Aggressive productivity: Members and teams should set aggressive targets and provide feedback. Identify and slaughter unproductive `holy cows'. Aggressively demand better delivery from internal suppliers while ensuring effective collaboration and team work. Question all overhead costs on a `zero-based' basis. Be unforgiving with both wastage and productivity losses.

Relentless collaboration: Have focussed and more productive meetings. People should voluntarily pitch in to get work done, even when the work is outside their immediate areas of responsibilities. People should mutually demand results from each other in clearly communicated ways. The value and critical nature of each task should be weighed in terms of time and cost. People should be non-defensive when pet ideas are rejected because point of diminishing returns is reached during collaboration.

Path-breaking consumer touch: Members of the top team, brand management and R&D should make consumer visits and have meaningful consumer contact on a monthly basis. Write down new thoughts/ideas and take individual initiatives in making them happen. Make appropriate improvements through international trends in tracking consumer behaviour, insight and best practices.

The move from 3Ps to COMEWIN
Why did Marico need The New Manager, after all? Despite being a leader in most of the categories it operates in, Marico sensed the environment around it's bastions get competitive - locally as globally. ``The new change taking place at Marico is more environment led. It forsees a high degree of competition in the future. And it is the pace of change in the industry, which led the company to device a new culture within,'' says Marico Industries chief human resources officer Mr Rakesh Pandey.

Just one sample pressure-point: Competition has sneaked into the Rs 500-crore coconut oils market, where Parachute is the leader, after Hindustan Lever relaunched Nihar and Coco Care. ITC Conagra has also become active in edible oils. These changes triggered the company to fine-tune its culture to strengthen it from within. While it already followed good HR practices, the company decided to closely align HR with corporate strategy as a major tool to insulate it from the evironmental changes. That HR practices would be the enablers to this change, was certain.

Thus, the old Marico values of 3Ps-People, Product, Profitablity- transcended into COMEWIN: Consumer, Membership, Excellence, Wealth, Innovation. The 3P Marico culture has its roots in the past when it was formed in 1990, to blend people coming into a fast-growth organisation from diverse cultures.

But integrating cultures was no longer enough. In mid-99 Marico realised that in the new environment speed and innovation will be the key drivers to growth. And for this, each employee would have to display speed and innovation by inculcating the three traits: aggressively productive, relentlessly collaborative, with a path-breaking consumer touch.

``While the process of 3Ps made the culture more explicit, innovation was defined as the key factor in all dealings,'' explains Mr Pandey. At a workshop organised last year with Professor Wayne Brock Bank from the University of Michigan, managers were prodded into defining the kind of mindset Marico now required-as well as brainstorm on the sources of competitive advantage.

The result of the intellectual boil: a need for a self-defined, new culture which would help Marico cope with external changes. The definition of the culture was then broken down into the new traits which would be needed in every Marico employee.

The idea behind the new traits was clear: to improve the four critical areas of branding, innovation, cost and distribution. ``If costs are being pared and targets achieved, then the member is being `aggressively productive'. If product innovation has gone up, then the member has inculcated the first trait of `path-breaking consumer touch' and branding. An improvement in distribution is a logical conclusion that the member is `relentlessly collaborative','' says Mr Pandey.

From COMEWIN to win-win
Does touchy-feely stuff like culture, really bring about tangible benefits? Sceptics can chew on one example. The cost of purchasing cartons is less than one per cent of the company's sales-but it was still quite a significant sum. The normal practice at Marico was that each of the company's departments would procure cartons independently and bargain the costs with the respective suppliers.

One department stumbled across the idea: why not reduce costs by aggregating the demand for cartons and wield better negotiating power with just one supplier? This information, which translated into cost reductions, was then speedily communicated to team members of the other departments .

``The speed at which communication takes place has quickened with the driving factor being the new HR policy and the variable pay system as the motivators,'' says Mr Chaitanya Deshpandey, divisional finance manager at Marico. While figures are not available, Marico claims to have considerably pared costs on cartons through this initiative.

Another sample: as the company deals with a lot of liquids, waste on account of spillage or leakage is a big issue. The waste on account of spillage forms about 0.5 per cent of the company's sales, which is again substantial. The healthcare division struck upon a new packaging innovation which was implemented by the R&D team, and is being replicated by other departments: cartons are typically, stacked one layer over the other in a truck during transportation.

Inspired by the new aura of innovation, cartons were now redesigned in such a way so as to reduce the spillage. Moreover, the innovation was done at the barest minimum cost escalation. ``We are more eagerly passing on the benefits to other team members now, after new traits were defined in the HR policy,'' admits an employee.

Driving innovation
``Marico decided to bring about consumer innovation much more strongly through technological innovation coupled with market research and creativity involving a project-based approach,'' Mr Pandey says. That means utilising every idea that churns out from within the Marico psyche. The company thus ushered in a Marico Innovation Process which converts a consumer insight into reality. This is done in co-ordination between marketing and R&D. The Marico Innovation Process is designed to drive the three new traits in employees.

``While a marketing person may stumble upon an idea, the R&D department will see how it can be implemented. A similar set-up is being planned for other departments also. This ensures that the success rate is high. The process is being institutionalised within the company,'' says Mr Pandey.

The new Parachute `tamper-proof' coconut oil with a tamper-resistant sealed cap which was launched recently, is one of the first few ideas to have bloomed from the Marico Innovation Process. The company says that there are a number of such ideas in the pipeline. Says Marico CEO (naturecare division) Mr Shreekant Gupte: ``I'm energised on the new product which is a result of the Marico Innovation Process. The Process is capable of generating good ideas, and not the run-of-the-mill kind. However, as a business leader, for me the innovation process will prove to be successful only when it delivers results at the marketplace.''

In order to usher in the Marico Innovation Process, the company has appointed a clutch of Innovation Facilitators: each has been hand-picked from a different division to ensure that ideas on projects are implemented through the right process.

According to company sources, Marico has been inundated with ideas after this process was put in place. In order to iron out the rough edges and filter down selective ideas, Gate Keepers have now been appointed. These Gate Keepers are usually CEOs who select the best ideas from the innovation-funnel process.

Driving employees
It was a challenge for Marico: what was needed to motivate a Marico employee to run that extra mile and inculcate the three newly defined traits? To ensure this, Marico decided to reward its employees through a variable pay system - Management by Results (MBR) - which is being introduced for the first time at the company. The total employee strength at Marico is about 600, out of which 200 managerial-level employees are directly covered under MBR.

According to this Gain Sharing Model, 50 per cent of the variable achievements in profits will be distributed among the managerial-level members including trainees. Will this encourage employees to be ``relentlessly collaborative and aggressively productive'? ``It has raised levels of enthusiasm and everyone is aiming to do better so as to get a better variable pay. It is definitely one of the triggers to inculcating the specifically defined traits in an individual,'' says Mr Deshpandey.

In terms of distributing the profits, a dialogue process is undertaken to fix stretch targets for individuals and the team. The variable pay is split between the team and the individual in the ratio of 60:40, based on the performance. The roll out is top-down, wherein annual thrust areas are defined first for the company as a whole. This then trickles down to various divisions which enumerate the goals that will enable the company to move in the targeted direction. The individual goals are then set, aimed at achieving the company goal.

While the variable pay system has been made effective from the current financial year, and the results will be out in April 2001, for Marico the returns on innovation through culture are already high.