Is your job protected against recession?

The word recession is common place now. People getting laid off is catching an upward trend in India, thanks to the recent global meltdown. Though this presents a lot of uncertainties around one's career, yet it gives you an opportunity to sit back and evaluate areas where you think you can add better values than others.

In India, most people take a career by force, not by choice. And situations like this create an opportunity for people to sit back and evaluate their options. If you are a software engineer working on some very low level activity where you feel there is very little value addition for the end customer, then you have all reasons to get worried. You need to sit back and ask yourself: are you working on something which is considered valuable by your customer? Is it a high priority item for your customer? Is customer deriving advantage from your work? If answer is NO, then you better re-evaluate and change your focus area as soon as possible.

Just go by one principle: "If there is no taker for your product/service, there is something wrong with your job. And such inefficiencies will be dealt by your company during such bad times."

Not Just ROI, but A Quicker ROI – Enterprise Software

When bad time comes, every company goes into a “cost-cutting” mode to ensure a relatively better bottom-line. And I believe, from a strategy perspective, controlling bottom-line is a better & cost-effective strategy during such time than trying to pep-up top-line. Cutting costs, in other words, means improving operational efficiency. And Operational Efficiency means “doing things better in relatively lesser time”. And Enterprise Software enables to achieve such a goal in an organization. So companies should focus on investing in Enterprise Software to maintain the bottom-line. In the same time, the key challenge for such a company is to ensure a Quicker ROI so that they can stop bleeding in fastest possible time. Hence the focus of an Enterprise Software Company should be to ensure “Not just ROI, but A Quicker ROI”…. 

Consumer Sentiments during Economic Downturn

Economic Downturn has hit hard the consumer sentiments and consumer spending is substantially low at present. Let's try and understand; what is the effect of such a situation on the consumption of different types of products.

I divide the whole range of products into 3 categories; Essential Products, Luxury Products (Designed for high class people), Semi Luxury Products (Considered as luxury for middle class).

Essential Products like Food items are always critical for consumers. Unless the economy is like the one in 1930, it's difficult for such items to see a downward trend in their consumption.

Luxury Products like Mercedes cars which are primarily designed for high class & cash rich people, are unlikely to see a heavy downward trend since the economic downturn has very minimal effect on the pile of cash that these set of people are sitting on.

Semi Luxury Products like Nike shoes, Jewelry items; which are primarily considered as Luxury for Middle class people will see a heavy downward fall in the consumption pattern. A middle class person often goes to a Nike showroom when he/she has good amount of disposable income, doesn’t think much about value-for-money and emotionally attached with the brand. Then he/she doesn’t mind paying 100% extra on his/her shoes. During economic downturn, middle class often faces the maximum risk of loosing jobs. Mostly his source of income is through salary and his cash reserves are normally not good enough to sustain his family without a job for even 12 months. So it essentially for him to cut down on the fatty expenses (he will be happy not going to Nike showroom) and ensure his cash reserve increases so as to face the effect of bad time in near future.

My 2 cents on it!!!

A true Leader's best friend - Ethics

A leader’s role goes beyond just making money for his followers and company. A leader stands out as a role model for the followers. It’s critical for him to be aware of his own responsibilities and, more importantly ethical values. When it comes to ethical values, Narayan Murthy stands out as a true role model. He probably understands the importance of ethical values more than anybody else. And he being at the helm of Infosys, I am sure the company will never face a Satyam like situation. In my view, Satyam's failure is more of ethical in nature than anything else. 

I just want to close this with one simple remark: "For a leader, Doing what is Right is more important than showing what is Right." I know it is common sense, but often common sense is very uncommon!!!