Turnaround in style

How would you briefly describe the Tata Chemicals’ turnaround story?

In 1999, soda ash prices were really low and profits were under strain. There were too many people in the organization, costs were high, and we were not competitive globally. To add to it, imports were coming in from China.

Our turnaround came about in three waves. The first one was called Action 500 which focused on initiating the turnaround from red to black. The second was called Manthan which came with its relentless focus on costs and efficiencies. The third one was Udaan which was not about costs but about value. It was a logical shift of focus from cost to value. To achieve this transition, the company changed the entire management around 2000 and a completely new team succeeded in turning around the company.

As a result of that we are the second largest soda ash company in the world today. We’ve done two major acquisitions in the last two and a half years. Today we have presence Netherlands, Kenya, US and India. We are a different company today, profitable and growing.

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Digital Media gives a hard time to marketers

Marketers must have a very clear line of sight into the media-usage behavior of their consumers, which has been changing quite a bit over the last few years. They need to understand what kind of experience consumers are types of media throughout the day whether they are looking for entertainment or information, or they are shopping or communicating. With that understanding, then marketers should think about the relevance of their brand and their marketing objectives for each of those media-usage occasions for the consumer, says Christopher Vollmer, author of Always On and Booz & Company Partner in an interview with Strategy+Business's summer 2008 issue . The Central topic was media environment is changing and what it means for advertisers and marketers.

He said marketers have to be savvy enough to combine the best of traditional media with digital media and use both in ways that are complementary and at times incremental. By complementary, he means, using media in ways that extend an experience from one medium to another. For instance, a person can find out about a product on television , and the marketer can offer him or her an opportunity to learn or experience more about it on the Web.

The critical trend today is that Consumers want to spend more time in environments in whic they can control how they consume the media. "We are going to see a continued migration to entertainment or information platforms, from video games to video on demand to online media, where consumers choose how they interact with programming and content," the author said.

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Equip employees to leave

With attrition becoming a big challenge, organizations seem to have tried every trick in the book but with little success. Here’s a radical idea that will change the very foundation of the employer-employee relationship.

Elizabeth Craig, Chi T. Pham and Sarah Bobulsky, authors of Accenture’s Research Report June 08: Rethinking Retention: If you Want Your Best Executives to stay, Equip them to Leave, find that organizations can strengthen their executives’ intentions to stay by equipping them to leave! The authors’ counter intuitive conclusion: the best way to ensure that critical talent doesn’t leave is by providing experiences and opportunities that truly enhance their value and employability in the external labor market.

This is contrary to the free agent scenario where managers and executives change employers frequently to take advantage of sweetened offers and new professional challenges. Employers often find themselves losing the very people they want most to keep as the talent wars intensify.

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