Core Competency Revisited

I am sure that among the various jargons which we used and exploited extensively in the past two years in the B-school, “Core Competency” was ahead of most of them. I can safely assume that in the times of an outsourcing boom, it was bound to be. Interestingly, with the passage of time the frequency f its use continuously decreased for “concentrating on the core-competency” became something as a commonsense for the business.
But these past two and a half months in Hyderabad has made me revisit this common notion we used to hold. Among many others, there were three very interesting encounters I had with different companies –

1. For a HUTCH mobile number in Punjab, I deposited 1000 bucks in one of their Hyderabad extensions in Madhopur after confirming the availability of this facility from them. But even today i.e. after 40 days of my payment, the account in Punjab has still not been updated after my repeated requests to them.


2. Riding high on the technology wave, we got ourselves a broadband connection and a wireless router for 4 laptops in the house. After having a very bad experience with the local broadband company, “Beam Cable” we decided to go in for the Brand “Airtel”. At first, it took us two complete weeks after depositing the money to coarse the Technical agent to deliver the connection. Over and above it, when approached for another connection, we were told that not more than one connection could be given in one house. And if a bachelor, forget about the connection at all.


3. ICICI was going to be my default option for the credit card as i have a salary account with them. Almost 2 months have crossed and I am still struggling to know the status of my application after submitting all the required documents 3 times.

There are still many more such incidents which happen day in and day out with us and I can just go on cribbing. But this weekend it became a topic of hot discussion among the four of us.
Towards the end KD very rightly pointed out that the operations of most of the companies have proved to be non scalable. When I get three different calls from three different persons verifying my personal information for the credit card, I am sure there is some major internal communication failure in the company.
I am sure a more practical analysis of the problem that how companies are loosing focus of their “Core Competencies” will serve a much better purpose than evaluating the movie ‘Krish’ as a business case study.