Introduction
The case study is all about a man who has joined his father business of newspaper in his early thirties and has changed the rules of game forever. Samir Jain who had a deep distrust of editors and feared for his ruthlessness has bring dramatically changes like abolishing the post of editor, increasing the profit 111times over a decade, evolving his news business into the advertising business. During this period he has been compared with personalities like Murdoch for creating phenomenal profit in small span of time and opposing diarchy in the office. He had faced lot of criticism not only from former editors like Dileep Padgaonkar but also from the rival publishers for the business and marketing strategies that he has been following. His business objective were clear he is aiming for the market share and not for market share of volume and revenue and as a result he has managed to gain the wealth in this process but other still criticized him saying that the strategy of price cutting only works in mature markets but in long run value addition is a better strategy to bet on.
Key Issues * Change in organizational Structure: - Samir Jain wants the complete control over the business operations so he decided to abolish the post of the editors but due to certain legal restriction it is not possible to do so, therefore he has abolish the position of editor internally. He designed the hierarchy in such a way that give me complete control over the business operations. In this kind of structure the authority and power to make decision lie in the hands of the person sitting on the top and this can lead to the shortage of good business ideas and suggestions also the growth of employees is get restricted in such kind of organizational structure. * Distrust of editors: - When the Samir Jain took up the post of Managing Director he had a deep distrust of editors, he had abolished the post of editors without taking them into the confidence. This makes all the employees unhappy and an unhappy man cannot contribute his 100% towards the work. * Complete Autonomy:- Due to the new organization structure Samir Jain has the complete or full autonomy which means there are no restriction on him and he hold the all the power to make decision all alone without the consent of his stakeholders. In every organization the power duties and responsibility should be segregated but in this case only duties and responsibility are segregated and the whole power is lying in the hands of one person. * Curtailing the power of editors in decision making: - There were several instances were editors try to suggest their ideas and suggestion to make an effective decision but Samir has no intension to take their suggestion seriously and alter his own thoughts about a particular thing. He has appointed the brand managers who would therefore vet an editor’s proposals for a publication. But all this going to start a war of price with editorial quality. * No focus on increasing attrition rate: - Due to the new organization structure were you are not supposed to act freely many of the good editor’s have started to leave the organization but Samir has not shown any efforts to retain them, this means in his organization there is no focus to retain the good employees due to which attrition rate is increasing which result in increase cost of recruitment of new editor’s. * More Focus put on pricing strategy rather than on editorial quality: - To increase the profit of the organization Samir Jain has chooses Price over quality. To gain the more profit he has ignore the suggestion and ideas of editor’s and have done everything from changing the Font and color to the shortening the length of article so that more space can be available for advertisement. All these things made the editors unhappy; there is no reward for good article or freedom of thoughts and because of all this editorial page of Times of India & Economic Times has lost its authority but growing in size and circulation. * Constant experiments:- One of the issue is Samir continuously indulge in experimenting new things around him, and many times it did not spell success; indeed they frequently ended in failure. One have to take decision after considering all the possible thoughts and possibilities and this happens when you include your employees in process of decision making, since Samir follows his own instinct he never bothered to listen or take advice of his editor’s or employees which in turn results in shutting down of many publications and due to this many people have lost their jobs. * Ignoring the importance of customer relationship: - Samir Jain has put more focus on revenue generation and very less on Customer need and satisfaction. This can been seen from the incident when he asked his manager to increase the price of advertising so that revenue will increase irrespective of the fact that customer will not be happy with this move and it will directly impact the volume of advertising. In today business scenario you can’t ignore the customer as today customer is treated as king. The revenue approach can only bring phenomenal profits but in long run its customer relationship that brings wealth to the organization help to keep it survives. * Lack of concern for journalistic values: - From the whole case study it can be easy to figure it out that Samir has no concern for journalistic values. He is more profit centric and least bothered about the journalism values. Cutting down of article size and not mentioning the name of the of the editor in the newspaper were the few incidence from the case study which shows that he is not concerned about the journalism values. * Resources were not put to use efficiently: - The managers which Samir jain hire are the executives of the leading corporations and are very efficient but Samir Jain fears that if he give them the authority which they deserve for being in that position, he will loses is position of dominating the decision making and thus he give them very little work to do and keep many managers sitting idle doing nothing or uses some of these to sharpen his marketing concepts. All this clearly show that the resources which could help organization to work more efficiently have not been put to use so that Samir can continue to dominate the decision making in the organization.