101 Ways Big Business (read Govt / LE) Can Ride Out the Pandemic with the MSMEs

Automation

1.     Explore automation of processes that are manual and monotonous to improve employee productivity

2.     Re-skill resultant displaced workers to generate more productivity from them without loss of employment 

Brand Engagement 

3.     Help customers to engage with the brand through surrogates like a branded ‘boardgame’ or other devices that captures the elements of the brand when playing the game or instrument 

Brand Demand Pipeline 

4.     Virtualize the game with ‘actions’ taken rewarded with vouchers, redeemable when business opens to: induce visits, build momentum, leverage underutilization of facilities to make the voucher value cost-free, and even profitable by spurring additional spending on site 

Brand Salience 

5.     Be in the news as related to the consumer / customer profile and needs to demonstrate the brand’s commitment to their well-being

6.     “Delighted to inaugurate online Bosch Make in India mask line which will produce 100,000 masks a day in Bengaluru. The 3-layer mask has efficiency > than 95%. These will be distributed free of cost to Covid warriors. Bosch has pledged INR Rs 50 Cr to combat pandemic. Congrats!” (Tweet from Amitabh Kant, CEO, of government think-tank NITI Aayog)

7.     Create characters and merchandise related to your business that has utility for the consumer

8.     Go online and promote the merchandise aggressively

9.     Crowd source ideas for building brand salience for above activities 

Capital Deployment 

10. Fund Small Business in the Community

11. Buy their products for self or for wider distribution through company distribution channels

12. Share depreciated plant, property and equipment – free or at a small cost with the small business

13. Buy new equipment to boost the industrial equipment industry

14. Redeploy working capital arising from employees working from home generating savings in transportation, power and water consumption, and subsidies such as for food

15. Provide employees (as Google has done) allowances to set up a comfortable facility to work from home including smart phones, tabs, connectivity for the family to pursue online education for their wards 

Community Support 

16. Build a common kitchen on company grounds to provide food for the unemployed employees and the community at cost or no cost as part of CSR

17. Fund personal expenses of the community, such as child’s education, by setting up a school for the community and funding the school expenses as part of company CSR obligation

18. Provide in tie-up with product and service providers smart phones, tabs, connectivity for the community’s children to pursue online education

19. Support educational institutions in the community to address online teaching challenges including shortage of proper equipment for teachers to do so from home but also tweaks in pedagogy to teach in an online environment  

Government Support for Business 

20. Provide land, water, power and road connectivity for businesses and employees to Work-From-Anywhere-Anytime (WFAA)

21. Provide tax holidays to encourage moving businesses away from cities

22. Provide support to educational institutions willing to set up schools and colleges in these clusters for talent development

23. Design policies that makes agriculture remunerative with land held by employees to generate additional sources of income scientifically managed to build up the food chain

24. Make provision and grocery requirements of these clusters self-sufficient through a funded grow-and-consume scheme reduce carbon footprint in goods flowing in and out of the cluster when they can be produced and grown locally

25. Provide sanitation and clean drinking water for these clusters linking up streams and rivers and building water pipelines to these areas

26. Focus on water harvesting and sewage treatment plants to promote hygiene and self-sufficiency in these areas

27. Provide public transportation that makes travel easy including airports for short haul flights

28. Through MNREGA and other schemes provide employment to the rural poor in the development of these clusters

29.  Provide good local government that policies are implemented and businesses are not constrained in anyway

30. Design housing, commercial properties and recreational areas that fuses with the heritage and culture of the area (like Cochin Airport)  

Human Capital Development 

31. Tie-up with an EdTech company to help employees upgrade or develop new skills

32. Engage employees – “Be CEO For a Day”- to crowdsource ideas for what would they do in the situation the company / industry finds itself in

33. Deploy employees to tasks outside the company so they stay engaged doing good in the community and building relationships for the company for future growth

34. Deploy underutilized company’s talent in public sector projects where there is a lack of such talent especially engineering talent 

Product Design, Pricing and Packaging 

35. Make the product affordable yet profitable through volume sales when the purchasing power in the hands of mass consumers is going to drop drastically

36. Make the soap wrapping paper into ‘soap’ to make it utilitarian instead of the wrapper crowding the wastepaper basket

37. Make the product last longer (a great value proposition) by ensuring just the appropriate helping is ejected when squeezed or poured

