New Media, Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Well, I am back from a very good trip to Bangalore. Met some old entrepreneur friends, some interesting people. Connected with some very established people and re-fueled my engine for my entrepreneurial journey ahead!

Though while on the way I connected with some online marketers on the flight back and here I am writing a piece which I have wanted to since sometime now!

Let me start by saying: Branding and Obscenity are Pretty Much the Same

Why do I say this? Well, the guy sitting right next to me looked at a book I was reading, which was about Branding and how radical concepts have changed consumer perception overtime. I was reading a few case studies and making notes, for a couple of Offline Branding Campaigns I am working on. Now suddenly this guy shoots, about how he is an Online Marketer and does handles campaigns online and how his firm has been doing lots of work.

Without an introduction, I heard him as a client, and asked queries, and he started telling me about how Google helps, SEO, PPC and SMM works. Especially SMM, which we also know by Social Media Marketing. Since I was in the Case Study mode, I posed a question:

Give me 4 solid case studies with the ROI that you have generated for the client or where you have actually gone back to the client telling him that he needed offline/ other marketing techniques as well, and how did you execute it!

And this gentleman starts discussing the best works he has done. A viral campaign, which had x number of hits…Helped a company generate these many leads online (which he had no ideas, of how much was the conversion).

Anyway, being a good listener, I patiently heard him, and then asked another question:

What is the difference between Branding and Marketing and why did some of his campaigns did not survive and what he then suggested to those clients?

I am NOT generalizing this, but I have been interacting with Online Marketers, majority of them in their late 20′s and early 30′s who have had no experience of raising a brand. Who have not seen the entire cycle, boasting about serving the Indian SME in scaling up.

I have been into the Social Media scene, since sometime now, and have struggled with the statistics, which I could really go back with, to a client and suggest him, this is where you should increase/ decrease your marketing spend and this is what you should look at diversifying.

I have NEVER heard from an Online Marketer that they have ever gone back to the client telling them, that look you product needs this, as this is what you customer is looking for on the internet

Majority of Online Marketing companies optimize campaigns according to what the clients are searching a product/ service with. Well, I challenge this thought. How do you that it was the right consumer who was searching this term which you just took from suggestions which Google Adwords provide you.

Branding – YES, Social Media helps You do Just That

Okay, so now I have my Branding lessons on. I get to know how Branding is established, online:

• a page/ profile on facebook
• an account on twitter
• targeted Ads on blogs/ sites
• ghost writing on discussion forums etc.
• videos on YouTube
• ppts on Slideshare
• photos on flickr

And if you still cannot achieve traffic numbers, well, go and post this content on various multiple platforms which are identical, so your content will be looked upon by more and more people an chances by simple probability to achieve are higher.

Okay, so I understand probability, but I am still not convinced with this number generation method, I remarked.

I am a Social Media guy and I have a problem with how things are going in India today

Okay, so for all those, who feel I have a personal bias, I have explored the online media to a good extent and hence I write my thoughts here. Majority of bloggers, social media experts/ evangelists/ marketers, strategists, have not had any Branding experience and talk Brand all the time. I have a particular issue with this, as many a times, what they dont realize is they can grow only if their client(S) grow.

Online is the new thing – you have to get on Social Media coz DELL made 3 million dollars from twitter

This is what I have heard from every religious online marketer, I have interacted with, who is pitching to any business from technology to holiday to whatever. Coz DELL did it, hence the opportunity exists and as in India, a small company thinks, even if I can achieve 30% of this, at a low cost, well I will make decent numbers.

And what happens month on month when you go ahead with Online Marketing for your business

• MONTH 1
  • Both the online marketing agency and the client are excited, many things happening around, online training, blogs building up, google ads, higher listing on search engines WOW
    • The marketer goes back and shares the numbers:
    • number of blogs, number of blog posts, google ads numbers, how they got the company(s) site(S) listed high on search engines on specific keywords
• Month2
  • Create content | POST it – HOST it – Virality!
    • Lets do it! Pictures, PPTs, Blog posts, Videos and what not
    • We will post it here – there – everywhere and wallah this will happen and this
  • Conversations are not happening – says the client!
    • Lets do ghost writing
    • Lets do ghost profiles
    • Lets do ghost comments
• Month3
  • Houston We’v got a PROBLEM
    • Firefighting mode

What did you till now, after a quarter?

