have learnt to flaunt them, in fact, go to the extent of saying that we cannot achieve anything without them, but touch your heart and think, has this brought you closer to your customers in the real sense? Do you really know what he or she wants from your organization?

I am not for a moment saying that we should not graduate to own these smart gadgets. But, to say that work will be hampered and nothing will get done without these instruments is hard to understand. Before the PDA arrived, a laptop was a ‘must’. With the arrival of PDA, laptop was forgotten. Once these are shut down in the office, it is switched ‘ON’ only after returning to the office the following day. PDA’s aren’t used to their capacity either. Only emails which require a very urgent attention get to be answered in an sms style abbreviated text with scant respect to language or the flow of content.

The above is only a small example of how things are shaping up here in India and hence, the question! Are we Indians getting more and more expensive to operate and thereby pricing ourselves out? In the Year 2000, the slogan for outsourcing work to India was “Come for Cost and Stay for Quality”; can we say that this slogan still holds good or have we somewhere lost control on costs? Are we thinking about what the customer wants and at what price points or, are we happy stating that we are like this only! Take it or leave it!

What worries is the slow change in our mindset about Customer Satisfaction. Gone are the days when we were more than willing to sacrifice ourselves to keep our customers happy and satisfied with our output. We were more than willing to put in additional hours of work to complete a job in hand. Is that fire still burning or has it got doused? Remember, we as a country took pride in our speed of response and the no-nonsense approach to work, similar to other Asian countries. We were once upon a time workaholics, but not anymore. We were known to perform multiple tasks, save on manpower costs with less dependence on technology.

While affordable technology and gadgets have arrived, the old values and the ethos seem to have taken a back seat. Is it then time for us to re-look at ourselves and re-define our goals and objectives with respect to ‘Operational Effectiveness’? While the answer is an overwhelming ‘YES’, the issue is who will show us the direction. While it is easy to point a finger at others, remember, when we do point a finger, three of them point back at us and ‘THAT’ is our answer.

Cheers!!