Embracing original ideas in business
M.S.S.VARADAN
MAVERICKS AT WORK — Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win: William. C.Taylor & Polly LaBarre; HarperCollins Publishers, 1 A Hamilton House, Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001. £ 14.99.
This book is all about bold new ways of being creative in business. A number of cases are presented in a convincing fashion to underline this approach. The book is divided into four parts: rethinking competition; re-inventing innovation, re-connecting with customers and, re-designing work.
Among others the case of ING Direct USA Bank, a subsidiary of the ING group is an interesting one. It was headed by Arkadi Kuhlmann, a maverick who differed from other banks and championed the timeless virtues of thrift and financial security. It is essentially an internet-based savings bank and a direct-to-the-customer operation. It has no branches and ATM machines, and charges no customer fees and asks for no minimum deposits. The bank offers a limited number of product offerings – savings accounts with no minimum balances and easy to understand mutual funds. The overheads are low and hence they give higher interest rates to depositors and charge lower rates to its borrowers. The result is $ one billion deposits every month. It has become the fourth largest thrift bank in the U.S. Kuhlmann and his colleagues believed in “leading Americans back to savings.” This is a good eye opener to our country wherein the banks and financial agencies are continuously trying to change the traditional good values of people to save, inducing customers to borrow more and spend more.
Open approach
Yet another interesting case is that of the Gold Mining Company Gold corp. inc. in Ontario, Canada, which had produced nearly 10 per cent of Canada’s gold output. They spent $ one billion on exploration. But how to get the deep spots for drilling was the problem. The experts in the company couldn’t make much progress in a whole year. Its chairman Rob McEwen spent a week at MIT learning about linux and open source software. He got a new insight from this. His idea was to use the internet to post all its data on the mine—50 years worth of maps, reports and other geological information in two and three dimensions. It was unthinkable to others in his organisation to open up this data to outsiders. But, inspired by the open source software approach, he then invited scientists and engineers from all over the world to download the data, analyse it and submit drilling plans to Gold corp. The goal was to find the next six billion ounces of gold. A prize of $ 500,000 was offered for the best submissions. The open source contest produced tremendous ideas for discovering gold which led the company to great heights to produce lot of ore at a low cost and by the end of 2004, Gold corp. was holding on to more bullion than the central banks of 45 of the world’s countries including Canada and Mexico. To stand out from the crowd, the mavericks create work places very different from the usual.
Out of the box thinking
With regard to people, mavericks do not believe in recruiting only when vacancies arise. Whenever they come across good people, they just grab them. This is done by companies such as Cirque du Soleil, which has gained a tremendous reputation for innovation. Many cases of “out of the box thinking” by mavericks are presented who had produced fortunes for their organisations, but at the base of it all is the axiom “Business as if people mattered,” whether they are customers, employees or shareholders. On the whole the book is racy with plenty of prac tical examples. Imaginative language dominates the writing and compels the reader’s attention all the time.
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