Life after ISB in the "Real World"

How can Congress respond to the Anna situation in a win win way

2011-08-17T21:36:00.001+05:30

I will keep this short and simple. This is a multi-party win-win solution so let's first define the parties:

1. Dr. Manmohan Singh
2. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi
3. Congress Party
4. Mr. Rahul Gandhi
5. Mr. Anna Hazare and associates
6. Opposition Party
7. General Public at large

Let's quickly review the facts:

1. People in general are frustrated with Dr. Manmohan Singh's silence and inaction. They expected that with a clear mandate, he will do some good things and improve the condition of the country. He has chosen to stay silent and inactive even when he needed to take action. He could've been a great President, watching everything, inspiring people and providing guidance but unfortunately he is sitting in the Prime Minister's seat and that is an executive position and he needs to act in some way - good bad or ugly.

He himself is confused and lost and will be very happy if there is solution to bail him out with minimum damage.

2. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, it appeared initially, never wanted to have anything to do with politics especially after what happened to Indira and Rajeev. But it became compulsory for her to step in for two reasons - Congress Party men needed a Gandhi name to act in a sensible way else they were becoming mad, secondly she had to ensure that Rajeev's reputation and family fortune are protected and also ensure a good future for Rahul Gandhi

3. Congress Party: Congress Party agreed to Dr. Manmohan Singh becoming Prime Minister only because Sonia Gandhi decided so, else there was no way they would've been so peaceful. They have been watching all the smaller parties take all the juicy portfolios and squeezing away all the money. They are now restless as the "time in power" is ticking away while they are getting nothing with Manmohan conceding to other parties than to Congress Party and with Sonia Gandhi as the head of NAC, they can't really revolt against Manmohan. They have been patiently waiting for either Priyanka or Rahul to take over as Sonia has refused, which suited them earlier. Their only hope lies with Rahul now and they think he has been trained enough in the populist activities/actions

4. Mr. Rahul Gandhi would've happily settled in some foreign country enjoying a normal life had it not been for the Gandhi tag. He would've never asked for this but "luck" has placed him where he is. Unable to enjoy simple pleasures of life and having to do something political forcibly, he has been doing a reasonable job. He is still not ready and is not sure when he would be ready. He would've been happy had Priyanka agreed to lift the mantle but now he has no option. He looks innocent enough and has enough people around him to advise him that he would be able to handle the leadership for the remaining period of the 5 years if it is thrust upon him. He would never say give it to me.

5. Mr. Anna Hazare and his associates have grabbed the attention and curiosity of the frustrated citizens and have successfully got masses behind them. Mud slinging attempts of Congress have created some confusion in people but whenever they hear Satyagraha, people think, something good will happen. For now Mr. Anna Hazare and his associates want to win this battle while we really don't know which war they are actually fighting

6. Opposition Party, which is the BJP, we can say has no agenda. All they want to see is something happening and their leaders being able to make some comments.

7. Finally we have General Public at large, which is dissatisfied with what they are getting. Inflation is rising, interest rates are going up, and to be honest nothing seems to be working at the moment. Whatever good is happening, it is happening at random and they see that the government including the politicians and Bureaucrats are either doing nothing or are making life difficult for common man and are amassing large sums of money. There could be exceptions but this is the general view. They keep seeing big numbers being reported in print and electronic media but can't really figure how exactly it is impacting them but keep feeling the pain nevertheless. They want something good to happen, they want a new leader to come up and they want some affirmative action. They would like to see supply (production) side improvement to tackle inflation and not just simple rate increases by RBI, they would like to see transparency from all those who are in a position of power - politicians and bureaucrats alike, they would like to see education getting reinvigorated in some way, they would like to see how we as a Country are going to tackle increasingly alarming environmental problems and many more.

Now lets move to the solution:

Step 1: Dr. Manmohan Singh announces that he is resigning as Prime Minister as he is unable to do justice to the position and that he is open for all investigations as he has not benefited himself even by a rupee throughout his tenure as PM
Step 2: Mrs. Sonia Gandhi welcomes the bold move of Dr. Manmohan Singh and invites him to be a part of the NAC and continue providing his services to the country in a consultative way
Step 3: Congress elects Rahul Gandhi as the Prime Minister and Rahul Gandhi accepts this while announcing his plan for the remaining tenure
Step 4: Rahul Gandhi as the new PM announces that the suggestions of Anna Hazare and associates would be accepted without any major changes

This solution will satisfy the objectives of all the seven parties for the moment and if all the parties make sincere effort will lead to a win-win future for India

Thanks for your patient reading. Jai Hind

Upcoming blog posts

2011-08-17T10:18:00.001+05:30

After a long time I have decided to start blogging again, thanks to my teachers for guiding me to clarity. I have almost stopped blogging due to lack of clarity but this time I expect to do a good job. Two topics I would like to quickly touch are:

How Congress can respond to the Anna situation in a win win way

Why Mba is not mandatory for your success

Looking forward for your feedback

State of Customer Service in India

2011-08-16T17:13:00.002+05:30

From what I have noticed in recent times, customer service, in particular, for telecom and DTH, reaching a customer service executive is becoming almost impossible. Instead writing an email to the respective id is bringing better results.

This is a reasonably good development for those who have access to email but it is highly restrictive to those who have limited access to email and highly discriminative to the illiterate.

Cost reduction efforts are great but this is an area service providers need to keep in mind. Explaining a service issue itself was a great challenge and now if one has to articulate, imagine the difficulty. If the issue is hot brought out properly, there is a good chance of getting a standard reply defeating the whole purpose.

I can't even imagine taking someone's help to write such mail in case I'm illiterate and lack of writing email in native language makes it further difficult.

Hope someone is reading and taking note of this feedback

Fwd: HNY 2011

2011-01-12T16:14:00.001+05:30

Wish you all a Very Happy New Year. Along with the wishes I am enclosing an excellent message from a good friend, read on ....

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: AK Rao
Date: Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 11:14 AM
Subject: HNY 2011
To:

My dear friend,

do you realize it is already a decade old in this new millennium? let me take this opportunity to wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year. i came across a very nice article on the new year resolutions and thought i would share it with you. who knows perhaps, you would take time to read it or print it and mull over it and transform eventually.

"Set and Forget"

Isn't that the typical approach to New Year Resolutions?

Before we consider a 7-part solution, lets start with the top 7 reasons why New Year Resolutions fail:

1. Projection

With past failures comes pessimism, learned helplessness and negative expectation of life desires being little more than hopes and dreams without belief or conviction.

2. Purpose

Having no greater sense of life direction or meaning to help steer daily choices, resolutions exist as 'floating islands' in the sea of life's distractions.

3. Process

A lack of a system, no solid plan-of-action, leaves resolutions as nothing more than wishful thinking.

4. Prioritization

Rational priorities are overpowered by conflicting emotional priorities – such as the instant gratification of overeating delicious ice cream vs. the struggle and hardship of eating sprouts and drinking carrot juice.

5. Procrastination

Lack of discipline, thought and control. i.e. Plain old-fashioned laziness.

6. People:

Circle of friends that drag us down discourage us from achievement, maintaining the status quo of mediocrity.

7. Politics

Economic troubles and political uncertainty with forced-backed regulation acts as an invisible hand that drains success and limits the globe's progress as a whole.

But if we can flip these 7 factors right side up we will have cracked the code to…

Keeping New Year Resolutions

1. 1. Projection

A positive attitude that:

"I am capable of learning how to achieve each resolution".

Mind-map showing the top 10 New Year resolutions of both 2009 and 2010 according to Franklin Covey research, and the 5 life categories they can be grouped under:

Turn negative expectation and pessimism into positive expectation and optimism.

Create positive expectation for success by building the confidence to succeed via the following 6 factors…

2. Purpose

· This list of resolutions is significant milestones to my greater long-term life direction and purpose.

· Making resolutions is usually one of the most significant things that people do for their lives, their families, their success and their happiness each year.

· After all, New Year resolutions signify some of the most critical, irritating, depressing addictions or problems in the majority of people's lives.

· But to help them stick, they must be integrated with a personal overall life values and greater sense of long-term ambition.

· This helps provide the emotional fuel needed to make behavioral and lifestyle changes.

· Writing out thoughts can do this and feelings to capture on paper your views and perspectives on yourself and your life. This can take a long time, but you are worth the time it takes.

3. Process

· I have a simple yet comprehensive method for creating a clear plan-of-action for each and every New Year resolution

· Create a way to break each resolution into a series of logical next steps.

· Here's the general plan for keeping New Year resolutions:

o Jot down clear, precise statements of my resolutions.

o Pre-plan the landmarks to achieve each goal destination.

o Maintain my enthusiasm and dedication.

o Set up my efforts with memory joggers and simple next steps.

o Review progress and adjust the plan accordingly.

· It isn't brain surgery but it's not so effortless either. Otherwise everybody would always accomplish his or her resolutions.

· The biggest difference between success and failure comes from what most people carry out which is basic Goal Setting vs. creating a genuine plan of action through something I call Processing.

· W E Demming – a very influential corporate guru, said: "If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."

· Setting goals means identifying something you want. Processing means developing a step-by-step method to attain a goal.

· If you have a specific procedure for how to complete something, naturally you will be a lot more optimistic, and can go ahead and take steps to achieve the resolution.

Consider it:

o TRY to maintain minimal confidence about doing something, when doing that something is simply a string of straightforward next-step physical actions visibly laid out for you in writing.

o You'll find yourself having a lighter mental state, better outlook, and not because of any inspiring peak performance fluff, but due to the fact that you'll own a process of achievement and not merely a list of wishful thinking.

