The healthy you - an investor’s insight…

Healthcare industry in India is undergoing a transformation. From being a typical doctor-driven model, the entire industry is undergoing a transformation to become an institution which delivers with care. ‘Customer centricity’ is no more just a word of an internal market. It has started branching out in the need-based models as well.

There have been many hospitals which have identified & adopted the need of the hour and paying attention & extra care to the high-paying customers; but they seldom do it for the mid and lower mid strata that avail services. India being 70% at the bottom of the pyramid, word of mouth of a bad service is just a blink of the eye away. The perceived ‘inaccessibility of medical services’ is becoming a distant reality.

This being the scenario, the who focus of the industry has shifted towards delivering seamless services under one roof and hence retain the customers. From a management perspective, this means repeated business and probably an extended business at times where a relative comes over as well. But with every brand getting into being a multi-specialty unit, there is immense pressure on the people involved in the system to do it right.

Till date, the hospitals have been a basic necessity of mankind and hence there are funds allocated in the budget in the name of social welfare allocated to healthcare. The scenario has now changed with private players parking their presence in the sector. Especially in tier 1 cities, the focus on customer centricity has been really high to an extent where MIS parameters have now been defined to calculate ‘conversion’ (typically - how many actually took the procedure with the hospitals and how many went out…).

If we dig deep into it, everyone understands the fact that there is big money involved in the healthcare sector. The brands which have been existent since sometime now are seeking the help of private investors for expansion. The typical ‘Eskimo hunters’ are now creeping into the healthcare sector. This means, they need more means of giving awareness to the otherwise healthy community to indicate preventions. To put it in plain text - ‘we need more footfalls’ is the management motto.

There is a sad side to it as well… It is leading to a lot of ethical issues as the doctors are turning to be Eskimo hunters as they are given targets! Are we trying to cure ailments or create scare? Only time will answer it…

Though the interest of private investors is helping the sector to institutionalize, I feel there needs to be a broader thought of contribution from policies, ethics and professionalism which will help to drive it in the right way. Else, we may end up doing what we did back in the 1960s in the name of industrialization (cut all those bloody trees…)!

Have I done it right…?

The last 6 months, though taxing, has proved to be something which has taught me perceptions - in the Indian market at least. Handling marketing at the ground level always gives an understanding of the pulse of the population around. With this write up I make a humble effort to list down the learning of the past.

It started around half a decade back when I realized my love towards understanding what people think. It started as an interpretation of the muted actions in the next table of a coffee shop and grew as an analysis of the people I am associated with. Though ‘thinking from their shoes’ at times meant experiencing loneliness, it helped build a confidence level about understanding people.

My first professional experiment of trying to sell my photographs in a retail outlet helped me read through the mindset of a retailer. To my luck, it was a Sardar who I was dealing with - the best known breed for being astute businessmen. Though the whole venture started off by passion, running it in the commercial way takes a toll on the creative aspect of it. (Or should I say - ‘it expects you to be more creative!’?). ‘What’s in it for me?’ was a reality which I realized in the hard way.

My next venture with a professor of mine in setting up the marketing & sales function let me implement the ‘What’s in it for me’ factor. But what we really forgot was - are we educating the already aware or trying to solve their problems? The whole effort of 5-6 months, though helped to create a buzz in the known circle, couldn’t create a big impact to help the initiative turn out to be a successful venture. This was the ‘Do I really need it?’ phase of learning for me.

These initiatives helped me gain some experience around the expectations from a marketing role. This helped in my next role for technology marketing. The scope of perception was international with an expectation of maintaining the already established brand positioning. It being a new domain (neither retail nor a product), the expectations were different. It was more of a sale pitch termed as marketing. The learning from the past did make a difference here. The questions / needs got redefined now - ‘is it a life and death situation for me?’

Jump into the healthcare sector meant a lot of ground zero work. Situations demanded me to take up marketing. With the help of a good investment & technical support, was able to answer the above questions to a good extent. Having done it all, there is still a void. There is a never a wide-spread acceptance of the message sent across. A concept of mass appreciation doesn’t exist. This lets me think ‘Have I done it right…?’

Does a ShAky top mean 'Problems'?

Well, this title made me giggle at myself… It definitely isn’t pervert and it definitely isn’t anything related to what you may be thinking about! ;)

Since the time I have decided to move on from IT, it has been a roller coaster ride and work has usually defined / controlled my time. Amidst doing it, a lot of random thoughts come by which affects decision making and which creates an environment of healthy argument. At times, it goes crazy enough to an extent that it becomes hard for me to decide on what exactly is required. Had taken my time off from work off late to introspect on what was happening and am I doing it right?

