Here are a bunch of 101 brainstormed ideas (written
as spoken) for CEOs and Bureaucrats on how to ride out the economic crisis
arising from the Covid-19 pandemic with points (64-89) related to ‘structural
reforms with perspective-forming statistics’ taken from Manish Sabharwal, Chairman,
Teamlease Service, India’s largest human capital firm with over 200,000
employees, interview with Jyoti Malhotra, National Affairs editor of the The Print
Automation
1.
Explore
automation of processes that are manual and monotonous to improve employee productivity
2.
Re-skill
resultant displaced workers to generate more productivity from them without
loss of employment
Brand Engagement
3.
Help
customers to engage with the brand through surrogates like a branded ‘boardgame’
or other devices that captures the elements of the brand when playing the game
or instrument
Brand Demand Pipeline
4.
Virtualize
the game with ‘actions’ taken rewarded with vouchers, redeemable when business
opens to: induce visits, build momentum, leverage underutilization of
facilities to make the voucher value cost-free, and even profitable by spurring
additional spending on site
Brand Salience
5.
Be
in the news as related to the consumer / customer profile and needs to
demonstrate the brand’s commitment to their well-being
6.
“Delighted
to inaugurate online Bosch Make in India mask line which will produce 100,000
masks a day in Bengaluru. The 3-layer mask has efficiency > than 95%. These
will be distributed free of cost to Covid warriors. Bosch has pledged INR Rs 50
Cr to combat pandemic. Congrats!” (Tweet from Amitabh Kant, CEO, of government
think-tank NITI Aayog)
7.
Create
characters and merchandise related to your business that has utility for the
consumer
8.
Go
online and promote the merchandise aggressively
9.
Crowd
source ideas for building brand salience for above activities
Capital Deployment
10.
Fund
Small Business in the Community
11.
Buy
their products for self or for wider distribution through company distribution
channels
12.
Share
depreciated plant, property and equipment – free or at a small cost with the
small business
13.
Buy
new equipment to boost the industrial equipment industry
14.
Redeploy
working capital arising from employees working from home generating savings in
transportation, power and water consumption, and subsidies such as for food
15.
Provide
employees (as Google has done) allowances to set up a comfortable facility to
work from home including smart phones, tabs, connectivity for the family to
pursue online education for their wards
Community Support
16.
Build
a common kitchen on company grounds to provide food for the unemployed
employees and the community at cost or no cost as part of CSR
17.
Fund
personal expenses of the community, such as child’s education, by setting up a
school for the community and funding the school expenses as part of company CSR
obligation
18.
Provide
in tie-up with product and service providers smart phones, tabs, connectivity
for the community’s children to pursue online education
19.
Support
educational institutions in the community to address online teaching challenges
including shortage of proper equipment for teachers to do so from home but also
tweaks in pedagogy to teach in an online environment
Government Support for Business
20.
Provide
land, water, power and road connectivity for businesses and employees to
Work-From-Anywhere-Anytime (WFAA)
21.
Provide
tax holidays to encourage moving businesses away from cities
22.
Provide
support to educational institutions willing to set up schools and colleges in
these clusters for talent development
23.
Design
policies that makes agriculture remunerative with land held by employees to
generate additional sources of income scientifically managed to build up the
food chain
24.
Make
provision and grocery requirements of these clusters self-sufficient through a
funded grow-and-consume scheme reduce carbon footprint in goods flowing in and
out of the cluster when they can be produced and grown locally
25.
Provide
sanitation and clean drinking water for these clusters linking up streams and
rivers and building water pipelines to these areas
26.
Focus
on water harvesting and sewage treatment plants to promote hygiene and
self-sufficiency in these areas
27.
Provide
public transportation that makes travel easy including airports for short haul
flights
28.
Through
MNREGA and other schemes provide employment to the rural poor in the
development of these clusters
29.
Provide good local government that policies
are implemented and businesses are not constrained in anyway
30.
Design
housing, commercial properties and recreational areas that fuses with the
heritage and culture of the area (like Cochin Airport)
Human Capital Development
31.
Tie-up
with an EdTech company to help employees upgrade or develop new skills
32.
Engage
employees – “Be CEO For a Day”- to crowdsource ideas for what would they do in
the situation the company / industry finds itself in
33.
Deploy
employees to tasks outside the company so they stay engaged doing good in the
community and building relationships for the company for future growth
34.
Deploy
underutilized company’s talent in public sector projects where there is a lack
of such talent especially engineering talent
Product Design, Pricing and
Packaging
35.
Make
the product affordable yet profitable through volume sales when the purchasing
power in the hands of mass consumers is going to drop drastically
36.
Make
the soap wrapping paper into ‘soap’ to make it utilitarian instead of the
wrapper crowding the wastepaper basket
37.