4. Prioritization

· I prioritize my entire lifestyle so that the New Year resolutions fit in with the rhythms of my daily life.

· You don't only need a process for each resolution, but all resolutions must fit neatly enough into your overall lifestyle so that your path of least resistance leads you to success.

· What in your life must be re-designed to fulfill your aspirations?

5. Procrastination

· I work to develop sufficient willpower to maintain any effort or discipline I need for achieving each resolution.

· Let's be real. New year resolutions are possible with this 7-factor approach, but that doesn't mean they're easy.

· It's hard to give yourself permission to take enough time to choose your resolutions, plan them out, factor them into your lifestyle, and then make efforts to take the first step, and each next step, until they are all done. But it's the only way.

6. People

· My circle of friends are developed or replaced by people that can encourage and support me in the direction I wish my life to take this year.

· You may have heard that your income probably matches the average income of your 5 closest friends?

· Likewise: If you want to get fit, get healthy, improve your finances, spend more time with family, and so on, then having friends that are traveling the same positive journey as you will help you stick to yours.

7. Politics

· Damn be those politicians bankrupting our economy and I will play my part to vote the bastards out so our civilization can pursue it's great technological rise into prosperity and harmony.

· Empower yourself with knowledge by reading from liberty and reason oriented info sources such as Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, Twelve Visions Party, Wikileaks, etc.

Keeping New Year Resolutions – The Bottom line:

· If you want the best opportunity of attaining your New Year resolutions in 2011 be sure to go way beyond the easy first step of listing things you would like manage the 7 factors of projection, purpose, process, prioritization, procrastination, people, and politics.

· Take the time and trouble to define in maximum detail exactly how you want life to be and the step-by-step details of each resolution this year.

regards,

AK Rao
www.onechildonelight.org

RE: Something that answers one of my questions

2010-08-02T18:23:00.003+05:30

Hi Kiran,

I just have a line or two to describe my thoughts on the question you posed below…

It's like someone sitting on the top of a tree branch & hurriedly cutting it – without noticing the abyss underneath him/her… we are too moved the constant need to outperform us vis-à-vis the competition, that it hardly matters as to the means employed.. maybe it's like … "Ends justify means".. and hence, the means that we are using now-a-days, may result in "The End"

Something that answers one of my questions

2010-07-30T11:22:00.002+05:30

I have gone through this small article in yesterday's ET that kind of gave an answer to my question. Actually when I started asking this question, I knew the answer but I thought if no one is thinking like me, then I could be wrong, so instead of going with opinion and solutions, I took this questions to many learned people. They give a wide range of answers and none of them satisfied me; may be I was looking for them to match the answer I have (my own bias), but then it doesn't matter. Now that someone published in the paper, I decided to make my opinion public by agreeing with this article and appreciating the article.

My Question was and still is: Is the current hunger for growth really necessary? If every corporation (incorporating the desires of individual) drives for more and more and keep learning from their failures and become more and more efficient and complex, what would it lead to? Can our Blue Planet support this hunger, can it sustain the man-made changes or will make it such changes that man cannot sustain? Now to the article:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEEP ECONOMY

Bill McKibben

FOR most of human history,the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch You could toss one stone and hope to hit both.But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest.That changes everything.Now,if youve got the stone of your own life,or your own society,gripped in your hand,you have to choose between them.Its More or Better.Given all that we know about topics ranging from the molecular structure of carbon dioxide to the psychology of human satisfaction,we need to move decisively to rebuild our local economies.These may well yield less stuff,but they produce richer relationships;they may grow less quickly,if at all,but they make up for it in durability.
Shifting our focus to local economies will not mean abandoning Adam Smith or doing away with markets.Markets,obviously,work.Building a local economy will mean,however,ceasing to worship markets as infallible and consciously setting limits on their scope.We will need to downplay efficiency and pay attention to other goals.We will have to make the biggest changes to our daily habits in generations and the biggest change,as well,to our worldview,our sense of what constitutes progress.The old realism an endless More is morphing into a dangerous fantasy.In the face of energy shortage,of global warming,and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be,I think weve started to grope for what might come next.And just in time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let me know what you think about this.

Suggestion to Banks with online banking facility - HDFC, ICICI and others

2010-05-14T11:04:00.001+05:30

I have sent the below mail to one of the banks and wanted to reproduce it in a public forum for the benefit of other banks.

Sub: Suggestion regarding cheque transaction management.

With the rise in usage of cash withdrawal from ATMs and payments/fund transfers through Internet Banking, customers (at least the salaried class and those who are well versed with online banking) are using cheques sparingly. But then these customers are the most prone to not doing the diligent part of cheque payments, which is maintaining the required amount till the time the cheque gets cleared.

I have a suggestion to your Bank to add value to its online internet banking service by helping customers overcome such issue and all the associated (Cheque returned for lack of funds, penalties thereof and reputation risk and the inconvenience in correcting the error) problems.

All the bank has to do is add a new service in the online banking service that can be called "cheque management." This service should work like this:

1. Whenever a customer issues a cheque, he/she can login to the online banking account and click on the cheque management service.
2. Fill the details of the cheque issued - name of the party, cheque number, amount to be paid etc.
3. Then click on the block cheque amount. After confirmation the said amount will get blocked from the customer's account and he/she will not be able to withdraw that amount from any means and the blocked amount will be used only for payment of the cheque indicated
4. In case there is any change in the cheque payment transaction, customer should be able to unblock the amount and do the necessary.

This should be only a voluntary, customer request based service and the Bank should not have any liability of any mistakes in amount blocked.

The information fed in the online account can be used to cross verify the cheque presented and can be used to avoid frauds too.

I would be delighted if the merits of this suggestion is discussed and implemented in a suitable manner. In case any further details are required, feel free to call me (your customer care has my number - hehehe)

Thanks and Regards
Kiran Kumar A

What makes an ocean

2010-04-16T10:48:00.001+05:30

I always had a pessimistic view about the CSR initiatives of companies. So when I got a mail from our Branding group to send them a list of CSR initiatives taken up in our vertical, I simply wrote a run-of-the-mill mail to other locations to forward me the details of initiatives taken up them. I just got three points, first one is about a medical camp conducted at some village where our project is being implemented - I thought what's so great about it, next point is about a 5000 rs donation to CRY by a group of employees, I felt that these are better than me, may be they didn't do anything themselves but at least they believed someone to do some useful work and the last one was the most interesting - as a part of our project implementation, we would need access to certain place and we pay crop compensation to the farmer whose crop may get damaged in that process, in one such case, the farmer is a old man and had a paralysis stroke, he got the usual crop compensation, which might be better than what he would have made from the crop (owing to the drought conditions), the story actually starts here, the two young engineers who were involved in this activity decided to go the extra mile, they discovered that the farmer wanted to buy a pair of oxen with the untimely money he got but was not in a condition to visit a market, negotiate and buy the ox, so these guys helped the farmer in identifying an excellent pair of oxen and then did all the negotiations and bought the oxen. When I saw the photograph, somewhere in my heart I felt very good, I surely have a soft corner for agriculture and cattle owing to my childhood in a remote village but then who doesn't like agriculture and who wouldn't appreciate the beauty of the pair of oxen in the photograph. Great job friends, small drops of good deeds such as these do create the ocean of positive energy and I am writing this post just to add another drop to that ocean

Kiran Alla

Twist or a turn

2010-04-08T11:48:00.001+05:30

My quest has led me to a new route. It could be a twist or a simple turn, not sure at this moment even as I start feeling better. But why write these thoughts on this blog - is it an attempt to project myself, is it to gain acceptance from some known and some unknown readers; I know that these are embedded in my actions and whenever I realize it, I would stop writing my thought junk on the blog but then the second principle that I want to implement is making me write this post.

For quite sometime, since the time I became independent, I have been following the principle that I will do no act that will harm others (at least to the extent my knowledge/wisdom goes) and I will not allow or keep quiet if someone is harming me. This has been the guiding principle for me to channelize my energies and to reconcile my actions at the end of the day. The second principle, about which I have been aware for quite sometime but not been practicing as rigorously as the first one, is that my happiness is not something that is limited just to me, it is linked to so many others and other things that if I just focus on myself, I would just remain independent and will be living in an island and would be going in circles.

Finally after about 12 years of experimentation and intermittent implementation I have decided to adopt the second principle in all my actions. Apart from not doing harm to others and not allowing others to harm me, from now on, I am going to spend time in evolving myself and others around me, with the clarity that only effort is mine while result depends on many other things. I have now decided to fully adopt the principle of "Interdependence" that Stephen R Covey wrote about in his Seven Habits book. Not that I have not practiced it but from now on I will make a conscious effort to make every action a beneficial interdependent action.

I would keep sharing my experiences and would greatly appreciate any inputs, reflections.

Dynamic websites

2010-03-24T10:55:00.001+05:30

My blogging has surely become quite intermittent. This is not because I have stopped having anything to share but because I am trying multiple things but my blog is still like my native place. I have been trying to bring whatever I am doing elsewhere to this blog, so that the regular don't miss seeing my ramblings (those who get used don't care if it is good or bad, I presume they just need the dose).

I would like to share this idea that has been coming back again and again in recent days and after seeing Firefox launching its Personas, I felt it is good time to share this idea.

I keep visiting certain websites on a regular basis, for example - my personal mail, a news site, my bank site, a certain professional body and so on. All these websites are well designed and look great for the first few times you visit them but after sometime they start getting boring - same color, same fonts, same logos.

I started thinking wouldn't it be wonderful if they make the website look dynamic not just customize/personalize. More and more we are living (spending time) on the internet and since the marginal cost going dynamic is small (I am assuming this here), it would be nice if we can make internet more like the Wonderland that Alice went to. This will provide opportunity for the creative part of us to come out on a larger canvas and keep life (internet) more interesting.

