Strategy by Prof.Vijay Govindarajan

Prof. Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck School of Business explains 'Strategy' differently. Strategy needs to be fundamentally different from what an organisation has done in the past. It's all about selective disposal of the past and renewal for the future - what he calls as looking at Box 3 (the future) instead of Box 1 and 2 (past and present).

Besides, strategy is contextual and relative, not an 'absolute' concept. What works for X firm may not work for Y in the same industry. What works for X organisation in one country may not work for the same X organisation in another country.

During my classes at IIMA, I happened to see his presentation. As an anecdote, he quoted Ford's introduction of a mid-sized car for India in the 1990s. They planned to introduce the $20,000 version for the Indian market. A new design team at Detroit worked on cost-cutting and, inter alia, proposed to retain power-windows only for the 2 front doors so as to reduce costs. In the Indian context, this was bound to be a disaster since labour is cheap and people who could afford a Rs.10 lakh car could very well hire a chauffeur. Finally, the one who got power windows in this Ford car was the chauffeur of the rich Indian.

I saw a few more talks by Mr.Govindarajan on youtube and was impressed by the way he delivered the concepts of strategy and innovation.

BCG Matrix

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Vijay Govindarajan - World Innovation Forum

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Anthropomorphism vs. Personification vs. Exemplification

Learning is a continuous process and here is something that I learnt today.

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human qualities, traits, characteristics or form to Gods, animals, objects or natural phenomena. Eg: Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, etc.

Personification is the embodiment of a particular characteristic or quality. Eg: If dogs are man's best friend, diamonds are women's best friends. (Diamonds personified as friends)

Exemplification is just the act of representing as a person, such as speaking of the sun as 'he' and the moon as 'she'. Eg: The Titanic was such a huge ship that 'she' carried almost a mini city.

Anthropomorphic Personification - Eg: 'Agni' is the Anthropomorphic personification of fire.

Engrish-san

In my previous job, I used to travel to Japan quite frequently and one of the peculiar things that I observed was the way they speak English. First of all, their pronunciation is very peculiar - 't' is replaced 'th' or 'd' by 'dh'. Probably they can't roll their tongue upwards behind the teeth and bring it down. In some cases, they have their own words to identify places or people - 'nihongo' for Japanese, 'Indo' for India or Indian, etc. Its hard to understand what they say sometimes because they use the sentence structure of Japanese translated with English words - and sometimes it doesn't make any sense or its just too funny.

See this website Engrish.com filled with snaps taken in Japan & China. There are some hilarious statements and captions.

This post is just on the lighter side and not intended to mock any particular person or set of people.

Best of Garfield