Capt. Gopinath is Managing Director of Air Deccan, a unit of Deccan Aviation Private Limited, India’s largest private heli-charter company. A graduate of the National Defence Academy, he has served in the army. Gopinath also has to his credit, the Rolex award for ecological site farming and is also the recipient of the Wipro PRSI Award.
What is transformation?
Rapid change perceived as desirable only after it has happened.
Act I Scene I: Transformation of land
Just out of the army, Capt.Gopinath returned to his village in Karnataka to find that his family's land had been acquired due to the construction of a dam over a nearby river. The land allotted to his family as compensation was arid and was widely perceived as uncultivatable. With no other options in sight, he packed rations, a rifle, his army tent, his pet dog and travelled with one farm labourer to the allotted land.
He toiled day and night and planted coconut saplings as also other plants. Plants were selected and positioned after carefully analysing the soil and the geography. After months of toiling, (during which he used to be ridiculed by others for toiling on dry land) the land started showing it's innate potential. The carefully planned planting of fast growing trees helped bind the soil. The now homogenous soil began retaining water. The 'uncultivatable' land seemed to have woken up from deep slumber! To this day, his farm is known for not using pesticides and the like. It 'lives and grows naturally' and needless to say, keeps Gopi's accountant very busy.
Act I Scene II: Transformation of silk production
With his farm yeilding results, Capt.Gopinath started considering silk farming as a viable business. He found that using bamboo as a substrate for rearing silk worms was something that no one else had thought of and implemented. Using bamboo racks for rearing silk worms cut costs drastically and improved yields since bamboo made the racks sturdier and made them usable over multiple rearing cycles. This one innovation is lauded to this day and earned Gopi the Prestigious ROLEX award for ecological site farming.
Act II Scene I: Heli business
One of his sojourns to his farms was with a colleague from his army days in an army helicopter. He loved the experience. The then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh extended an open invite to entrepreneurs in one of his drives to boost the economy. The ever vigilant Captain spotted the business potential in starting a heli-charter company. Gopi and his friends rented a helicopter and flew it down into Hyderabad one foggy morning. They went straight to the CM's residence - because they did not know where else to go! Deccan Aviation won it's first client. Today, Deccan Aviation is India's largest helicopter operator next only to the defense services! With bases across the country, they have offered variants in their services such as heli-ambulance.
Act II Scene II: Flying a billion people
On one of his trips to the US, he learnt that the number of persons that flew annually there was higher than the population of of two states in india put together. The model of Ryan Air and Southwest airlines drew his attention. That was enough to launch him into what would lead to the transformation of the Indian skies - Air Deccan
The Indian aviation sector had witnessed the shakeout of the 90s and people considered aviation as a business where you could become a millionaire very easily - if you entered the business as a billionaire in the first place. The well networked lobby controlled the prices of air tickets and a one way ticket from Bangalore to Delhi costed anywhere from Rs.8000 to Rs. 20000. All this was to change.
Air Deccan's business model was different,.... quite different
Smaller aircraft such as ATRs with higher fuel efficiency were inducted. Smaller aircrafts meant lower landing and parking fees and quicker turnaround times. Quicker turnaround times meant longer times in the skies, which meant higher revenues ("an aircraft earns money only when flying not when parked in the bay" as Gopi says). Aircraft space was for sale for advertising. For the first time, you could see NDTV on the tail cone of an aircraft, Sun Microsystems near the landing gear, Chevrolet on headrests of seats and Wipro under the cockpit fuselage! Pilots had to pay for their training, airhostesses got a share of the revenue earned from sales on board and the HR team was two members strong for the first year of operations!
When asked about competition from the other airlines, Gopi categorically stated that his actual competition was from the railways! (This seems to have been proved right with the Railway Minister recently announcing a second round of fare cuts for AC class tickets)
Nothing is free on an Air Deccan flight. When asked "Surely, you can at least offer water?", he had this to say: "Look, we flew 1.5 million passengers last year. If we made provisions for free water, it would have been consumed by the flight crew, the airport staff and others as well. In the process, we would have ended up spending Rs 3 crore on water alone. It is not feasible for us. We need to educate the customers instead of asking them what is on their wish list. If you need something, you may as well pay for it. In this way, we have been able to save 20 per cent on distribution costs and turned our cost centres into revenue centres."
A strong focus on costs made it possible to introduce tickets for fares of Re.1 and Rs.500. Even today, the taxes are often higher than the ticket cost on an Air Deccan flight!
Has he succeeded at transforming the Indian skies? You bet!! From one aircraft and two routes a day, Air Deccan has grown to a fleet of 36 aircraft. It offers 270 flights a day and 55 destinations across the country at a 98% ontime performance. All this in three years flat.
The Impact
Indian skies have changed colour. New airlines such as Spicejet, Go, Indigo, Kingfisher, Paramount and Air India Express have made their appearance in what was considered a 'closed' industry. Today, the average price of a ticket from Bangalore to Delhi is around Rs.2500. Check fares have made their appearance. Airports are being modernised. Interior towns that were economically soporific are twitching their noses at the waft from freshly minted green papyrus.
Capt. Gopinath seems to have changed the altitude (and attitude?) of flying in India. Like he says "making a billion dreams fly".
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Eternal optimism... shattered? Re-build it
There is a new similie in town... "He looks like a HR guy without transactional work"
Go deeper and you will discover that for a very long time, HR has been and probably for time to come as well, will be associated with mundane, day to day, essential but not important transactions. There has been movement from Personnel to Human resources to Human capital... but, are we actually redefining the role?
Look around and you will find lots of HR professionals who strongly believe that HR's core competency is transactional effectiveness. This seems to spring from the eternal spring of hope that some day ... somewhere, they will get a revelation that will tell them what to do other than transactions.
