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By:

Rashmi Kulkarni

23 March 2025 at 2:58:52 pm

Making a New Normal Feel Obvious

Normal is not what’s written. Normal is what repeats. The temple bell rings at the same time every day. Not everyone prays. Not everyone even walks in. Some people don’t care at all. And yet when that bell rings, the whole neighborhood syncs. Shops open, chores move, calls pause. The bell doesn’t convince anyone. It simply creates rhythm. That’s how “normal” is built inside a legacy MSME too. Not by speeches. By repetition. Quick recap: Week 1: You inherited an equilibrium. Week 2: People...

Making a New Normal Feel Obvious

Normal is not what’s written. Normal is what repeats. The temple bell rings at the same time every day. Not everyone prays. Not everyone even walks in. Some people don’t care at all. And yet when that bell rings, the whole neighborhood syncs. Shops open, chores move, calls pause. The bell doesn’t convince anyone. It simply creates rhythm. That’s how “normal” is built inside a legacy MSME too. Not by speeches. By repetition. Quick recap: Week 1: You inherited an equilibrium. Week 2: People resist loss, not improvement. Week 3: Status quo wins when your new way is harder. Week 4 is the next problem: even when your idea is good and even when it is easy, it can still fail because people don’t move together. One team starts. Another team waits. One person follows. Another person quietly returns to the old way. So, the old normal comes back … not because your idea was wrong, but because your new normal never became normal. Which Seat? • Inherited : people expect direction, but they only shift when they see what you consistently protect. • Hired : people wait for proof “Is this just a corporate habit you’ll drop in a month?” • Promoted : people watch whether you stay consistent under pressure. Now here’s the useful idea from Thomas Schelling: a “focal point”. Don’t worry about the term. In simple words, it means: you don’t need everyone convinced. You need one clear anchor that everyone can align around. In a legacy MSME, that anchor is rarely a policy document. It’s not a rollout email. It’s a ritual. Why Rituals? These firms run on informal rules, relationships, memory, and quick calls. That flexibility keeps work moving, but it also makes change socially risky. Even supportive people hesitate because they’re thinking: “If I follow this and others don’t, I’ll look foolish.” “If I share real numbers, will I become the target?” “If I push this new flow, will I upset a senior person?” “If I do it properly, will it slow me down?” When people feel that risk, they wait. And waiting is how the status quo survives. A focal ritual breaks the waiting. It sends one clean signal: “This is real. This is how we work now.” Focal Ritual It’s a short, fixed review that repeats with the same format. For example: a weekly scoreboard review (15 minutes) a daily dispatch huddle (10 minutes) a fixed purchase-approval window (cutoff + queue) The meeting isn’t the magic. The repetition is. When it repeats without drama, it becomes believable. When it becomes believable, people start syncing to it, even the ones who were unsure. Common Mistake New leaders enter with energy and pressure: “show impact”. So they try to fix reporting, planning, quality, procurement, digitization … everything. The result is predictable. People don’t know what is truly “must follow”. So everything becomes “optional”. They do a little of each, and nothing holds. If you want change to stick, pick one focal ritual and make it sacred. Not forever. Just long enough for the bell to become the bell. Field Test Step 1 : Pick one pain area that creates daily chaos: delayed dispatch, pending purchase approvals, rework, overdue collections. Step 2 : Set the ritual: Fixed time, fixed duration (15 minutes). One scoreboard (one page, one screen). Same three questions every time: – What moved since last time? – What is stuck and why? – What decision is needed today? One owner who closes the loop (decisions + due dates). Step 3 : Protect it for 8 weeks. Don’t cancel because you’re busy. Don’t skip because a VIP came. Don’t “postpone once” because someone complained. I’ve seen a simple weekly dispatch scoreboard die this exact way. Week one was sharp. By week three, it got pushed “just this once” because someone had a client visit. Week four, it moved again for “urgent work”. After that, nobody took it seriously. The old follow-ups returned, and the leader was back to chasing people daily. The first casual cancellation tells the system: “This was a phase”. And the old normal returns fast. One Warning Don’t turn the ritual into policing. If it becomes humiliation, people will hide information. If it becomes shouting, people will stop speaking. If it becomes a lecture, people will mentally leave. Keep it calm. Keep it consistent. Keep it useful. A bell doesn’t shout. It just rings. (The author is Co-founder at PPS Consulting and a business operations advisor. She helps businesses across sectors and geographies improve execution through global best practices. She could be reached at rashmi@ppsconsulting.biz)

