Almost every thinking state in the country now hosts an event to attract investment. Usually it is a global summit. The Chief Minister of the state ensures that a clutch of global CEOs and domestic industry leaders are paraded. Agreements worth billions of dollars are signed. Though a fraction are implemented.The latest in the list is Emerging Kerala Summit. Other states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka hold such summits regularly.The states hope that global and domestic corporations will be suitably impressed. That the investors will set up factories, create jobs and help the state prosper. Single window clearances are offered. Tax breaks and lucrative financial incentives are offered. The great pool of human talent of the state is presented as must have for all companies.Year after year, state after state, it is the same story. There is a lot of razzmatazz at the “Let’s lure the investor Summit.” When the party is over the headaches set in for business leaders. Headaches, not from hangovers. But headaches caused by the daily frustration of negotiating the nasty rules of government processes. Foreign investors watch in shock as state based companies tell them tales of horror. They speak of the number of licenses required to start a factory. They speak of the clearances needed for expanding a business. They fret over labour laws that hurt workers as much as the employers.The ease of doing business in states has not improved despite scores of such summits.Most states put more effort in managing the event than in changing their rules and regulations. Basic rules of governance are missing.Most Chief Ministers are happy to lay a red carpet for investors once in a year or so. But what they don’t realise is that investors need a red carpet every day, in every government department. The government has to set clear and transparent rules of business. They officials have to take time-bound decisions. But this is tougher to do than hold an occasional summit.Successful branding of a state as an investment destination does not depend on a slickly managed investor event.The branding depends on more prosaic issues. The reputation depends on how a state is run. The reputation depends on how easy it is to live in its cities.A recent survey on location branding done by Hong Kong based company PublicAffairsAsia lists the attributes that an investor seeks in a destination.The top attributes were business operating environment, political stability, infrastructure, qualified labour and quality of life.The survey was done for cities in the Asia Pacific region. Singapore was ranked as the city with best location branding. Mumbai and Delhi were at the bottom of the ranking. No amount of “summiteering” can change the quality of personal and work life in Mumbai and Delhi.What state chief ministers need to do is to make their cities cleaner while improving the ease of doing business. According to the PublicAffairsAsia survey, most reputations are built on word of mouth recommendations.This means that people and companies that experience the change will do more for promoting a state or city than needless conferencing.Chief ministers should realise this.(Pranjal Sharma is a senior business writer. He can be contacted at pranjalx@gmail.com)
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Long gone are the days when leading pharmaceutical companies managed the entire value chain from drug discovery and development, clinical trials, and manufacturing, to marketing and distribution. Leading companies such as Novartis, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline have continually outsourced labor-intensive, time-consuming activities around the world. Various contract research organisations (CROs) and contract manufacturing organisations (CMOs) bill themselves as low-cost service providers, capable of reducing the time-to-clinic and decreasing the overall cost of a drug, from development through manufacturing. Predictably, in recent years many outsourcing organisations have emerged in Asia — including China, Singapore, and India — where biology and chemistry PhDs are abundant, patient enrollment rates for clinical trials are high, labour costs are low, and tax concessions are generous. With the continuous knowledge transfer from pharmaceutical companies to outsourcing organisations, what will the industry look like in 5 to 10 years? If leading pharmaceutical companies are to sustain their competitive advantages, how will they operate? Rather than a new phenomenon, the current industry trend closely parallels what has already occurred in the personal computer (PC) sector. Because of the open modular architecture of PCs, contract manufacturers in Asia were able to bypass an integrated, complex system and supply western PC firms with subsystems such as motherboards, CD-ROM drives, monitors, keyboards and mice. Initially, these contract manufacturers could only assemble the simplest components according to specifications. But by collaborating with western PC firms, contract manufacturers benefited from continuous knowledge transfer. Over time, they took on additional responsibilities for product design and component procurement, becoming more involved at the design stage of the computers. (Industry practitioners refer to these sophisticated contract manufacturers as original design manufacturers - ODMs.) Western PC firms, after offloading the less profitable operations, focused on marketing activities and performance metrics for quality control. Dell, for example, invested very little in mechanical and electronic R&D. It relied on contract manufacturers to innovate the next generation