BRANDLOGIC
BY L K G UPTA
During the superstorm Sandy in October 2012, a young lifeguard Dylan Smith rescued a dozen people in the Queens neighbourhood of New York by paddling from porch to porch with his surfboard, moving the helpless from imperiled spots amid swirling floodwaters. Besides displaying great courage in the face of danger, Smith’s action exemplifies the principle of jugaad – a creative idea executed well under conditions that lacked resources and time. Where no boats or rafts were available, but the need was great, Smith’s surfboard served well as a life-saver.
Jugaad is a Hindi term which is widely used by Indians. Examples of these abound mostly in rural and semi-urban areas, where ingenuity has resulted in creative solutions of the common man, for the common man and by the common man. Ranging from a rural transport vehicle powered by a water pump engine to using an electric iron as a hotplate to warm milk, the single most important underlying reason for their invention is lack of resources. It is this reason that serves as the mother of the jugaad solution, and emanates from bright people desperate to solve problems that make lives difficult.
Practical benefits of jugaad notwithstanding, we have to be careful not to make these the prime examples of the innovative Indian. Specifically inside organizations, it carries with it the danger of condoning, nay even encouraging shortcuts, and it forces our eyes off the pursuit of excellence in all that we do. I have seen people take pride in Indians’ ability to think creatively and come up with jugaad; so much so that the ability to do a jugaad solution is perceived as being dynamic and result-oriented for any situation.
That’s wrong! For, jugaad inside an organization will kill true innovation. There is no excuse for a well-resourced organization to take shortcuts when it should be creatively using its resources to make better, more useful, safer and enduring products. Consumers of a company’s products and services need the assurance of well thought-through and robust quality processes; they don’t need a rural transport vehicle to take them down the highway for five rupees.
Not only within the organization, acceptance of jugaad mentality can easily spread to vendors too. When they realize that the end justifies the means for the company, they won’t hesitate to take their own shortcuts – the thickness of the sheet they use, the staining adhesive they apply on your fixtures, the cobbling together of random parts to get your booth standing, the quality of their manpower, it will manifest in numerous ways, some seen and many unseen.
The trap of jugaad at an organized level can kill a great idea. A ready example is the famous Aakash tablet which, for the sake of keeping cost down, was a poorly executed piece of work with an outdated design, weak battery life and not the best screen technology. A non-starter to begin with!
Does this malaise figure only in the quality of hardware that we produce? Not at all. The jugaad mentality rears its ugly head in marketing processes too. Many a plan and its implementation have been left in disarray because the marketing process was not robust and allowed individuals to work in their loosely defined paradise. Here are some of the classic signs that you might be working in jugaad-land:
No formally defined SOPs for initiatives: People love having lots of elbow room and don’t like rules to define their moves.
Aversion to and lack of written briefs, feedback, or project closing reports: Sheer laziness, nothing else.
Unclear role definition in multi-department initiatives: No functional expert for planning and executing specifics of a project, e.g., not having a retail marketing guy take charge of in-store activation, or attempting ideation on social media without the digital marketing folks, or even decisions on specialized matter being made by committees of unqualified people.
Habitually pushing agencies and vendors for unrealistic deadlines: Take your own sweet time taking last-minute decisions, but expecting your vendor to be a Superman who is under oath to deliver within 48 hours.
Taking pride in being “fastest to market” rather than “best in market”: Just because you have done it successfully before, you delude yourself into thinking that last-minute execution is the best way to do it. Being agile is one thing; being shoddy another.
Habit of working on shoestring budgets, believing that hard negotiation will do it for you: It is oh-so-important, but you deny adequate resources and force vendors to cut corners.
Make no mistake; jugaad is not the same as innovation. True innovation is about developing new customer value through solutions that are fundamentally sound in product, process and idea; it is not taking shortcuts to save cost or time to deliver a semi-finished solution, however useful it might seem at the time. If we promote jugaad as a way of life in the guise of cost efficiency or expedient timing, we will invariably cut on high quality and stifle true, sustainable innovation.
Feedback: lkgupta610@gmail.com
