IIPM: December 2011

Friday, December 23, 2011

“Most people are sincere”

Customer and dealer centricity in tandem have been key to the success of JK Tyre in the Indian market according to A. S. Mehta

For A. S. Mehta, a career spanning 25 years in JK Tyre has been professionally and personally fulfilling. From starting as a CA, Mehta took up additional roles in the company before becoming Marketing Director in 2007. In this interaction with amir moin, he talks about his personal and professional journey & success mantras:

What is your leadership style? What are the factors that have contributed to your success?
Since the last 25 years, I have always believed that most of the people are sincere and committed. They have the passion to succeed and aspiration to move upward. My efforts have always been to channelise their passion and their competencies to excel in their respective fields. I have followed the inspirational style of leadership rather than the hierarchy-based style. Highest degree of integrity, very focused approach for any assignment, quick decision making, easy access to members of the team, coverage of connection, process driven and systematic style of functioning have been the attributes to whatever I have done for JK Tyre.

What would you regard as the key milestones in your journey to this position?
I must say that success is a journey where the destination is not defined. It is always a moving destination because once you reach one destination you have the next destination in your mind. Hence, there have been many milestones. Keeping the sales force united and motivated was the first milestone and thereafter, there were several milestones like leadership in the truck radial market, introduction of CRM, introduction of fleet management and introduction of dealer relationship management et al.

What are the unique strategies that you have undertaken for the Indian market and what is the outlook at the moment?
We have been a prominent player in the commercial tyres, OTR and car tyres. For commercial tyres, our strategies have been two pronged; one on the customer front and the other one for channel partners. In the Indian market, the dealer is the most influencing factor and we have been very strong in our relationship with channel partners. On the consumer front, our Fleet Management and Customer Relationship Management have been the best initiatives in the tyre industry.

How do you spend your free time? Which is your favourite vacation getaway?
I am very religious person at heart and family man. Whenever I get some free time, I like reading on religion, philosophy and spend time with family and relatives at religious places. I’m also very close to my brothers, their children and even other distant relations. It has been an inner urge to do whatever I can do for them. For vacations, the best place I could think of is Udaipur.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Wednesday, December 14, 2011

“Security threats have grown more complex”

Pradeep Nair, Director, Software Group, IBM India/South Asia discusses the security market, client expectations and ibm’s competitive edge

Security is a big concern for business in today’s time. Which industries are the most concerned about security issues?
When we look at the Indian market, we have BFSI, telco, retail, organisations in the government space; we have a number of sectors which basically are large. Who would be concerned about security? Typically they would be organisations that need to protect their brand & reputation in the market or have a mandatory regulatory compliance requirement. So when I look at it from a prioritisation perspective, I think BFSI is one of the key adopters from a regulatory compliance perspective, or from the perspective of data protection; ensuring there is no risk of data loss, unauthorised entry or unauthorised access into their systems. A lot of organisations have adopted such solutions. The next set of customers is from the telecom base. With the kind of massive inroads into technology, giving access, going ahead and working with clients, having huge amount of customer information are areas that organisations wish to protect. You would have heard in the news about breaches that led to degradation of an organisation’s brand value. The ITeS and BPO sector are also very stringent from a security perspective. Efforts from NASSCOM and the industry have been made to ensure that once companies from outside India outsource their infrastructure and data & applications, it is maintained and operated in the most secure environment. These companies are most concerned and want to adopt the best security infrastructure. We are also working with regular enterprises that could be across manufacturing retail, healthcare and even in the SME space.

Despite innovations, security threats persist in today’s organisations. How are the threats different today, say, with respect to around a decade back?
Firstly when you look at threats, they can be in the form of worms and viruses; unauthorised access into your network infrastructure; access of privileged users to information that they are not supposed to see; when you are looking at a global mobile workforce and you open up your access to infrastructure for productivity, security gets compromised et al. The threats have only gone more complex and with the greater penetration of IT, they are growing. Worms and viruses that harm infrastructure and productivity are there today as before. IBM has a solution called endpoint security that ensures that your patch management and virus updates are in place. For external threats, there are intrusion prevention and protection systems so that the threat is mitigated. Threats haven’t changed, they are only evolving. For instance, seven to eight years back, there was no phishing like, say, sending e-mails posing as banks and asking for your details. I think those are increasing now. Around 2-3 years back, the banking system got vulnerable in the face of these attacks.

There has been a spate of recent attacks on organisations and even government infrastructure. So does that mean organisations are not really as prepared for security breaches as they look?
You are as secure as you think you are. You think you are secure and when there is an attack, you realise that you are not. IBM has brought out a security framework that is a combination of our capability around software, hardware and services – a complete framework. It has three tenets. The first is around security governance – rules and policies that organisations lay down and ensure that they are followed. There should be a security governance leader who ensures that the rules are followed and there is a right monitoring capability in the organisation. The second tenet relates to risk management. What is your approach to managing risk? What is the analysis that you are doing on the risks faced day in day out by the organization? How do you really manage current and future threats? And what is the best way to manage security exposure? For instance, how do you really correlate that the incident that happened was due to a vulnerability in the firewall or was an unauthorised access? The third tenet is compliance. Companies must ensure that the current security infrastructure meets compliance requirements and established guidelines.