Strategic tools for the practising manager

KIT

This week: Health and wellness

Thirty-nine per cent of the affluent males and 32 per cent of the affluent females visit fitness centres and health clubs at least once a month.

The spend on lifestyle by Indians is estimated at Rs 8,000 crore a year. Spas have a huge market potential in terms of spend.

One of the main reasons for the growing number of spas is the increase in the level of hypertension among people "" it is 30 times among the urban population and 10 times among rural dwellers.

Twenty-three per cent males visit health and beauty spas at least once a month. Surprisingly, females are a bit behind here, with only 20 per cent visiting them at least once a month.

Even though memberships and services at speciality spas have a hefty price tag, the proportion of business from them is 12-15 per cent.

Among women, 45 per cent visit beauty parlours once a month followed by 58 per cent visiting them once in two-three months.

Not just the ageing population, but people in general have realised that fitness is more than vanity, and that flexibility, meditation/breathing, yoga and other holistic exercise routines will provide long-lasting and meaningful benefits.

NUGGETS
Selections from management journals

In search of lessons to apply in our own careers, we often try to emulate what effective leaders do. Roger Martin says this focus is misplaced, because moves that work in one context may make little sense in another. A more productive, though more difficult, approach is to look at how such leaders think.

After extensive interviews with more than 50 of them, the author discovered that most are integrative thinkers "" that is, they can hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once and then come up with a new idea that contains elements of each but is superior to both.

Martin argues that this process of consideration and synthesis (rather than superior strategy or faultless execution) is the hallmark of exceptional businesses and the people who run them. To support his point, he examines how integrative thinkers approach the four stages of decision making to craft superior solutions.

First, when determining which features of a problem are salient, they go beyond those that are obviously relevant. Second, they consider multidirectional and non-linear relationships, not just linear ones. Third, they see the whole problem and how the parts fit together. Fourth, they creatively resolve the tensions between opposing ideas and generate new alternatives.

How successful leaders think
By Roger Martin
Harvard Business
Review, June 2007
Subscribe to this article at www.hbr.com

How can companies capture the magic of Toyota's product development engine, without spending the 60 years Toyota took to develop it? The trick is not to imitate particular steps but to emulate the overall mind-set, building a system that sidesteps the constraints of conventional R&D and constantly reinvests in improving the process.

Toyota's product development process focuses on carefully building and nurturing a set of six capabilities that are precisely orchestrated to enable the launch project to succeed. The six elements form an internally consistent, self-reinforcing system: structure and organisation; the development process; extended enterprise; institutional learning; people development; and culture.

Innovation agility
By Kevin Dehoff and John Loehr
strategy+business,
Summer 2007
Read this article at www.strategy-business.com

Executives should distinguish between two types of complexity "" institutional and individual. The former concerns the number and nature of interactions within a company, the latter the way individual employees and managers experience and deal with complexity.

Most business people focus primarily on institutional complexity and thus fail to see that some forms of complexity, if managed well, can create value and do not have to generate excessive complexity at the individual level. Institutional complexity can enhance organisational resilience and enable companies to take on new strategic opportunities.

Companies must get three things right to manage complexity for value: organisational design, coordinating processes and systems, and capability building. Each requires thinking about complexity at the individual level, though executives should always be alert to the possibility that a complete organisational redesign may be necessary.

Cracking the complexity code
By Suzanne Heywood, Jessica Spungin and David Turnbull
The McKinsey Quarterly,
Number 2, 2007
Read this article at www.mckinseyquarterly.com