of machines. HP, on the verge of shutting down its laptop division in 1999, outsourced its entire business operations to several Taiwanese firms. Services that were outsourced included hardware assembly, software installation, product testing, final packaging, and direct shipment to customers. As they progressively "hollowed out," western PC firms (with the exception of Apple) essentially became technology companies without technologies. Today, Taiwan has captured nearly half of the global integrated circuit market share; it has become the biggest producer of flat panel displays in the world; and it supplies over 90 per cent of the global laptop shipment volume. While leading pharmaceutical companies may not follow Dell and HP to exclusively focus on sales and marketing, the widespread knowledge transfer to CROs / CMOs, particularly those in Asia, will cause an irrevocable shift in the industry. In search of greater profits, outsourcing organisations continue to vertically integrate in order to provide a broader range of product offerings. Joint ventures and acquisitions abound: the strategic alliance between PPD and CMIC in Japan, the merger between Tokyo-based GNI and Shanghai-based Genomics, the acquisition of AppTec by Wuxi Pharmatech of Shanghai, and the investment in Commonwealth Biotechnologies by Beijing-based Venturepharm Laboratories. Services offered by these outsourcing organisations include developing, formulating and manufacturing drugs, managing clinical trials, monitoring safety, preclinical trial, toxicology, processing trial samples, and other complementary services. (Industry practitioners refer to these vertically integrated, single-source providers as contract development and manufacturing organizations - CDMOs.) As outsourcing organisations in Asia progressively develop a fuller set of capabilities, it is not hard to imagine that some may eventually develop new drugs of their own. But unlike other global products like PCs, drug discovery is — by nature — fragmented into geographical regions that each has distinctive disease classes. Unique disease mechanisms exist in China, for example. Gastric and liver cancers are much more prevalent in the region, with different disease etiologies. This implies different "white spaces" in which drug discovery efforts can specialize. More importantly, medical treatments for disease classes commonly found in emerging economies are often deemed unprofitable by established pharmaceutical companies. The local population's ability to pay and the corresponding institutional arrangement present an operating environment in which it is difficult to generate a level of profits comparable to that of advanced economies. Consequently, infectious diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, syphilis, dysentery, gonorrhea, and foot-and-mouth disease still wreak havoc in China even though the scientific understanding on how to treat these diseases exists. For an established pharmaceutical company, commercialising a large-scale prevention and treatment regimen for these diseases is far less attractive financially than tackling diseases important to the Western world. The fact that charity organisations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are needed to fund the development of a variety of vaccines and drugs for impoverished communities in Africa underscores this broader phenomenon. But to a vertically integrated outsourcing organisation in China, moving up the value chain to develop these once-ignored drug classes can be commercially attractive because of the company's different cost structures and business models. In other words, emerging firms are motivated to fill the market void. These emerging firms, in the long run, however, are unlikely to compete directly with established pharmaceutical companies in the same market. In contrast to consumer electronics, personal computers, or home appliances where consumer needs converge on a global basis, disease classes vary greatly across geographic regions. These variations persist because of different climatic conditions, dietary habits, living standards, and lifestyle. The pharmaceutical industry may be one of the rare examples where industry incumbents and new entrants are able to achieve a peaceful co-existence, each specialising in drug discovery activities in their core markets. This is indeed good news for everyone.Industries will develop differently, however. Managers must be able to recognise the basic patterns of their own sectors before devising the firm's strategy for capitalising in the new consumption-driven Chinese economy. Blindly following others is not only ineffective, but downright dangerous. Ultimately, the wait-and-see approach of many multinationals seeking to expand into the Chinese market could be doomed before they even get started. So how can these companies strike the right strategic balance? (The author is a professor of Strategic Management and Innovation at IMD, where he teaches in the Orchestrating Winning Performance and Building on Talent programs. His teaching and research activities focus on why and how some firms can sustain new growth while others cannot)
