Battle for Design Leadership

And the Award for the best design in Mobile phone goes to..."Xiaomi"

Well, such a line seems to be unrealistic not because Xiaomi can't win the prize, but because there are no such award announcements like Oscars for phones.

But over the years we have seen traditional leaders in mobile eco-system are losing sheen and giving the to spot to tier 3 or 4 vendors. The latest salvo is the fact that Apple phones are not the coolest gadgets to carry around now, and Samsung is confused if it should make good phones or promote solutions like Samsung pay to increase sales of its phones.

And in this all commotion, Xiaomi with limited production of Mi Mix has taken first mover advantage. We see this as smart move because it has strategically declared Xiaomi leader in product design and taken that title from Apple and Samsung.

For non-starters Xiaomi launched Mi-Mix in early 2016 in China. The phone boasts highest screen to body ratio. Xiaomi achieved this by removing the top bezel completely using piezo-electric effects of Ceramic to convert electric energy to sound. By this effectively there is no need of ear-piece on the front of cell-phone. Using this design approach bezel-less design on three edges was achieved, but there was a catch. Due to difficult manufacturing process using Ceramic, production of only 10,000 handsets per month was possible. So, does selling 10,000 phones a month was a great strategy or not.

What Xiaomi gained by selling these 10,000 phones:

Brand Placement:

Xiaomi is known as a brand that gives good performance and high specs in affordable prices. The brand was never considered leader in product design, as most of the products were designed by taking design elements from Apple and other brands. But with this launch, the brand created a buzz about itself, and differentiated from OPPO and Vivo which are with similar Chinese origins.

Customer Mind Share:

Xiaomi launched Mi Mix in China, but the phone created frenzy in customers who were looking for different phone experience across the globe. This strategy more than sales generated brand awareness, and customer interest.

Brand Promotion:Xiaomi has resorted to flash sales to create it's brand initially, creating a sense of achievement for anyone buying Xiaomi phones. But, launching a product ahead of market, it had caught customer frenzy globally. Although the Mi Mix was launched only in China, but customers across the globe have shown lot of interest in this.

But why no one else launched it?? Why Xiaomi...

Well the answer lies in the fact that mass production of devices was not possible, and large brands work on weekly sales targets of 100s of thousand of devices. So, effectively it didn't make any sense for Samsung or Apple to launch a phones with production constraints.

So, what's such a big fuss around selling 10,000 devices by a brand which is not among top.

Well let's see:

Apple:Apple has always enjoyed an envy by other brands because of the design of iOS and close integration with hardware. This combination of hardware and software has lead to amazing performance and reliability that no one could match. Though the cap of robust OS is still with Apple but the market leader is also known for setting trends in product design. Be it iPhone 5s or iPhone 6, these models 'inspired' complete phone series by competitors with its design. But without any change in design over last 3 generations it seems like Apple is moving on footsteps of Steve Ballmer's Microsoft. Where shoving the product down the throat of customers appears to be motto, and why not if that helps with topline & bottomline.

Samsung:

Korean giant has been a leader in product design with innovative designs like Edge and Note. At the same time Samsung has shown agility in designing products that have been in line with market trends like A series and so on. The company has never shied away from taking the best design cues from competitors and imbibing in its products. But the biggest differentiation was the fact that Samsung has been considered as undisputed lead and torch-bearer of Android world with innovations across products and solutions on top of it.

Though these efforts along with marketing created a lot of brand recall for Samsung, but for quite sometime company is on wrong side of discussions in news starting from 60 pre-loaded/burned apps on ROM bloatware to performance degradation of devices typically after 12 months of usage. Further the company has tried to take reluctant approach to improve it Android UI, which has not met considerable success and which is not uniform across all devices. But still if we consider only hardware company was considered the leader in its hardware design. But with being a laggard in launching bezel-less design company seems to be doing this distinction among Android users.

We understand that impact of limited production of niche phones by Xiaomi has not made large dent to P&L of large players, but it has made Xiaomi appear as a serious player in an already crowded market, and sort of a pioneer.