In a whole startup environment, the situation is usually very random with loads of thoughts coming into the mind of the group of people spear heading it. There will be humongous amount of situations which wouldn’t have been included in the ‘planned’ expansion. But usually one thing will be very clear - the final destination. Without that in mind, there isn’t anything which will take the growth of the organization in a healthy way and in the right direction. This article is my attempt to bring in the nuances any organization may encounter when this so called ‘destination’ is missed / miss communicated.

When the individual / group heading the organization isn’t clear of what they want as an output and which is the market segment they want to play in, it usually starts having ripple effect in all its functions / departments. For the sake of simplicity, let me take you through the core functions any organization will have - Sales & Marketing, HR, Finance and Operations.

Sales & Marketing

Marketing is usually considered as an overhead in the IT industry and usually confused to be a part of the Sales function (at least in a SMB setup). It is usually the other way round in the healthcare industry. That is why I have clubbed them both out here as the end result of it is revenue to the organization.

When the thought process isn’t clear, the investments go hay wire. The expected ROI out of the effort is usually perceived to be zilch. But what people fail to understand is the fact that the communication hasn’t gone right and hence the person executing the whole thing isn’t doing it right. Added to this, if there is a fickle minded boss sitting on the top, one is in for a jolly ride!

Now, the ripple effect for this is enormous!

• The employees don’t feel they have contributed enough as there is no recognition for the effort
• The market may start perceiving the organization as something which one may not want to be positioned as
• The competitors if smart enough will take one for a ride until they have a bloody home run!

HR

The most important thing when the organization is growing is to hire the person who can hire. Without it, the growth story cannot even crawl - forget running. But what one needs to be careful of is the fact that there has to be a structural thought process in mind. Here again, the thought process of the top management has to fizzle down - else, the situation will be screwed up and the recruiters wouldn’t know whom to source. Without the aim, the policies go hay wire and hence one runs a risk of losing the star performers which will be a big impact in a growth path - not worth the risk I suppose…

Finance

Finance as a function is the most powerful according to me for the internal functioning of the organization. Though the others are equally important, without a proper finance structure, writing a single letter in the growth story would be difficult.

One needs to have a mix of people who have the following qualities. It indeed is a killer combination!

• Know all the rules & regulations to the T - but more importantly know the loopholes in the system
• Know the processes & how can they be tweaked to make it comfortable for coworkers
• Understand the business scenario and work closely with the marketing team to understand the market trends
• Data entry - day-in & day-out

Imagine the change in confusion a finance person observing the market trends and MIS will have with a shaky top management. They won’t be able to budget for the next month, they wouldn’t know what will happen in the coming months and they will not be able to promise anything to the board / investment committee. This defines the way any organization is heading towards and this defines the future of the growth story. So, is it shaky enough??? Not yet I guess…

Operations

Managing vendors is the biggest challenge and the grouse of the entire gamut of people involved in any organization revolves around the timelines of the support functions. Though it is more of a back-office job, it is the most interesting piece of work for any management enthusiast.

When it comes to a growth pattern, no involvement from the operations team (assuming one has the right set) will have an impact on vendor relations and reduces the negotiation power. One cannot exploit economies of scale. There is no price discounts one will get and there is no relationship built in the due course.

Having dealt with a shaky top head, for the last 6 months, it definitely is a very uncomfortable situation to be in for any middle management. There is no one person who can take a proper decision. Nobody in the system is sure of any decisions taken and there is no accountability at the top for a decision taken - a perfect recipe for a degraded growth story I suppose!

Get a larger purpose

A day which started with a deja vu when I sat on the bed staring at the ceiling wondering WTH am I doing in life. Is it all worth it at the end of the day? How is it going to impact my future life - is it going have an impact at all?

This lead me to think towards the larger purpose called 'Life'. Wish I could just do what I liked to and have just enough to lead a content life. But then what do I like to do? That to me is the biggest question mark? Would love to just travel round the world for the rest of my life - but without a purpose? Not done! What would I achieve at the end of it? Not something which I would sit on a hammock and rejoice about.

The thoughts then got back to where it was - WTH is the larger purpose? How I wish I had an answer for it and could just get it rolling from the next moment. I should stop thinking about it and get on with it I guess...

Stick to the basics

Creating a jazz has become the need of the hour these days. Every service you take needs an enormous amount of it! The argument is that without jazz people will not know and appreciate and feel the sense of growth of the industry. Might be - but are the people associated with creating this jazz really thinking about the so called side-effects of it? Tried revolving my head around a few of the sectors where it has become evident.

Travel being my prime interest, the images of the recent Kedarnath floods stuck me with despair. The holy place for the Hindu community is now a disaster-hit spot with more than 250 people dead around Kedarnath alone. Let us go more than 100 years back. Were there no cloud bursts then? There might have been - a few which might not have been recorded as well. The main reason for building a temple around the lingam was to protect it and the reason for keeping the pilgrimage so far off and out of access is to make the pious people realize the fact that it is not easy to be where they are and hence they will appreciate the act of being present around Kedarnath and such regions.

