Harish Palaniappan's

Where there is a billon [$], there is a way..
Where there are a million [employees], there are ways..

Globally more and more large businesses seem to be converting their targets of business growth based on factors like millions and billions. rather than net profit, net percentage growth, or returns per share, like it used to be.

Why, a few months back, the too giant search engines Yahoo, and Google, fought in public media claiming theirs as the most used search by people, ...becos they had a billion directory listings, or million searches per month.

Whatever... the scenes are changing.. probably triggered by IT industry we can say, because, only IT companies started the idea of reaching a billion $ turnover as a big milestone ahead of their competitors who were less than a billion $. Though the difference could be sometimes just a few millions, the latter probably feel themself smaller when compared to the competition which is already making 1 billion$.

Having worked for Cognizant technology solutions, chennai, india, i remember how many mails of motivation and inspiration we used to recieve from corporate heads across the globe in the excitement to reaching the 1 billion $ target, right from the day when we were only 600 million $]. Sometimes it used to look like unless the company made that money, it wasn't happy with what it had. And to make it more obvious, Cognizant gave all its staff an Apple iPod with 10gb disk space in celebration of achieving the target. No, I had left the company before the target and did get calls from friends saying they wished i still worked there so that i could have got one.. iPod.

Such celebration and boosters happen in many companies on many occassions, i dont mean it only happens in IT, or neither do I feel all this is unneccessary. .. but it happens "more" these days, is the point.

Indian railways always had a hell a lot of employees, which we indians always knew from childhood, but suddenly in 2004 people seemed to have drummed it around, and Indian railways was recognized for its 1,583,614 strong employee base by the ..who? Guiness book of world records.

I am not sure whether the railway employees got an iPod or not, but sure it made some news and celebration... and sent the message across to the world, right on time in 2004, that India is a labour intensive country.. and arguments at college as to whether being an Indian is a pride or not, started having statements like "we got guiness record for largest number of employees in an organization, has China got it?"

This slowly seems to have evolved into a tradition.. the numbers.. earlier we used to see importance of numbers only with the balance sheet of public companies. And I dont think increasing employee numbers to 1 million was considered a target which large companies were eager to achieve, 20 years back.

Recently there was some more news.. about another largely-employed organization in India, the Indian Army. I remember in my younger days I used to get bored watching the republic day parade on TV.. they used to keep walking and more soldiers keep coming.. all from morning 7AM or so, till close to Noon. And you had to wait hours to see a mouth-gaping view of the latest defence equipment India had, till 1000 or odd soldiers marched past... like some kind of a break between the sea of soldiers we had that equipment coming.

Ah! yea about the recent news... it seems like, Recently, indian IT companies are in the interest of taking HR lessons from Indian Army and Walmart on managing more than 10,000 strong employee base.

About walmart, it seems it has 1 million and odd employees. For a supermarket chain, that is a whopping number. If walmart employees itself bought their stuff from walmart, the company should find no difficulty making profits.

Bottomline:

Is having more employees, a strength or weakness of a company?
We could debate that. Imagine putting 50 people on a project which might as well do with 10. I think that would sink the project, its costs and its timeline in managing the extra 40 all the time.

Is a billion dollar company really "The" big/best company, shouldn't we factor that as to, "With what employee base, or customer base, they achieved that target?"

Anyways, we assume that corporate heads are in-the-know when it comes to numbers and how it affects (or effects) their show.

And after all this reading.. if you are not carried away thinking about your company size, or your neighbours family size, etc., you can read this interesting article on 'IT cos taking lessons from Indian Army and walmart'

In the meantime.. let me sharpen my conversion skills on how much is a million in lacs and billion in crores.. everytime i see those words millions and billions., i remember i need to work on this. Uh! ...one of the effects of learning the british system, while the british themself seem to have started talking in American system.