Books

Shaping Organisational Strategies, future perspectives, concepts and cases

Gautam Raj Jain & Atul Tandan(Former Director)

Organisational Behaviour (OB) is being taught to management graduates with age-old theories and practices of the past, with cases and exercises developed in western countries. The fast pace of change in the global market on account of information and communication technology requires organizations to constantly evolve new models of management practices to remain competitive. Given the constant shifts and changes occurring in the business environment and the need for organizations to adapt to such changes, the courses in OB have to go beyond existing models of organizational practices and develop an educational pedagogy that facilitates student’s learning through experiencing current organizational realities.

With the objective of equipping students with the capacity to foresee and conceptualise rather than just learn organizational behaviour and keep pace with the challenges of the global economy, a new course ‘organisational dynamics’ (ODy) was developed. It was designed to enable students become dynamic and discover complex but ever-changing patterns of relationship of the people with the organizational systems and its contextual environment, and respond to them creatively. The thrust of the course was to initiate students to be self-learners and generate knowledge based on current trends and practices in dealing with organizational dynamics. The pedagogy required students to be engaged in self-exploration to find the ground realities of organizations they trained in, dynamics of the work place, what sustained the manager’s urge to remain dynamic or organic rather than bureaucratic, mechanical or structured in dealing with business challenges.

This book is a collection of cases in ODy from the experiences of students in a host of situations that organizations and managers experience while dealing with or responding to internal and external environmental constraints. They are all real-life situations involving a series of interactions and interviews with managers at different levels of organizations. The concepts discussed in the book are not based on a particular theoretical framework, but have emerged out of the broad discussions on emerging issues and thrust of the cases. The book essentially offers ‘learning through experiencing’, where learners have to involve themselves in developing their own perspectives and deeper insights through reflection. The main objective of the book is, therefore, to help build a perspective about various organizational situations rather than apply a set of strategies or theoretical framework for analyzing organizational dynamics.

The book will be useful for prospective as well as practicing managers to gain deeper insights and understanding of issues of organizational dynamics and evolve approaches to deal with them efficiently and creatively. Educational and training institutes may use these cases as part of the learning pedagogy in sessions related to organizational behaviour, personal and interpersonal dynamics.

About the authors

Gautam Raj Jain is Senior Professor, Head of General Management Area and Entrepreneurship Development Centre at Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. He has extensive experience of 27 years in management education and international projects. He has numerous books and publications to his credit. His detailed CV can be viewed (Click here)

Atul Tandan (Former Director, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad). He has a diverse experience of 35 years, comprising 25 years in the industry. He specializes in Brand Management. He has been associated with management education since 1984 and has several books and publications to his credit. His detailed CV can be viewed (Click here)

Essays in Media Planning and Media Management

Media planning in India is two decades old. Put together, this industry plans for close to USD 3 bn, that is across television, radio, newspapers, magazines, cinemas, outdoor and internet.

The last decade has witnessed the proliferation of media specialist organizations which plan and buy media for their clients. It has undergone a revolution with speedy changes in the forms of media, their volume and consumption. It stands burdened with analytics and negotiations. Despite that there are barely any books that have approached the subject to give an Indian perspective of Media Planning and Media Buying. The same issue haunts the broadcasting industry in India which is now fifteen years old - very little has been chronicled in terms of best practices and key processes.

A fact that may have led to this is that the information has resided with a handful of individuals who acquired it with experimentation and experience. The whole philosophy of this book is that the coming generations of Media Planners and broadcasters - who will be subjected to lesser time frames and for whom the costs of mistakes can be colossal – benefit from these learnings of their seniors. This book has been written with a very clear view to give Indian best practices, caselets and case studies, related to these two critical areas.

This book is the first volume in this direction. It is a collection of essays that takes a look at some perspectives in Media Planning. The subsequent volumes will be about advanced techniques and focus on live Indian case studies.

A cross section of people will benefit from this book, apart from professionals currently in the industry include, students specializing in advertising and media management, general management students and broadcasters. Professionals in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, who draw parallels form Indian markets and where the industry lags from India by a couple of years.