Well, Sir, look at your brand, look at how many people came to this landing page, look at all of this. Sales will start happening soon.

Lets See – the client now is thinking of how to convert the contract into a pay for performance?

Well, and this is where problems start. Retainership goes down and performance kicks in, knowing well, you dont even know what GAP EXISTS (if any) between the following parties:

• Senior management
• Existing (employees and clients)
• Prospective (employees and clients)

The majority of online marketers, go ahead with no such GAP analysis, and without knowing what exists in the market and what needs to be addressed, just go ahead because they have a medium to connect people with, because out of the 300 million plus people on facebook, there will always be some who will be looking for your product/ service.

Well, I have no inherent bias against anyone, but if I strongly feel, if you are not clear of something, well, dont fluke and sell, coz what you don’t realize is anyway, after 3 years, there are only the better ones, who will be having the repetitive business, because you will be out of market to which you have been marketing.

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Why do I pay 45 when the burger is for 40…written on d menu? It’s the VAT sir, replied the cashier.
I asked this question when I went into a restaurant to catch up with a bite last night.

Well, being an entrepreneur is a life of Pride, Passion and amongst many more things its about living life on the edge. I have seen many people around who say look we are running a side business while we still earn from a day job. Alas, I took the harder path.

With a right on the edge bank account, no financial backing at all…and nothing else, other than DREAMS to count on, I am learning and growing each day. Feels hard at times…people tell me, that leaving some very lucrative and smart paying job offers which I was being flooded with, even in these times of recession was foolish on my part. Well, and all I have as an answer is: there are DREAMS to take care of, they are calling!

As I am writing this blog post from my mobile phone, since I had to leave my laptop which was given to me by my previous company. I realize somethings in life: im being taught how NOT to be dependent on things and how to CREATE POSSIBILITIES in every situation.

It’s been great being an entrepreneur and as I start my new journey as the Co-founder and CMO, Proideaz Consulting, I look for wishes and support in creating a whole new world of opportunities.

Thanks to all my family n friends, esp my Mom n the other best part of my life…who’v been amazing pillars of emotional support always.

Its time to get cracking and see more DREAMS!!

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I landed back from Mumbai just yesterday and surely it was great LIVE Blogging the biggest Leadership event ever in India. Out of my many experiences in the financial capital of India and the city of dreams. Bollywood stars and the rest, I found this very amazing example of simple yet striking innovation by an entrepreneur.

This is what I found:

What you see in the picture above, no its not a Google van! Its the freshest and the best Gola (ice candy) made of fresh mineral water and fruit juices called Gogola India.

I bumped across this van while I was going for a meeting on the Hill street near the Globus mall in Mumbai and just for the fun of it and to interact with the van guys, I did buy two Golas from the van. The van looked pretty okay (a second hand maruti van) with all the electrical machines inside to make a good gola in seconds.

Interestingly, the menu is like an IE page, which gives you all the options of the various flavors available simple, yet unique!

The Revenue figures of a single van which stands since 12pm till late in the night and keeps rotating in between two streets in Mumbai are:

• Daily sale (golas): 300 (in good times) 150-200 (in normal business days)
• Price per gola : INR 30
• Positioning of van is changed on weekdays and weekends
• There are more than 10 vans in the city, doing the rounds

My Feedback and Comments as an Incubation Consultant:

• Good to see that the logo has been duly trade-marked (good asset)
• Good revenue model (taking in consideration, all operational costs, costs of building the supply chain, maintenance of vehicle etc.)
• Simple and effective!

The Gola I had, was pretty good and was surely packed in a healthy manner, with properly kept juice/ color bottles.

I very strongly feel, the kind of Innovation we have in India, is amazing! Its simplistically brilliant and a concept which can surely become into an auto-generating proposition, and once your brand is recognizable, and you have a size, you can diversify.

Kudos to the entrepreneur

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So, we have Ms. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw post lunch at The Leaders In India 2009. I have always admired Kiran as a woman entrepreneur. She has proven words with actions! My respects Mam

Talkign about the Global Biotech sector Kiran says that it is a business size of over 90 billion dollars globally. Each of the past decades have triggered a new growth of innovation. Interesting to know how the entire Biotech industry has evolved over time. Though Ihave not really understood the Biotech industry much, but sure, I am intrigued!

