Subway - No way

I used to be a big Subway fan, to the extent that all my eat outs used to end up at Subway. My wife would object saying it was not hygienic to eat stuff which was cut and kept open. I used to give her a big lecture on Subway as an international brand which was very quality conscious and so on.

One day my wife got and opportunity to counter all my quality conscious Subway gyan. We walked into a Subway outlet in Gurgaon and I was getting ready to order, when my gaze moved to one of the containers on the counter which had a dead lizard in it. I was shocked and so was my daughter. I quickly clicked a snap of the thing and called out to the counter boy. The boy looked sheepishly at me, picked up the lizard and threw it in the dustbin and had the courage to ask me ' your order sir'.

I was amazed at the lack of quality consciousness of this chap, and that got me thinking about how shallow the claims of these so called big brands about quality consciousness is. I am sure this incident did not get escalated any further, nobody got to know at Subway of this fact and the next time around the same thing may happen and it will get brushed under the carpet just like this one incident.

You and I will probably assume that the brands do mean quality, but many incidents in the recent past have shown that the big international brands do not guarantee quality, be it worms in chocolates, pesticides in cola and so on.

For the time being, I have stopped eating Subway, not that it impacts their business, but just cannot come around to it. I wish my trust was not betrayed in such a manner, and more importantly I wish my wife did not get this opportunity to pull my leg every time we went out to eat.

Management Knowledge sharing initiative

My dear friend Avneet Jolly, who contibuted matter for my most popular blog item 'An Indian in Texas', has embarked on a very interesting venture to help consolidation of management knowledge and sharing it for people who need it. Details about his outfit are given below.

Also there is a contest for contribution of good ideas and knowledge for people who may want to partcipate in it.

A good initiative and another one has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. All the best Avneet for this good effort.

Sanjay

-------------------------------------------------------------

Insightory Inc.

Company

(http://insightory.com)

Insightory is a platform for management professionals, academicians and graduate business students to share their knowledge and insights with the corporate world, solve management issues collaboratively, and network with peers who have similar professional interests.

Our goal is to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge i.e. put it out on the "open" web, so that those who have expertise can add to it, and those who need the expertise can tap into it. In doing so, we will create powerful networks, with rich opportunities for "providers" as well as "seekers" of management knowledge.

We believe in five "core" tenets:

• Companies need a constant supply of "management knowledge" (best practices, trends, how-to's, insights, etc.)
• Having access to multiple viewpoints is better than having access to a few.
• Management knowledge is not the essential domain of a few; it is distributed among tens of thousands of smart, experienced people all over the world.
• Currently, there isn't any effective way for companies to tap into the experience and expertise of those who aren't employees or contractors / consultants.
• The most efficient mechanism for building and distributing knowledge is an open, internet-based system.

This is our alpha website. A beta version will be launched in December 2007. We are currently holding a Contest for the best management-related documents. Anyone in the management community is welcome to participate. See details, rules and award information here.