38. Redesign the product packaging and the delivery packaging when products in the future are going to be ordered online

39. Provide consumer with EMI payment scheme even on provisions and personal products if they order it as a hamper of x no of items

40. Repackage / refurbish products damaged during the sudden lockdown of people and goods movement to salvage its costs and provide benefit to the consumer

41. Create a platform for liquidating stocks in a bazaar kind of sale to create new inventory

42. Rationalize the product lines and variety for better production efficiencies

43. Create a loose and packaged product lines as done by hypermarkets to offer the loose as promotional items with the packaged

44. Run co-promotions to improve offtake and offer better value

45. Provide an opportunity for consumers to trade reusable or used product containers for replenishing their stock and benefiting the packaging industry with recycling the pack instead of adding to the landfill 

Senior Management Development 

46. Take up Advancement Management Program to upgrade skills and get new ideas from peers cross-industry to manage the company in during-and-post pandemic times

47. Write articles and publish books on learning-to-date to educate management students and contribute to improvement in management, governance and employee productivity

48. Offer mentoring services to colleagues including self-employed businesses by joining their associations since they generate 70-80 percent of employment in an economy

49. Get familiar with using digital platforms – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube – to educate and build professional profile

50. Learn to conduct effective meetings on Cisco Web, Skype or Zoom platforms

51. Explore new ways of working and managing the change without drop in productivity from communal working environments to work-from-home (WFH) that obscures the separation of professional work and demands of the home and family; including loneliness if living in solitary confinement

52. Seize the opportunity to be creative in lifting the business out of potential recessionary trends and sentiments 

Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Mentoring 

53. Provide management guidance

54. Share use of productivity tools

55. Connect them to company’s network to explore opportunities

56. Help them use supply chains better

57. Teach them negotiation skills

58. Form them into a community to generate pricing power for their product

59. Brainstorm opportunities that they should be exploring

60. School them in business ethics to build trust and long-term growth of their enterprise

61. Develop lines of business where the company becomes a buyer of their products or reseller, improving the company’s strategic position in the industry and tap into an additional revenue opportunity 

Sponsorship of Events 

62. Select events that can showcase community messaging of ‘social distancing’ by tweaking formats: sprints, hurdles, relays are run not together but each runner is timed to declare the winners like in Tour de France Bicycle race; what can that teach us about tweaking processes in our business to maintain social distancing

63. Tweak ‘contact sports’ rules e.g. Kabaddi as a creative exercise to observe ‘social distancing’ and apply them to how we run our business through a creative brainstorming session with company executives and innovation coaches 

Structural Reforms Post Covid-19 (industrialization, formalization, financialization, urbanization, and apprenticization)

64. Customers on strike due to the pandemic unwilling to buy except the bare necessities – will post-Covid scenario translate to frugal or hedonistic (or revenge spending) is anyone’s guess and so need to prepare accordingly whichever bet is punted for

65. 70m state migrants; 40m dependents; 30m in labor force; 3-4m have gone home; 550m labour force; only 57m registered with ESIC

66. Labor shortages are not the binding constraints for corporate India to get normal for a few reasons

• Not everybody is looking forward to getting back to 100% capacity utilization exceptions being fmcg since demand side is growing very slowly
• Wage premium has emerged in cities and labor not keen to go home e.g. logistics employee
• Not running towards cities; running away from wastelands

67. How do you pay for a safety net when India’s per capita income is $2500; (comparative: US $50k; New York itself, $93k); India cannot act as a developed country; India does not lack intention; it lacks resources

68. 63m enterprises in India; 12m do not have an office; only 12m registered for GST; only 1 million pay social security; only 19.5k companies have a paid-up capital of Rs 10 cr+

69. India is inadequately formalized, financialized, urbanized and skilled

70. It’s a given in a crisis situation: Indian Migrant (will go home), Indian MSME (no margins to continue in business), Indian Bank (won’t lend), Indian Beat Cop (will use his lathi)

71. People could have handled 30 days but not 60 or 90 days of lockdown; MSME and migrants are caught in the cross-wire of the lockdown

72. An entrepreneur must manage risk and mitigate risk

73. War too important to be left to generals and education to be left to teachers; lockdown is an economic, social, political and medical decision and needs to be addressed by strong leadership, collectively

74. US Payroll payment program is $100 bn for SMEs; Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet by $3T in last 7 days; the US is borrowing $4T in the next 90 days; there are no good choices here, its between the bad and the worse for India