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I see from my Twitter brand page that Big Boss is a trending topic for me. Not being something I would ever be interested in, I was surprised; until I remembered how I was outraged — when at a movie theatre — there was an announcement that Big Boss would like the audience to stand up for the National Anthem. Almost like sponsoring the National Anthem, really. So while I wouldn’t want to be known for an interest in Big Boss, enough tweets were exchanged over the issue to make the topic prominent on my page.Notice that I say page, not my regular Twitter stream, seen on Twitter.com or via any of the hundreds of Twitter clients that we use. This page comes from Twylah.com, a fascinating and immediately useful web application or service usable by individuals or businesses. Twylah is a startup co-founded by serial entrepreneur Eric Kim and his wife Kelly Kim in San Francisco. A bolt-out-of-the-blue idea triggered off the Twylah web service based on the fact that once you’ve done tweeting, your tweets just get buried in the stream. Apart from the few words that make up your profile and your immediately visible tweets, no one really knows what you stand for, sometimes not even you. Although Twylah is still in beta, has a lot going for it – and its users.Here’s what Twylah does: When you sign up and are accepted and sign in, a neat and beautifully laid out web page is created for you, dynamically. What this page shows is your profile from Twitter, right on top. Under that, is a row of topics, just as you’d see in the tabs of a website. These topics come from what you tweet most about and those of your tweets that are “trending” I your own network. On the page itself, you see the topics showcased with your tweets. Images and videos are picked up from your tweets to create a magazine style layout, making everything more attractive and engaging. You also have a choice of layouts to play with. The result may remind you of paper.li, but there’s a big difference. There, the focus is on the content. Here, the focus is on you, the creator, curator or influencer.Manage Your Topics For BrandingThe first and most amazing thing that Twylah does for you is to give you the big picture of what you’re talking about on Twitter. Now, I love taking photographs but I’m no professional and certainly don’t deserve quite much attention for the photos I share. Yet, this topic is prominent for me. Twylah lets you front three topics, so I pushed photography down, letting tech topics come to the top. But this change only reflects on the Twylah page. To actually change things, I would need to increase my tweets about those other topics. This feedback is the first step towards better crafting your Twitter activity. Incidentally, you can also remove tweets from Twylah to clean up your page. So if you don’t want a rant about the government and its inefficiencies to be part of your branding statement, a tweet on the subject can be hidden. To get it out of Twitter, you would have to delete it, of course.Showcasing YouWhen anyone visits your Twylah page, they see instantly what you’re about, what you stand for, and the message is powerful, specially because it’s visual. You can highlight your page (or site, really) by embedding it on your own site, or by linking to it. But the other more interesting way to send users to the site is via Power Tweets, a recent addition to the service. To Power Tweet, add the bookmarklet to your browser. This can also be done on the iPad, which is good since so much content consumption is done on the tablet. When your browser is at a page you want to share (your own or other content) just click the bookmarklet to share to your Twitter followers – and you can add other services such as Facebook as well. When your followers click on your shared link, they will be led to your Twylah page from where they can further go to the content you shared. Power Tweets increase the engagement from your followers who come to your page and see more of your content. But don’t overuse the feature and end up annoying your followers. The ideal time to Power Tweet would be when you’ve been focusing strongly on some topic and want peope to see more of what you had to share, not just a single article.A big list of media types is supported by Power Tweet including content you share from YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr.Up The EngagementBecause of the arrangement of tweets by topic, your tweets are not lost and forgotten. On Twitter, they have a life of a few hours at the most. When a follower goes to your Twylah page, he or she can choose to explore ever deeper into tweets relating to a topic of choice. One can reply and retweet while viewing the tweet from the Twylah page as well. For people who are intimidated by the chaos of the Twitterverse, Twylah is a great way to make sense of content rather than scanning tweet after tweet in a stream without context.While Google and Twitter no longer play nice with each other, your Twylah page gives you another place from which to be searched and found. And anyone who deliberately looks for you by name, plus trending tweets or tweets related to a topic, will be led to your Twylah page within the first few search results.The next thing the Twylah team is working on is analytics. These are not available at all right now but showing them to Robert Scobble, Eric Kim demonstrated how a whole lot of interesting data can be pulled out, such as what topics get you the most tweets. Retweets are analysed separately. It’s not clear when this set of tools will be open to users and whether they will be part of a premium service or free. Twylah, like any service, needs a business model and as the application opens up to users, this will be what the team will explore. They already have several ideas including ads and even a revenue sharing format with users.Head to twylah.com and request an invite. I’ve been an early user and have now decided to be an active one. Looking at all that Twylah offers I was impressed afresh and felt rather lucky that I’d signed up soon after it went beta.
