The 7^th MMA Award for Managerial excellence in Services Sector was awarded to P S Saminathan, Promoter & Chairman of Pyramid Saimira Group. While chairing the session for this event, I got an opportunity to interact with Mr. Saminathan, under his leadership the Pyramid Saimira Group has become world’s fastest growing entertainment company with operations in six countries. Connecting more than 2 million people every day in some form or other, the group has emerged to be one of the successful business groups from Chennai.

Few thoughts shared by this leader for Sevice Sector Excellence

• Customer is the centric point of a services or hospitality sector
• Banner does not matter to customer, unlike the industrial sector there is no input-output correlation in services sector meaning pumping capital into a project does not necessarily result in a happy customer. We have seen this in case of many big ticket movies that have flopped.
• Customer connect is a non language bonding
• Setting the culture of change – instead of adapting to change or anticipating the change, be the future yourself
• Rapid decision making is crucial in service sector-  Elephants at the speed of cheetah
• Invite risk and don’t chase results
• Structural efficiency vs. operational inefficiency, rigid structure should not impede operational efficiency, remember Vista?
• Look at how technology is changing the way we do business like music vending through iPod.
• Velocity of business to be high with great scale: brought the concepts of supply chain in movie productions to reduce the production cycle time.

While chairing the session,  I had shared the following few points:

• Service components of world GDP is exponentially rising. In TN, Services sector contribute to 45% of GDP, Manufacturing sector comprises 34% of GDP and Agricultural sector comprises 21% of GDP
• While IT and BPO hog the most attention with a CAGR of 33% and estimated 64 billion dollar revenue, there are a few segments in services sector that hold great promise to ensure equitable growth to make our country globally competitive. Some such sectors are healthcare industry, media and entertainment, travel and tourism, financial services and so on.
• A study conducted by FICCI/ PWC predicts the media and entertainment industry in the country to witness a growth of more that 20 per cent with a turnover of 20 billion USD by 2011
• Today South Indian film industry is much bigger than the Mumbai film industry, with more than 300 films made annually in south India grossing over USD 2 Billion.
• TN today is the fastest growing state economy in India, one of the top three FDI recipients, second most favored IT destination, and an ever growing manufacturing base giving it a status of Detroit of South Asia.
• Now the services sector matching the growth of the ICT and manufacturing sector can catapult TN to a number one state in the state

My recommendations to MMA was they should also include agricultural sector as one of the categories in MMA’s managerial excellence award.