By doing this, the general health & the determination of the person visiting such places increase and it is natural for this to happen. With all the modern amenities and the thought process of ‘making the travel conducive and accessible’, the beauty of it is gone! There are associated services of lodges; restaurants etc around to ensure that the travelers are taken care. I am not refuting the requirement of the hour for travel and hence the income to the nation is improving and all that. But then, there probably could have been better ways to implement it rather than losing the beauty of the place and spoiling the natural habitat.

The other area of interest imbibed from my mom being education, I have been a constant observer of the recent trends that are taking place in the sector in India. Technology off late is playing a vital role in pulling in the crowd (to be read as parents). ELearning with digital classrooms are becoming a reality these days. My mom was attending a seminar which spoke about implementation of cloud computing in the schools and colleges to help share the information across without caveats or scalability. This of course brings in the pricing model of pay as much you use. So, a win-win situation is created according to the marketers there.

I have my own doubts about this. The other day, I was seeing a video of one of the greatest innovators in education - Sugata Mishra. He, with his efforts of proving the working of child self-learning has communicated a research idea of self-learning which works everywhere. Unfortunately the mediocre educationists have just taken the ‘self-leaning’ bit of it into consideration thus killing the whole essence of Indian education of giving it a motherly touch. There are only grades now and the kids don’t really need to know stuff to get through with higher grades especially with a proposition of increasing the percentage of multiple choice questions. There are other sets of people who argue the reason for knowing the basics when they are readily available and thus the concentration can be on what is not existing and thus contributing eventually to the innovative community.

That may be one view of seeing it. But without knowing the basics, without going through an arduous effort, the amount of appreciation the kid will have towards learning probably will not be so much and they will tend to make a lot of basic mistakes without a 100% understanding. Technology is no doubt a great enabler for innovation, but I feel that it has to be implemented in a proper sense. There are things which cannot at any point of time replace technology and we cannot create silos out of kids. They will eventually not know what bonding is all about. Educating kids is not all about getting them to the next level. A lot of moral, ethical and social feelings are associated along with the basic sciences; and these cannot be replaced by technology (however advanced it may get).

Innovation, increased level of service and technology are indeed great terminologies - but only till the time they are used constructively. Else, they turn out to be beasts. I can correlate it to the famous saying about processes - ‘A process is supposed to ease the living of the individual going through it; else, screw it!’

The changing designation

I have been observing the change in trend in the 'designation' offered to people around for quite some time now. The trend has changed so much from being a straight forward 'what I do as a job' to 'what am I perceived as', especially in the companies which are big in stature. I have captured a couple of those fancy designations here...

• Associate Vice President - A senior technical designer
• Architect - A senior developer
• Deputy Manager - An entry level manager

The argument which the HR personnel might have for such false impressions will be around motivation levels. Well, look at how the motivation levels will act upon when they search a job outside. Companies which are small & blunt will not even look at such roles... A HR will have an argument of this being a retention strategy. Well, the arguments are endless - aren't they!

On a contrary, there is another trend among the so called startups with a trendy looking designation. A few of them listed below:

• Story teller - CEO
• Eskimo hunter - A sales guy
• Head of creative destruction (HOCD - a derivative of HOD) - Creative head

Well, what can I say for all this?!? The corporate world has truly come a long way!

An event called death...

This has been hovering around my head since a while now. The fact that I wasn't around during my sister's death has stayed back I guess; with glimpses of my imagination of the moment wandering among the neural networks inside the skull. Today was one such day... The news of BGS passing away, triggered a few muscles at the top.

Always wonder what happens after death. Remember having endless conversations with a few of my friends around the existence and non-existence of an entity called 'Soul'. They say that a well defined version can be referred in Garuda Purana, to which I got introduced to, through the Tamil movie Anniyan. It apparently is a bad omen to read Garuda Purana while you are alive! It is best read during the rituals of death. It is said to show the path beyond death according to the Hindu belief.

More importantly, the event of death leaves behind a humongous amount of misery for the ones left behind. Given the fact that the person cannot return, the focus of the close ones around should be towards living through the loss and moving on. That probably is why a 13 day post-death ritual is imposed among the Hindus - so that a good lot of relatives will be around to help out...

On a contrary, there exists an entire community who live on the dead bodies - yes, the Aghoris. The event of death for them is usually filled with hope of food and joy of an opportunity to perform the rituals. Its a little sad, but a coin always has two sides... 

Well, I agree with you - This article is a little confused - more like the event itself! Just penned down a few stuff running through my mind.