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Coca-Cola has put in place a new operating structure in India and south west Asia in keeping with its business priorities. This will come into effect from October 1 and follows Coca-Cola India's plans to invest $5 billion in India by 2020.As the soft drink major unveiled several leadership changes to push its global growth, it named Venkatesh Kini as senior VP, India region. Kini, so long, global VP, marketing of Juices, will report to Atul Singh, president, Coca-Cola India and South West Asia Business Unit.With focus on India as long-term strategic growth market, the new business unit will organise around two major operating regions: India region (Coca-Cola India) and South West Asia (SWA) region consisting of the high-potential Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives markets. The SWA region will also include the juice business, making it a significant growth engine for overall business.Neeraj Garg, currently VP, company owned bottling operations (CBO) in India, will assume the responsibility of the SWA region as well as the juice business. Both these executives will report to Atul Singh, president, Coca-Cola India and South West Asia Business Unit.Announcing the realignment, Atul Singh said: “India is one of the key growth markets for The Coca-Cola Company and the business unit’s role is critical to the company for achieving its 2020 Vision. We have been growing for the last 24 quarters and the India market is now amongst the top seven markets for the company. As we move into the next phase of our journey, we have a solid foundation and necessary momentum in our business. This is the time to take the next step in our evolution. We now need to have the scale and resources to capture latent growth across the Business Unit. Also, keeping in mind the market realities, we need to be more responsive and have a sharper and deeper focus on our business. The new structure lends us stability and robustness and positions us well to capture the latent growth in our markets”.“Kini and Neeraj are proven business leaders and I look forward to partnering with them and the rest of my leadership team, company owned bottling partner (Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd) and the franchise bottlers as we continue our journey towards our 2020 Vision”, added Mr. Singh.This announcement does not impact Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd,the Company owned bottling operations in India. Coke offers a range of beverages in India including Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Thums Up, Fanta, Limca, Sprite, Maaza, Minute Maid Pulpy Orange, Minute Maid Nimbu Fresh, Minute Maid Mixed Fruit, Minute Maid Apple, Minute Maid Mango, Minute Maid 100% juices, Georgia, Georgia Gold, Kinley, Kinley Club Soda, Schweppes and Burn through a network of more than 1.7 million outlets Incidentally, Coca-Cola has returned to Myanmar officially after 60 years. The soft drinks giant also plans to set up a bottling operation in the country. Coke's rival reentered Myanmar after 15 yeears as the company takes advantage of eased US sanctions and moves forward with efforts to expand into emerging markets.