Automobile industry blamed for stalling ethanol push

THE ETHANOL CONUNDRUM - Part - 3


Ethanol producers raced ahead of targets, but engine upgrades lag

Kolhapur: The current crisis confronting India’s ethanol industry is increasingly being attributed to the automobile sector’s sluggish pace in upgrading vehicle engines. The Centre’s ambitious ethanol blending programme rested on two pillars — ethanol production and vehicle manufacturing. While the ethanol industry surged ahead, meeting targets well before schedule and expanding capacity aggressively, the automobile sector failed to match that momentum. The resulting mismatch has pushed the ethanol ecosystem into serious difficulty.


India’s vehicle population continues to grow rapidly, to the point where even an expansive national highway network appears inadequate. There is little doubt that demand for ethanol-blended fuel will rise further in the coming years. However, parallel reforms in vehicle technology did not keep pace with the rapid scale-up in ethanol production, creating today’s bottleneck.


Linked Technology

The use of ethanol-blended petrol and the need for compatible engine technology are intrinsically linked. Conventional engines have coped reasonably well with petrol blended with up to 20 per cent ethanol. Beyond that threshold, engine modifications become unavoidable. The absence of such upgrades has triggered mixed reactions among consumers, with complaints surfacing about engine-related issues linked to higher ethanol blends.


Against this backdrop, ethanol producers have urged the government to raise the blending level by at least another two percentage points to absorb surplus supply. However, reliable sources indicate that the Centre is reluctant to move further, given the technical concerns associated with existing vehicle engines.


Brazil offers a stark contrast. The country has used ethanol-blended fuel for decades and routinely operates vehicles on blends as high as E80. This has been possible because E80-compatible and flex-fuel engines are widely available. In India, despite being one of the world’s largest automobile markets, manufacturers have been slow to embrace this transition.


While notable progress has been made in two-wheeler manufacturing, the sector continues to flag gaps in supporting infrastructure. In passenger vehicles, Maruti Suzuki has so far introduced the country’s first flex-fuel model, but the overall rollout remains limited. Industry watchers say the Centre will have to push the automobile industry harder — possibly through stricter regulatory timelines — to get it aligned with national biofuel goals.


Extended Delay

The consequences of this delay extend beyond ethanol producers. Pollution reduction efforts remain in limbo, both the sugar and ethanol industries are under strain, public investment risks remaining locked in, and potential savings in foreign exchange from reduced fuel imports are at stake.


In the interim, a possible middle path lies in the adoption of flex-fuel conversion kits. Such kits, already available in global markets, cost around Rs 15,000 on average. Promoting domestic manufacturing of these kits under the ‘Make in India’ programme could help bring costs down. If deployed at scale, they could mitigate engine-related issues associated with higher ethanol blends.


Until the automobile industry scales up production of flex-fuel vehicles, flex-fuel kits could offer a practical stopgap. Making flex-fuel engines mandatory in the future, industry experts argue, may be the only way to permanently resolve the crisis facing India’s ethanol sector.


To address the ethanol surplus, the Centre should consider providing export-linked subsidies that allow Indian ethanol to compete with global prices and reduce excess stocks. At present, maize-based ethanol receives an incentive of Rs 5 per litre. With a modest additional support, exports could become viable.


Beyond this, if India succeeds in scaling up domestic biofuel use while emerging as a major ethanol exporter, it could reap significant gains through carbon credits. This would require the government to establish a dedicated institutional mechanism to monetise such benefits. Dr Desai also underlined the need to strengthen infrastructure support for two-wheeler manufacturers that have made substantial advances in ethanol-compatible engine technology.

-Dr Deepak Desai, Chairman, Ethanol India


(Concludes)

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