Google has been doing this on its home page and I think people like the surprise element of that without loosing the basic nature. I mean to say that websites can become dynamic without changing their basic character/identity. I can try this on my blog itself but then I am not that savvy and even though I tried to get some help earlier, not much actually happened.

I want this message to mainly reach ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, ADB, WRI, different sites hosted on nic.in, even gmail. Let's see if someone is reading

What to do with the extra money FM gave us - Save or Spend?

2010-02-26T17:22:00.001+05:30

After a long time, our Finance Minister gave relief to all of us in the salaried class. By increasing the tax slabs and adding another 20k tax free investment in Infra Bonds, he gave 51000 extra money in hand (if your taxable income is 8 lakhs or more) and 6000 reduction in tax payable if you chose to invest 20k in infra bonds.

Splurge or Save will be the big question. I hope that I am correct in saying that my reader group has more or less reached a certain maturity level in our careers and that we are all cash positive and we expect to be on a growth path for few more years. My further discussion would be based on this assumption.

What to do with the extra income - splurge or save? Before you choose to decide on the correct answer, let me take the fizz out of the question by adding that there is no single correct answer. The plausible answer is "it depends."

One has to live in the current moment otherwise there is no life, you would either have memories or dreams. Memories and dreams are not totally unnecessary - you get cheered up when you recall a happy moment and will get motivated when you start thinking about a dream, in fact they are part of present but alas memories and dreams cannot feed us nor can they make things happen. You have to make things happen in present so that you can realise your dreams in future look back at these as past memories.

For me, Money is a kind of measurement. Measurement of various things - value, utility, energy, requirement, needs etc. Of these, utility is the most subjective one that impacts our view about money and all other earthly things. What is this utility, then? Utility is supposed to be the happiness (another subjective word) derived by the individual by doing a certain task, physical, mental or emotional and disutility is the unhappiness or discomfort.

Utility, as can be observed easily by any one of you independently, can be derived from various things - eating, sleeping, playing, watching a movie, possessing a rare thing, interacting with someone, caring or being cared by someone, reading a book or watching a nice movie, spending time with someone you like, mostly categorizable as satiating different types of hungers and certain abstract things such as meditation, prayer etc. Sometimes utility and disutility go hand in hand and in such situations we think about the net effect and decide whether to do it or not.

End of the day, all of us want our day to be a day in which we have gained some utility and thereby experience life positively. If, on a given day, all you experience is disutility, you would wish that you were better dead than alive. What I am arriving at is that on a daily basis we keep searching for utility like a bee searches for honey - searching has some disutility but finding what we want has greater utility, so we are ready to experience some disutility to gain utility later.

One of the first steps to make life better - is to identify the things that give us more and more utility. But as money is designed to represent the aspects that have common utility to all human beings, it generally can buy things that all human beings can recognize - you can have tasty food, travel to a exotic destination, but some entertainment, indulge in a pleasure hobby etc etc. And the utility money can buy is the easier one though it may not last long and since the disutility of doing the work to gain money and utility that is gained by spending such money are disconnected we never know if it was worth it (disutility of earning money vs the utility gained by spending money)

While we need the utility that can be bought by money to live, there are many other things not related to money but can be done if you are alive. My take is that we should keep using money to buy those things that we need to live - food, house, clothing etc but learn to see the real utility. Wearing a 2000 rs branded shirt may make you feel better and superior to a roadside pedestrian but if you look at the real utility, the value of things that 2000 rs can buy will look like a mountain compared to the branded shirt. You can spend 500 rs at a multiplex but if you make effort and plan and meet few friends for a sport, it will give you far more happiness. So learn to understand yourself and your utility for various things. One of the most important activities I have done as a human being is having good friends. Human being is supposed to be the most evolved being on Earth at least in my conscious and spending time with a mentally evolved human is the best thing I can do after my basic hungers are fulfilled. While fulfilling hunger is necessary you have understand the hunger first, why do you desire something so much is a difficult question to answer but you can keep trying.

When you save, you are postponing consumption of things that money can buy and it means fulfillment of someone elses utility. If you have got enough utility for the day, then your postponement of that little utility not cause disutility. Thus right amount of saving is a zero utility/disutility activity and knowing this "right amount" is critical.

To conclude, it is a good time to do a review because you have that little extra money in your hand (about 10%) without any additional effort. You are not sacrificing anything and therefore you need not feel bad and decisions that are taken when one is stable would be good decisions. Take a good decision

I hope I gave you some good utility in writing this mail and sharing my thoughts with such good friends is a great utility for me. If you want to discuss anything personally, feel free to get in touch with me.

Inovative ways for New Joinees Induction

2010-02-19T10:11:00.001+05:30

I received a mail on Linkedin from a contact seeking suggestions for new and Innovative way for New Joinee Induction. He mentioned that they do the Following things:
1. Corporate Induction Presentation
2.Sharing with Company's each and every policies in details along with HR
3.Corporate Office/ Factory round.
4. Meeting with Key person (HOD's)

My reply, which I felt can be of of help to other HR Managers is as below:

One of the first things a new joinee needs is a friendly peer. Seek volunteers in different departments who would like to volunteer for such work and train them a bit on what to say and what not to and during induction introduce these guys a friendly peers and tell them that the new joinee can approach any one of them for any issue. Slowly they will develop good rapport with one or more old employees, which will help them transit smoothly into the system.

Another innovative thing you can do is to conduct a small competition among the new joinees. Give them a target such as making a presentation about the company to an investor or a customer and give them a list of people they can meet to get information.

Regarding policies and processes, give them a challenge of coming up with the most difficult questions they can think of about the policies and create a repository of the same as FAQs. Everytime someone comes up with a new one that is not covered earlier, reward them with something. That way they will go through the policies thoroughly and will also act as feedback to the company. Later let them go through questions raised by previous new joinees.

Dear Shri Manmohan Singh

2010-02-12T16:29:00.001+05:30

Dear Sir,

I am writing this letter to bring a message from my fellow Indians to your attention. It is mainly related to what they have been expecting since they voted Congress (and you) back to power with much clear majority. Last time they were not so sure but looking at what you managed to achieve even with left problems, they decided to relieve you of that problem and keeping in mind the global crisis they felt you are the best choice to do something progressive as you earlier did (or appeared to) in 1991.

We have already taken note of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi's sacrifice of position. We know that Sonia Gandhi would never like to be in a position of direct power and that she is doing whatever she is doing so as to create a good situation for Rahul to succeed. There is time for this to happen and the Indian population will wait for that. But meanwhile we are expecting little more than just holding the seat for Rahul from you. In the last 8-9 months we have noticed that you had allowed ministers to be chosen not on merit but on a spoils-sharing agreement within Congress and with other parties. But then you are still the Prime Minister.

We have given you enough time to test the pitch and play defensive for quite a bit of time and if you are thinking you can play out the next 4 years like Dhoni tried to and failed to in the test against South Africa, let us know immediately. It is better to act retired hurt and sit in the pavilion rather than being out there and wasting precious time. As the Prime Minister of a country with 1.2 billion Indians, every minute you waste is equivalent to 33 lifetimes and I request you to keep this in mind whenever you chose to waste a minute.

More important message I would like to bring from my co-countrymen is that we have expectations other than those Sonia Gandhi, Congress, allies of Congress etc have from you. We want to lead a peaceful, harmonious, simple life. Majority of we Indians aspire for few simple things and are ready to live with many imperfections.

First of all, we need to have good food. It is good that Agriculture's contribution has shrunk to less than 20% from a high of 60% earlier but the food still forms the major portion of our consumption, at least 40% to 80% of daily spending by an average Indian would be on food. If you now see the way food prices are growing, whether it is the making of Mr. Pawar or it is because middle class Indians started eating more as former US President Bush said, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have two square meals without feeling sad about the amount of money that has been spent on them. How can a average Indian come out the poverty or below average life cycle if he is constantly grappling with the challenge of increasing food prices. All his increase in productivity, innovation, hard work is getting sucked by the spiraling food prices. Please think about this. As the Prime Minister, you have access to all the intelligent brains of the country in various bureaucratic, political and academic positions, brains that were nurtured over a long period of time and brains that keep writing excellent theories for newspapers and if you can put the best brains together, we are sure that you can come up with a pareto solution, which will address one of the basic responsibilities of modern society - opportunity to live.

Second, please stop thinking in terms of stock market rallies or dips and the macro GDP numbers for sometime. If you ensure that all the entrepreneurs are facilitated to achieve their goals in fair means, they will push the GDP enough. Simplify the regulations and taxation and ensure that you don't have provisions through large fish can escape but the small are caught. Treat everyone equitably. Tax income of every individual and organization and ask no more. Don't entertain smart Chidambarams, who come up ideas such as tax a honest man who wants to withdraw his money from the bank. Be fair and try to see if you can keep Gandhi's words in mind while doing this. Mr. Gandhi, if I remember rightly, said that an individual should earn only as much as he needs in his lifetime. Every individual needs food throughout this life, needs a shelter over his head, would like to educate his children, would like to have some entertainment in the form of TV, music, cinema, arts and other cultural activities, would like to help his fellow human beings in need of it. Few may want other goals, let them do it but don't let them lock in the resources in the form of money to such extent that other human beings are starving as they have no opportunity to earn their bread for the day.