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In their book on luxury, The Cult Of The Luxury Brand: Inside Asia's Love Affair With Luxury (Research Press), Radha Chadha and Paul Husband during the course of interviews with retailers, industry experts and consumers gave a glimpse of the thriving luxury market in South East Asian countries. In the chapter 'India: The Next China?, the authors say 'the heightened interest in India today is because of the unprecedented success of luxury brands in China". Chadha also says in the book that the Indian luxury market at $100-million is at its best. This was in 2007. Today, a 2011 report by CII and AT Kearney pegs the Indian luxury market at $5.8 billion - approximately Rs 31,900 crore. Chadha acknowledges that the Indian luxury market has changed since then. "The culture of luxury brands in India has spread since then - more brands, more products, more stores, more cities, and of course, more consumers, " she says in an interview with BW Online's Sanjitha Rao Chaini. An IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus, Chadha is a brand strategy and consumer insights expert and runs her firm Chadha Strategy Consulting. Excerpts: Do you think the definition of luxury is constant or do you think it keeps changing? Tell us your views...The definition of luxury is tricky — it means different things to different people, and it varies by countries and cultures. It can be Dadi's wedding ear-rings handed down to you, or a spanking new Aston Martin that purrs just so, or a sunset shared with a loved one. Talk to luxury houses and they will tell you about heritage and craftsmanship, creativity and impeccable quality. Talk to old money and they will echo many of the same adjectives, alluding to timelessness, elegance, and exclusivity. Talk to a fashionista, and she will give you the buzz about the season's it-bag, the hot designer of the moment, and which celeb is wearing what.But there is one defining factor — and this is the thrust of my book - that has fuelled the growth of the luxury industry: The unprecedented rise of new money in Asia, and the role that luxury brands have played in showcasing this newfound success for millions and millions of consumers. The logos and symbols have become convenient shorthand for displaying wealth.You wrote The Cult Of The Luxury Brand in 2007. How has the Indian market changed ever since? How do you compare growth of luxury goods and its perception in Indian market vis-a-vis other Asian markets? What are the patterns you are seeing now?The culture of luxury brands in India has spread since then - more brands, more products, more stores, more cities, and of course, more consumers. Interestingly, luxury brands are no longer a big-city super-rich phenomenon - it has filtered to second tier cities, and fanned out to the next rung in the social ladder.Having said that, the luxury brand industry in India is still small compared to other parts of Asia, say China - which is the world's biggest market for many luxury brands — or the Middle East. I moved to Dubai last year, and was surprised to see almost every woman in a burqa carrying a Chanel bag, which starts at $2,000+. The growth of luxury brands is directly linked to the growth of the economy and the rise in personal incomes - you need hard cash to buy expensive things, it is as simple as that — and India still has a lot of growth ahead of it.We have always perceived luxury to be something associated with an imported item. How do you think high-end Indian brands should work towards changing this perception?When I was in college, a pair of imported Levi jeans was the ultimate luxury we hankered after! We have come a long way, but you are right, when we talk of luxury brands, we are mostly thinking of Western brands like Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Mercedes. If I have a wish, it is that Indian luxury brands grow and blossom. There is a whole crop of high-end clothing designers — and some are very good too - but growing to the stature of a Prada, Burberry or Hermes is going to take some doing. There are obviously a heap of things that need to be done, but I would focus on two things: one, worship impeccable quality in all its aspects, and two, develop a signature style in a sea of sameness.Has social media changed marketing of luxury in India — or in any other markets globally?Globally, luxury brands are using social media in a big way — for example, Burberry has 13.5 million 'likes' on Facebook, Louis Vuitton 9.4 million, Gucci, 9.1 million, and so it goes. Burberry has to be singled out as a champion of social media - and an innovator with initiatives like a tweetwalk (tweeting photos of the model before she walks the ramp) especially in an industry that was slow to embrace digital media.In India, the size of the luxury industry is small, and so is social media activity. I'd say there is a distinct opportunity to use social media to spread the luxury culture in India.Is luxury always something that money can buy? Or is there class, style and some exclusivity associated with it?You can always buy the product. Style, of course, is a subjective thing, an aesthetic judgment.High-end premium apartments, homes designed by Italian designers in India, customised holidays — do you feel the luxury market is moving from products to experiences and services?In other countries it has typically followed the direction of products first, and then as consumers evolve in sophistication and affluence, there is a move towards services and experience. For example, a woman who happily spends $1,000 on a piece of jewelry, will baulk at a $1,000 per night luxury resort in an exotic location — it will take years, and a significant jump in her bank balance, before she pays top dollar for an experience.But in India I find that it is all happening at the same time - products, services, experiences, all are growing. We are a huge country and development is reshaping lives in dramatic ways, leaving people at different levels of economic ability and social desires. And luxury companies are responding with products and services to match these desires.
