Business Today Net Special

In Search Of Competence

This interactive 'professional club' is a learning ground for middle-level corporate executives to update managerial skills.

By E. Kumar Sharma

In a bid to create one of the widest knowledge networks in the country devoted to practicing management professionals, Hyderabad-based talent management company TMI Networks launched themanagementor.com in August this year. "Modelled as a professional club, it is aimed at building competency through knowledge updates, peer group networking and off-line activities such as competency seminars," says T. Muralidharan, 42, Managing Director and CEO, themanagementor.com.

The site offers its members, apart from chat rooms and networking, knowledge mailers in six broad areas: manufacturing, marketing, information technology, finance, human resources and strategic management. Each field is, in turn, further divided into sub-sections (see table). Any particular knowledge mailer has three articles chosen from a wide database.

"Each content writer reads at least three articles while putting together an article, and therefore, each knowledge mailer, with its set of three articles, would mean content from at least nine articles," says Abhimanyu Acharya, 46, Vice President and Chief Knowledge Officer, themanagementor.com.

The point is, being in the knowledge business, the issue of content and its proper management has to be central. To deal with content, themanagementor.com has a basic database of 1,265 international journals, 250 Indian newspapers and journals and other medium such as reliance on television news channels. Each article that is put up passes through a rating process, wherein it is rated at various levels in the content team for its conceptual integrity, readability (pieces in, say, 500 words that can hold reader interest), actionability (applicability in the Indian context), novelty and case studies for examples.

Even so, Muralidharan feels dealing with the issues of content management is crucial. According to him, the key issues are quite similar to a brick and mortar factory: right sourcing of raw material and at a competitive price or the sourcing methodology, quality inspection, packaging and shipping (or presentation). There is therefore the constant pressure to maintain quality (consistently) and ensuring that the minds are fresh. (Themanagementor has tried to deal with these problem by ensuring that there is a continuous source of new ideas and the writers and readers are given a reorientation, opportunity to interact with the outside world and lecture at various fora). Also, according to Acharya, 'just-in-time' concept does not work when it comes to building competency. "We need to work ahead of time and also ensure user feedback," he says.

The main target audience for themanagementor.com, which already has a 42-member strong content team, is corporate executives. Typically, the middle-level working professionals in the age group of 27 to 45 years. So far, there are 500 members (which includes 250 executives from the Nagarjuna group and 50 from ITW Signode) and Murlidharan is hopeful of touching a 30,000 membership level over the next four months, which will enable him to achieve a cash breakeven.

The revenue model for themanagementor.com is subscription fee (from corporates for their employees, individuals and through associations for their members), selling of content to newspapers (it is already selling content to the Hindu and the Telegraph), facilitation fee from its 10,000 members in the Middle East (such as offering them services like arranging for a doctor to undertake a regular health check up for their family members here and mailing the doctor's report and organising for other services such as arranging for airport pick up, etc).

"Since, it is like a club, we also have a buying aggregation model, wherein members could network and decide on bulk purchase of items and claim bulk bargains from various agencies, says K Sriram, 41, Vice President and CFO, themanagementor.com. For example, 300 members could jointly decide to buy Peter England shirts and approach the retail centre for a bulk discount. From these services also, themanagementor plans to charge a small transaction fee.

The main source of revenue however remains sale of content and subscription fee. "We have kept the basic membership fee at a very reasonable Rs 999 per annum," says Murlidharan. Members are however offered a lot of freebies with the membership. For instance, there is a silver membership fee at Rs 1,498, which comes with a silver credit card of ICICI Bank and Rs 1,998 for a membership with a gold card of ICICI Bank. Then there are number of discount coupons available for purchases at various centres.

Will themanagementor's subscribers pay a premium for quality content? The answer, my friend, is blowin' on the Net.

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