Thanks for showing so much love to my book – The Anexas Story. Based on many requests to publish chapters of the book on LinkedIn, I continue to write a series of articles based on these chapters. Please read on and keep believing that there is an entrepreneur in you…and everyone!
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Akshaya Patra, an organization based in Bangalore, feeds 1.5 million children every day with free midday meals in schools across India.
Though it is run by a charity NGO with religious affiliations, it has succeeded in creating the best in efficiency and ‘Just In Time’ management that I would ever see in my life. Partly thanks to their process excellence team led by Murali and Jay, and partly to their strong visionary leadership team. Anexas is proud to have implemented Lean and Six Sigma there, right from their meal production and distribution process to finance and HR divisions. During one of the meetings, its visionary CEO Shridhar gifted me a book – Blue Ocean Strategy. As this was a new concept and the book was making waves after its release, it intrigued me. As I went through the book, I realized that unknowingly we at Anexas had implemented so many concepts of the Blue Ocean Strategy.
Plus, there was scope for more. It was like the days of Pele in Football or Dhyanchand in Hockey. To them, no one else mattered as a competitor. The book talked about a strategy where you make your competition irrelevant by creating a unique identity based on your strength rather than copying or worrying about your competition. Companies can succeed in creating ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space, as opposed to ‘red oceans’ where competitors fight for dominance, the analogy being that an ocean full of vicious competition turns red with blood.
By then some of the Blue Ocean Strategies which we had already implemented were:
- Going to Saudi Arabia which was a virgin market for the services we provided
- Reducing costs by cutting down on expensive training venues when everyone believed to spend lavishly on giving extravagant ambiance for attendees of training programs and
- Hiring fresher graduates and training them to become star-trainers in their mid-twenties.
We thought of expanding the business to other countries by following the same strategies. Probably because of this, during our whole journey we never took any loan from any bank, never sought funding or never embroiled ourselves in any debt trap.
We even launched a training program as an offering on Blue Ocean Strategy, with our example as a case study! Now that was bold. This could have been rebuffed by the trainees but no one even guffawed. I guess they had bought into it.
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For subsequent articles, please watch this space.
You can buy the book directly from its website on https://www.anexasstory.com
or on Amazon on https://www.amazon.in/ANEXAS-STORY-There-Entrepreneur-Everyone-ebook/dp/B07ZGLN8C7
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Amitabh Saxena is founder of Anexas, a well-known lean six sigma and project management consulting organisation. He has trained over 50,000 participants and has 30 years of experience in consulting more than 300 organisations around the world including Fortune 100 companies across industry domains. With a strong team of 25 Master Black Belts, his organisation Anexas has been helping individuals and organisations achieve eminence through excellence since 2006. They can be reached on enquiry@anexas.net