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It’s not just Narendra Modi who has his eyes set on Delhi.The Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, which owns India’s largest food brand Amul, is keen to take over the Delhi Milk Scheme.Vipul Chaudhary, the new chairman of GCMMF, said he was going to approach the ministry of agriculture with a proposal to acquire DMS. “We are going to request them that this business be handed over to us,” he said.He was speaking at a press conference in Delhi on 12 September to announce the launch of Amul Moti, the brand’s new UHT (ultra high temperature) milk to be retailed in aseptic polypacks. DMS owns barely five per cent market share in Delhi. “It does not have the volume, but it has outlets in strategic places,” said R. S. Sodhi, GCMMF managing director. DMS has the capacity to produce about five lakh litres of milk, but is only churning out three lakh litres currently. There have been various reports that DMS has sought government intervention to help it raise production.According to Sodhi, Delhi is the biggest market for Amul for its milk products. And Amul, he claimed, was the largest seller of milk in pouches in Delhi, retailing 40 lakh pouches a day in the Capital.Sodhi said Amul’s focus is increasingly going to be on fresh products. “2010 to 2020 will be all about fresh products. We are increasingly going to source milk outside of Gujarat as well and hope to be handling 200 lakh litres per day by 2020,” he said.Currently Amul handles 125 lakh litres per day. The no-refrigeration needed Amul Moti, which has a shelf life of 90 days, will be initially launched in Jammu and Kashmir, Chhatisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. It is meant for milk deficient areas as well as places where consumers have no means to refrigerate milk, said Mr Sodhi. Priced at Rs 20 per 500 ml pouch and Rs 9 for a 200 ml pouch, it is more affordable than its tetra pak offering Amul Taaza.Chaudhary dedicated Amul Moti to GCMMF founder Verghese Kurien, who passed away on 9 September.
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Bribe is a simple problem. But the solution to this problem is complex. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh suggested recently that bribe giving should be made a criminal activity.His argument is that much of the bribe giving activity occurs between big corporations and government representatives. His belief is borne out by the recent scams that show how corporations were in cahoots with people in authority. This nasty proximity between led to rules being bent, flouted and ignored to benefit few at the expense of many.Some countries like the United Kingdom have passed laws that make bribe givers liable for prosecution too. The Bribery Act that came into force last year makes UK companies liable for prosecution not just in the country but also across the world. The law makes it illegal to receive or offer bribes. It also makes it a crime if a public official fails to prevent bribery.This stringent act has been lauded and has set a fresh benchmark of anti-corruption law.But this idea has been largely ignored by India’s political and business leaders. The Prime Minister is seeking to put this idea in public discourse.The views in the industry are varied. Some industry leaders have welcomed the statement by the Prime Minister. But they are cautious about how a law like this would be enacted. As always the details will make or break such an effort.Last year, another such debate was triggered by former Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu and Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies NR Narayan Murthy. They said roughly the opposite of what the Prime Minister has said. Kaushik and Murthy endorsed the idea said that bribes giving should be legalized so that it is easier to track.Giving legal protection to a bribe giver would ensure that they would be the first to blow the whistle on the bribe taker. Also such a step would ensure that illegal transaction of every size, at every level can be attacked with this.The issue though is that in many cases the bribe giver wants to keep the transaction in the dark. In most of the scams under investigation these days the bribe giving company actively colluded with government representatives.The solution to fighting lies somewhere else though. India has many existing laws to tackle corruption and bribery. Much of the cases get stuck in archaic judicial system for so long that very few people are fear action. Swift justice is a bigger deterrent than complex or strict laws.In fact, more laws are pending that includes the Whistle Blowers Bill that protect government officials and corporate executives who report fraud and corruption.The real answer though lies not just in fresh laws. The real answer is creating more transparent government processes. Increasing transparency will also mean reducing discretionary powers of officials and ministers. Most cases of corruption are a result of cronyism where discretion is used to favour the few.The coal scam is a great example of this. The coal block allotment process was so opaque and discretionary that favoritism was inevitable. If the coal block process was open for all with clear transparent guidelines, the government would have been in a better position today.The Prime Minister and industry should collaborate to enhance transparent processes. Use of technology can ensure that officials can’t tamper with rules even if they want to.The current system has so many loopholes that officials and companies are tempted to encash the opportunity. Higher transparency and lower discretion will attack the roots of bribery far more than increasing liability of participants.(Pranjal Sharma is a senior business writer. He can be contacted at pranjalx@gmail.com)
