KIT: Internet for leisure

THE NUMBER OF Internet users in India is close to 60 million or about 5 per cent of the population.

SEC A HAS THE HIGHEST numbers using the Internet for leisure.

THE USERS OF Internet for leisure are young (20-30 years old) and combined with the next largest set of users (15-19 years old), constitute 90 per cent of all users. Women represent only 17 per cent of all users.

THE PREFERRED places for Net-based leisure activities in order of most preferred are: Internet cafés, home, residence of friends, college and workplace.

THE MOST POPULAR activities within the category in order of most preferred are: Chatting, playing games, listening to online music, social networking, downloading media and blogging.

NUGGETS
Selections from management journals

RESEARCHERS W CHAN Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that firms seeking to grow in mature markets need to create new buyer value, thereby entering Blue Ocean markets, where they don’t have rivals. In contrast, firms fighting rivals in bloody, Red Oceans will struggle to remain profitable. To facilitate the search for Blue Oceans this paper aims to offer managers a new tool to uncover new points of buyer differentiation.

It suggests that one way to generate Blue Ocean strategies is to use the fundamental building blocks of value creation. Based on extensive work with value creation logics, it proposes that there are three types of value firms can offer customers: Lower prices using an industrial efficiency logic; increase user connectivity with a network services logic; or enhance the offering’s fit with the user needs using a knowledge intensive logic. By combining parts of two or more of the value creation logics, managers may construct innovative bundles of attributes.

Using a value creation compass to discover ‘Blue Oceans’
By Norman T Sheehan and Ganesh Vaidyanathan 
Strategy & Leadership, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2009
Subscribe to this article at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/10878570910941172

LAYOFFS ARE A FACT OF life today, as is survivor guilt —which engenders the feelings of fear, frustration and distrust harboured by some people who still have their jobs. Companies can address survivor guilt by recognising that large-scale layoffs represent fundamental organisational change. Leaders need to manage layoffs carefully, ensuring that departing employees are treated fairly and respectfully while striving to give remaining employees confidence about the future.

MANAGING SURVIVOR GUILT
March 2009
BCG Publications
The Boston Consulting Group
Read this article at http://www.bcg.com.br/

RRCESSIONS ARE A GOOD time to disengage from businesses and practices that are weak and under pressure — but the volatile environment demands that managers let go of old approaches. The depressing headlines are only the latest manifestation of a trend that has been long in the making: The encroachment of Schumpeter’s famous “gales of creative destruction” over what were once relatively stable, even mature, businesses.

Unfortunately, leaders of many of today’s more mature organisations don’t have the right mindset or practices to help their organisations survive. They grew up with management practices suited to a different age — one with higher barriers to entry, greater transaction costs, fewer capable competitors, growing and increasingly affluent markets and far less information.

The environments they are facing now, however, are less predictable and more volatile. The result is that many of the core businesses — involved with what may be boring old, mature products and services that everyone has ta en for granted — are themselves becoming more uncertain.

How to rethink your business during uncertainty
By Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C MacMillan
MIT Sloan Management Review
Read this article at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/

BARELY 12 MONTHS AGO, media and entertainment was one of the hottest segments for investors in India. Now, as television channels and print publications face declining advertising rates, media firms appear to be in trouble. Profits are under pressure and layoffs have begun. Some of the problems are of the media’s own making. Experts, however, see the slowdown as a temporary phase; they believe growth prospects over the next five years could exceed 12 per cent.

After years of rah-rah growth, media firms present a grim picture
India Knowledge@Wharton
March 27-April 9
Read this article at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/