Power of an online community vs. Corporate muscle power
A series of interesting and very powerful real life events are unfolding that are showing the power of a well know online community vs corporate muscle power.
“Mr Harish has been an unfortunate recipient of Skoda’s appalling standards of service. His only fault? That he spent 12 lakh rupees on the wrong brand. His Skoda had parts worth a whopping 4.0 lakh rupees replaced by counterfeit ones by Skoda’s official dealer / representative; fake parts that could have taken a toll on his family’s life (e.g. fake brake discs installed in his car). Now, Skoda is busy fighting him in court. Not to mention, his Skoda Octavia has yet not been returned to him. IN A YEAR!
Instead of apologising and making up to its so-obviously-wronged customer for their dealer / representative misdeeds, Skoda continues to fight the poor gentleman.
Harish turned to Team-BHP for support and posted his entire Skoda ordeal here (Skoda dealer changes parts in my car = Consumer Court = Car not returned in a YEAR!) with FACTS and supporting pictures.
Skodas response: Threaten the community and trying to curb freedom of speech.
Obviously, this has created a stir within the Team-BHP Community. Members are angry and united against Skoda.
Follow the full story here:
This is going to be a big one and will show the power of online communities in the digital age.
Does Knowledge Management need the KM Function to be successful
Does an organization need a dedicated and separate KM function in order for it to do KM?
If one looks at great organizations like Google, Apple Yahoo (who are considered to be great Knowledge led organizations), they don’t have dedicated KM functions. What’s important is that the basic tenets, ethos and culture of KM needs to be part of the organizations ‘being’, the way of life — akin to the breathing process, doing it continuously without even realizing it.
All the above organizations (and many more) are role models in the knowledge era. The great thing about these organizations create processes & structures that truly embody the spirit of the ‘needs’ of the knowledge worker and through that they are able to attract the best talent and provide them with an environment that goes to the core of what knowledge management espouses. They don’t do KM for the sake of KM and saying ‘oh, we also do KM and realize the importance of it and hence we have dozens of knowledge managers supporting KM’…
I personally believe in the approach taken by the Google, Apple Yahoo type organizations as an effective way of doing KM.
For the ‘regular’ organizations I believe that creating a dedicated KM function is a good thing to bring ‘focus’ on KM and giving it legitimacy. This will send the right signals and help get going.
However, for KM to be truly effective in those organizations, over a period of time, the KM function should strive for enabling the different parts of the organizations to do KM themselves and not rely on the KM function. This is where KM needs to be part of the organizations ‘being’, the way of life. This should be the role and end goal of CKO’s and they should also be measured on this aspect. Once the above has started to happen (and this should happen in a measurable/definite time frame) then the KM function should be considered for dissolution and the charter of the KM function should become to just oversee it’s disbanding
The above may look good in theory but there are practical challenges like (just some of the many…):
- Over a period of time the person leading the KM function can get attached to it and can find it difficult to let go.
- KM has overlap with almost all functions and in the beginning there is less conflict and at a conceptual level people agree for KM to work on the areas of overlap and make progress. As clarity emerges and overlap areas gain traction, the different functions start voicing or thinking about what do these overlaps mean and start questioning this.
- This creates ground for small battles in bigger organizational ‘turf wars’ and results in various functions/departments further entrenching in their beliefs/positions and the organization opting for ’status quo’ approach to please all.
It’s sad but a true mirage and we continue to rely on “Knowledge Management needing the KM Function to be successful” approach…
Corporate Version of “Moments of Truth”
A recent book that I was reading reminded me of a yet to be published book that has been lingering in my mind for a very long time.
We have the seminal book — ‘my experiments with truth’ by Mahatma Gandhi and for long I have desired to read a contemporary and a corporate version of that message. A version that has been written by a great corporate leader, talking about ‘moments of truth’ from a corporate context. A journey through the tough moments in the corporate world with all the human elements of their right and wrong decisions, human failure, temptations, greatness, etc. The book would NOT be about the ‘company/organization’ but about the business leader and their ‘moments of truth’.
The book can be written by a business leader, looking back at his/her own corporate journey(from a ‘moments of truth’ perspective) or can be a compilation of chapters from all the great business leaders of this country(or the world).