Lastly, it would be great if you can keep asking representatives from different sections, representatives who truly represent their section not those who claim to be representing, what is that one thing if changed would impact them in a positive way, not from financial dimension but from societal and economical dimension. Ask the young kids from different regions, ask the bread-earners, ask the bread-makers, ask the mothers, ask the honest, ask the corrupt, ask the responsible, ask the laggards, ask the MBAs, ask illiterates, ask the roadsider, what I mean to say is develop a feeler network. The objective of our democratic society is not to achieve a high GDP growth or a certain level of per capita income or to ensure that the stock market goes up or to ensure that the interests of few are served, it is to eliminate the "might is right" and other similar brutal forces and help human and other living beings leadn a civilised and collaborative life in which there is always a give and take between living and non-living beings.

May be I wrote a little too lengthy letter but I am sure you would have got the message. Please think about this and do something about it. We have high hopes from you.

Regards
A Indian Citizen

Where do we stand?

2010-02-09T10:24:00.002+05:30

Just saw this article on Economist. Wonder do we (India) gain a position in such graph.

Wish you a Happy Sankranthi and what exactly do I wish

2010-01-13T10:43:00.003+05:30

This blog post got triggered when my friend Satya sent our Middle Earth group a Happy Pongal e-mail.

I must thank him for the wishes and at the same time for triggering some thoughts in me. I am missing the Bhogi celebrations but I guess I can participate in the Lohri celebrations. But I would like to say something about this "wishing" business. While there is nothing wrong and in fact good that we use this opportunity to say hi (actually saying that I am alive and I remember you all), I have never experienced this wishing business till I moved to Hyderabad, a urban city. Similar to what famous poet Sri Sri says in the "Saapatu etu ledu paataina paadu brother" song of Aakali Raajyam movie, there is no difference between Sankranti or Dasara or Christmas in the Urban City, for the common man it is a day when he forcibly takes a day off and spend some his savings on food, clothes and other little luxuries.

And people like us with incomes in the 70 percentile and above range keep wishing each other - Happy Pongal, Happy Sankranthi etc etc, and take a day off to spend time in front of TV or watch a movie and spend time with family, which are our little luxuries. I think it is time for us to research into the roots of these festivals apart from the mythologies attached and understand the social aspect and we should try to reconstruct our culture in these urban jungles and make the festivals alive. Thanks to internet, we have all the information at our finger tips these days

It is time for us to take time off and indulge in activities like kite flying, making rangolis (men too can help), distribute some vegetables and rice (as is a custom in villages even today), have the pongali (a sweet dish made of late harvested rice and freshly made jaggery and milk) and other home made dishes, wear new clothes and meet friends and relatives and pray to god.

I would also like take this opportunity to mention that despite the fact that politicians are fighting over Telangana and Samikhya Andhra, this festival unites all the telugu speaking people in a unique way.

సంక్రాంతి బాగా జరుపుకోండి, ముగ్గులు బాగా వెయ్యండి వెయ్యలేకపొతే పక్క వారి గొబ్బెమ్మలు తోక్కండి, అరిసెలు, బూరెలు, చక్కిడాలు బాగా తినండి (వండటం రాక పొతే స్వగృహ స్వీట్స్ లో కొనుక్కోండి), పతంగులు లేదా గాలి పటాలు ఎగుర వెయ్యండి, ఉన్నదాంట్లో కొద్దిగా లేని వాడికి పంచండి, అందరూ సుఖంగా ఉండండి :)

Photo Courtesy: Chittaranjan's Photostream, Manavata.org

Who is the Third Idiot?

2010-01-01T19:38:00.002+05:30

Media is all gung-ho that the Amir starrer is a mega mega grosser. But novelist Chetan Bhagat is crying that he has not been given enough credit and Amir is supposedly blasting him for asking more than what is agreed in the contract. If these two are thinking that people are idiots, they are two of the idiots in the title and the third would be those who believe these media nonsense.

Though I liked the novel and I'm sure that the movie would be gud, the hype is nothing but nonsense. I was originally planning to watch in a theater, now I have decided to watch in DTH. Even the previous Amir's movie Ghajini, which was a remake, was not as good as the first version in tamil and it no where is close to Memento. Memento is a puzzle from the beginning to the end, Ghajini managed to popularize the almost-forgotten Polaroid camera.

I have read all the four novels of Chetan Bhagat and two of them are based on his own life, which are the better of the lot. One night @ call center was a big flop while 3 mistakes of my life is ok. One can sympathize with his Mother that she couldn't find her son's name but Chetan trying to use it in media is a proof that he is trying to live up to the title.

All those who read his book would know that the movie is based on his novel and if it has really sold so many millions then there is no necessity for Vidhu or Amir to acknowledge it. But if Chetan and/or his Mother is feeling bad about not being able to see Chetan's name right after the movie title, then no one can help it.

Hope 2010 will not be full of such celebrity idiots and that they become sensible over time.

Wish you all a Very Happy New Year once again.

Adios 2009 --> Welcome 2010

2009-12-31T21:52:00.002+05:30

Happy New Year Everyone

Avatar - My take

2009-12-19T19:16:00.004+05:30

These days almost all the movie, novels, articles seem to be directed in the same direction - selfishness of human beings, how they have/are destroying Earth, and different kinds of possible endings and how forces of nature would stand united etc etc.

Right from Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Matrix, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and now Avatar. More or less all of them are saying that life will not be as what we are experiencing in future and the continuous digging into nature's resources and breaking the energy chain is gonna lead to some kind of disaster.

James Cameron, with Avatar, took this game to a different planet. So there is nothing great about the storyline. I can see so many parallels from which he must taken inspiration. What is more awe inspiring is the way he made the movie, it is amazing. I have watched in 2D and now decided to watch it again on 3D. I would say it is a must watch.

Every one of us, given a chance, would say will behave like the main character of the film. He made the hero so simple and relatable and he convinces that skills of a human can come handy in a distant planet.

Nothing in the movie comes out of the blue but the imagination and being able to bring it live on-screen is what Cameron managed to do successfully and he has done it in a fantastic way. One worrying thing that occurs to me from all the above message movies, books etc is that while the human species seem to be a harmonius one by nature but the kind of needs we have developed are building a artificial barrier.

I really don't know if I need this blog but I am using it and will keep using it as long as it is available. And that's the concern - I am doing something, which I am not really sure if I need it and at the same without understanding what is price I am paying for it.

Conscious Action

2009-12-13T18:51:00.002+05:30

As a living being, we all keep doing so many things at a sun-conscious level. But as a species endowed with the advanced faculty of thinking, analysing and assimilating, we can further ourselves only through conscious action.

In so many situation we keep belittling ourselves and end up in a state of disappointment and distress. If you remember Newton's third law - Each action has an equal and opposite reaction; and if you understand that your action requires certain amount of energy and therefore it will have to result in another re-action equaling in energy to that of yours, you will understand the power of your conscious action. One should also keep in mind that focusing the energy on a specific action is critical as directionless energy gets scattered and one cannot see a visible re-action. Instead focus your energy on whatever action you decide to take and you would be able to clearly see the re-action. The re-action could be the result that you desire or something else but then if you direct your action correctly you can expect a correct re-action.

So next time you want a certain outcome, don't just sit there and think in scattered directions, think in a clear direction and focus your energy and action in that direction. That's the first step to achieve a successful result.

I have not discriminated good or bad here as energy has no such distinction, however I believe that life itself is a positive force and therefore trying to do something that one believes is bad would be against our nature and therefore will result in negative energy on us.

Do we need Telangana?

2009-12-12T17:45:00.001+05:30

As a guy born in Warangal and bought up in Hyderabad, I keep wondering who will get benefited from the new state of Telangana, if formed. Only the politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers come to my mind. In India, we as the subjects always want to catch up and join the ruling class as we believe that leading a normal life is impossible. So we keep searching for opportunities that can give us an opportunity to be the leader. In our view, leader is the one who gets all the privileges without having to do anything.

Surely our thinking needs to refreshed. We have an excellent country well balanced in everything. The biggest problem we seem to be having is that of population (nothing wrong with this, India has the most conducive climate for reproduction, I suppose) and lack of general direction except if difficulties.

In case Andhra Pradesh gets divided, all I can visualize is the amount of infighting that will get started, which in turn will drive away all the investments from the state. Rather if Telangana people believe that they are not being treated fairly, they should demand for specific things rather than fight for a state. Where were all the so-called Telangana intellectuals all these years. Why couldn't they bring out the problems people are facing till now. Where were they hiding. Why were they not ready to fight for issues of downtrodden. When farmers were committing suicides, where were these students, politicians and intellectuals hiding. Why couldn't they conduct the agitation that they are conducting now, where was the unity and social responsibility hiding then.

Similarly, the so-called Samaikhya Andhra supporters, were sleeping till the time the Telangana issue became hot? If they were sympathetic to issues being raised by the Telangana leaders, why couldn't they bring out the issues and create a platform to discuss and create action plans for elimination of the same.

Personally, I feel that this is an attempt to bring down Rosaiah from the CM post. One plausible solution is to make a Telangana guy the CM and appoint two Deputy CMs - one from Rayalaseema and one from Andhra. Let this apex political team identify the regional issues and how it can balanced in favor of all. As a larger state, AP has greater possibility to balance out the differences, Andhra region will continue to be the agricultural belt, Telangana can be made the Industrial belt and Rayalaseema can be developed as the mining area, legal and not the illegal Reddy types. Focus on creating education opportunities and distribute the funds in proportion to the population and not by any other measure.

