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Date:25^th July 2010	Compiled by: M Sathya Kumar
The Story of Dabbawallas Angrezi bolne ka Entreprise aur Entreprenuership se koyi sambandh nahi hai (The ability to communicate in English does not have anything to do with Entrepreneurship – Enterprise is not just the domain of the urban educated English speaker) You know how some speakers are always given a standing ovation? Where one person in the crowd stands up and claps and others follow suit? Well, I’ve never been that one person who stands up and claps first. Not until yesterday evening. After Manish Tripathi– the chairman of the Dabbawallas association finished his talk yesterday at the opening ceremony of the Tata Jagriti Yatra, I was the first to stand up and clap. In my admiration of the man I forgot my cybershot was in my lap and it hurtled down a flight of stairs (Its ok.. seems to be working fine. I’ve seen very few people with so much stage presence! Especially in a language that is not native to them. The man’s attitude, passion, style and total belief in what he spoke about was evident. He knew he was representing his people on that stage – and he was proud of it! He also had a killer sense of humour which was evident in his closing dialogue – “the Dabbawalla system will exist as long as husbands love their wives”. The Dabbawallas of Mumbai are basically an organized network of delivery personel who collect lunches from working people’s homes, bring the lunches to their office (on time, where they might work) and after lunch, collect the now empty lunch boxes and deliver them home again. To do this the system employs 4500 delivery personale and uses Mumbai’s local train network to commute. Most of the dabbawallas are illiterate. So every address is color coded in a code which is almost a business secret! All in all, the Dabbawallas deliver 200,000 lunch boxes every day. They have an error rate of 1 in 1 million and are six sigma certified. Their business model has been discussed as a case study at the Harvard, Stanford etc. This amazing success story had its genesis about 119 years ago when a Parsi business man employed a servant to bring him his lunch box every afternoon and take the lunch box back home. The trend caught on in his office and soon in much of Mumbai. The Dabbawallas were born! However, as with all things India is so proud of including but definitely not limited to yoga, we waited to give them their due recognition till a westerner recognized them first. The Dabbawallas have much affection for Prince Charles and think of him as their biggest brand ambassador. In fact when the meeting with Dabbawalas was being coordinated, the first venue was the Taj. The dabbawalas had it changed to VT station (and also politely inquired if Prince and Charles were two different people). Manish Tripathi, as I mentioned before, is full of killer one liners. My personal favorite was “If you have a question, I have an answer.” The learning business can take from the Dabbawalla system are many, they can be summed up as: 1. Customer is king 2. Your business will only thrive if your heart is in it. 3. Always focus on your core competency, don’t diversify without knowledge of the domain. 4. Do not employ highly qualified employees – you will never retain them. 5. Your employees must have their heart in your business. They should be happy working for you. 6. Commitment matters, qualification doesn’t. Article was earlier published in one of the entrepreneurship website.
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