I am sure that the young professional would benefit immensely from such experiences. Too often we have books that portray our business leaders as heroes but very few, if any, that talk about their being human and their ‘moments of truth’ in a corporate context. I also know that this is a very sensitive subject and not many people would be willing to share their ‘moments of truth’…
web2.0 auto portals in India: mee too syndrome…
eb2.0 & Automotive portals? wow..!!! As a passionate automobile enthusiast and a firm Web.20 believer, it represents the best of both worlds for me.
I have been following the auto portal scene in India from the late 90’s and have seen them evolve, stagnate and fade away. Have witnessed portals such as indiacar.com, cybeersteering.com, bsmotoring.com come and stagnate in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
When ‘AutoMartIndia‘ (now called ‘FirstChoice‘) was launched in early 2000’s, as an automobile enthusiast I was excited as it represented a paradigm shift in the way Indians bought & sold ‘used cars‘. In fact, the term ‘used cars’ came into existence — at least in India after that only. Previously ‘used cars’ were always referred to as ‘second hand‘ cars.
In the last one year or so, I have been very impressed by carwale.com. The way these folks have approached about building an auto portal is simply great. They put in one feature at a time, must have analyzed user behavior to ensure that it was working spot on, and then built on the simple web2.0 premises of usability & simplicity tied together and anticipating user needs. Once you looked at carwale.com, you realized — why the hell did other auto portals not think of it? This is exactly what I as a user wants.!! Features like used car prices to the granular level of models/city and mileage are a great boon to users. carwale perfected this with tapping into it’s user base to come up with city/model specific indicative pricing for used cars. There are a number of other features that one can go on and on about the value proposition that carwale.com provides — both to end user(car buyer) and car sellers (individuals & used car dealers).
Of late numerous auto portals that are replicas of carwale.com have come up. In my opinion, while this is testimony to the fact that carwale.com is successful and good, is also resulting in mee-too auto portals‘ whose value proposition is exactly same as that of carwale.com. While this can also be termed as expansion of market, this leads to stifling of innovation & new business models. These mee-too auto portals are doing exactly what the auto portals of late 90’s did — copy each other.
Don’t believe me: Just look at the home pages of three different auto portals(carwale.com, carazoo.com, driveinside.com). It would be very hard for a user to distinguish one from another.
What’s wrong with automotive websites/portals in India
In the ‘print’ media, auto magazines like Overdrive, Business Standard Motoring, Autocar, etc cater to the motoring enthusiast of the country and all of these are very successful print magazines. For years, these magazines have been the sole medium for the auto enthusiasts to keep in touch with the passion they are mad about — automobiles.
Similarly, in the ‘television’ space, literally every channel worth it’s name is having it’s own ‘auto’ show — at times with tie-ups with the ‘print’ magazines. These ‘auto’ shows on television have their ‘experts’ who are very knowledgeable and respected in the motoring world and very often these ‘experts’ are also the experts/editors of the print magazines. These experts often do the following:
- Answer queries on issues/problems that viewers face with their vehicles
- Recommend which vehicle to buy to their viewers depending on their needs
- Analyze the auto industry for happenings and trends
- And other things – like international motoring scene, product launches, motor sports etc.
In the ‘internet’ space, as far as ‘automotive business websites/portals’ go, there seems to be a vacuum w.r.t websites/portals that can be termed as successful and having a broad user base (with the exception of carwale.com – a late entrant). Many of the internet websites/portals aimed at the automotive segment were even backed by big names of the tv/print media – autocarindia.com from the Autocar stable, bsmootoring.com from Business Standard, Indiacar.com, cybersteering.com, overdrive.in from the Overdrive magazine.
One can safely assume that auto experts were involved with these websites and they would have shared all their experience. Why were these internet websites not able to catch the users attention in India and become successful? All these websites seem to have the ‘obvious’ and ‘seemingly right’ set of features available to make them successful. Most of the websites offer the following:
- News from the auto industry & editorial articles
- Compare vehicles
- Buy & sell vehicles
- Road Tests
- Ask the experts
- Prices of vehicles
It seems that most of the print magazines don’t know how they can leverage the internet and create communities of auto enthusiasts. At most, these print magazines view their internet websites as the place to advertize about their print magazine and few other add-ons. These magazines are not taking a strategic view of how ‘building communities’ can increase the sales/subscription of their print magazines. It can offer a whole new paradigm of distribution channels, business models and extremely great competitive advantage.
In a subsequent post, I will talk about a auto website/portal that is successfully ‘building communities’ and is perfectly poised to leverage the user community into a great competitive advantage.
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