End of the day, Hyderabad is a central city. Despite the fact that it has some water problems, it is geographically well connected by Air, Road and Railways. Trying to create three states out of one will be a major disaster. Let the so-called intellectuals sit across the table and come up with a solution that has no incremental cost and is pareto efficient. Jai Telugu Talli, Jai Andhra, Jai Ratanalaseema. Manamandaram Telugu vaallam, manalo tedalu undavachu kanee mana bashe mananu kalipi unchagalugutundhi. Mana rashtram lone manam ila tannukunte, bayata deshallo unnavalla paristhithi emito alochinchandi, ippatidaka telugu vallam ani cheppukunna vaallu, repatinunchi, memu teluge kani maadi telangana, maadi andhra, maadi rayalaseema ani cheppu kovalsi vastundi. Baagupadedhi Raajakeeya Naayakulu mathrame. sorry for getting into Telugu but the matter can be better expressed only in mother tongue.

Visit to Hyderabad

2009-11-27T15:03:00.001+05:30

I am traveling to Hyderabad tomorrow and would be there for 3-4 days. It would be good to catch up with all my friends.

Cheers

A tough day for an Idealist

2009-11-14T10:36:00.005+05:30

Yesterday was a tough day for me. I can call myself a pragmatic philosophical idealist. I started as an idealist, expecting perfection in everything including myself, got frustrated, accepted that there is friction and inefficiencies due to transactional issues, became pragmatic but my search for meaning made me philosophical.

However I never stopped being idealist, only learned to factor in the practical issues and view the result in a philosophical way. But the mixture doesn't seem to be perfect as the idealist keeps pushing things even as the pragmatist keeps warning and the philosopher keeps smiling.

Day before was an eventful day and I got see all the three roles and pros and cons of each one. Idealist caused the maximum trouble but without him it would have been uneventful and lifeless. Pragmatist tried to adjust but was falling short in digesting the Delhi attitude. I met a store manager who believes that all educated guys in Delhi are arrogant and that his internal process is important than listening to the customer, met a Sardar who believes he cannot be bullied by anyone and can bully anyone, saw a security guard who was believes in establishing peace in a peaceful way, a customer care executive who fully realizes that the customer is making a rightful claim but can do nothing about it, and a businessman who believes that selling cheap is the best way to succeed in India.

Idealist pushed it hard, pragmatist tried to control the situation but only when the philosopher took over did the whole thing resulted in a amicable resolution. Egos were clashing, voices were raising, tempers were flaring but finally, only when the philosopher intervened, everything calmed down. The Manager got colored by the shop guy and took it personally but only when I got ready to give up, he saw the truth and when he saw the humility, he could accept the truth. All in all it was an experience from which I managed to clearly see the three roles clearly

Books and my thoughts

2009-11-10T17:29:00.003+05:30

I wonder how people survive without reading books. For me it is no less essential than eating food and sleeping, you can postpone them for sometime but you cannot be fine without them.

I have just finished reading 2 States by Chetan Bhagat and it is worth the money. To extract the maximum value, I am planning to approach the 2nd hand book seller for an exchage. I have the Rick Riordan's final book lying with me and I am confident I can get two old books of my choice in exchange of these two new books. To be honest, I don't think it is necessary for every reader to buy a new book. I have survived because of lending libraries, and Hyderabad second hand book market. I can confidently say that there are few writers who start writing for their livelihood and I am also sure that they wouldn't mind if more than one person reads one copy of their book. I don't know why Delhi has no lending libraries. As a reader I am willing to pay 10% of book price to read it and will pay another 10% if I like it and if I want to read it again and again, I would go and buy that book. If the publishers take cognizance of this, they would save lot of paper without loosing much money. I am sure good authors wouldn't mind for this kind of arrangement.

Though I have been reading soft copies in pdf format, I don't like them much mainly because of lack of flexibility to carry and the lighting effect of LCD screen. I don't I'm ready yet for a Kindle or any other ebook reader.

I'm currently reading "Happiness" by Matthew Ricard and the second one is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and it is so interesting to see the connections between all these three books. As a human being, endowed with the ability to think, analyse, assimilate, theorize etc etc, we are obligated by nature, life and God (if present as a separate entity) to do something different than other living species, something better not detrimental. Instead of simply eating, sleeping, mating, dying and evolving (and adapting) like other animals, we should do more than simple physical evolution. We should evolve in certain other dimension, people keep talking about emotional and spiritual but I'm not yet sure about what they exactly mean.

This is what keeps me going and makes life interesting, not the money I make or the things I achieve(d) or the things I possess. This process, if you want to call search for meaning or continuous evolution or spiritual journey, is the only thing that keeps me engaged these days. Does it mean I'm satisfied with what I have, I don't think so, I keep thinking about so many things I want to do in future. This happens to be the most interesting phase of my life till now. Hope it will be so forever from now on

Diwali Wishes

2009-10-17T19:13:00.002+05:30

Wish you all a Very Happy and Prosperous Deepavali

My learning - 1

2009-10-16T11:34:00.001+05:30

Most times you feel that the current problems are no different from the ones you faced in the past and therefore past solutions would work fine. This may be true to some extent, in spirit, all problems or hurdles are same, they are challenging you on your path, but nevertheless it will be foolish to think that the same old trick will work all the time. In reality, everything, except in your thinking, might have changed. It is better not to get carried away by past success and go back to basics and give a fresh thought.

Recall the great enjoyment of planting a new seed and watch it grow, it's the same with overcoming a challenge. Why spoil the fun by using the old solution, which might have got rotten by now. Use your senses along with common sense

Cheers
Kiran

Delhi Rains

2009-09-13T17:27:00.003+05:30

Two days of incessant rains has caused havoc to all the Delhi Roads. They have become worse than village roads and driving car on them reminds me of bullock cart ride in my village fields. Summer this year has been quite sever compared to last year, July was the worst and August was irritating, I hope the winter will not be severe.

I managed to pay a visit to Golden Temple in Amritsar lat and planning to visit Jaipur sometime next month. I loved the Ghee dripping halwa prasad. Visit to the Langar and having food there was a great experience. Kesar Dhaba was a big let down. Despite the fact that there was so many people thronging the place, it is poorly maintained. However dessert was very good.

Work has suddenly peaked and for the first time I have spent a completely sleepless night yesterday. Did some focused work that was quite satisfying; similar to one of those nights spent of Adv Corp Fin assignments.

Happened to watch an excellent ad after a long time - Ad of Teri's Solar Lantern, amazing lyrics, music and concept. Unable to find the video online but it is a must watch. All said and done, first 3-4 years post-MBA is a testing period and I hope to utilize it for Deliberate Practice

Two Banias

2009-08-16T19:06:00.003+05:30

It is mere coincidence that I have been reading stories of two banias who influenced modern India. In my view it is also coincidental that the two happen to be banias; however even as they appear to taken two completely different paths one cannot help notice the the striking similarity between the paths. To begin with, for both of them, their way was the only way, both started their career abroad and came back to India to pursue their dream, for both of them children were a part of achieving "their" dream, role of their spouses, though not recognized as deserved, was very important, both developed huge following (both pro and anti), they both loved being called bhai and so on and so forth. If you have not guessed it by now, I am talking about Mahatma Gandhi and Dhirubhai Ambani.

Both the stories happened to have little more of whatever I was expecting and they both did disturb me a bit, in fact they left me a little unsure about the path I am treading now.

As I have started this post with mention of a particular caste, I would also like to make my views about caste also clear. I don't belong to the bania caste and I never consider myself of any caste except that I come from a peasant family. I enjoy anything related to agriculture, anything related to production and value creation in general. I have never used my caste for any favorable benefit and even dislike people using it for favors. I believe in equal opportunity and fully believe that given enough time and opportunity, any individual can achieve what any other individual has achieved if he wants to. Extreme cases may come to mind immediately but then don't take in the literary sense, look at it from a macro view and you will appreciate it.

The stories of the two banias did teach me that to achieve goals one has to be relentless and should persevere and never forget the beginning. Like Glinda, the Good Witch of North advises Dorothy in Wizard of Oz, "It's always best to start at the beginning." Let's get started

My Friends

2009-08-02T21:13:00.003+05:30

As everyone else is celebrating Friendship Day around, I thought I would celebrate it by writing about my "Friends."

I am the eldest in my family and me ad my brother grew up at separate places except for few years, which meat we never strongly bonded in childhood, today we rather share a friendship than brotherhood. This meant that throughout my childhood, I was making friends anywhere and everywhere. I would not try and describe each of my friends but just try and list them in a chronological order; may be I will attempt to write about few in later posts.

Before I start listing down, I, with my whole heart, thank GOD for giving me such wonderful friends, who stood by me in difficult times despite my shortcomings and foolishness, who stand by me, if not physically but with a shadow of their soul hanging around me. As an extrovert, it was never difficult for me to make friends; one can always see me in the open hands posture for a new friend. Some of you might say that friendship develops over a long period of time but for me it is instantaneous and few of you may say that it must be mutual but for me it need not be. I don't know where I read this but I vaguely remember that it is from Gita that God is present in every living being including oneself and from that moment I tried experiencing it and despite being a judgmental person in nature, I started regarding everyone as a friend even if I had a reason to hate/fight them.

