Campus 2 Corporate

Believe it or not, you are a negotiator. Everyone negotiates something every day. Sometimes we negotiate with ourselves on different positions or sometimes we negotiate with others in order to gain the position. People negotiate even when they don’t think themselves as doing so. Negotiation is a basic means of getting what you want from others. Everyone wants to participate in decision making activity; fewer accept the decision dictated by someone else. Its not only in personal life that we reach to a decision through negotiation, this happens at every juncture whether government, business or family.

Although negotiation happens every day but it is not so easy. Sometimes people use strategies to negotiate that leave people worn out, dissatisfied or alienated and frequently all three. Now when I say that we are involved in negotiation in some way or other, which means we are selling something by which we want to gain position. And thus it is a sales process. Precisely, I am writing this article for the students who are all set to join corporate soon. But this can also be used in day to day life and in the long run. There is always a gap between campus and corporate which needs to be bridged anyhow. This gap can either be bridged by the faculties or students or corporate. If faculties or students are doing the job, we call it lead generation. This means you are trying to create the opportunity in suspect. There are several ways by which you can do so; Cold and Hot Calls, Marketing and promotional campaigns to name a few. I am not driving in to details of the ways. But ideally, initiation of the lead generation process should come from students because the sooner they learn, the better they will fit in to corporate. The third situation is when the prospect walks to you for solutions, this is fairly easy. This means opportunity is knocking your door. And we call it a qualified lead.

Now once the suspect is identified and converted in to prospect, the real sales process starts. In corporate we propose solution that fit in to customer business, we gather requirements, do gap fit analysis, design the solution, design the prototype and show the demo. Then we do negotiations over price, resources, deadlines and budgets. And finally the deal is in pocket. Mind you this is not the end, now the project has to start, resources have to be deployed, finish in deadlines so that we can generate more business from the same prospect. We call it farming activity. Thus it is a long process.

Sorry to take you on a long drive, but this will help you to win. Let me tell you how you can convert a suspect in to a prospect. You need to be smart enough (which you are already) to do that. Do the research about the business of your suspect, understand the business cycle operations, how they reach the margin and strategies followed by them. Try to gather the information from various sources about the current news and events. By doing so you have almost prepared yourself to be the part of the company. Trust me, you now understand where you need to create the opportunity in suspect to turn in to a prospect. Rest the prospect is yours, use it the way you want it.

If the prospect is walking to you which is fairly a simple case, he will walk to you with requirements. Your job is now comparably simple as you already know the requirements and you can propose the solution.  Customers are always smarter than sellers, they know what they want, if you don’t provide them, they will walk away. For this you need to be empathic, put yourself in to your customer shoes. Try to understand the requirements thoroughly. Do the iterative research of the business which your customer is in to. You will get the clear picture what you need to propose. To be very simple and frank prepare yourself to get placed.

Now you are ready to join onboard. The negotiation starts on the other side of the table in two ways. First is the testing of your domain knowledge which you have gathered by understanding business. Second are your etiquettes to drive the business in a professional and ethical manner. Be cautious while you are in to negotiation mode. Negotiation are of two types hard and soft. The third one is both hard and soft. This is called principled negotiation developed at Harvard Negotiation Project. Thus you need to be both hard and soft at the same time, hard internally and soft externally.  

It is important to develop the professional attitude and etiquettes before you are set to join. Remember the following, Separate the people from problem; Focus on interests not positions; Invent options for mutual gain; Insist on using objective criteria. I am writing in crisp but you can always discuss with me in detail.

Vaibhav Sharma

Why Top Management Fails: A Flip Side

Innovation has always been a hot topic of conversation in organizations, cultures and ethnicities. You call it either a radical change or a breakthrough; it has been so influential that it is been able to transform the lives. Be it the Six thinking hats of Edward de Bono; DNA principles of Clayton Christensen or theories of Min Badasur, many organizations are using them in different combinations to fetch the revenues and profit out of industry. These organizations are so dependent on it that they do not talk of anything else. But the excess use or the improper use of anything may be harmful. And sometimes the reason is top management. Yes, top management which is responsible for a driven fruitful change in the organizations.

We always talk about the positive side of the management fiascos and rarely get acquainted with the negative side. Let us now talk about the flip side of the coin; why even top management is not successful.

Let me tell you the reason why leading companies in three different industries (fast-paced disk drives, slower-paced mechanical excavator industry, and process-intensive steel industry) which frequently innovate get stumbled or failed. It was not because of the engineers who got stuck upon the technology paradigm or ignored innovations. No doubt, these problems affected some of the companies. But there is core strong evidence which is found beneath the surface. As long as the new technology is required to address the needs of the customers, establish firm must able to muster the expertise, capital, suppliers, energy and rationale to develop and implement the requisite technology both competitively and effectively. And the most important outcome of the problem was ruled out which was top management a root cause. With no reason the top management here had a good track record of understanding the un-articulated needs of the customers, finding which technology can address best to their customers and could be capitalized. It was only when confronted with disruptive technologies in which they failed.

Here comes the role of disruptive technologies. And this is one of the reasons why good management can lead to failure. There are three parameters which can lead good managers to a bad dawn.

1)      The first one is strategically important that is unable to identify what I call sustaining and disruptive technologies. The concept is way different from incremental change or a radical change.

2)      Technology progress map. There may be an unmatched behavior between different technologies which may outstrip the market needs. This will surely be a hindrance to identification of un-articulated needs.

3)      Customers and financial structures of various companies color heavily the sort of investments which appear to be attractive to them, relatively to other entering firms.

Sustaining technologies always foster an improved performance. These can be discontinuous or radical in nature while other may be incremental. Products associated with sustaining technologies always have an improved performance factor.

While sustaining technologies believe in enhancing performance, disruptive technologies lead to innovations that is the worst product associated with disruptive technology is likely to outperform.

Disruptive technologies bring a unique value proposition to market. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform in mainstream markets but as a whole they create value to the customers. Products based on disruptive technologies are simpler, cheaper, smaller and convenient to use. Examples could be the small off-road motorcycles introduced in North America and Europe by Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha were disruptive technologies relative to the powerful, over-the-road cycles made by Harley-Davidson and BMW. Transistors were disruptive technologies relative to vacuum tubes. Health maintenance organizations were disruptive technologies to conventional health insurers.

Let us talk of second cause of failure that is technology progress map. Technology can progress at very high pace which is not required by the market demands. This is illustrated in the figure below.

 Source: Harvard Business School

Because of this sometimes suppliers give customers more than what is needed. This means the disruptive technologies which are under performing today may outperform in the same market tomorrow leaving a bridging gap between technologies. For example many who once needed mainframe computers for data processing, no longer need or buy mainframes. That is mainframes performance has surpassed the requirements of original customers.

The last and the final cause which leads top management towards failure is that companies making aggressive investment in disruptive technologies are not a rational investment. This has three different bases. Firstly disruptive products are simpler and cheaper and hence offer low margins and not great profits. Secondly, disruptive technologies are sometimes commercialized in an insignificant emerging market. And lastly most of the leading companies initially can’t use the products based on disruptive technologies as they promise lower margins.

Thus it is not the case that top management will bring a radical change every time. Excessive use of innovations may create an unmatched gap between technologies which thus leads failure of the decision of the top management.

-----Vaibhav Sharma