Managing the Mobility

Connected, IoT and Mobility have been the buzzwords since past two years and the echoes are, undoubtedly, growing across the industry. The organizations are embracing the mobility as long lost enabler, which has come to the rescue, and promises improved efficiency and always connected work force. The change has been much more dramatic than what we saw around 10 years back when industry embraced Laptop, as Laptops were ultimate device to enable mobility, the title which Blackberry took lately. But all these implementations of mobility were spearheaded by IT department in the organization. But over the years multiple models of mobility roll-out has taken place. The area of mobility now is no more limited to mobile devices and laptops used by work force, it is increasing as purpose build hardware, tablets and other connected devices have made it all but manageable.

The situation offers an opportunity to System Integrators to wear their consulting hats and help organizations to make this mobility roll-out cost effective and manageable.

Over past years while working as Digital Product & Solutions Consultant, I met customers who want to improve business efficiency but at the same time doesn’t want to implement Device Management ecosystem in their enterprise. A further probe into such preconceived perception clarified that a misconception pervades all the efforts to such solution rollout, which is that most of Senior Executives confuse Mobility management with “restricting Mobility”. The perception of restricting the usage of organization assets like laptop using various mechanisms still governs the thought process, and this is leading to suboptimal roll-out of mobility in enterprises. Mobility management is not only about security policies, but it includes:

• Supporting/trouble shooting devices when these are in a far flung village with a field executive
• Safeguarding enterprise data when these devices have fallen to wrong hands
• Simultaneous roll out of enterprise apps like salesforce, CRM, & ERP to all deployed devices
• Segregate employees data from corporate data (If that is necessary)
• And lastly ensuring enterprise security policies are implemented across all devices (these policies varies from enterprise to enterprise, so if you really don’t want your employees to face any restricted access, then just avoid creating highly restricted device profiles)

Managing mobility in enterprises is as important to managing core IT infrastructure, as the whole purpose of such roll-outs is defeated if this is not managed. This opens a new business opportunity to services organizations who can provide managed mobility services to their customers which doesn’t restrict itself to device management only but spans across to complete eco-system including device provisioning, app deployment, app-store management, updates management and auditing. As they say “You can’t manage, what you can’t measure”, its not a metaphor anymore for Managing Enterprise Mobility

Mobility New Opportunities & Changing Paradigm….

I have been working in the domain of Mobility, and have been closely associated with many customers on several Mobile Initiatives. During the same time period, I worked on taking a B2C eCommerce platform online starting from scratch. In both the scenarios it has been pervasive nature of mobility and computing that has created new opportunities and new business models.

Going back a 10 years, when the iPhone was just launched and other smart devices were more of bulky bricks, with flaps than anything close to smart, who could have imagined that we will be ordering butter through our mobiles, without speaking a single word. Who could have thought that we can avoid our official laptops at home, and can check all enterprise internet on our mobile. We were talking about PCs and laptops, and comparing them on their boot time, if it is 30 sec to or 40 sec.

Since then we have progressed at breakneck speed. Now tablets need not be shut down, and the time to wakeup devices from standby is couple of seconds. Now more than buying anything, we can sell anything online. Use cases of technology keep on evolving and so is the backend IT models.

But what next, is the value created by technology is ability to buy or sell anything online.

Well if that is true then most valuable tech companies would be the one letting us buy and sell things. The latest Forbes list, of most valuable Tech companies says something else.

Rank	Name
1	Apple
2	Microsoft
3	Google
4	IBM
5	Facebook
6	Amazon

A closer look at the top organizations reveals a generic observation that the top companies are the ones that have control over the eco-system primarily OS. But there is another factor that defines the top technology companies.  These companies invariably have a lot of information about their users, and that information goes till intimate level like what does the user buy, what does he watch,  where does he go etc. And it helps these companies in delivering customized experience to its users. But this doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities to new entrants to enter this market.

IoT and Telematics is opening a new segment of users, which are machines or devices that are connected. These devices will be consumer for those companies that provide communication platform for these devices, which is easier to configure and easier to manage. The strength of platform would lie in the fact that, any device should be able to talk using this platform. The learning curve should be minimal for these devices and the platform should be universal so that any device can use it.

Any organization coming up with such UIT (Unified Interconnected Things) Platform will be able to serve the market that is largely untouched and which is potentially 4 times the consumer market that is there. The buying behavior of these devices would be more reliable, as these devices would not suffer from mood swings. For Example, an inverter which is allowed to place an order for supplies like distilled water within certain budgetary range, can automatically triggers an order without any behavioral dysfunction that delays buy decision. 