Let me get started with the list now:
1. Earliest of my friends is Mahendra from Govindaraopet, Warangal. He studied along with me till class 3 at Kakatiya Public School
2. Suraj was the next friend I can remember. I met him at United High School, Adarshnagar, Hyderabad
3. Next I remember Raghu who provoked me to study hard and come first in class in class 4 again
4. Then come my friends who are still closely in touch with me - Allam Praveen Kumar, M Srikanth, Chandrasekhar (chandu) and M Srinivas from Unique Public School, Suryanagar, Hyderabad. Two female friends Kavita Bandari and Praveena Reddy, I will never forget in my life
5. One of my closest friend with whom I share an intimate relationship - Amuda Vijaya Partha Saradhi, my diploma classmate
6. Ravi Kumar Popuri, a very generous friend and Ravi Sankar, my intellectual friend again from my diploma days, Sampath - a confused friend
7. Another friend, to visit whom, I specifically traveled to remote locations, Siram Srinivas, is special one. He stood by me in one of the darkest hours of my life. I can never forget the question I asked him and the reply he gave. He stood for what he believed and from that answer I built a new life
8. Ramakrishna Pavuluri - a colleague but more of an uncle and friend, MAS Charyulu-again a uncle friend colleague from Bakelite Hylam days
9. My boss friend - Rajendra Kumar Kandikonda
10. My guru friend - Nanduri Jagannadham
11. My enlightened friend - Sadanandam, all the above from Bakelite Hylam again
12. Trimurthy Ragi, a friend from whom I learnt how to live life
13. Sivakumaran - a dear colleague
14. Rummy Sharma, Rohan Kashyap, Ritu Raj, Poulomi Ghosh, Shibabrato Ghosh, Sawan, Satya Prakash, Chidanandam, Bhaskar, Srinivas Reddy, Prashanthi, Suryanarayana DSN, Sireesh KK, Ram Goutham from Middle Earth Consultants, Hyderabad
15. Venkata Raman Govada, a special friend again from Bakelite Hylam days
16. From ISB, if I have to list there are many but those who come my mind are - Rao Korupolu, Suhail Abrol, Anandram Narasimhan, Gauravjeet Singh, Sudhanshu Bankata, Viswa Kirti, Nidhi Reddy, Sonali Sighal, Ratnakar Gore, Arun Kumar Singh, Alka, Amit Goel, Ankur Agarwal, Ashish Naredi, Dhiraj Kumar, Dinaz Vervetwala, Karthik Polasani, Krishna Chaitanya, Narayanan Krishnan, Nisha, Deepthi and Sumit Gared, Parag Rastogi, Pradeep, Pradyot, Swati, Pavana, Shikha&Amit, Shallabh Pal, Varun Khullar and many more
17. Deeptha and her husband (who helped with my AIMA project)
17. Aman Tripathi (where are you)
18. Peter Ballem, Rajeev Kumar, Rajender, Pandyan, Rimjhim, Shirisha Boda, Sarat Sahu, Sujata Joseph
19. P G Venkateswaran and family - my dearest friend
20. Sravan Dasoju - a friend who showered me with his goodwill
21. Sunil Godavarthy (AIMA friend)
22. Anil Rawal, Anil Chilukuri and Abhishek Ranjan from ADAG
23. 100g - a special friend

If I have missed someone, I apologize but if I recall a name, will append this list. I once again thank each and everyone and many more for making my life a worthy one.

Can we think differently

2009-07-31T20:19:00.002+05:30

As an ISB classmate put it, what I gained after ISB is perspective about life. I am reproducing a small reading from ET for you, which I found different and interesting. Do read it and leave your comments, if any

THE MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH
Benjamin Friedman

OUR conventional thinking about economic growth fails to reflect the breadth of what growth, or its absence, means for a society. We recognise, of course, the advantages of a higher material standard of living, and we appreciate them. But moral thinking, in practically every known culture, enjoins us not to place undue emphasis on our material concerns. We are also increasingly aware that economic development — industrialisation in particular, and more recently globalisation — often brings undesirable side effects, like damage to the environment or the homogenisation of what used to be distinctive cultures, and we have come to regard these matters too in moral terms. On both counts, we think of economic growth in terms of material considerations versus moral ones: we weigh material positives against moral negatives.
I believe this thinking is seriously, in some circumstances dangerously, incomplete. The value of a rising standard of living lies not just in the concrete improvements it brings to how individuals live but in how it shapes the social, political, and ultimately the moral character of a people.
Economic growth, a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens, more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy... when living standards decline, most societies make little if any progress toward any of these goals, and in all too many instances they plainly retrogress.

My Comments: From a micro perspective, economic growth is relevant only till the survival goals os a human being are met post which over focus on economic growth slowly grows into an excess. However corporations/firms are created mainly to drive economic growth, expecting anything else creates distortions but then we need to know what level of importance we need to give them in the modern society. Do we want our civilization to be known as the one that printed money and got lost in that mirage?

Business Ethics

2009-07-21T19:33:00.004+05:30

This post is an outcome of a random chat with an acquaintance. The random chat after the initial rounds of pleasantries moved towards a controversial topic, which is Business Ethics. Phrases like "healthy competition," "drama of bidding," "business ethics are not applicable for every thing you do," "if i talk about ethics i wont grow," etc were freely used to justify the way contractors engage actively to form a cartel. I tried to argue but then quickly realized that it is difficult to convince a person about ethics in a chat conversation, they have to built on a much stronger foundation.

This conversation also bought along with it another question - how does the current generation regard ethics and morals? In my interaction with many acquaintances, I generally found that people are generally good by nature and would want to help others but then when it comes to things such as ethics that are created by humanity while creating the society, opinions swing widely. But I can clearly say from my past experience that sticking to certain basic principles and ethics is NPV positive in the long-term and long-term means a time horizon of 2-5 years. Many times who take shortcuts quickly loose out but then they never realize that it is their deeds that resulted in their side-tracking; rather they keep blaming luck, situation and unfairness around, which in fact they have been actively contributing to.

The person with whom I chatted also called me idealistic but then without ideals, would we have the so-called civilized society and the life that we all are trying to lead. How does it sound when two thieves divide the houses that they are going to steal and how ethical would it be if two rapists starts sharing who they would be raping next; sorry for the harsh words but then that is how I felt when the person started justifying sharing of contracts between the parties that are supposed to be competing, which is nothing but sharing public wealth (tax payers money) privately.

I have not been blogging actively, which is not because I've been very busy rather it is just the opposite. Corporate world has failed miserably in engaging me while ISB was exemplary in that. Just learned that a batch mate is joining a Phd program in US, which I think might be for similar reasons. Having spent about 5 years in Training, academics do pull me but then hardcore academics may not be for me. I'm trying to engage myself by coming up with ideas and discussing with classmates but then overcoming the laziness to develop them into full-fledged B-plans is proving to be a tough thing but I'm working on it. One of the biggest pains post-ISB has been the steady payments to be made for education loan. I am just weathering away the dull times while trying to bring in some cheer. Hope Varuna, the Indian Rain God shows some mercy on us and shower us with his blessings and the much wanted rains. Good bye

After Harry Potter, it's Percy Jackson

2009-06-21T22:25:00.003+05:30

Since last 10 days I've been engrossed in the Percy Jackson's series after reading a book review in Business Standard. While this series is completely different from the Harry Potter series, lot of similarities can be noticed in the vocabulary. Both the Heroes have similar character and they would easily give their life for their friends.

I've just bought the final book - "The Last Olympian" and eager to finish it but at the same time concerned a bit that this is the last book.

Coming to personal life, my office got shifted from Nehru Place to Gurgaon - 7 kms becomes 15 kms. This is one development I don't I would like despite the fact that I've been given a separate cabin.

Work otherwise has been a roller coaster ride. Working with a company that is serious about a specific sector is a great advantage. You go deep but then as the sector is in nascent stage, things wouldn't be smooth. I never thought I would be thinking about Energy, Power and Electricity after leaving Bakelite Hylam but then God always has a plan. Last week I received a mail from an old colleague with whom I worked for very small period. But this guy managed track me, get my mail id and sent me a message. There are many more Go-Getters out there who are making things happen.

Right time for an IPO

2009-06-04T14:33:00.001+05:30

With the equity markets in a upward swing, I think this is the best time for an IPO. Situation is similar to the one prevailing Reliance Power IPO issue. Everyone is bullish and demat penetration has gone up significantly, which means lots of applications. If other things are taken care, any IPO in the next few days, though procuderally very difficult, will be a big hit.

I have decided that instead of trying to write long and in-depth posts, small thoughts can be easily shared and thereby keep the blog active.

The current upswing can be explained only in Indian terms as normal valuation models fail to explain the fall and rise. What changed in two months - a stable government, mixed signals from US (minimum impact from Obama's taking charge), some stock specific signals, lots of big investors missing the election-results rally making them go after midcaps, etc etc.

Real estate is still precarious, trust levels between the developers and buyers at an all-time low and job-loss worries at an all-time high in the IT sector. But the prices have still not come down to reasonable levels and therefore better hold for some more time before taking the plunge.

Class of '09 appears to be placed fully now and I hope this placement season acts as a warning for the modern day gold-hunters, who assume that just by getting admission to a good B-school would ensure a high-paying salary.

Having run around for 14 years, I have decided it is time to hit decelarate button for sometime and allow others to go ahead and instead spend time on more important things in life. Lot of time is now going in to reading fiction, playing squash, watching movies with family, buying vegetables etc etc.

Delhi weather is becoming more agreeable and I think coming weeks would be much better

This is amazing, it works

2009-04-27T10:47:00.001+05:30

Technology works, not to create magic or inconceivable stuff but to remove the hindrances created by bureaucracy. When I first saw Jaagore ad, I was impressed but not motivated. It was a kind of cheek-slap ad but then we Indians have been taught to show the other cheek (we follow it not because we believe in the principle behind it but rather due to laziness or due to the marginal effort required (MBA stuff).

But then the Jaagore team kept on slapping, throwing cold water on sleepy faces in different ways. In the end I decided to give it a try. First I visited the site and created a form, which is quite simple. But then the biggest value addition is the mention of the ERO details alongwith with a mobile number. I tried calling the ERO but the response was that they have closed enrolment due to ongoing assembly elections and that he doesn't when they would open the counter again, my motivation went back to square one (system doesn't work). During this time, I explained all this to my colleague, who too registered online but then did nothing after that (average Indian). After couple of months, I received another follow up mail from Jaagore saying that enrolment in Delhi is ON and that I can do it now.

