Have you heard of a media company called T-Series? Chances are, you probably haven’t. Gulshan Kumar, whose résumé up to 1983 read, “Fruit juice seller, streets of New Delhi,” founded it that year. Since its inception, T-Series has become an unlikely media powerhouse—its YouTube channel has 119 million subscribers. To put that in perspective, The New York Times, which was founded in 1851, has a total subscription base of 4.7 million across print and digital. The T-Series channel also has 90 billion views. That’s the equivalent of every human on the planet, including babies and people with no access to the internet, having watched 13 videos each on this channel.

According to the Nov. 14, 2019, issue of The Economist, media giants in the past five years have been battling for viewers’ attention and have spent $650 billion for acquisitions and content. As The Economist puts it, with wry understatement, “There will be blood.” In this shifting media landscape, how are brands going to win at getting their customers’ attention and emotional engagement? In this opinion piece, we will explore five modern principles for winning brands.

During the last decade, product quality has become increasingly important to consumers. In fact, a recent B2C study found that consumers rank quality as the most important component in making a purchase, rather than price. This change in focus can be attributed to several factors but is paced by leading brands that set a high bar for exceptional product experiences which drive customer preference. Take Herschel, for example, which prominently prints the word “quality” on everything it produces—a bold brand promise that is meaningful to consumers.

Understanding the causes of faults and defects, and then improving the system or process so it won’t happen again, is central to lean manufacturing. This article looks at some of the methods used to identify the root causes of issues so that you can prevent downtime and move toward zero-defect manufacturing.

It’s generally accepted that large organizations, for a host of structural and cultural reasons, are at a disadvantage when it comes to innovation. Less agreed upon is why their employees outside of R&D should care. Can’t acquisitions and partnerships make up the creative deficit?

Think again, counsels Manuel Sosa, INSEAD associate professor of technology and operations management, in a recent interview for the INSEAD Knowledge podcast. Sosa says that the fruits of innovation—novel, valuable products and services—should not be confused with the tree itself.

First and foremost, innovation is a process for conceiving “novel and useful” solutions, which is necessary for business and career success, no matter where you’re sitting in an industry or organization. The fruits can easily be bought and sold, but planting, cultivating, and harvesting know-how is far less transferable. For the neophyte, learning to innovate requires diligence, patience, and (most of all) direct collaboration with skillful role models.

‘Lean” is such a convenient term; everyone uses it based on their own definition. People frequently use “lean” in place of “efficiency,” probably because it sounds more cool. Another round of cost cutting? Sure, let’s tell everyone we’re “going lean,” again.

Lean is a proven, powerful productivity approach (we probably owe post-WWII modernity and the internet age to lean), yet most people don’t know what lean is really about beyond the hype. And in this age of hyper-competition, not knowing or using tools that are proven to work is a big disadvantage.

So people should learn and practice lean. But there’s one complexity: Today’s lean is a mix-up between two different but same-sounding management concepts—lean manufacturing and lean startup. Lean startup is a recent-decade thing—it was inspired by, and hence not disassociated with, lean manufacturing, but it serves a somewhat different purpose and audience. Lean manufacturing traces its roots to Japan’s post-WWII industrial recovery with the aid of some key American industrial engineers.

Let’s clarify.