Strategic tools for the practising manager

KIT

The Indian Books market is estimated at Rs 7,000 crore and is projected to grow at 15-20 per cent (CAGR). India is the third largest in terms of volume though it is much smaller in terms of value.

The market is highly unorganised with organised retailing constituting only about 6 per cent of the total market.

Organised retail is expected to grow at 30 per cent. Key organised players are Crosswords, Landmark (Trent), Odyssey and Oxford Bookstore. The market is concentrated in the six metros, with about 60 per cent contribution coming from them.

School text books address 36 per cent of the total market, although demand is highly seasonal.

According to industry experts, the proportion of regular readers in urban India is just 3-5 per cent or only one in 20.

The base of CORE readers looks small at the current level of 15 million. However, it is expected to increase to about 45 million in the next four years.

Rampant piracy of trade books, textbooks, professional books (scientific, technical and medical), and scholarly journals continues to plague the publishing industry, and is estimated at 25 per cent of the total market size.

Selections from management journals
NUGGETS

When Google announced its Gmail email service two years ago, a lot of people figured the company was joking. After all, Google had been known to offer up the occasional gag, like saying it was starting a research centre on the moon.

More importantly, nobody believed that consumers would tolerate Google's plan of scanning people's emails and then delivering advertisements to them based on the emails' contents.

Two years later, Gmail has tens of millions of users. But consumers' initial disbelief underscores the web's knotty privacy problem, according to participants at the recent 2006 Wharton Technology Conference.

Consumers say they want privacy online although they often behave in ways that contradict that statement; companies insist they will protect privacy, although they sometimes fail to do so. And everybody is wary of increased government regulation.

Read this article at https://bsmedia.business-standard.com knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Proactive corporations have typically invested in increasingly ambitious sustainibility initiatives. However, managers need to identify the circumstances favouring the generation of both public benefits and corporate profits.

For some firms, better utilisation of resources may result from some environment-related investments. For others, obtaining ISO 14001 certification or having some eco-labelled products can enable them to pursue competitive advantage.

However, no one generic strategy makes business sense for all firms. This article presents a framework for categorising generic types of competitive environmental strategies in order to help managers define and prioritise areas of organisational action, thus optimising the overall economic return on environmental investments and making them into sources of competitive advantage.

Read this article at http://cmr.berkeley.edu