Well we may be living in a world with small patches of things/people connected to each other, but the opportunities will continue to exist till we do not reach a state where all barriers to get and share information, from any person or object, are not broken. Once we reach that utopian state, I believe then we will find new mountains to climb, and new journey will begin.

IOT: Why Do We Care

To Start With

Disruption has been the keyword in the technology landscape of lately and the kind of disruptions that we have witnessed in past 10 years have been much more than what human race has seen in past except for the World War II era. We have seen how this disruption have made computing so pervasive that we start and end our day with computing devices, that would have qualified to be called as Super Computers at one point of time in human history.

But after so much disruption, IoT promises to be another disruptive technology that have the potential of impacting every facet of our life and every facet of industry in long term. We have learned from our mistakes from internet era, and the evolution of IoT is cases based as of now. But before embarking on our journey to unfold the impact or potential impact of IoT, we have to understand why connected devices qualifies to be called disruptive technology.

It started with

We have seen over past few years that technology has focused on improving customer profiling, and generating meta-data to make it possible for suppliers to reach to their customers. In the process things have moved from creating all the beautiful arches at entrance of your shop to cost per click model. The cost of click has been largely the game of few large players that control search market, and e-commerce websites who have so painfully captured our buying behavior over months of purchases.

But this data driven approach doesn’t come free, and these players have offered some value proposition to end users. Be it efficient and relevant search or be it discounted products.

But invariably these platforms have captured information that has been shared by users consciously while taking some action or other. Whereas connected ecosystem offers an advantage that the information entry and capture becomes context based without explicit entry by the end user, and hence leads to better data quality.

Threat or Opportunity

There is no doubt that IoT is the biggest change that will impact all our lives going forward, and for various industries, be it e-Commerce, manufacturing or technology the impact of IoT will be the way these industries perceive this. For industries like digital marketing, IoT would require the digital marketing firms to adapt to new technology as the existing technology is going to be irrelevant in near future.

People will spend more time with small screens like wearable, and more time with the benefits from technology, rather than looking at the pretty interfaces. In such scenarios analytics will play increasing role in predicting when a certain purchase decision is about to come, and accordingly customer targeting is going to be precise

Well these are some specific scenarios, and I believe the best way to realize the impact of IoT would be discuss specific use cases in details, that I would touch upon later on. For the time being, lets wait, watch and predict.

The Blurring Lines of Media Entertainment Access……..

The technology world is taking its turn at an incredible speed, which is evident from the fact that the past without an iPhone is not too distant. From an iPhone to today the world has changed to such an extent that we have started demanding a lot from technology. From buying baby diapers online to books, we have seen a change in our buying habbits. But there is a bigger change that is happening, which is not evident at first glance. It is change in the consuming habbits.

By consuming habbits, the reference is towards the way we consume digital goods, and services. Be it movies, eBooks or music, our habbits are changing. We want all the information to be on our finger tips, be it a late night movie in our cozy home, or to catchup an episode of Boston Legal. The underlying effect of this change in consumption trend is the changing role of various devices be it television, mobile or tablet. The old age platform of entertainment like television, are moving towards new usecases and the elevance of digital television is losing its relevance due to inherent inflexible nature of content and content on demand is essentially taking baby steps towards capturing the eye-balls at home. Till now the reach of content on demand was limited to laptops, PCs and mobiles, but there is a major push towards taking it to the homes on a larger screen.

In this transformation the devices OEMs with limited control on content will probably restrict their engagement with customer to one time transactions, but the content providers see towards gaining windfall profits due to possiblity of becoming mainstream entertainment content provider on the primary screen at home. An example of this phenomena is Youtube which has seen net revenue CAGR of 50%(source: emarketer.com) from 2011 to 2015. With the acceptance and adaption of Smart displays, that can access internet, the revenue growth is poised to pickup, and video adverts which have been forte of television channels is going to face challenges from unexpected quarters. 

