&ldquo;Step aside, lady! The man, too, needs his time before the mirror.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s what, the makers of personal grooming products would like to believe, is a routine exchange across homes in urban India. For, they are betting big on bringing the country&rsquo;s male population in their fold with products designed specifically for men, across categories like hair care, skin care and deodorants &mdash; the last being a category that has seen quite a bit of action lately.

Deo-drama hots up for men

Business Standard

Ginger Hotels, the budget hotel brand of the Tata group, has had a solo run since its launch in 2004 &mdash; unchallenged by any international or domestic organised sector player.

New players seek to ginger up budget hotel market

Jonathan Mildenhall is vice-president, global advertising strategy and creative excellence, at the Coca-Cola Company. He has worked with ad agencies such as Bartle Bogle Hegarty, McCann-Erickson and TBWA before joining Coke and in this role, oversees marketing communications, idea development and content production. He talks to Viveat Susan Pinto on the challenges of marketing in a country where Coke is not the leader.

My job's to build confidence in teams to come up with ideas not tried before: Jonathan Mildenhall

Developing a deep bench is a human resource issue, not restricted to the top management, but spanning an organisation&rsquo;s hierarchy. In most global organisations, leadership development initiatives are considered an integral part of the corporate strategy. Are Indian corporations using global best practices to plan succession? Does India Inc.

The leadership pipeline

Parting shots are a symptom of social and institutional stress.

Parting shots: The hostile exit letter as an art form

Aslightly vexing aphorism recommends, &lsquo;If life deals you lemons, make lemonade.&rsquo; How can we make lemonade out of Akerlofs lemons? To return to Akerlofs original example of the market for second-hand cars, both buyers and sellers have an incentive to try to fix the problem: sellers want to get a decent price for their peaches, and buyers want to buy peaches. If inside information is wrecking the chance of a mutually beneficial deal, both sides will want to find a way to bridge the information gap.

Making lemonade

Two years after the Indian Railways decided to take its core catering business away from the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the public sector undertaking has refocused its business and made a life for itself away from the unit which is now the world&rsquo;s fourth largest commercial or utility employer.

Some people will always be disappointed whatever our bandwidth: Rakesh Kumar Tandon

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The top 10 business bestsellers

The Indian food and FMCG packaging market has witnessed a growth of 15-20 per cent annually. More than 80 per cent of the total packaging in India constitutes rigid packaging. The remaining 20 per cent comprises flexible packaging.

KIT: Food Packaging in India

    The payment industry is witnessing a new revolution where mobile readers that plug into a cell phone&rsquo;s head set jack are replacing traditional Electronic Data Capture (EDC) machines and the manual card imprinters.

Answers to last week's The Strategist Quiz (#250)

It&rsquo;s not just the premier engineering and management institutes which are smiling this placement season. Law colleges across the country have also seen good placements, in addition to salary hike of anywhere between 20 and 30 per cent. Law schools say, apart from the usual law firms, many other companies have also recruited from campuses this year.

Campus beat: Legal eagles in demand

US-headquartered Harvard Business School (HBS) has finally found an address for its executive education classroom in India. The B-school, beginning this March, will offer executive programmes at the Taj Lands End, at Bandra, in suburban Mumbai.

Harvard B-school has a new address in Mumbai

In 2004, Amar Pandit left a cushy job in the banking and financial sector in the United States to become a financial planner in India. Pandit started his firm, My Financial Advisors, in early 2005, enrolling alongside for a certification in financial planning. &ldquo;I wanted to start my firm in the US, but I opted for India as the financial planning market had a huge opportunity here,&rdquo; says Pandit.

Financial planning as a profession catches up

Despite sluggish growth and uptight market condition, average salary offers at Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB) grew by 6 per cent this year for all its 180 students, compared with last year.

Average salary offer at XIMB up 6%

As Kingfisher Airlines flies deeper and deeper into air pockets of losses and indebtedness, spare a thought for the bird that bears its name: the stunning Common Kingfisher.

Kanika Datta: Animal instincts in branding

Some 86 companies, including 22 first-time recruiters, participated in the process. The average salary last year was Rs 15.54 lakh, and the highest domestic package was Rs 26 lakh.

JBIMS achieves 100% placement for 2012 batch

Airline mergers are notoriously complicated and tough to pull off. There are enough examples of troubled marriages all over the world &mdash; Delta Air Lines and Northwest; America West and US Airways and so on. And labour issues have invariably headed the list of potential complications. That&rsquo;s because all airlines have their own culture and their own working rules, and integrating the two can be nightmarish.

Shyamal Majumdar: Maharaja's labour woes

Harvard Business School&rsquo;s (HBS) famous alumnus, Ratan Tata, has gifted a classroom to his alma mater, which has been looking to set up a permanent facility to provide executive education programmes in India. The classroom at the Taj Lands End hotel, Mumbai, will be an amphitheatre-style classroom, fashioned after the one at Harvard Business School in Boston.

Ratan Tata gifts a classroom to Harvard 

One big media decision in the nineties was &ldquo;scheduling&rdquo;.

Madhukar Sabnavis: One day, one event, big impact

Nokia India started the year 2012 on the backfoot. While it stays firmly ensconced in the No 1 slot in the mobile handsets market in India with a little over 38 per cent share in 2011, its dominance was under pressure.

Nokia's hopes ride on Asha

Facebook&rsquo;s hundreds of millions of users could soon be faced with a lot more advertising &mdash; in their newsfeed, on their mobile devices and even when they log off.

Page 803 - News