Taare Zameen Par

Suddenly all the Big Stars of the corporate world have been brought down to earth with one big name company falling after the other. The recent fall of Citibank brings down the bank which never sleeps. Only if they had followed the age old advice that a good night's sleep does a lot of good to your health. Hopefully now Citibank will start sleeping well to ensure it can regain its health.

I think time has come to go back to the basics and go back to age old advice that our ancestors have been giving us. Its a good time for the companies to stop chasing the latest management fad and start looking at creating organisations which work on realistic targets and do not chase unhealthy profitability and growth goals, do not grow beyond what they can manage, sincerely start believing that employees are their greatest assets and finally go back to respecting your customers, which was getting ignored since there were just too many customers out there, so what if a few were unhappy.

The challenge I see right now, is that laying off people has become the latest fad, and organisations are trying to outdo each other about how many they are planning to layoff. A few companies have started trimming salaries at the top, the biggest impact on cost reduction on salaries is there, which is the right way of going about changing the organisations. At least these organisations start looking at accountability for the top management and hence are showing 'walk the talk', unlike the CEOs of the large car companies, or AIG top executives, who continue to splurge at the cost of job loss to juniors.

My simple advice to companies is that this is the right time to get your house in order, now that there is excess capacity, utilise this time to build capability, upgrade your processes and be ready. I am confident that we have a boom cycle coming our way in a few months time.