Going Social

In any generation of businesses, key for success is about selecting and adopting the right form of technology at right time. Good entrepreneur always have to be agile and proactive towards its business. He or she must have to continuously hunt for better tools to improvise the level of his business. On the contrary, many entrepreneurs who often tend to grow but they become rigid towards their certain opinion. They make strong perception in their own mind and it becomes very difficult to come out of that perception. Lalit K Nagar is the owner of a growing trading organization which deals in electrical equipments. They often provide components to electrical manufacturing companies and they also import product and sells them directly to the market through a distribution channel. Mr Nagar, employees around 25 sales professionals. The average age of the sales workforce is less than 30 years and the working hours in office is 9:30 am to 6 pm. Any of his staff is not authorized to browse on internet which is not related to the core functional area of his or her responsibility. Mr Nagar has strict policies against social media as he does not want any of his employees to spend time on it. Although he has certain strong opinion regarding this medium and he don’t want to change this, but there are facts that some of his competition is using this medium effectively and accessing potential customers through this. Since, Mr Nagar himself do not spend much time in the field to interact with their customers, he does not have this knowledge that his customers are actively using social media. This knowledge gap and understanding gap is letting his business facing a challenge of registering growth. Resistance from employers to embrace social media and new ways of working could be a major barrier hindering the future potential of most of the Indian smaller businesses. HR experts who specialises on SMEs business environment often urge employers to move away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to employee engagement and to make their organisations more receptive and supportive of younger generations and the new skills and experiences they have to offer. At almost every forum that emphasize on the factors that can bring growth for SMEs, technology has been identified as one of the key drivers. But this also exposes a big gap between traditional employers and the new generations entering the workforce. Although these forums always highlights the issues for effective and sustainable growth and these forums get rich participation by the entrepreneur community but how effective would these talks could become if people don’t usually implement the new ideas into their business. Time is changing, what we have now was not their 10 years ago, and similarly what we have now will not going to be their in next 10 years. So, their should be no conventional ideology in the frame of an entrepreneur. The mind has to be open for new ideas, and courageous enough to experiment those ideas. But the realistic picture has to be kept in mind and realistic approach should be taken Written by Faiz Askari, Editor, SME Monday, 17 October 2011 09:11