My own journey of Biocon has been that of experimenting and learning! I call myself an accidental entrepreneur!

I was always interested in brewing. I have had to overcome countless challenges over decades. We started small with simple technologies we built and also partnering has helped me build my own entrepreneurial vision. I started my entrepreneurial journey when I had the provilige of starting India’s first Biotech company, which had its own large number of challenges. People were very skeptical of success and at my time, India was still a developing company and we had sub-optimal structure that we have today and it was the time of the license raj than today. I was a 25 yearold first generation woman entrepreneur!

All I had was foolish courage!

There was no access to VC all I could avail of was very expensive debt based funding which I accepted. I was very driven by green technology at that time. But there were very few takers at that time and one of the BIG challenges I had was, the space I was getting into, was based on one very important need, which is: high quality uniterrupted power supply which India does not have even today.

I started my business from scratch opting for less evolved technology. We focused on a niche opportunity, as I had to be very real about the infrastructure and the environment I was working in. I always knew that India was a very small market for me and hence I had to operate in a niche which gave me some kind of advantage. Also in my starting years, what helped me was, I started this as a JV with a small Irish partner, and they provided me with assistance to market, my product to Global markets and this is what helped my business started.

Up until 1980′s we were still loners in Biotech in India

It was really abotu building this company step by painful step and slowly the Biotech sector started gaining acceptance in India when the govt realized the importance. Creating the skill based that we need to drive this industry has paid us fairly well in time. Thankfully because of the success of the IT and software sector, the VC had taken root in India. Since this happened, we started looking towards VC funding, when we tried to scale up. It also allowed to develop sophisticated products and I was able to compete due to our cost base.

By late 1990′s I had a fermentation unit which could handle all sorts of enzymes

The cluster effect that had started in Bangalore really helped us. the boom in Bangalore had many innovative start-ups in the space which also helped the entire industry as such and hence we were benefited. We had international players coming into India setting up operations which helped gain confidence and many are now building scale into what they were doing. Biocon had started gaining market leadership in the niche segment we were looking at.

As an entrepreneur I felt that enzyme segment was going to be limiting to our growth and we had to take some hard decisions

We hence applied our technology to develop into bio-pharmaceuticals. We were the first to cut across the IP barriers hence defining new opportunities.

“We are the world’s first and only company i manufacturing Insulin and Insulin analogs and I am proud to say that”

Overtime we have become bolder in saying that lets innovate in the Bio-pharmaceuticals now. We can today afford to innovate, we can afford to build programs around new products. Innovation in the field of Bio-tech is something we must surely take very seriously. We tend to opt for low risk services and generic versions of drugs and vaccines.

In India the cost of risk is very affordable and hence we must back innovation

What is happening to companies in the western world, is an opportunity for us. I think India really has a good opportunity to cash on in what is happening in the western world. There is a whole new emerging opportunity in Bio-generics. We will pursue Innovation led mantra to grow and that is really my goal as a company and myself as an entrepreneur! All along e have constantly challeneged ourselves and tracked new technologies.

An important learning that I have learned as an entrepreneur is challenging the status quo and moving ahead

We are trying to develop world’s first Oral insulin and its going to be a game changer for us, if it happens

We have really made a lot of conscious effort in partnering with companies, which has actually helped us leapfrog, and it has been a great business tactic for us. In our journey there is one inflection point, I had a tough and emotional call to make! Enzyme was going no where as we were not really investing enough in it, the reason being we had limited resources. And hence we finally said, we must dis-invest and divested into our competition and they have invested and grown this business fr more than we were doing it at that stage. But we surely benefited out of the IP and knowledge we had built over time. We bought a company in Germanhy which will help us start our operations in Europe.

We have started building global scale in our businesses

Our strategy has been always to develop products, leveraging India’s cost base and using affordability as our competitive edge and we are determined to do it at an affordable rate.

