In the excerpt below , Mr. Das writes “Concentrating on one’s core competence .
ID: 371598 • Letter: I
Question
In the excerpt below, Mr. Das writes “Concentrating on one’s core competence . . . was one of the first lessons I learned.” What was he referring to?
On One-Pointed Success
I first arrived on the island of Bom- bay on a monsoon day after eight years of high school and college in America. That night, 15-foot waves shattered thunderously against the rocks below my window as the rain advanced from the Arabian sea like the disciplined forward phalanx of an army.
The next morning I reported for duty at Richardson-Vicks’ Indian headquarters, which turned out to be a rented hole-in-the-wall with a dozen employees. This was a change after the company’s swank New York offices in midtown Manhattan, where I had been interviewed. That evening my cousin invited me for dinner. He worked in a big Brit- ish company with many factories, thousands of employees, and plush multistoried marble offices. I felt ashamed to talk about my job.
“How many factories do you have?” he wanted to know.
“None,” I said.
“How many salesmen do you have?” he asked.
“None,” I said.
“How many employees?” “Twelve.”
“How big are your offices?”
“A little smaller than your house.”
Years later I realized that what embarrassed me that night turned out to be our strength. All twelve of our employees were focused on building our brands without the dis- traction of factories, sales forces, in- dustrial relations, finance and other staff departments. Our products were made under contract by Boots, an English drug company; they were distributed under contract by an out- side distribution house with 100 salesmen spread around the country; our external auditors had arranged for someone to do our accounting; and our lawyers took care of our gov- ernment work. We were lean, nim- ble, focused, and very profitable.
All my cousin’s talk that night re- volved around office politics, and all his advice was about how to get around the office bureaucracy. It was not clear to me how his company made decisions. But he was a smart man, and I sensed that with all his pride in working for a giant organiza- tion, he had little respect for its bu- reaucratic style.
If marketing a consumer product is what gives a company its competi- tive advantage, then it seems to me it should spend all its time building marketing and product muscle and employ outside suppliers to do ev- erything else. It should spin off as many services as someone else is willing to take on and leave every- one inside the company focused on one thing – creating, retaining, and satisfying consumers.
There is a concept in Yoga called one-pointedness (from the Sanskrit Ekagrata). All twelve of us were one- pointedly focused on making Vicks a household name in India, as if we were 12 brand managers. I now teach our younger managers the value of a one-pointed focus on consumer satisfaction, which P&G measures every six months for all of its major brands.
Concentrating on one’s core competence thus was one of the first lessons I learned. I learned it because I was face-to-face with the con- sumer, focused on the particular. Somehow I feel it would have taken me longer to learn this lesson in a glass tower in Manhattan.
As so often in life, however, by the time I could apply the lesson I had learned, we had a thousand people, with factories, sales forces, and many departments that were having a lot of fun fighting over turf. I believe that tomorrow’s big companies may well consist of hundreds of small decentralized units, each with a sharp focus on its particular customers and markets.
Explanation / Answer
In the above excerpt, what Mr. Das is actually referring to is how the products and services should prioritize only upon the factor of customer-satisfaction. The one-pointedness is nothing but a focus on to the customers. In marketing, Customer satisfaction is a tool to measure how products or services supplied by a company meet or surpass a customer's expectation. With the increase in customer satisfaction, there is lead to better earnings as these customers become more loyal towards the Organization's product and in most cases, also refer to others to avail the same.
Seeking an example of the same, in the opinion, Amazon is the Company that has great customer satisfaction. The Mission Statement of Amazon.com is ‘Focused on the Customer’. Right since its inception, the founder Jeff Bezoss had clarified Amazon’s one and clear mission, that is to center all its business activities according to the requirements of customers in terms of their services and preferences. Hence the mission has rightfully clarified the Company’s customer-centric approach which is an integral part of any Company’s growth and survival story. Its honest implementation has helped the Company be regarded for great Customer satisfaction.
By undertaking Customer satisfaction surveys and analyzing there upon, or by undertaking the most standard customer satisfaction metric, asking your customer to rate her satisfaction with your business, product, or service and then the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score Test) score is then the average rating of your customer responses; all this help in measuring and demonstrating customer satisfaction. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) also helps in demonstrating the likeliness of a customer towards a specific product thus a popular way to demonstrate customer loyalty.
In terms of cost-effectiveness, yes as it saves a lot of time in Product positioning, test marketing, etc, if customers’ loyalty is measured high to accept another new product offered by the same Company in the market. Hence, what really matters in a business in order to be successful is to keep its customers satisfied at all times which hence needs a serious quantum of concentration as described by Mr. Das.