About the Author

Atul Phadnis(Visiting Faculty) started his career in Media Planning, moved to Strategic Planning and then to television broadcast research, before setting up his own venture. He has worked on brands such as Colgate, Unilever, Godrej, ICICI, Fiat, in organizations such as Rediffusion DY&R, Mindshare, Starcom Worldwide and TAM Media Research. During his stint at Starcom, he conceptualized and headed a venture called Starcom Digital, now rechristened Starcom IP; at TAM he launched the S-Group, TAM’s strategy and consultancy arm and headed ADEX India. It was during his time at TAM that he won two international awards (Shanghai 2004, Montreal 2005). He is very well known and respected in the media and broadcast circuit, having written more than a hundred articles in leading publications such as Brand Equity, Strategic Marketing, Hindu Business Line, ESOMAR Global Research Excellence, Exchange 4 Media, Money Control, etc. He actively teaches Media Planning and Broadcast management at professional development programmes, industry forums and B-schools such as MICA, S. P. Jain, Sydenham.

Issues in managing media are becoming increasingly complex as the industry progresses through an exciting phase of growth and structural change.  At the same time media management is slowly and steadily gaining the status of a distinct discipline given the rising importance of media production in the economic management of the national economies in terms of employment, balance of payment, competitiveness and growth.  

The complex problems associated with managing creative resources and intellectual property, integrating local and global cultural markets, and ‘responding to new technological temptations’ have rendered media production an intricate enterprise. On the other hand, the expansion of reading, viewing and listening choices has complicated consumer decision making more than ever before. 

Media management is an interdisciplinary area of study, where a variety of disciplines like economics, management studies, political science and sociology come together to explain the interfaces between media strategies and social change processes.  Research—both theoretical and applied—is, hence, a critical tool of media management, as little exists in terms of paradigms.

This collection of papers, based on student research at MICA, represents our collective efforts to explore and locate the intricate nuances of an emerging discipline.  These essays give us a glimpse into the diversity of issues that a fledgling discipline like media management—however, imperfectly we define it—has to straddle.  They also demonstrate that this discipline requires myriad angles of enquiry to negotiate its specificities.

About the Editor

Tara Nair(Visiting Faculty) has 13 years of experience in research and consulting in the areas of economics of media, audience economics, microfinance and SME policy environment. She has contributed articles/papers to journals and edited volumes on related topics. She was a Visiting Scholar at REGARDS, Maison des Suds, University of Bordeaux III, France and at the Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. She has carried out consultancy assignments for national and international agencies like ILO, UNDP, CARE–Bangladesh, International Commission of Jurists and Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (Japan).  She is a co-opted member on the Governing Council of the Bankers Institute of Rural Development, Lucknow. 

Entrepreneurship traditionally has been defined as “ starting a business”. However, this definition is not complete for businesses in the field of communication as there are more nuances to be studied than merely the idea of starting a business. Hence the nature of entrepreneurial study in this field is such that it studies the factors contributing to conception of entrepreneurial ideas and setting up sustainable entrepreneurial ventures and organisations. The various factors taken up for consideration of the book are:

Entrepreneurship –

Vision and idea

Entrepreneur’s motivation

Behavioural skills

Managerial skills

Venture management (start up and initial period of enterprise stability)

Organisational management practises

In addition to the above, it is also important to identify factors and processes that lead to the emergence of and entrepreneurial person who conceives not only commercially feasible and viable ideas but also translates these ideas into value driven commercial institutions.

The book has case studies on:

1. Preeti Vyas (Vyas Giannetti Creative)
2. Sudhir Sharma (Elephant Design)
3. Neeraj Roy (Hungama.com)
4. ML Kaul (Melcole PR)
5. Prema Sagar (Genesis PR)
6. Michael Menezes (Showtime Events)
7. Debi Basu (Mode Research)
8. Sunil Mirani (Ugam Solutions)

Gautam Raj Jain is Senior Professor, MICA. He has held various academic positions in premier management schools like IIM-A, GIM, EDII, AHRD, and AIM and worked as an international consultant to UNIDO, ILO, UNDP and EU, PriceWaterhouseCoopers.  He has 24 years of academic and training experience and has conducted more than 14 international workshops in Asian and African countries and 25 national training workshops in India. He has co-authored three books and published several papers in reputed journals/books and offered presentations in national and international conferences.