Review Dabbawalas: Lessons for building lasting success based on value. - Srinivas Pandit
Story of Mumbai’s ubiquitous homemade food delivery men
115 year old
Book of a dialogue between 4 characters
Values: Decentralized Decision-Making Continous value addition
Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust
Review:
Dabbawalas for Mumbai people need no introduction. Even before they got all fame and glory and appreciation globally, they were still the most unique kind of service and logistics in India. It was a food line for many of the Mumbai citizens. The formal name of this entity is "Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust".
For those who are still scratching their heads, it is Mumbai based Tiffin box service. It supplies Tiffin boxes from an individual’s residence to his/her office. This is noting but home made food. So basically it is just a logistics service. The Tiffin reaches every afternoon sharp at 12:30 without fail. The delivery default rate is one in a million deliveries. During evening the empty Tiffin box are returned back to the respective homes sharp at 17:30. The pick up is done sharp at 08:30. The delivery is done anywhere to anywhere in Mumbai. Hence they recently received a SIX SIGMA certification.
Now coming to core issue Re-viewing the book. I always feel that re-viewing should be a subjective issue, which will definitely bring the understanding of the book. Hence I will define it in one word FANTASTIC. Though I feel more information in the book must have helped us understand deeper. Apart from that it is a crisp book.
As always in my reviews, let us check the typographical issues. Also let me review the physical aspects of the book. It is just 100 pages thick, actually it isn’t thick. It took me around 3 hours to read the book. The book and page quality is nice. Fonts are perfect, no eye popping issues. Spacing and organization of paragraphs are well done.
The book is organized or rather written in an interview format. The conversation is between 4 characters Raghu(R), Gaga(G), Anita(A), and Srinivas(S). Raghu and Ganga belongs to the association and the rest are the reporter and the author respectively. Hence the book gives us the live feeling. It’s like they are interviewed live in front of us.
Here comes the management learning. The book gives just a glimpse of the overall management of the trust. Yeah it can be termed as a glimpse because they provided us with limited examples. But no issues they validate enough to have an understanding of their strategies. Still I feel personally more examples would have cleared some doubts.
It gives mainly the intentions and mentality of these guys, which is the most important thing as far as they are concerned. It is these attributes that have made them famous and which have kept them together in spite of low earnings and wages.
Total there are 12 chapters. Each chapter gives some practical situation/problems they faced and how they dealt with it. Also at the end of each chapters there are these TAKE AWAYS(learning) from the chapter decrypted by the author. The author have done one more boatful thing, he has summarized the whole chapter in one line. The learning is explained in a comparative fashion. The comparison done is between the Current Practice and Current Opportunity related to the concept being taken in that particular chapter. The author reveals many interesting facts regarding Prince Charles’ wedding, BBC documentary etc.
So without revealing much and to maintain your curiosity to buy and read the book, I will stop the review here with the some chapter headings which are also the one line summaries I talked about.
Chap 6: .Savor the old but enjoy the changing
Chap11: the success secret of any business is to make its service segment humane