Make
the product last longer (a great value proposition) by ensuring just the
appropriate helping is ejected when squeezed or poured?
38.
Redesign
the product packaging and the delivery packaging when products in the future
are going to be ordered online
39.
Provide
consumer with EMI payment scheme even on provisions and personal products if
they order it as a hamper of x no of items?
40.
Repackage
/ refurbish products damaged during the sudden lockdown of people and goods
movement to salvage its costs and provide benefit to the consumer?
41.
Create
a platform for liquidating stocks in a bazaar kind of sale to create new
inventory?
42.
Rationalize
the product lines and variety for better production efficiencies?
43.
Create
a loose and packaged product lines as done by hypermarkets to offer the loose
as promotional items with the packaged?
44.
Run
co-promotions to improve offtake and offer better value?
45.
Provide
an opportunity for consumers to trade reusable or used product containers for
replenishing their stock and benefiting the packaging industry with recycling
the pack instead of adding to the landfill?
Senior Management Development
46.
Take
up Advancement Management Program to upgrade skills and get new ideas from
peers cross-industry to manage the company in during-and-post pandemic times
47.
Write
articles and publish books on learning-to-date to educate management students
and contribute to improvement in management, governance and employee
productivity
48.
Offer
mentoring services to colleagues including self-employed businesses by joining
their associations since they generate 70-80 percent of employment in an
economy
49.
Get
familiar with using digital platforms – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
– to educate and build professional profile
50.
Learn
to conduct effective meetings on Cisco Web, Skype or Zoom platforms
51.
Explore
new ways of working and managing the change without drop in productivity from
communal working environments to work-from-home (WFH) that obscures the separation
of professional work and demands of the home and family; including loneliness
if living in solitary confinement
52.
Seize
the opportunity to be creative in lifting the business out of potential
recessionary trends and sentiments
Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Mentoring
53.
Provide
management guidance
54.
Share
use of productivity tools
55.
Connect
them to company’s network to explore opportunities
56.
Help
them use supply chains better
57.
Teach
them negotiation skills
58.
Form
them into a community to generate pricing power for their product
59.
Brainstorm
opportunities that they should be exploring
60.
School
them in business ethics to build trust and long-term growth of their enterprise
61.
Develop
lines of business where the company becomes a buyer of their products or
reseller, improving the company’s strategic position in the industry and tap
into an additional revenue opportunity
Sponsorship of Events
62.
Select
events that can showcase community messaging of ‘social distancing’ by tweaking
formats: sprints, hurdles, relays are run not together but each runner is timed
to declare the winners like in Tour de France Bicycle race; what can that teach
us about tweaking processes in our business to maintain social distancing
63.
Tweak
‘contact sports’ rules e.g. Kabaddi as a creative exercise to observe ‘social
distancing’ and apply them to how we run our business through a creative
brainstorming session with company executives and innovation coaches
Structural Reforms Post Covid-19 (industrialization,
formalization, financialization, urbanization, and apprenticization)
64.
Customers
on strike due to the pandemic unwilling to buy except the bare necessities – will
post-Covid scenario translate to frugal or hedonistic (or revenge spending) is
anyone’s guess and so need to prepare accordingly whichever bet is punted for
65.
70m
state migrants; 40m dependents; 30m in labor force; 3-4m have gone home; 550m
labour force; only 57m registered with ESIC
66.
Labor
shortages are not the binding constraints for corporate India to get normal for
a few reasons
a.
Not
everybody is looking forward to getting back to 100% capacity utilization
exceptions being fmcg since demand side is growing very slowly
b.
Wage
premium has emerged in cities and labor not keen to go home e.g. logistics
employee
c.
Not
running towards cities; running away from wastelands
67.
How
do you pay for a safety net when India’s per capita income is $2500; (comparative:
US $50k; New York itself, $93k); India cannot act as a developed country; India
does not lack intention; it lacks resources
68.
63m
enterprises in India; 12m do not have an office; only 12m registered for GST;
only 1 million pay social security; only 19.5k companies have a paid-up capital
of Rs 10 cr+
69.
India
is inadequately formalized, financialized, urbanized and skilled
70.
It’s
a given in a crisis situation: Indian Migrant (will go home), Indian MSME (no
margins to continue in business), Indian Bank (won’t lend), Indian Beat Cop (will
use his lathi)
71.
People
could have handled 30 days but not 60 or 90 days of lockdown; MSME and migrants
are caught in the cross-wire of the lockdown
72.
An
entrepreneur must manage risk and mitigate risk
73.
War
too important to be left to generals and education to be left to teachers;
lockdown is an economic, social, political and medical decision and needs to be
addressed by strong leadership, collectively
74.
US
Payroll payment program is $100 bn for SMEs; Federal Reserve has expanded its balance
sheet by $3T in last 7 days; the US is borrowing $4T in the next 90 days; there
are no good choices here, its between the bad and the worse for India
75.
