Aim for excellence, Success will Follow

Just came back from watching the move 3 Idiots and changed the subject of my blog. The original intention was to write on GDP, its growth and measurement but decided to take up the challenge of writing a contra blog on the 3 Idiots.

The reason I say challenge is because the movie is nice good entertainment, acting of Madhavan, Sharman Joshi and Kareena is good and the message is very clean and presented in a detailed manner. The key messages are:

- Aim for excellence and success will follow
- Don't decide what your child should do in life
- Do what you love and your work will be enjoyment
- Remove the marks and the grading system and the race for ranks
- Encourage students to learn, experiment and explore and not to just acquire knowledge that has already been discovered.

So, if I am saying all good things about the movie, what is the challenge in writing the blog. The challenge was in finding what was wrong with the movie.

I think the acting of Aamir Khan and Bomman Irani wasn't that good. In fact, I think Aamir over-acted in the film. You could feel that success has gone to his head and his acting showed that attitude. Probably not everyone may feel the same way and I am not saying this just because this is supposed to be a contra blog. I am saying Aamir needs to be careful of not allowing success to go to his head. I am a fan of Aamir Khan and his movies and see him in the role that was played by Kamal Hassan of experimenting with each role and doing things nobody would think possible. In fact the best credit that could be given to Aamir was the Toyota advertisement which showed Aamir in many roles.

Not allowing success to go to your head is the unsaid message of the movie and which I am trying to bring out through this blog. That when we aim for excellence and success follows, so does our ego and ego feeds on success. Success corrupts us and bloats our ego and prevent future and further excellence and success.

Then starts the downward spiral. Where we become parasites. Taking credit for the success of others. Could be our staff, our peers, chance success and so on. Where we are no longer aiming for excellence but start aiming for success since the ego needs a continuous stream of success to remain alive. It does not have the patience to wait for long term success which could come from pursuing your goals. People should praise you, newspapers should carry your names, you are the only one entitled to promotions and not others and it manifests in so many other ways.

Aamir needs to be careful of this and so should we.

Customer Service-MNC Vs. Local Companies

Most people carry the perception that the customer service of MNC Companies is better than that of a local Company. This is due to the belief that the MNC's bring their global processes and their customer focus to their operations worldwide.

I had a recent experience that proved the contrary. I wrote a mail to three companies on the same day, one MNC (Unilever) and two Local Companies(J.K. Helene Curtis of the Raymonds Group and Tata Croma Retail) for customer issues with products that I was using of these companies.

From Unilever, I immediately received a automated response from the System Administrator. The content of the mail was as under.

"Dear Sender,

Thank you for contacting Levercare.

Please do not respond to this mail, as it was automatically generated.

Best Wishes - System Administration"

No promise of looking into the matter. No promise of reverting in a particular period and till date they have not responded.

From J. K. Helene Curtis, I received a mail after two days, but despite my not seeking a replacement of the product, they insisted on the replacement and did it. The Consumer Care Team got in touch with their local representative, gave my phone number and contact details to the local representative and replaced the product.

From Tata Croma Retail, I got a automated mail immediately on registering my complaint on their website and a call within one hour from the Local office. They apologised for the problems that I faced and resolved the same immediately. Since this complaint was related to a purchase that I did not make, the representative called me again after a few days and asked me whether I had purchased the product. She had analysed the customer invoices to check for my Invoice and not finding it had called me. I had purchased the product from another Croma store in the same city and told her so. After this the issue was closed from their side and I received a email closing the issue.

I do not mean to generalise for or against MNC and Local Companies. In fact, I have used the customer service of Dell and HP in the past and vouch that the kind of support they provide is unbeatable. My Dell Laptop Warranty comes with a SLA of 24 hours onsite and I have found that their processes ensure that the support reaches me in 24 hours.

The learning from this is that the local companies are improving their processes and customer care and that MNC always does not always mean better customer care.

If the Local Companies continue this way in customer focus, quality, research and development they will not have anything to fear from the larger companies.

After this experience, my loyalty to Croma Retail and J. K. Helene Curtis is definitely higher than my loyalty to Unilever India.

As stated in the last post, I will endeavor to present the contra view with facts, data or anecdotes to help you make an informed decision.

The Contrarian thoughts to What's happening to this world?

Everyday morning and throughout the day when I see illogical behavior, where I see irrational positions being taken by people, where I see the media going overboard, where I see Wall Street excesses and then the excesses of Wall street bashing, I end up wondering "What's happening to this world?" Through this blog post, I will try to present a contrary view of the world happenings.

We live in a information society today more than any other time in the history of mankind and as humans we naturally get influenced by logical points of view presented by someone without in some cases applying our mind to the fact that the logic being presented by the person may be one-sided or prejudiced.

And therefore the point of view being expressed by this blog will try to present information from both sides so as to enable a reader to form his own opinion.

I am not a writer and therefore my blogs may not be written in the easy flow manner. However, the idea is to share my feelings, thoughts and knowledge. Happy reading to all and I look forward to your comments.