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Don't Attempt The 'Speed Breakers'The CAT exam has certain questions which can best be termed as 'speed breakers'. Although these questions can be solved, they take too much time and hence, break the candidate's speed or momentum. Hence, although the candidate does get marks for one correct answer, he/ she spends an amount of time-in which he/ she possibly could have attempted 2-3 other questions and scored more marks. How do you spot these questions? These are often found in the Analytical Reasoning or the Data Interpretation section. While a particular set of questions may be quite easy, they may require actual calculations involving tedious multiplications or divisions of large numbers (or numbers with many decimal points). Look carefully at the answer choices. If they too close and differ only in the decimal numbers, you may need long actual calculations to find the answer. If you are pressed for time, it is best to avoid such questions.For Analytical Reasoning questions, questions with too many statements in which there are too many conditions mean that you will need too much time to solve them, as several possibilities exist and need to be evaluated. Again, it is best to leave these. Don't Calculate EverythingAn analysis of the CAT tests of previous years shows that the test taker doesn't need to calculate everything. The exam, amongst other things, tests your ability to make a crucial choice- when to actually calculate an exact number and when to approximate.If an approximation works, use it. It will save you time and effort. For example, in some graphs, a simple visual examination will suffice; the exact values of the plotted variables may not be needed.Don't Underestimate The Need For Planning"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" is an old saying. It is as true for the CAT exam as for anything else. Hence every candidate attempting CAT should have a strategy in mind. This will vary for different candidates depending on their relative strengths and weaknesses.For example, those strong in Quant may wish to attempt more questions in that section; while those strong in Verbal Ability may seek to maximize their scores in that. The candidate' strategy must also cover aspects such as which kind of questions he wishes to attempt first, which later etc. For example, the candidate can choose to keep caselets pertaining to Reasoning for later as these may be time consuming.Don't Forget To Use TechnologyThis is an important point-the Computer-based CAT exam can make life easy for you, if you know how to use the technological features offered by the test interface to your advantage. For example, how can the student know whether he has attempted enough questions in the given time limit to clear the sectional cut-off? The technological feature of the 'Review' tab helps here-clicking on this provides you a quick snapshot of how many questions you have attempted, how many you have left out etc. If you have clearly attempted too few questions, speed up and try and do a few more in the given time to clear the sectional cut-off. Don't Be Inconsistent While Preparing; But Don't Overdo Your PreparationThere is no single recommendation on 'how much to study' for the CAT. This depends on several relative factors including the candidate's IQ, his strengths and weaknesses, how much time he can spare etc.But the candidate needs to be consistent. If he/ she has decided to devote three hours a day then he/ she must adhere to it. The mistake that students often do is that they go easy during the week and study for ten hours over the weekend. This does not work!But too much of anything is bad. There is an optimal level for most things and preparation for CAT is no different.Do not overdo the number of mock tests you take. I have seen students take up test packages from 3-4 different coaching institutes and attempt all of them. This may only lead to fatigue and burn-out. Attempting three-four mock tests per week is probably good enough. Similarly, it may not be necessary to burn the midnight oil while preparing. Rather be consistent and diligent with your preparation, as earlier mentioned. An alumnus of IIM Calcutta, Sidharth Balakrishna is part of faculty of top management institutes. He has authored a number books on management: his latest book is called An Introduction to CAT: Tips from an IIM Alumnus (Pearson)
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