My message to other companies from developing world(s) is, who are stretching hard to fight against odds, we have:

• Dont hesitate to partner when you want to pursue certain business opportunities, it allows you to grow faster
• Its important to start simple and start local, be realistic about matching your skill sets w.r.t technologies you are trying to develop

I started my life as a brewmaster looking to brew beer, your journey can take you anywhere, but your life should be an inspiring hope

It was great to listen to you Ms. Mazumdar Shaw as usual! The fire of entrepreneurship has surely gotten a needed kick from you!

Now we have the session int he Q&A mode!

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Praveen Rajpaul, talks about Innovation and how FICCI is helping organizations to improve their productivity and how innovation is changing the riles of the game.

Innovation distinguishes between a LEADER and a follower says Mr. Rajpaul

What do you need for innovation? Its an Idea!

1. Incremental
2. Revolutionary
3. Disruptive
4. Game changer

Unless we have all these sorts if ideas, we wont’ further. But how do you generate such ideas? Is there a process? Can we make it simple? How can we simplify the process of generating the ideas? Puts forth Mr. Rajpaul to the gathering!

Golden Principles of Innovation:

1. COMBINE
   1. products
   2. proceesses
   3. technologies
   4. disciplines
   5. capabilities
   6. arts and science
2. REVERSE
   1. conventions
   2. business models
   3. products
   4. processes
   5. Orthodoxing
3. ELIMINATE
4. ADJUST
   1. Cost
   2. Time
   3. Space
5. DIVIDE
   1. Handling
   2. Transportation
   3. Space
6. SUBSTITUTE
   1. Greener
   2. Lighter
   3. Faster
   4. Better
   5. Stronger
   6. Smarter
7. UTILIZE
   1. Talent
   2. Brand
   3. Networks
   4. Waste
   5. Harmful effects
8. MODIFY
   1. Designs
   2. Eco friendly
   3. Energy efficient
9. UNLOCK CREATIVITY
   1. Passion

Well, there have been some real fantastic principles, that we have seen over time and some real fantastic concepts, which may be workable and may be just vague at the same time. But good to see innovatoin in my lifetime!

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So here I am Live blogging the Day two of Leaders In India 2009, with the first keynote being delivered by Mr. Adi Godrej.

I am sure this is going to be a great learning session with immense value for all present.

Our group has a fairly long history, we are 112 years old, Our sales turnover is a little over a 100 billion rupees

Interestingly Adi is sharing keen information about the Godrej business and they have grown till date. In 1991 we clearly felt that we had to give a boost to our competitiveness. We partnered global companies in our existing businesses, which were GE and P&G as Joint Ventures, though they dont’ continue today.

We learnt a lot from these great International organizations, which we have implemented over the years and they have learnt a lot about India, from us

Each of our companies and businesses, has a non family managing director or president who runs the company, I am surely interested in learning this.  We have a rather strict rule which has that only professionally qualified family members can join the business.

I am the third generation in the business and the fourth has already been inducted into the business

One of the major values we believe in is, that people are our strongest assets. We go out of our way to LIVE the value that people are our strongest assets. We have a constitution of a young executive board, one’s with great future potential and their job is to look at strategy, corporate governance, HRD etc, and then advice the Group CEO’s. Hence we get a tremendous bottom up response. I am very intrigued with the learning from Mr. Godrej.

Being a family business, as a professional and entrepreneur, I am so glad to hear and learn about the functioning of the Godrej group and how it is constituted at various levels. Very interestingly the structure provides the company a very strong bottom up feedback in runnign the company and in my view provides them with a great leadership development tool, creating a very scalable structure.

We have very emphatic programs on diversity within the group

Whenever we have emphasized diversity, the talent we get is much better than the average, Eg: if you go out of the way to recruit strong women, you get great talent, in cases much better than men. We have a very strong E-MBA program within the group. People who have not yet done a management degree, are eligible and promoted to do so. We insist on a 5 day learning schedule.

I myself make sure that I at least spend 30 days a year for learning

We follow a process of forced ranking in our group, we force ranks into non-performers and extra-ordinary achievers. The bottom non-performers which we get everytime in ranking, as it is relative. What this process doe sin a country like India is to strongly improve the working of the team, as everybody does good to work to be in the top 20 per cent.

I get evaluated by my sub-ordinates on a 360 degree basis regularly, and this is only a self evaluation tool

We re-assess our portfolio on a very regular basis and in the last years we have had several strategic acquisitions. We hired a British branding partner called Interbrand to re-launch our brand and it helped us great way in re-positioning our brand and leverage the brand asset value and equity towards achieving growth!