75. The ability to handle Covid depends on your resources as a country, company and individual

76. Rs 17 lakh crore government announced stimulus package will never be enough but India cannot afford anything more when it’s at 11% fiscal deficit to GDP, US at 15%, Japan at 19%; India at 14-15% GDP is going to be problematic

77. “Uncertainty as a pivot of strategy” must crystallize the response: keep optionality, keep some powder dry, unemployment must not convert to hunger, working capital problem does not convert to bankruptcy

78. Order of policy priorities will be poor people, small companies, big companies, and then banks; should we steal from our grandchildren and borrow Rs 10 lakh crore, difficult to tell as we don’t know where we are as yet;

79. International investor are circling back to emerging markets, India is very attractive to international investors if we can get our act together; need to signal intention that we will make India a fertile habitat for job creation; must use this policy window to do structural reform; China’s brand is damaged, wages are up, and trade war with US is hurting

80. Per Capita GDP matters (138th in the world) more than GDP (4th in the world)

81. Willingness to give a living wage to our workers depends on the productivity of the economy

82. Fiscal / Monetary policies can no more save India; only structural reforms can:

• Industrialization including farm sector
• Formalization (cannot have 63m enterprises when US has only 22m with 8x the size of Indian economy)
• Financialization (need 200 banks not just 94 to push credit: GDP ratio to 100%),
• Urbanization (only 52 cities with more than 1m when China has 375; 6 lakh villages with 2 lakh with less than 200 people; cannot take job to people but people to job; need for good urbanization: avg taxi travel at 8km per hour in Bangalore; lost productivity; New York GDP is equal to Russia with 6% of the people and 0.00005% of the land; cities are engines of economic growth
• Skilling (50% of our children fail at every stage in their 10th, 12th and 30 lakh make it to college of 260 million who join school)

83. India’s labour is handicapped without capital and capital is handicapped without labour

84. Pain in India post Covid-19 will be nothing like what we have seen since the financial crisis of 2008

85. A large number of SMEs and small companies will disappear as they cannot handle three or four months of zero revenue due to lack of financialization which means no access to capital; liquidity problem becomes a solvency problem; for a well-run listed company banks are always willing to lend money to help them get over capital shortfall

86. Farm employment and self-employment are really self-exploitation where every member of the family is involved

87. India is really poor and we don’t have to be, it is not cultural, our plumbing is screwed up: if we fix our labour market plumbing, if we fix our bank plumbing, if we do civil service reform, if we fix our political plumbing …

88. Apprenticeship done right (as per Indira Gandhi program of 1975) would have created 15 million in the same proportion as Germany instead of 5 lakh apprentices that India has

89. Only social security that India can create is job creation; use the tragic Covid-19 situation to get rid of regulatory cholesterol and undertake some of the difficult reforms … lot of real pain after lockdown is lifted … don’t have the resources to underwrite 2.3 bn people

Work-From-Nearer-Home (WFNM) 

90. Sridhar Vembu, Founder Zoho (SaaS) company is experimenting with village offices which is nearer to his employees’ home

91. Decongest cities by letting employees WFM from where they hail with nodal offices 50-100 kms away that serve the purpose of a brick-and-mortar divisional offices

92. Use the vacated office spaces as residential complexes or guest houses for employees and outstation visitors to engage more efficiently and be more productive by saving on travel time and decongesting traffic on the road and of course reduce the carbon footprint

93. Education department must encourage home schooling through blended / hybrid program delivery to ensure the child’s progress to higher education

94. Entrepreneurs and corporates to develop local cluster environments by supporting community aspirations and requirements to be self-sufficient

95. Encourage a new way of working where professional and personal development obtains a balance in a village environment – an antidote to city work culture of burnouts

96. Distribution of skilled workforce in diverse environment is also an effective response to pandemics / epidemics and natural disasters that tend to close down whole businesses

97. Hitherto people living in villages get the benefit of city dwellers rich educational background for downloading the knowledge and skill base to rural folks by teaching in the schools or home teaching several children together

98. The city allowance costs to be converted to village development allowance costs for each employee to contribute to his environment

99. ‘Jugaad’ which India is famous should be encouraged blended with the scientific to develop a global market for local innovations 

Vision and Hope 

100.         Build larger vision and become champions of hope

101.         For every discouraging statistic or news report counter with a positive one which you are doing out of a sense of nation building, commitment to innovation, but above all, because ‘defeat’ or ‘impossible’ is not a word that is in your personal dictionary