The
ability to handle Covid depends on your resources as a country, company and
individual
76.
Rs
17 lakh crore government announced stimulus package will never be enough but India cannot afford anything more when it’s at 11%
fiscal deficit to GDP, US at 15%, Japan at 19%; India at 14-15% GDP is going to
be problematic
77.
“Uncertainty
as a pivot of strategy” must crystallize the response: keep optionality, keep
some powder dry, unemployment must not convert to hunger, working capital problem
does not convert to bankruptcy
78.
Order
of policy priorities will be poor people, small companies, big companies, and
then banks; should we steal from our grandchildren and borrow Rs 10 lakh crore,
difficult to tell as we don’t know where we are as yet;
79.
International
investor are circling back to emerging markets, India is very attractive to
international investors if we can get our act together; need to signal intention
that we will make India a fertile habitat for job creation; must use this
policy window to do structural reform; China’s brand is damaged, wages are up,
and trade war with US is hurting
80.
Per
Capita GDP matters (138th ) more than GDP (4th) in the world
81.
Willingness
to give a living wage to our workers depends on the productivity of the economy
82.
Fiscal
/ Monetary policies can no more save India; only structural reforms can:
d.
Industrialization
including farm sector
e.
Formalization
(cannot have 63m enterprises when US has only 22m with 8x the size of Indian
economy)
f.
Financialization
(need 200 banks not just 94 to push credit: GDP ratio to 100%),
g.
Urbanization
(only 52 cities with more than 1m when China has 375; 6 lakh villages with 2
lakh with less than 200 people; cannot take job to people but people to job;
need for good urbanization: avg taxi travel at 8km per hour in Bangalore; lost
productivity; New York GDP is equal to Russia with 6% of the people and
0.00005% of the land; cities are engines of economic growth
h.
Skilling
(50% of our children fail at every stage in their 10th, 12th
and 30 lakh make it to college of 260 million who join school)
83.
India’s
labour is handicapped without capital and capital is handicapped without labour
84.
Pain
in India post Covid-19 will be nothing like what we have seen since the
financial crisis of 2008
85.
A
large number of SMEs and small companies will disappear as they cannot handle three
or four months of zero revenue due to lack of financialization which means no
access to capital; liquidity problem becomes a solvency problem; for a well-run
listed company banks are always willing to lend money to help them get over capital
shortfall
86.
Farm
employment and self-employment are really self-exploitation where every member
of the family is involved
87.
India
is really poor and we don’t have to be, it is not cultural, our plumbing is
screwed up: if we fix our labour market plumbing, if we fix our bank plumbing, if
we do civil service reform, if we fix our political plumbing …
88.
Apprenticeship
done right (as per Indira Gandhi program of 1975) would have created 15 million
in the same proportion as Germany instead of 5 lakh apprentices that India has
89.
Only
social security that India can create is job creation; use the tragic Covid-19
situation to get rid of regulatory cholesterol and undertake some of the
difficult reforms … lot of real pain after lockdown is lifted … don’t have the
resources to underwrite 2.3 bn people
Work-From-Nearer-Home
(WFNM)
90.
Sridhar
Vembu, Founder Zoho (SaaS) company is experimenting with village offices which
is nearer to his employees’ home
91.
Decongest
cities by letting employees WFM from where they hail with nodal offices 50-100
kms away that serve the purpose of a brick-and-mortar divisional offices
92.
Use
the vacated office spaces as residential complexes or guest houses for
employees and outstation visitors to engage more efficiently and be more
productive by saving on travel time and decongesting traffic on the road and of
course reduce the carbon footprint
93.
Education
department must encourage home schooling through blended / hybrid program delivery
to ensure the child’s progress to higher education
94.
Entrepreneurs
and corporates to develop local cluster environments by supporting community
aspirations and requirements to be self-sufficient
95.
Encourage
a new way of working where professional and personal development obtains a
balance in a village environment – an antidote to city work culture of burnouts
96.
Distribution
of skilled workforce in diverse environment is also an effective response to
pandemics / epidemics and natural disasters that tend to close down whole
businesses
97.
Hitherto
people living in villages get the benefit of city dwellers rich educational
background for downloading the knowledge and skill base to rural folks by
teaching in the schools or home teaching several children together
98.
The
city allowance costs to be converted to village development allowance costs for
each employee to contribute to his environment
99.
‘Jugaad’
which India is famous should be encouraged blended with the scientific to
develop a global market for local innovations
Vision and Hope
100.
Build
larger visions and become champions of hope
101.
For
every discouraging statistic or news report counter with a positive one which
you are doing out of a sense of nation building, commitment to innovation, but
above all, because ‘defeat’ or ‘impossible’ is not a word that is in your
personal dictionary