Interestingly we have Mr. Godrej talking about the various succession plans in the company.  Talking about succession planning, Mr. Godrej talks about what if you tomorrow come down a bus, well, we are planned for it, and I remember having the similar conversation with a friend, while running an Incubation Consulting company.

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So now we have a power panel talking about recession and the current scenario and the road ahead being moderated by Steve Tappin, chair, LII 2009.

What’s happening at the Global credit Markets?

Theres’ no doubt that the US and UK are going to see slow growth and hence if you look at where the growth would really be, well, India, China are in the race. We did go through difficult times in Q1, but now we are introducing the concept of reverse integration. We are manufacturing products at price points which make sense to the masses int he country. Hence we are focusing on a whole new market segment to look at.

Corporations like us have to better how to work with the governments around the world. We as an institution have to get better at doing this as the funds today really are with the governments. We have realized that in some markets its better to partner with exsiting organizations to achieve the right and fast growth.

Now we have the Airlines industry being represented and what we are discussin are the cycles in the airlines industry. Global recession and fuel prices, have hit the industry pretyt badly. Now how do you weather a downturn like that?

I believe, what you need to do is have a very detail and deep customer focus. If you listen to your customer right, you kind of know the bad weather for which you could well be prepared. You hence start thinking on what best can be done with the customers hence delivering and creating the right value. In any industry if you do your homework and understand where the world economy is going will help you a lot.

One of the reasons the Indian airline industry is losing 1.5 billion dollars is the Me-too syndrome!

And now we are discussing the remittance industry and interesting to note that the trends in this industry are still increasing. And what we did as a company is get the slow down much faster and quickly, hence we looked at strategic growth options. We as an organization grew and looked at our corporate strategy, aligning it with the growth and then we looked at investments. We had the following two crucial pieces with us:

1. Communicating with our stakeholders
2. Being progressive and Aggressive than the industry – high level of execution

And now we have the IT Services business being represented from the panel and interesting to note that the comopany went ahead to drive growth within and external to the organization.

We went to our top 50 customers and understood their issues and problems and had our swot teams helping clients and helping them grow their businesses

We went to our partners to look at how we could get the right pricing models for our customers and finally we went to unions in the EU, and supported the cause of outsourcing which highly supported us in generating new business than cutting on any sources/ costs

And now we are in the Q&A mode in the panel discussion, which will be open to public view next. Interesting to share the notes here, we are discussing the defence industry as an opportunity in India. Tejpreet from GE remarks that the new and innovative products which will come, will be from India and China and emerging economies now rather than the west and this will drive growth of the market in the west.

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So here we are with the second session of Day 1 of The Leaders In India 2009. This is a panel discussion with a very impressive moderated panel, and the discussion will revolve around Mergers and Acquisitions which surely is an interesting discussion to be in.

We have the resident editor from Mumbai for Outlook magazine moderating the session for the gathering and he talks some very interesting numbers.

70% of acquisitions fail

Company like Cisco which has done more than 135 acquisitions till date, we have the Chief Globalization Officer from Cisco, talking about how Cisco has mastered the art of acquisitions. He says the majority of our acquisitions came from our customers. This is the Go To Market anc business strategy for Cisco. We differentiate in market enetering, expansion and acceleration. Our success rate is 70%. We are very high on retention as well.

You need a culture in a company to be able to do M and A

We also do acquisitions to enter new business models. Our learning with acquisitions is that you have to have that culture in your company and today we have an entire team to do these acquisitions. Last but not the least, its a process. Now we are talking India in specific and interestingly Cisco has so far done 6 new investments in India.

Key takeaway: M&A can be a key part of your strategy and it can become your culture

Now we have Mr. Charles from wattson wyatt, giving the Human angle to M&A. What I have learned working with clients, there is no standard template for culture. It has to be something which is central to all parts of your transaction. In terms of due diligence, if you really dont understand the culture of the organization that you are buying, you should not think of buying them.

I was very impressed with the amount of expertise and process and real hard work which went into due diligence when I was working with clients in India

But the whole diligence was on the financial part and not the cultural or Human part. One of the things you need to accept about M and A, is that you need to be better at it.

