The jalebi is a quintessential Indian sweet and has been often used as an analogy. In the early 1990s Birmingham-based Bhangra-rap singer Apache Indian sang about wanting a girl “sweet like a jalebi” in his song Arranged marriage. But Shombit Sengupta, international management strategy consultant, uses the characteristics of a jalebi as a management analogy in his recent book, Jalebi Management.
Shombit Sengupta is the founder of Shining Emotional Surplus Pvt Ltd, which has four independent groups — corporate transformation, product design, branding and retail addiction. Shining Emotional is best known for its designing of the Wipro rainbow coloured sunflower logo with the slogan “Applying thought”.
“Every organisation’s individual character is distinct. No organisation, like no individual, or no jalebi is like another”, he says. Shombit was brought up in a Bengal refugee colony outside Kolkata.
In 1973 at the age of 19, he left for Paris with US $8 in his pocket. His education at the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and Ecole Superieure d’Arts Graphiques Penninghen in Paris, was left incomplete due to paucity of funds. Today, his company’s clients include international corporations like Unilever, Danone, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, Nivea, Hejkel, Ferruzi, Reckitt & Colman, Remy Martin, Pernod Ricard, Britannia, Marico, Wipro and Brooke Bond.
His concept of Jalebi Management has woven society, history and business in a way that shows how they can co-exist in harmony. Can an organisation become like a jalebi that all stakeholders enjoy biting into? Culling his 30 years of global experience in top management consulting with corporations, he is equating the complexity of business and its management to that of a jalebi.
His tryst with jalebis began three days after he landed in Paris. He saw a pyramidical building block of jalebis in a North African sweet shop but he could not afford the 15-Franc jalebi. It was only after two months, when he got a sweeper’s job with a monthly salary of 500 Francs that he bought his first jalebi. It was only after he tasted the jalebi he understood it is so unique and that not only are two jalebis different in shape, but the jalebi changes its taste and appeal from culture to culture.
In subsequent years in Paris, through several jobs and his own consulting enterprise in management strategy for corporate houses worldwide, he realised the importance of being as unique as a jalebi while operating in the established environment of global business norms.
His book explores many novel ideas in management. For instance, complacency, he says kills the innovative spirit in an organisation. It is imperative for organisations to inflict self-discomfort by considering radical ideas or deviating from the norm to step into an innovative world. It makes an organisation see things differently to become competitive and innovative.
To be really consumer sensitive an organisation needs to understand how consumers anywhere in the world indulge themselves by breaking into swear words. The indulgent language of the curse has different dimensions and layers depending on a person’s mental stamina and social position.
Consumers may not directly revolt against certain business discrepancies that exist, but these may create coldness that could be damaging for business tomorrow. In the realm of technology  when a product  becomes half its price after a year of launch, consumer confidence is totally violated. This is a high alert for globally reputed companies who constantly seek new markets. Such flaws are prevalent and numerous in emerging economy countries, less so in sophisticated developed countries. With consumer sensitivity growing at a rapid pace, these jagged edges need to be avoided in delivery.
Technology and outsourcing excellence are reducing at staggering speeds the surprise element of a product or service, which was considered as organisational knowhow 30 years ago. What was unique yesterday is exposed to the external world today. So imitations of expensive brands are available at low costs worldwide. Consumers and customers may not perceive tangible value differentiation between big global brands and low cost generic market products.
Sengupta even has his take on feminine psychology and consumerism. A woman’s subconscious mind is like a spider’s web with tremendous depth and networked links. Women, either as shoppers or influencers, impact today’s consumption discipline. Their psychological paradigm is multi-dimensional, replete with characteristics like nurturing, loving the intangible, having patience, aesthetics, subtlety, exuberance, mystique and the inclination to network. To make businesses multi-dimensional, organisations need to understand these same substances that women intrinsically possess.
Most of all his book considers the billion people economy of India and China. The scale of a million people and their way of functioning is very different from the billion population scale. The billions in India and China have different cultures, but both carry thoughts and actions relevant to the billion-mindset. They are very tolerant of the varied others around them. They think in terms of adjustment and family, instead of independent actions as people in the West are prone to. In both India and China demands for new management techniques are now gaining ground, either for the masses or to provide support services to the developed world. The emerging new management knowhow for the billion-mindset will indicate the changes in work culture that the West has to adapt to.