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Ram Charan Biography:

Ram Charan was born in India in 1939. At the age of eleven his family started a shoe shop and there was where he has learnt his first business important lessons. For example: the importance of continual cash flow or the fact that keeping the cost of selling shoes low would ill to have profit margins.

Then, he studied in Banaras Hindu University and in Harvard Business School where he did a MBA successfuly and received a doctorate degree. After, he served on the Harvard Business faculty.

He is well known for his unearthly ability to solve problems and for providing business advice but he is also a fabulous speaker (he has won several awards in this discipline) and an amazing writer. He has written lots of books such as: Leadership in the Era of Uncertainty, The Game Changer and Leaders of all Levels, between others. Also he constantly publishes articles in The Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Director's Monthly and Strategy and Business.

His theories about business are based in Five Building Blocks: Cash Generation, Profit Margin, Velocity, Business Growth and Customers. This seems like common sense, but as he explains: "common sense is very uncommon".

All his knowledge has permit him to work for significance companies such as: KLM, DELL, GE, DUPONT, VERZION and Bank of America.

How the CEO of DUPONT reacted to current economic crisis:

The article entitled Corporate Crisis posted on Ram Charan's book named: Leadership and the Era of Economic Uncertainty explains how DUPONT CEO Chad Holliday had reacted to fight against the global crisis.

DUPONT's major customer in Japan told him that a crisis was coming and, as soon as possible, he started fighting against the catastrophe. The evidence of how serious the problems were coming appeared in different ways; it was time to take an action. DUPONT's seniors managers valued the crisis cause and put appropriate disaster-control procedures in place. They called it Corporate Crisis. The plan assembled the 17 standing teams that always appeared when a crisis is declare and they determined the procedures that the company has to follow to stive the financial crisis. First of all, they started with a communication program: every employee had had a face-to-face meeting with a manager who explained them what the company needed to do and asked them to identify 3 things that he or she could do to conserve cash and minimized cost. A few days after, Holliday made a poll to see how the news had affected them and to evaluate what were employers doing and what they should be doing.

Though, Holiday thought that people were not conscious about the urgency with which they must be acting and he had had a meeting with each of the company's top 14 leaders. Immediately, crisis measures were put in place and the 3 person DUPONT's team of top executives decided to cut back over 20,000 contractors (because they could be released with one weeks notice and without severance cost) and internal employees, whose operations were slowing, were shifted into the others work.

DUPONT hole reaction was incredibly fast and admirable because he stared into the face of uncertainty and reacted quikly without fear. He leads the hole operation with a decisive, firm, brave action and he never stoped struggling, even when the situation was grim. He is an example of what a leader must do.

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