Interestingly we have an expert talking about post integration and acquisition and she says, when you are in the midst of your deal, how much attention have you paid to the fact that what would happen to the organization after merger and what would form out of it?

You need to have the systems integrated to get the right prioritization, post acquisition integration. The key thing for you is to get the right internal team together. You need to bring all the elements together with common objectives and right prioritization, as you cannot do everything in 30 days, hence you need to have the right planning which will definitely pay dividends in the long run.

By bad post acquisition realizations, and if not planned well, you could inherit losses and other issues. Hence plannign the right internal team with the right objectives is the right thing.

Bad M&A?

Sure, there is bad M&A there, but it is also the time for opportunity. Governments are going to have to raise money in the near future and taxes are the way to do it and hence this is the time to have a strategic look at your group structure and if you have your IP rights at the right places in your organization and if you are exploiting them fully.

Q&A:

Now we are in the q&A mode with the moderator of the session leading with the questions.

Very interesting discussions happening about Indian family businesses and also how Cisco does the right things by setting the right expectations, while discussing business Integration across verticals and internal employee cultures.

Money is a Motivation – setting the right financial structure post integration:

We now are discussion how compensation structures change and how they are controlled and managed over time, post integration. You need to structure the deal looking at the fact that anybody who has set up a business has a huge amount of emotional attachment with the business. What we have found is: if you can intelligently find out the right roles for people post integration, looking at what they are doing, they love, you can have a successful post integration team merger and integration.

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Here I am, LIVE blogging Mr. To Peters, Management Guru and Author at The Leaders In India 2009.

We said somethings 25 years ago about basics and we are in this mess today. I said to a MIT graduate, that shut down MIT and we can go a long way in bettering. Since 1996 of my time, I have focused on the issue on women in leadership and women in management. Now it is not an issue of social justice, but its that woman buy things!

I am pretty much able to give a guarantee that I will dissapoint you this morning

If you have reached the age of 66, you know for sure that the only secret is there are no secrets! Tom starts by giving an example of Conrad Hilton’s answer to “what was the most important lesson you’ve learned in your long and distinguished career” and he said, remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bath tub!

The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers; the simplest are the best and common sense in fundamental. From which one might wonder that how it is that generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever – Napolean

Interestingly Tom shares how he has learned from his life and the neighborhood talking about one of the issues that India faces today with its growth, which is continuing the growth.

I am often asked by would be entrepreneurs seeking escape from life within hgue corporate strcutures, How do I build a small firm for myself? The answer is: Buy a very large one and WAIT – Paul Ormered

If you are not pursuing incredibly aggressive strategy, your days are numbered. And Tom shares his experience of working with Mckenzie with one of his colleagues. Interestingly Tom shares some very amazing statistics from the US and how companies have failed over years. if you look at the world’s largest exporters:

• No.4 is Japan
• Tie for 2nd and 3rd : American and chinese
• No 1: Germans

I am a strong strong strong believer of middle sized companies. I believe that medium sized enterprises are the future for us. I think if you look at the US economy, which continues to have a significant productivity lead than the rest of the world, fundamentally every automobile plan has the same productivity!

Everything in existence tends to Deteriorate – Norberto Odebrecht

If you have to make a sizeable company, you have to go to war against yourself. The only thing that beats a company is ITSELF PERIOD! I have read Tom before, and I feel this is an absolute truth, which was also supported by Mr. Subroto Bagchi yesterday at NASSCOM.

Giant mergers destroy value. PERIOD

Execution IS strategy – Fred malek

The three magical words that are crucial for an enterprise. And Tom is giving this perfect example referring to the Blue Ocean! I am impressed Tom What’s the point of looking outside if you can’t do anything with your assets?!

Two point strategy by Tom in life:

1. Execution is strategy
2. You only find OIL if you drill wells

**My apologies for not being able to blog the entire session by Tom, due to an urgent call by the Co-founder of my company!

But here I am again covering the question and answer round with Tom.Tom just spoke about the lessening of the cultural differences and how we should be working towards getting the systems right! The CEO is NOT teh best strategist, but he is the guy who would get the best Strategist on board to do the right work.