The Go-getter in me woke up. I called the ERO who didn't respond but then I used my Google skills (my perception about googling is that by now people have developed so many ways of googling, some efficient and some inefficient that there is a need to conduct Certified Training Programs, basic, advanced specialist etc in googling skills) and found out the landline number (someone will lift the phone, no caller ID hehehe) and found out the location where I need to submit the form BUT then the person said that the date for submission is gone. Alas, after so much effort, it's back to square one again. But then the go-getter wanted to finish it on some action note, so I mailed to Jaagore.com explaining what all happened and request them to check if what I found is true and if something could be done. I received NO RESPONSE. Average Indian Initiativee, after all, at that point it appeared to me that Jaagore's effort are limited to backend and to achieve real success we need local support too. I told about all this to my colleague who happily blamed the system once again like an Average Indian and I joined. After all the blaming, we decided to check with the ERO of his constituency and found that enrolment is open there.

I finally decided to physically check the whole thing and the next day turned up at the place where forms are to be submitted along with all the proofs. After some teething issues, I managed to submit my form and get an acknowledgement, which neither has a number nor a due date. I finally decided to rest the issue and came back. All this happened a month ago.

I kept searching the Delhi online voter list, which is hopeless as everytime I give my name, it brings me back the list of ALL VOTERS in the constituency. I nevertheless tried to check my name but it was useless (the data was as of Feb but I was hoping in vain that it will be updated regularly). Finally on last Saturday I wanted to give it a try again and visited the website of Delhi CEO (interesting abbreviation) and found a number where I can call to check the status. I called the number, gave all my details and then WOW, it worked, I got a alphanumeric number of EPIC (Election Photo Identity Card, :) ). Equipped with this information, I wanted to see my name in the voter list, I visited the site with no positive result again but found a link to a form in which I can punch in may mail ID along with my EPIC number and I'm supposed to get my voter details. I did everthing necessary and expected a mail by evening but looks like even the system is on Holiday.

But then the reason I titled this post "This is Amazing, it works" because at precisely 9:56 AM someone in the CEO office clicked on send reply to all mail requests and I got the enclosed mail along with my voter details, yuppie.

I now can confidently say, in India, world's largest democracy, systems work and that I am gonna vote this time. For those who missed the deadlines and lost motivation, I must say, there is hope. Once the elections are over and the new government comes in, you should finish submitting your Form-6, we don't know if the current political leadership will handle the hung situation like P V Narasimha Rao handled and avert a repoll. Both ways you will be a winner but till then let's Hope for the best.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Election <ceo@mail.nic.in>
Date: Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:56 AM
Subject: Voter & Ps location details :UBV1xxxxx6 at 27/04/2009 09:56:03
To: kiran.aalla@gmail.com

Voter & Ps location details UBVxxxxx6

Attachment: 090427r001s6717.html (removed)

Test Blog

2009-04-18T22:25:00.001+05:30

I'm trying to experiment with the new feature blogger has come up with. Considering that I get most of my ideas at work, I suppose I can beat the proxy settings and keep posting on my blog. If this works, you can expect some very interesting posts coming your way shortly

Cheers
Kiran

It's Graduation Day at ISB

2009-04-04T08:37:00.003+05:30

It's that time of the year again, when 400 odd ambitious and smart youngsters (some oldies too) look forward to receive their graduation certificate (though a dummy one) and toss their Hats in unison.

Lots of people have been asking me about how ISB Class of 2009 has fared in placements and I think last weeks newspapers covered it clearly and adequately. This batch, only after the founding batch has faced problems with placements, thanks to financial melt down and the bearish outlook. But according to me, this is best starting for a long and successful career, a career that is built on one's real capabilities and "Reality" and not on someone's bullish exuberance.

Campus recruitment is a market place in which it is the Employers (buyers)who should be desperate to get a right person for their organization but I don't think it is a place where a student targets a company or two and gets into them. I am not complaining about what happened to our batch last year but then I wouldn't have complained with what happened this year too.

By the time FT reaches this batch for its annual rankings after 3 years, I would bet that this batch would be atleast as good as other batches if not better. I wish each one of the Class of 2009 batch a great success in the year ahead. I hope that Class of 2010, which would be getting started sometime next week, keeps this in mind and doesn't focus on placements but rather focus on building capabilities to handle tough situations.

Feeling good that I have been able to finally finish this post. See you all shortly

Vote for

2009-04-03T19:52:00.003+05:30

It's election time in India; slowly but steadily election fever is drawing away eye balls and air-time from the financial meltdown and recession

My tryst with voting this time got triggered by Jaagore. Though the Jaagore initiative didn't quite meet my expectation, it triggered action, which I think is a great achievement in the social space. I finally managed to locate my ERO and submit my voter registration form.

Other dimension of this election is that my earlier boss Shri Dr. Sravan Kumar Dasoju is contesting from Secunderabad parliamentary constituency (Andhra Pradesh). I had sensed this when I met him before moving to Delhi. This person has the energy, passion and guts to take a decision and follow it up with action. He was Head HR in ca reputed IT company in Hyderabad but then he listened to his calling. I hope there are more candidates like this.

With his background I'm sure he would add great value to national skill building initiative. He is so passionate to help people from rural background and those from backward sections, which I happened to witness during my short stint with him. Hat's off Dr. Sravan.

Very few believe in what their heart is saying and very few act upon it. By giving opportunity to such a person, Chiranjeevi, Praja Rajyam Party President, has done a great job. I wish people of this contituency recognize the opportunity to elect such a person who can positively influence livelihood of many sons and daughters of the country.

A website has been set up to support him and I urge all the voters of Andhra Pradesh and Secunderabad constituency visit this site Dr. Sravan's web page and learn more about him.

I located his speech on Youtube, which I think is average and doesn't fully convey what this man really is.

I wish him the best and wish that more people, who believe they can contribute through politics, take such step and change this country.

My thoughts, mixed randomly - 2

2009-03-18T21:29:00.002+05:30

While I have abandoned the translation thing, I thought I would share something other thought that occurred to me while at ISB and is still with me.

My question was: How long would firms try to outdo themselves and analyst forecasts, quarter after quarter. And in this mad rush what exactly are they achieving or ending up doing. For me most of the business (and even human) world grows by exploiting nature. There are very few businesses that don't draw from nature. Human beings, as individuals are less potent than they are when they are organized into societies and further into focused institutions called business organizations.

Till a certain extent one can draw from the nature without really impacting the overall picture but as the exploitation crosses a certain limit, there will be impact, small but slowly growing into a devastating one. Once the damage is done, it is difficult to comment whether it can be reversed to any extent. Government, an institution that has been established by society to manage the common activities of the human society surely takes advantage of the authority and keeps on imposing taxes as a price for exploiting nature. But what is government made of? Nothing but other human beings; would these guys in government think differently than those in business? I doubt. They to respond to the situation and react in a way that at least doesn't harm them if not benefit them.

Nature, which we are exploiting without even blinking for a second, is slowly but surely undergoing significant change, definitely a damaging one. For an individual, life is normally in harmony with nature but organized business distorts the harmony and separates the individual from nature and in a certain takes away the sensitivity to Nature and the natural balance.

In our attempt to prove that Markets are perfect and that we can value anything intelligently, we are bothered about discounting the future cash flows and more about the underlying assumptions. And as far as I know, none of the analysts or financial modeling experts consider sustainability or impact of nature while determining terminal value unless the effect is substantial and is well known at that time.

We keep coming up different fads but I really don't see the conviction and belief to take decisions that have very little impact in the short term but have great impact in the future. Somehow we seem to be too selfish and don't care much about what happens after 20-30 years forget about 100-200 years or a 1000 years.

The ad on oil conservation in which the boy comes up with the idea of setting up a cycle repair shop when he grows is a nice depiction of our day to day behavior. We keep acting as if someone else has to come and tell us what to do. This is true even for the top men leading countries and corporations, they too are expecting to be told. If we don't tell ourselves what to do, surely nature will come up with another tsunami or a drought or a hurricane or something far more devastating and unexpected to give the message.

There is nothing wrong in leading a happy life but acting aggressively with Nature is not the right way to happiness.

May be on the extreme side but nevertheless with some truth in it, Stacy Blackman rightly says Did B-Schools Create the Financial Crisis?. Click on link to read more.

My closing thought is this - may be it is time for us to think and decide if what we were trying to do in the last few years in the name of different ideologies is correct or is there are a need to fundamentally change our approach towards the connection between life, business, nature and society and factor that into the day to day life.

Pics from Agra Tour

2009-03-15T22:01:00.001+05:30

Some pics from my recent Agra Tour

My thoughts, mixed randomly

2009-03-15T21:11:00.003+05:30

A deep thinking classmate of mine recently shared a link through his gtalk status message. The link led me to arecent post about the commencement address delivered by J K Rowling at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

It's a great piece of reading and inspired me to come back to the blog that I have been ignoring for quite sometime. Coincidentally I came across a piece of paper on which I scribbled my thoughts long back, really long back, back then when I had no idea about what I would do in life.

I thought it would be idea not just to share the link that I could relate strongly but also share how my thoughts were long back and still are. Here it goes:

Victory brings delusions to our mind on the other hand failure brings wisdom and development of personality. Person who didn't experience is like the Lord who doesn't know truth. Failure hits truth on your face. Difficult situations evoke divine qualities such as humanity, empathy, unity etc. Great are the chances for a person to become a demon while in pleasure, for thinking to go bizarre and lead to destruction of the man.