Online Content Providers	Satellite Channel Content
1.    Context Sensitive ads 2.    Captur statistics of ads exposure 3.    Limited capability to directly capture conversion 4.    Better market targeting	1.    No context sesitization 2.    No information about ads exposure 3.    No such capability 4.    Generic market targeting

The advantage that platforms like Youtube, and Dailymotion have as compare to television channels is that these platforms can serve the ads to users based upon users persona or context. These context sensitive advertisement will have higher probability of capturing the mind share of viewers. Further on a TV screen viewers might not be inclined to skip the ads as they do on laptops/PCs.  Companies like Google are trying to give momentum to this trend by products like Chromecast and Chromebit. With the direction towards IoT the context of user will be defined more accurately and the user targeting will become increasingly more specific to improve conversion rate.

This change in consumption habbits has multiple stakeholders playing their roles simultaneously, with each facing their set of opportunities and challenges. These stakeholders include end user device OEMs, content providers and advertisers. I will touch upon the opportunities and challenges for these players in coming articles in details. I have already touched upon the topic of how Google has invested on fortifying its position in an era of mobility with smart investments like Android. I Would really like to know your views on how you see the phenomena of blurring lines between various content sources going to unfold in future. 

Its Sales Time…… A Story of Industry Convergence

Well As all my previous articles talked about strategy that is 60,000 ft. above the ground thing, in my current analysis/observation/rant my focus is moving to 30,000 ft. above the ground things.

I have always been amazed by strategic actions companies take to fortify its core competencies. In this process their core competencies evolve and they tend to transgress on others ground. Google, has core competency in the domain of search. They always want that users never stray away from their websites, mails and operating systems. They paid a billion dollar every year to Apple to ensure that their search is the default search on apple devices. They paid a billion dollar to an operating system startup, and then gave away the mobile OS (Android) free of cost to all the companies that were struggling to put together a reliable software platform to compete with iOS. And today they have their applications on 85% of smart phones as default and more than 90% smart phones in total.

But as market never remains the same and continuous change is only constant thing. Samsung the biggest player in Android smart phone market plans to come with Taizen OS. Amazon modified the stock Android and made its own android for kindle devices and Amazon Fire phones. Apple that used to be pinnacle in terms of product prices is offering products like iPhone 5C to target price conscious customers. There seems to be paradigm shift where focus is on two things:

• 1.       Market Share
• 2.       Eco-system ownership

But why such a frenzy when everything is going fine for all the big players. And at that time Google’s Eric Schmidt’s stating that Amazon is their biggest competitor.

Well to understand all the crazy activities we have to understand one basic thing, everyone works to earn money. And digital world has two primary ways to earn money either sell advertising space or sell advertised product. So instead of writing it in thousand words a picture will save yours and my effort to be on same page.

So how do you want to earn money, that’s the question whose answer will tell you, why facebook wants facebook smartphone to click with masses. Why Amazon wants people to use Amazon Fire and why Google wants to own ecosystem.

If we take a broader look at smartphone market specifically, devices are becoming commodities but the money lies in Advertisement selling and online retail. If a company has strong grip on software ecosystem every device can be considered as a retail store in the hands of end user. They are end user who buys stuff online and are target for advertisers. Hence for all companies who want to make money they have to control the mobile ecosystem primarily software.

So where does it leave Samsung. Well the answer lies in Tizen.

ROLE OF HR IN MERGER & ACQUISITIONS

Introduction

he M&A activities are becoming the one of the most important activities in the life of an organization. There has been a paradigm shift in the role and kind of M&A taking place over years. The M&As throughout the 1960s were mainly due to unions between conglomerates, the 1980s and 1990s has witnessed an increase in M&As between firms of different sizes and different industry types.

The primary purpose of merging and acquiring new firms is to improve overall performance by achieving synergy. Synergy is defined as utilizing the combined resources of two firms more effectively than the utilization levels achieved by the firms individually.

The role of HR in managing and ensuring the success of any M&A activity can’t be ignored. The process involves various stages that matures along with the various stages in M&A activity. The process can be broadly represented as:

 Pre-merger stage

During an M&A activity we have to define what should be the approach towards the M&A. There can be many approaches with emphasis on different things like:

• Using one or the other culture

• Creating a culture that incorporates the strongest aspects of either culture
• Creating a completely new culture that does not use either culture as its base

The M&A can lead to four decisions that may require proper handling of the situation. These are:

1. Integration: It occurs when members of the acquired firm want to retain their independence & cultural identity. It leads to structural assimilation of two cultures, but little cultural and behavioural assimilation
2. Assimilation: In this process one group willingly adopts the identity and culture of the other. Thus the firm that adopts the culture of the other firm lose its independent identity.
3. Separation: This approach calls for minimum cultural exchanges between the two groups, and each will function independently. Both the firms retain theri identity and culture.
4. Deculturation: It occurs when the culture of both the firms are lost during the process.

