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Strategic Pokes
The Business Jalebi
First Edition
- Shombit Sengupta - International Management Strategy Consultant
February 2014 | 326 pages | SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd
Jalebi Management, the first book in Shombit Sengupta’s Jalebi Trilogy, compared Indian industry to a jalebi. It showed how it is necessary for organizations to interconnect seamlessly, both internally and externally, so that business can swim smoothly in the sweet syrup of the jalebi. However, the jalebi has a flip side too—its shape is never predictable; but business has to be unsurprising. Being the world’s most complex and heterogeneous society how can India find a pattern to get out of the irregular, negative aspects of the jalebi?
Strategic Pokes, this second book, is about all the unconstructive areas that business houses in India have to cope with. The book rides through the Indian and European landscape, spanning across history, to explore the perceptible, exciting distinction that customers value. It has examples of how the West is obsessed with embedding the “quality spark” in products and services, which enables them to deftly handle their business and successfully take it around the world. The book reveals how Indian business entangles itself in the jalebi’s uneven character, and then with disruptive insights, it looks for a jalebi pattern to exit this maze.
Prologue
Foreword Shekhar Gupta
Preface: Variegated Ideas in Doses
Introduction Jean-Paul Larcon
Biz in an Uneven Society: Enterprises Have to Define and Deal with India’s Billion+ Pokes
Visual Art for Business: Resources to Deal with Pokes
Quality Customers Want: Quality Required to Poke with
Human Ingenuity for Business: Poke to Bring Organizational Change
Disruptive Platform in Business: Shock-of-the-poke for the New
Epilogue: Action Surpassmark: Pokes for Your To-Do List
Postface
Strategy experts say that you can compete either on cost or on differentiation, but that if you try to do both at the same time, you might miss the target. Shombit Sengupta’s book is the opposite of a dogmatic lesson. It is opening new avenues for sensing market opportunities, and thinking about our companies’ future. To create value, one has to build on own strengths and distinctive competences.
The book is about entrepreneurship, innovation, creative solutions, and the art of building or renewing the brand image of the firm and its corporate value. This process has to do with the CEO’s vision of the firm, but also with the development of human capital: the skills, the commitment, the loyalty of the personnel sharing this vision and the values of the company.
Shombit Sengupta’s new book will give you hundreds of fresh ideas on how to develop your business, and stronger confidence in how to tap the potential of your organization to develop new strategies and business models.
Professor of International Business, HEC Paris School of Management, (Senior Associate Dean for International Development at HEC Paris)
[The book] opens new avenues for sensing market opportunities and thinking about our companies’ future. It offers a very clear answer to the question of how to unleash the potential of our companies.
A must read for its uniqueness of thoughts and design.