Many big corporations in India are trying a new trick to stay at the cutting edge.

Reverse mentoring

Business Standard

Every marketer wants his new product launch to be successful &mdash; ensure his product flies off the shelf while keeping costs low and profit margins high. Siddharth S Singh, associate professor of marketing, and director of the fellow programme in management at the Indian School of Business (ISB) tells Rajarshi Bhattacharjee how marketers can manage all that on a tight budget.

'Firms are learning how to leverage social media'

You Don&rsquo;T Need A Godfather: Create Your Own Success by Elango R.

The top 10 business bestsellers

Procaffe, the Italian coffee roasting conglomerate, is all set to debut its flagship gourmet coffee bean brand Caff&eacute; Bristot in India. To start with, Caffe Bristot will be launching its complete range of coffee beans and cafe branding for Indian cafes. Over a period of time, Procaffe along with its partner is also understood to be exploring option to expand its caf&eacute; business under the brand Testa Rossa.

Caffe Bristot set for debut in India

Decentralisation is the buzzword at Star TV, the country&rsquo;s largest broadcaster. Star India CEO Uday Shankar spoke to Surajeet Das Gupta and Gaurav Laghate on his next steps.

The film model won't work for television: Uday Shankar

Management institutes, which dragged the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to the Supreme Court, now wish to withdraw their case. But the AICTE is in no mood to relent.

SC case: B-schools seek compromise

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B) will conduct a general management programme for strategic management of luxury businesses, to be held at IIM-B campus between September 10 and 12, 2012. This programme aims to benefit entrepreneurs and CEOs of luxury businesses, GMs/profit centre managers of international luxury businesses, designers looking to create luxury brands, managers of luxury franchise businesses, suppliers of products/services top international luxury businesses, advertising agency executives of luxury brands, etc.

Luxury business management course

Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, has announced scholarships totalling Rs 2.5 crore for students of its incoming PGP class. The scholarships at ISB are a part of the institute&rsquo;s total scholarship outlay of about Rs 8 crore, and will be awarded to talented professionals from a broad spectrum of sectors and functions, including healthcare, government, media, finance, technology, etc. ISB awards scholarships to students selected on the basis of academic and professional performance as well as personal qualities such as leadership, integrity and community service.

ISB to provide scholarship worth Rs 2.5 cr

XLRI Jamshedpur has announced the inauguration of the third round of &lsquo;post-graduate programme for certificate in entrepreneurship management'.

XLRI inaugurates certificate course

Students in India mostly lack soft skills and are oblivious of the skill set required in a particular job. Tie up will not only help student in technical and soft skill but student will also see their goal from beginning and thus can orient their studies to gain knowledge. Besides, these tie ups will force university, colleges to update their syllabus as per the need of the industry. Students will also be able to involve themselves with the live project of the industry thus gaining first hand experience in that field. Thus it will help to generate more employable youth.

Students' corner

For last few weeks, the backs of Mumbai&rsquo;s ubiquitous BEST buses have been sporting pictures of the dashing Virat Kohli, the 23-year-old cricketer and youth icon, holding a handset of an unknown brand called Celkon.

Star power or starry-eyed?

Quick. What&rsquo;s common to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bill Clinton, N.D.

Brand monogamy

    Wendell Weeks, CEO of Corning which supplied the Gorilla glass in six weeks just in time for the launch.

Answers to last week's The Strategist Quiz (#269)

Whether your audience is children, international business travelers, or local politicians and nonprofits, the challenge of relevance can be difficult. And this is not only because getting people to care is generally difficult.

Forget the hard sell

We are not in fine arts. Here, creativity is for business. The media landscape is a complicated one. The media clutter has made saying something, which will be remembered by people, a lot more challenging. As a result, we have become more innovative because we and the client will have to survive in it. We, after all, help them to communicate and sell. So, the pressure on ideas to be more arresting has gone up.

Creative people are not contract killers: Prasoon Joshi

I have been reading the horror stories about how the cash-on-delivery model of payment touted by the e-commerce companies in India is the root of all their troubles and may ultimately lead to their ruin. It is almost funny how one of the most innovative ideas of our time is getting blamed for the things it is not really responsible for.

Deliver like Domino's Pizza

Heart, Smarts, Guts And Luck: What It Takes To Be An Entrepreneur And Build A Great Business by Anthony K Tjan, Richard J.

After a tiring day at work on Friday nights, 35-year-old Amit Pande is thrilled by ACP Pradyuman&rsquo;s investigative skills and dialogues. He has been watching CID, the longest crime serial in India&rsquo;s television history (produced by Sony), for the last 14 years.

Crime pays on television

When the tag line was coined, V Kurien only said &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s utterly mad; but if you think, it will work, go ahead&rdquo;.

The 'Utterly butterly' story

The job scene will surely improve by end of this quarter, as by looking at recent figures on GDP growth from 5.3 to 5.5 per cent in the previous quarter, can be seen as a positive sign. Even in US, the unemployability rate fell for the present quarter. As our domestic market itself have high consumption levels, so global slowdown will not affect Indian Inc. much. Till now, no hive-offs are seen in our&nbsp;corporates&nbsp;, so a slightest further improvement and stability in the economy will surely create quantum in jobs opportunities by the end of the quarter.

In 1994, in the first heady flush of economic reform, I wrote a breathlessly hopeful article in Business Standard that talked about the prospect of buying McDonald&rsquo;s hamburgers, petrol from a Shell outlet, power from, say, China Light and Power, phone services from AT&amp;T and so on and so forth.

Page 782 - News