The four options can be shown in the four quadrant, representing the value attached by the acquired firm to its culture?

Under these situations the role of HR can be represented as:

• Help to identify issues/planning using due diligence 
• Plan due diligence for people/organization cultural fit  
• Help to educate the “deal” team 
• Help to develop acquisition guidelines 
• Estimate people-related transaction and ongoing costs 
• Identify/assess cultural differences 
• Estimate people-related savings 
• Recommend HR policies and programs 
• Validate intangible assets 
• Assess costs of integrating hr systems 

During the merger stage

During merger employees should be provided training for smooth transition to cope up with the concept of constant change, to develop new relationships, and to engender the support of new managers.

The problems faced during this stage can take any of the following forms:

• Culture, image and identity are at stake in a cultural integration
• Employees will feel a great sense of loss
• Their pride and confidence may be shattered.

This may lead to mass exodus of the employees post merger from the company. The people affected by a merger or change of ownership become detached and cynical. Those who lose something in the cultural game tend to protect their situation and resist, trying to maintain the status quo while ensuring they are dispensable to the new organization.

It is not what is done, but rather how it is done that really matters. People crave to be treated with respect, to be identified with the new organization, to be accepted as members of the new team and to keep their status and prestige within the new organization. The most important way to execute a merger and change a culture successfully is to be open and honest with the employees. Thus the role of HR becomes to:

• Develop strategies for employee communications
• Design programs to retain key talent
• Plan and lead the integration effort 
• Develop total rewards strategy for new entity 
• Help new organization cope with change 
• Define organization blueprint and staffing plan 
• Monitor employee attitudes and engagement 
• Manage selection and placement process 
• Advise on productivity/workforce synergies 

Post-merger stage

In case the executives of organization consider themselves to lose in the process of merger, they may tend to go through a process called grieving. The process has the following stages:

1. Denial: In this stage executives might not accept that the merger could take place and expect that the offer will be withdrawn somehow.
2. Anger: In this stage the executives might feel angry with the acquiring firm or even at their fellow executives for allowing this.
3. Bargaining: At this stage executives might expect to develop propositions that their status quo will be maintained.
4. Acceptance: This is the stage of submission in which executives might think of accepting the changes taking place.

The post merger mindsets can be classified into three different categories:

• Ready: These are those employees who are excited and zealous regardless of the fact that there will be employees who will resent this positive outlook.
• Wanting: These are the employees who do not get the job they wanted and are now trying to figure out their course of action.
• Wrung Out: These are the extremely pessimistic employees. They always consider that the change is towards the worst. Conducting one-on-one interviews with them is one way to find out how each employee feels about the situation and perhaps to find ways to work through the situation.

The role of HR in this stage will be to:

• Align HR policies, programs, and practices with business practices
• Monitor progress of people-related synergies and
• Ensure workforce momentum is sustained
• Ensure incentive programs are designed to reward executives and key employees

HR should also encourage the new company’s leaders to do the following: 

• Recognize and reward behaviors that support the new culture 
• Consider cultural behaviors that support the new culture
• Align culture with the vision and business strategy of the combined organization
• Identify the desired culture and gain agreement from senior management and opinion leaders of both organizations 

This article was originally written by me for my college magazine. The original article can be found on: http://xlrisapphire.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/role-of-hr-in-merger-acquisitions/

References

Appelbaum, S. H. (2000). Anatomy of a merger: behavior of organizational factors and processes throughout the pre- during- post-stages (part 1).Management Decision , pp: 649-662.

Ivancevich, J. M. (1987). Executive Actions for Managing Human Resources before and after Acquisition. 0Academy of Management EXECUTIVE , pp.127-138.

Larsson, R. (1999). Integrating Strategic, Organizational and Human Resource perspective on Merger and Acquisition: A case survey of synergy realization.Organization Science, Vol. 10, No. 1 , pp. 1-26.