Tom very strongly puts how the best of the projects fail due to lousy execution specs in the proposal. The Chrysler Americans and the Daimler Germans may not be the best strategist in the history! It is the little stuff that matters with significant multiplier effects, says Tom, giving a very interesting example of surgeons.

A professional listener is as same as a professional pilot

Business schools are a scurge of the world! Many of you went to Bschools and so did I, but I like thinking of the fact that I outgrew it!

In my perfect world you should have someone on Board your company under the age of 25! Things are changing and you I can challenge, dont realize it! You are as good as the people you spend your time with.

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Listening to Steve Tappin from Yorkshire, and he pushes the ambitions of CEO’s to be the best and be more inspirational which is his day job and his night job is the book he is writing, which is secrets of CEO’s.
Interestingly, Steve says that two thirds of Global leaders that we have at the moment are not big enough, two thirds are managers at best and they don’t have the leader’s qualities. Steve gives areas for CEO’s:
1.    Business performance
2.    Business leadership
3.    Personal performance
4.    Personal leadership
5.    Talent

And after a good networking energy filled opportunity, we have Peter Rigby, Chief Executive of Informa Group plc, Non-Executive Chairman of Electric Word plc. Peter starts the day with introducing the Leaders In India and how the contribution of such platforms can make a meaningful difference to the communities we serve and as the community as a whole.

We now have Steve again talking about the TRUMP group and here we have Donald Trump. And Donald starts with the resilience of the Indian marketplace and Donald will be talking about the emerging markets in specific the Real Estate Market. WSJ has dubbed Real Estate as India’s new Tech.

It takes an outsiders perspective to look at the things that can change

Donald is sharing his experience of a conference he attended at Dubai and well how the buying patterns are evolving.

To move things forward we really have to get things back to basics.

My father was teaching me abotu business and about focus and he told a story in the early nineties which explained to Donald what focus really is. you can’t be all things to all people. One of the biggest pitfalls every one has seen over the last few years is that all are going the same direction, but in my view we have to understand the subtleties. We hence lost track of basis, we lost track of cost, margins shrunk. Its time to ge trealistic!

Why India today?

interestingly, Donald is talking about the India story and what things can you do differently and what new things can you do to move forward. In 27 years India has only had 1 year of negative growth.

Fluency in English in India is a great advantage, which I see as a great potential, as it still is the language of business

There is a level of aspirational wealth here, that you don’t see anywhere else in the world. The desire here is so much stronger that I have not seen anywhere lse in the world! People here really love try and do things. And you have to love what you do to be successful. You never will out-perform anyone else in the company if you don’t love what you do.

Urbanisation is another thing which is very rapidly growing and is a mind boggling statistic which has applications everywhere

I have always heard of the American Dream, even in Obama’s speech, but today listening to Donald Trump, creating the amazingly HUGE Indian DREAM! I am a proud Indian (as always) !

Opportunities:

• People wanna know what they are buying
• They wanna know who they are dealing with
• Creating a risk adjusted level playing field

The biggest issue in my mind in investing into any emerging market, is the lack of transparency

Certainty creates value. Without transparency its going to be difficult to create continued investment. When my own backyard is getting interesting, it creates good competition for not just the emerging markets but for everyone.

The TRUMP organization has developed a model over the last few years to do business across the globe. We dont assume that we know all things about all markets. The first emerging market which cracks the transparency code will WIN – Donald Trump Jr.

I just love the so much home grown talent in India, but that doesn’t still mean that you dont want to attract foreign talent.

You don’t get anything that you don’t ask for. And this is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt in life, which took me three years. Transfer of knowledge creates clarity. International players have not been able to get in touch with the legal system in India.

Donald Trump Jr. is now talking about Infrastructure and I agree to him on this, as an emerging market, we do need infrastructure, not just in terms of rail and roads, but also agriculture, education etc. Someone has to bite the bullet and it has to be done says Donald.

Cultural Differences

Donald Trump talks about talks about business and how it is done globally. And how people do need to understand that there has to be a common understanding in doing business. A times I go losing 3 hours on a business call which should effectively get closed in 5 minutes for me. Trump talks about creating a level play, a level playing field and I agree no less to himi on this. Business in India has to become this.

Donald, closes with his remark the potential for this country is amazing if some of these things are changed and now we are in the Q&A mode.

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