So strong is their belief that transactions is the way, the truth and life, that they stop reading the latest happenings, they are apathetic to an orientation of applying concepts to day to day work.
These are the people who are going to be hit by the awakening that companies are experiencing of late. Companies are creating units that will be totally responsible for transactions processing and asking HR to do what they are supposed to do!
This is where, the devotees of Transactions are finding themselves at a loss.... they lived on eternal optimism of the earlier mentioned revelation. Now, they find that they are not supposed to do that which they prided themselves on!
What is the way forward? Read, read and read some more. Take up a topic close to you and become an expert in it. Network like mad. To start, introduce low transaction, high impact activities. Connect concepts, try to make a difference. Often I wonder if "Service orientation" is the 6th Big personality factor.
Think about it..... let me know....
Cheers!
~Sid
Go deeper and you will discover that for a very long time, HR has been and probably for time to come as well, will be associated with mundane, day to day, essential but not important transactions. There has been movement from Personnel to Human resources to Human capital... but, are we actually redefining the role?
Look around and you will find lots of HR professionals who strongly believe that HR's core competency is transactional effectiveness. This seems to spring from the eternal spring of hope that some day ... somewhere, they will get a revelation that will tell them what to do other than transactions.
So strong is their belief that transactions is the way, the truth and life, that they stop reading the latest happenings, they are apathetic to an orientation of applying concepts to day to day work.
These are the people who are going to be hit by the awakening that companies are experiencing of late. Companies are creating units that will be totally responsible for transactions processing and asking HR to do what they are supposed to do!
This is where, the devotees of Transactions are finding themselves at a loss.... they lived on eternal optimism of the earlier mentioned revelation. Now, they find that they are not supposed to do that which they prided themselves on!
What is the way forward? Read, read and read some more. Take up a topic close to you and become an expert in it. Network like mad. To start, introduce low transaction, high impact activities. Connect concepts, try to make a difference. Often I wonder if "Service orientation" is the 6th Big personality factor.
Think about it..... let me know....
Cheers!
~Sid
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Are we forgetting them?
Are we forgetting them?
“He is an engineer and a distinction holder at that. Does he have good attitude? Big time!”
The wave of the information technology industry while undoubtedly having given lakhs of citizens of our country an entry into professionalism and a life of compliant and comfortable consumerism in it’s crest, seems to have left a couple of annual generations in its base.
It is but common experience that companies experience annual frenzies called recruitment drives in engineering colleges where they vie each other to grab freshers. These freshers are not immediately ‘billed’, but are put through a learning cycle wherein they are effectively made to unlearn more than they are needed to learn! By this, I am referring to the focused range of skills (Languages/tools) that they are made to master. Thus, we seem to be effectively recruiting them for their ability to learn rather than the competencies that they posses.
While recruiting for a HR operations assistant, it was the author’s experience that out of the ten resumes shortlisted for the post, seven of them turned out to be those of engineers who had graduated in the years 2001 and 2002. They were all good students going by their marks and all of them were either computer science engineers or Electronics engineers.
All of them were victims of the downturn that the IT industry experienced and hence the subsequent freeze that was imposed on campus recruitments. Thus, the lofty dreams of a good job that they could look forward to were no longer around.
On further investigation, the author discovered that approximately 60% of those who had passed out in the years 2001 and 2002 seemed to have either augmented themselves with a MBA or had continued with ‘not very well’ paying jobs which in turn seem to have drawn them into vicious cycle that keeps them away from a job that many of their juniors have! The object of our discussion is the latter segment.
What are your views on taking this segment of ‘freshers’ who seem to have been forgotten by us, skilling them appropriately and providing them with a ‘life’?
Do write in with your inputs!
~Sid
“He is an engineer and a distinction holder at that. Does he have good attitude? Big time!”
The wave of the information technology industry while undoubtedly having given lakhs of citizens of our country an entry into professionalism and a life of compliant and comfortable consumerism in it’s crest, seems to have left a couple of annual generations in its base.
It is but common experience that companies experience annual frenzies called recruitment drives in engineering colleges where they vie each other to grab freshers. These freshers are not immediately ‘billed’, but are put through a learning cycle wherein they are effectively made to unlearn more than they are needed to learn! By this, I am referring to the focused range of skills (Languages/tools) that they are made to master. Thus, we seem to be effectively recruiting them for their ability to learn rather than the competencies that they posses.
While recruiting for a HR operations assistant, it was the author’s experience that out of the ten resumes shortlisted for the post, seven of them turned out to be those of engineers who had graduated in the years 2001 and 2002. They were all good students going by their marks and all of them were either computer science engineers or Electronics engineers.
All of them were victims of the downturn that the IT industry experienced and hence the subsequent freeze that was imposed on campus recruitments. Thus, the lofty dreams of a good job that they could look forward to were no longer around.
On further investigation, the author discovered that approximately 60% of those who had passed out in the years 2001 and 2002 seemed to have either augmented themselves with a MBA or had continued with ‘not very well’ paying jobs which in turn seem to have drawn them into vicious cycle that keeps them away from a job that many of their juniors have! The object of our discussion is the latter segment.
What are your views on taking this segment of ‘freshers’ who seem to have been forgotten by us, skilling them appropriately and providing them with a ‘life’?
Do write in with your inputs!
~Sid
Starting off
I used to and still have a site on Geocities which I find a little painful updating and Orkut is slightly an exclusive community that not all my friends prefer or have an account. Advantage Blogger!
In the coming weeks/months, I hope to spew out my neuronal transactions. Do post your opinions and thoughts about the same. Let's try and make a difference.
Cheers!
Sid
In the coming weeks/months, I hope to spew out my neuronal transactions. Do post your opinions and thoughts about the same. Let's try and make a difference.
Cheers!
Sid
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