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| Critics don't make GOOD ARTISTS |
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| My worst strategic mistake
... and what I learnt from it by
A.G.Krishnamurthy. |
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| BUSINESS STANDARD, The Strategist, 2 Aguust 2005. |
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Watch a baby learning to walk. It's life's best demo
for everything you need to know about mistakes and how
to learn from them. Babies have the healthiest attitude
towards mistakes. They are so focused on attaining their
goal, that they make their falls seem so inconsequential.
You very rarely see them contemplating or whining about
their falls. All they need is a minute or two to re-orient
them selves and they are up again, bravely making another
go of it. Of course, there are the occasional tantrum
throwers who bring the house down, but they are the attention-seekers
and not the norm. Invariably, if you leave them alone
they, too, get back on their feet soon enough. Nearly
all babies seem to have a pre-programmed knowledge about
the temporal nature of their mistakes. We have a lot to
learn from our early days on this planet.
So, what is a mistake, really? The dictionary defines
it as an error or fault resulting from defective judgment,
deficient knowledge or carelessness. My takeout is that
mistakes are the flip side of learning. Not one of us,
unless he or she is God, can ever claim fault-free judgment,
complete knowledge and total attention at every stage
of our lives. Perhaps mistakes are the reason formal education
plays such an important role in our lives. A good college
education - be it in management or medicine exposes you
to the mistakes made by our predecessors and the lessons
that can be learnt from them. Thus, hopefully, prevent
the new generation from making the same errors all over
again. Little wonder the phrase "If only I had known ...
" is the most common reaction to mistakes. That said,
it's time to talk about mine and what five learned from
them. |
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| We are sure it's right, till it goes wrong |
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There are some mistakes you make that leave their lessons
engraved in words of gold, so to speak, in your heart.
One of mine is a division we at Mudra called "Passion".
Let me give you a little backgrounder first.
Vimal, as you all probably know, began its product line
with sarees and dress material. And integral to the product
is textile design. In a market such as sarees, constant
variety and pattern innovation is critical in ensuring
that your customer stays brand loyal rather than watching
her be lured away by a fancier design in a competitor's
shop. It is one of the key factors that keep your brand
ahead of the rest. Leading the pack has always been a
Reliance trait, and textile design was one of the harbingers.
At its peak, the Reliance Design Studio at Naroda was
the largest in Asia, with over 300 designers churning
out 500 designs in 18 color ways (that works out to 2,200
designs) every month!
Now, marketing these designs is another feat altogether
and that's where Mudra came in. To promote the latest
designs we used to design posters that featured the saree
design of the season. Mudra's poster designs became so
popular that the print featured on the poster would become
the best seller of the batch. Pretty soon we became the
blue-eyed boys of both the client and the dealer network
because of our ability to spot winning saree designs.
Our creative judgment was lauded by one and all! So we
reasoned that if we were so good at spotting popular designs
it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to actually design
them ourselves! Sounded very logical to us at the time-after
all we were in the field of design.
So with great hope we opened "Passion" - a textile design
studio. We wanted to create exclusive designs that could
be sold in boutiques and other exclusive outlets. But
we ran into problems pretty soon when we realised that
textile design was fabric-specific. In other words, certain
designs could only be reproduced on certain fabric. That's
when we realised that we were trying to put the cart before
the horse, so to speak. Fabric construction itself is
an exciting and creative world. That is the foundation.
Then design is add-on, literally, to enhance the inherent
beauty of the fabric. Not the other way around, as we
had assumed. It was a disastrous attempt. We were trying
to learn the business after getting into it! Needless
to say, we had to shut shop pretty soon when we discovered
that the act of "creation" was very different from the
act of "creative judgment" |
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| Falling, learning... |
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| Our mistake clearly indicated we had defective
judgment and deficient knowledge. Let's address the first
-defective judgment. We erred in blurring the lines between
two established roles - the creator's and the critic's.
The critic is seldom, if ever, a good creator. Take any
example - from the world of art books, movies, the culinary
world...any where and you'll see it happening every time
a critic tries to become an artist, director, author or
a chef. His work invariably doesn't quite make the grade.
I see a |
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of this happening between clients and agencies,
too. A discerning buyer is very different from a
good producer. Experts tend to make a job look easy.
It doesn't mean it is. And it definitely doesn't
mean that any one can do it. Failure to recognise
the merits and value of each other's disciplines
are the first rumblings of a catastrophe waiting |
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Experts
tend to make a job look easy. That doesn't
mean it is. Failure to recognise the merits
and value of each other's disciplines are
the 'first signs of a catastrophe waiting
to happen.' |
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to
happen. The second failing was deficient knowledge.
I cannot stress this more. Never, ever get into
any discipline that does not belong to your skill
set. Every organization has it own core competencies
and if a new discipline doesn't fall into this purview
it will invariably end up as a costly mistake. In
the early 1990s - the post-Liberalisation |
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| phase as it is now known - many large corporations
in India got into takeover mode with great gusto. They
began acquiring companies that had vastly divergent interests
from their core businesses. Textile companies got into
cement and so on. They valiantly tried to run these businesses
for a couple of years and then had to shut shop. Lack
of in-depth knowledge and unfamiliarity with the terrain
of the business that you run is akin to committing commercial
suicide. So, to reiterate a management truism coined more
than 20 years ago by management guru Tom Peters in his
classic corporate opus In Search of Excellence: stick
to the knitting. |
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| Life's way of getting us back on track |
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| Here's the bottom-line. You can make your mistakes work
for you. If you view them positively they are marvelous
eye-openers and the best part is they are lessons that
are tailor-made for you. It's a bit like being given "special
tuition" to get you back on track. At the end of the session
if you are smart enough, you will emerge stronger, faster
and wiser than the rest. You have my word for it. After
all, I've had my share of both mistakes, and the rewards
of learning from them! |
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| A.G.Krishnamurthy is the Chairman,
AGK Brand Consulting, and founder Mudra Communications
and MICA |
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