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I had ealier posted an article wherein I had discussed the penchant of company executives to be the number one in their market. Maybe they have become convinced of the idea that the only way to make money is become number one in one’s market from Jack Welsh of GE or maybe they have read the book on PIMS database which suggests that high profitability is linked with high market share in the served markets. In another article, I have also made comments of executive’s obsession to grow fast by whatever means so that they can either become number one or become large enough to reap economies of scale.

I had just finished writing the post on “Do no call Registry” when this incident happened. I am trying to get a payment gateway for my website so I had called IndiaMart to set up a meeting with their sales people as they provide payment gateway. I talked to Mahesh who told me that he has passed on a message to the salesperson and that he will call today. But nobody called. I reminded Mahesh a number of times and everytime he told me that the person will call. But nobody called. Today morning I again spoke to Mahesh and this is how the conversation went.

Sometime back, I had mentioned in one of my blogs that why are we, as a customer, asked to register our names and telephones to stop getting calls which are an invasion of privacy as well as illegal. According to law, unsolicited calls are illegal. The court has also fined the telecom companies as well the association of mobile operators. I felt that it should be other way round, that is, whichever customer wants to receive calls should register their names and telephone numbers. Now this is what the Supreme Court has also suggested.

Everytime airline industry gets into a problem, it seems that the problem is the travel agents and the commission that they receive. Somehow the whole industry seems to feel that the cause of all their problems are travel agents. The commission given to the travel agents increases the cost of the ticket which results in increasing the cost of travel which in turn reduces the demand and causes severe problems for the airline industry. I am guessing this is the logic behind the thinking of airlines.

It seems that Indian Express (IE) is going through restructuring so that it can raise funds to revive and grow uits print media business.

I am a little surprised as to why Vijay Mallaya (VM) is so confused about branding issues related to his airlines as he has been pretty successful at building his other brands.

Hindustan Times, a leading newspaper in the India, has a appointment supplement called Powerjobs which it distributes along with its main paper. Powerjobs supplement from, at least an outsiders perspective, is not doing well even though HT folks have told me that they are making some money from it. The leading appointment supplement is Times of India’s (TOI) Ascent against which the appointment supplements of every other newspaper competes. According to me, the market position of Powerjobs is getting from bad to worse. I don’t remember the last time any of our clients advertised in this paper even though we release appointment advertisements in TOI-Ascent on a regular basis (By the way, I run an advertising agency).

The Singh family, promoters of Ranbaxy Laboratories, in a surprise move sold their controlling stake to Daiichi. Now this act of the Singh family is just what it is - a stake sale. However, Malvinder Singh, CEO of Ranbaxy has explained this move as a pioneering move and as such I am forced to comment.

I have never been able to understand people who put undue pressure on their kids to come first in class. Only one out of the many contestants or participants or students will come first or become a champion. Everybody cannot become a champion

I have been reading about the derivative transactions that a number of companies entered into with banks. It is clear both the companies and the banks entered into these risky speculative transactions to make quick bucks. Now when the transactions resulted in huge losses, the companies are blaming the banks and vice versa.