More organisations today seek a transformation in their businesses, yet most of them think of and talk about managing change.

Change is characterised by ‘reactivity’. Most of us live in the domain of change both as individuals and as organisations.

The characteristics of transformation are positive and actually creative. They stem from a new found sense of purposefulness, once a higher purpose is discovered.

The implications of this conflict will not be fully appreciated until we learn to distinguish between change and transformation.

Clearly, we all aspire to live in the domain of transformation even if we presently are in the domain of change.

Of course, sitting out in the country I possessed less information than anyone else at headquarters about was going on, but they called me anyway.

But as soon I arrived at my country house, the telephone began ringing.

And it kept right on ringing with questions from people back at the office about the most mundane matters.

In the summer of 1992, the first year I became president of XYZ, I decided to take a two-week vacation.

In my view, a priority sector should be an area of market failure.

Priority sectors include agriculture, small scale industries, housing, exports, etc.

Economics say that a market has failed when the market does not provide efficient outcomes for society.

The government of India directs substantial bank credit to what it deems are ‘priority sectors’ for the Indian economy.

It is not clear how sectors get identified for the priority tag, as there is no clearly articulated logic.

Markets fail for a variety of reasons.

Merchants soon grew rich as the demand for products increased.

Trade started from person to person but grew to involve different towns in different lands.

Eventually, people got a greater variety of things to choose from.

People found work in transporting the goods or selling them.

Several years ago, senior executives from Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart met for two days.

Wal-Mart has increased its Procter & Gamble diaper business by 50 percent and cut inventory by 70 percent because of this collaboration.

They wanted to explore how they could jointly apply quality management principles to the disposable diaper business.

As a result of this meeting, a team of Procter & Gamble employees moved to Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart’s headquarters, to work with Wal-Mart executives on productivity and quality issues.

The situations in which violence occurs and the nature of that violence tends to be clearly defined at least in theory, as in the proverbial Irishman’s question: ‘Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?’

However binding the obligation to kill, members of feuding families engaged in mutual massacre will be genuinely appalled if by some mischance a bystander or outsider is killed.

Probably the only uncontrolled applications of force are those of social superiors to social inferiors and even here there are probably some rules.

So the actual risk to outsiders, though no doubt higher than our societies, is calculable.

The inherent expectations of a high short-term return on advertising investment that is common to most traders who are attempting to scale up operations is not conductive to a long-term consistency in advertising direction.

The lack of significant players with national reach is only one of the factors that explains the relatively low attention given to mass marketing by the retail sector in India.

Mass marketing by Indian retail chains has hitherto been the exception rather than the rule.

The focused brand image which leads to pithy, punchy advertising has been difficult because most retailers have not been focused in terms of their own vision for their retail brand. Most advertising has tended to focus on the presence of locations or the range.

Advertising then tends to focus significantly on announcement of in store promotions and events, where the payoffs in terms of immediate increases in customer entry and average cash memo size are more visible.

Thrills, ranging from video games to burgers cover the rest.

This is because the returns from browsing cover only a percentage of your costs.

The bigger your cafe, the more is the need for additional mean of income.

Some cafes can get away with being plain vanilla.

These fruits will make your clients spend more time with you and also add to your profits.

But others cannot.

A difference in the frequency of usage of counter proposing between skilled and average negotiators suggests that counter proposing may not be, as effective one tends to think it would be.

I may have suggested that my son buy a pair of trousers at a certain price whereas my son would have made a counterproposal that he would rather buy two pairs at half price each.

Research conducted across several negotiators ranging from sales negotiators to purchase and labour negotiators shows that average negotiators tend to counter propose more often than skilled negotiators.

This happens in everyday life too.

Think back to the last time you were discussing completing an assignment with one of your colleagues : you may have suggested that you both come in on Saturday to finish the work and your colleague may have counter proposed that you could stay back on Friday evening and finish it instead.

If you are used to having your stimulation come in from outside, your mind never develops its own habits of thinking and reflecting

Marx thought that religion was the opiate, because it soothed people’s pain and suffering and prevented them from rising in rebellion

If Karl Marx was alive today, he would say that television is the opiate of the people.

Television and similar entertainments are even more of an opiate because of their addictive tendencies.