360 degree perspective for success

BANGALORE, INDIA: Companies are hesitating in moving ahead as they wait for market improvement. Frost and Sullivan's annual event - 'Growth, Innovation and Leadership' (GIL) 2009 held in Bangalore recently, focused on how CEO's need to maintain a 360 degree perspective of their industry.

Speaking at the event, David Frigstad, chairman of Frost and Sullivan said that the Indian economy is at a critical cross-road, faced with the challenge of maintaining a steady growth rate between 7-9 per cent despite the sluggish global market.

“Enterprises need to follow the rule of innovation and leadership to achieve growth in their businesses,” he said.

Frigstad said that as many as 12,000 product launches have happened since 1985, but only a few of these launches actually showcase true innovation.

Citing example of Steve Jobs, he said a man with core leaderships skills can set vision of the company, bring space for innovation and lead the company to growth.

He said, “While, the recent slowdown had affected the entire industry. Everyone witnessed a 20 per cent fall in their market sales, Apple was the only company to register a 40 per cent growth.”

Resonating the same opinion, Dinesh A Keskar, president, Boeing International Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd, said that with an estimated market of 100 billion USD in next 20 yrs for the commercial space, and 31 billion USD in next three years for defense, the aerospace market is poised for a huge growth, but this would not be achievable without innovations and leadership.

“It was because of their leadership through innovation, that made Boeing bag a deal worth thousand billion USD, from Air India in yr 2006 against Airbus,” he added.

Keskar highlighted a few innovations as milestones in their industries like nuclear submarine, Bandra-Worli sea-link in Mumbai, Tata Nano, e-Chaupal, Mumbai Dabbawallas and Muti-cooler.

As part of maintaining the 360 degree in leadership, the CEO should focus on all the factors around him, as a good leadership comes with partnership with the society, academia, government, industry, customers etc. All these factors could have more or lesser need, but they need to be looked at.