Don't blame difficulties rather listen to silent lessons from them. Pleasure is a kind of intoxication. If you are weak, don't surrender to pleasures rather enjoy and let other enjoy life; don't become a pleasure addict. Not everyone may not be able to speak truth all the time, if you are like that too, at least accept the truth, you will slowly realize that only thing permanent is truth. Heart is like a horse, unless you tie the right blinders, it run towards the truth. If you don't do that, it will start wandering and start getting lost in the unreal illusions.

Huh, I never knew it takes so much effort translate something from my Telugu to English. So I take a break now and would come back later. Meanwhile go through
J K Rowling's address and give it a thought.

ISB ranked 15th by FT

2009-01-27T21:10:00.002+05:30

ISB has proved that it is no one-day wonder by climbing up in the latest FT rankings to 15th position from last year's 20th. Check out FT Rankings 2009.

I'm sure all the ISBians are greatly elated. While none of the ranking mechanisms can fully capture the picture completely, it can act as a proxy. This would surely attract more number of international students adding to the diversity at ISB.

India surely needs more schools such as ISB considering the Human Resources and the demographic dividend that we boast of. We seem to be moving in two extremes - on one side we have countless number of colleges that offer MBA's or the equivalent there are only few colleges that produce MBA's who count. Either the existing colleges tighten the belt and start treating MBA as a course not similar to MCA or some other course or let new colleges that understand the essence of MBA be set up.

The over focus we have on the result that too the short-term puts too much stress on the system. Even though ISB or the other top colleges give no assurance of placements, I can safely claim that more than 80-90% of applicants believe that admission to ISB means a salary 20% more than the average (interesting statistic, isn't it).

We need more and more entrepreneurs and I hope the system becomes a facilitator rather than being the enormous hindrance, which is what it is now. To get into a job, you need no license but to get into a business, you need 101 clearances and to acquire them you have to graft the officials. Lots of energy gets drowned in overcoming the system. It is further more funny to see the politicians claiming the achievements of private sector as their despite the fact that the private sector not only has to earn and ROE but also to pay for the grafts.

This time placements at ISB would be a different game compared to last year and I hope that the challenging times would bring out some bright entrepreneurial diamonds. Good luck Co 09

Random Musings

2009-01-17T18:25:00.002+05:30

Last week was fully occupied by Satyam scam, most of the time being spent in jumping to extreme conclusions - one that says Raju confessed the truth and that Satyam is in trouble and the other being that he used the confession letter to start another scam and that money has been siphoned to Maytas/property buying, so Satyam may recover.

I have quite a few close friends (apart from ISBians) who are with Satyam and Maytas. Incidentally both the sectors these firms operate in have been hit hard by recession already and this scam comes another major blow.

Only reason that I could come up with for Raju's action is that as one climbs the ladder of success, he starts attracting too many close people around, who may not be connected to the reasons of your success and in the noise of their advise, rationale is lost and results in this kind of disaster.

I have traveled to Lonavala near Mumbai on an official trip. The most horrible thing is the Mumbai traffic. During this trip I managed to finish Arvind Adiga's "The White Tiger," and it's effect on me is this - it amplified my hatred towards the luxury car owners of Delhi (though Honda City, which is used in the book, is not a luxury car).

Traffic in Delhi is always a Prisoner's Dilemma situation. Everyone wants to go ahead but knows that following rules in a normal situation is the best behavior but then in Delhi no day is a normal day, so breaking the traffic rules is the only way to reach your destination. Always stay in the wrong lane, better in the middle of two lanes so that you can turn to the one that is moving fast. Every time I enter a traffic signal situation, almost invariable the car from the left cuts me and zooms ahead.

Every other car driver (or owner) thinks that his car is a Ferrari and every other car has to give way.

The other book I'm reading a little slowly is the Biography of Warren Buffet, written by Alice Schroeder. The author reiterates time and again that Warren Buffet has made much higher returns than the market while taking less risk. I have read little about Buffet earlier and I am relatively new to the Market, but from what I read, I felt that Mr. Buffet was taking unsystematic risk in a systematic way, there could've been a gain or loss. This must be the way to beat the market - take unsystematic risk in a systematic way and insure yourself.

Delhi's winter has been horrible and I am sure that the summer would be too. I am planning to visit Old Delhi and take long walks as I used to do in Hyderabad before the weather becomes really hot. Would appreciate any guidance.

That's all for now. See you again shortly

Working as an Employee - Risks and Rewards

2009-01-11T11:12:00.005+05:30

My father was an entrepreneur and this always made me believe that entrepreneurship would be my way too. However by the time I finished my diploma engineering, I had no option but to take up a job, may be I could've still tried to start something but then entrepreneurship was not my priority, there were many other important things for me in life. So instead I took up a job.

One of the biggest problems in a jobs is that one is controlled by another human being. However intelligent or smart a boss is, unless he behaves as a human being instead of the artificially created "boss" character, it is difficult to work under one. Fortunately I ended up with some very good human beings as bosses, except the second one who was too caught up with being a boss.

The risk reward equation for me so far as an employee goes like this - you give your best, you may (70 - 90% of the time) get the best, you be mediocre and you'll get the average (90 - 100% of the time), you do mistakes and errors, intentional or unintentional and you'll get fired (0 - 20% of the time) but then when a bolt strikes in some form you can get fired (0 - 100% of the time) and when you want something to happen,it rarely happens( happens only 0-10% of the time). So you've to be patient enough to make things happen and persistent enough with your effort to reap the reward but you can surely laze around and stay far from the firing line in a job.

But the biggest risk of factors that you have no control over affecting your fate is the biggest risk. You feel I've given my best but why has this happened and sometimes I am ready to give my best but then would it be enough.

I joined Bakelite in a very interesting way. After losing my first job, I was desperately trying to get a full-time job and doing everything that I could think of. But then, back in 1994, there were few job advertisements forget about job-sites to post your resume. On one such day, I received a letter forwarded from my village that was sent by Bakelite, Nacharam unit asking me to attend an interview in week. I never knew Bakelite has some openings nor I sent my resume to them, later I learnt that Bakelite guys have picked up addresses of the top to students from our college and sent us interview letters. After two rounds of interviews I managed to get that job.

I finished 14 months of the 24 months training period, during which time my immediate boss and his manager were both impressed with my performance. Around this time there was a change in the management and there was a directive reduce costs. The HR manager also had a target, he could do nothing with the unionized staff so he decided to transfer or throw out the trainees and newly joined supervisors. And this news leaked out to us. For the first I experience the risk associated with a job and how one's life is in control of someone else. I was very frustrated, I questioned the HR manager - why he couldn't foresee this and why did he recruit us.

You trust someone in good faith and if he happens to be not in control of events but his actions/inactions affect your future; this is what is happening at Satyam with all the employees, I feel.

One thing I learned from the Bakelite episode was that there is always a risk of loosing your job due to a reason that you have no clue or control about. And due to this you may end up in a very bad position even if for a short while. Even though the probability of such thing happening is close to zero (not zero actually), as one wouldn't like to go through the distress situation and wants to keep that probability to zero (not close to but actually and firmly to zero), everyone who is taking up an employment must be prepared to face this risk.

Some risk mitigation measures would be actively pruning your Resume, having savings worth 6 months expenses all the time and actively maintaining relationships.

As human beings, the worst thing to happen for us is to live in uncertainty. We would like to know what is happening, if not about the next 100 years, atleast about the next 100 days.

"This too shall surely pass," however I wish that every Satyamite (not just employees) is favorably blessed by the God.

Management and Handling Ambiguity

2009-01-07T21:27:00.004+05:30

Before I joined ISB, I received feedback from my Manager (s) that I need to improve my ability to handle ambiguity. They even said that as you go up there will be more and more ambiguity and that one has to learn to handle it.

I could understand that ambiguity increases as you go up, I never really understood how they were handling ambiguity and how their actions were improving the situation. Everytime a unexplainable decision was taken, they blamed "Management."

It is very interesting to note that this is the same thing I observed even in the old economy firm that I first worked with. Everything was blamed on the elusive and invisible "Management." At that point I was in the junior cadre and thought that the senior managers formed the Management and used to get little surprised when the senior managers themselves blamed "Management." But then when I saw the CXO level also blame the "Management" I couldn't stop myself from wondering where/who the hell is this "Management." But Mr. Ramalinga Raju of Satyam, by taking complete blame on himself has kind of answered my question that the "Management" lies at the top and now where else.

How foolish does he expect the shareholders by stating that he and he alone was responsible for all the non-sense. He may have given the okay for all the decisions but then every other top manager must have known what was happening and had all the opportunities to raise alarm. To this a classmate of mine said that who knows if someone has raised an alarm and he was stopped. But then raising alarm is to get attention and unless you get enough attention and thereby some action, you shouldn't stop.

May be this is a reflection of our behavior. As someone said, we are ready to fire anything as long as it is over someone else's shoulder; we will never take responsibility and I think this explains why the "Management" Devil never dies - it doesn't matter if it is old economy or new economy. We have so much pressure to comply with the boss that we are afraid to talk against the decisions that may harm the company forget about taking decisions.

In my view handling ambiguity is not sitting there and waiting for ambiguity to get cleared; instead everyone in the management has to work to reduce ambiguity at each level and give decisive direction to lower levels. I had seen that very few managers actually accept ambiguity and talk about it lest try to reduce it. In fact their behavior adds to the ambiguity.

What I would like to say is that every employee at every level is part of Management and that they have take responsibility to the possible level and reduce ambiguity in company's business and take decisive action towards performing company's business. This is what would benefit all the stakeholders not the shareholders who just give the money. Only then can we expect to rise against the tide not just along with it.

It is a day of great importance to India and to all the so-called Corporate Managers and Leaders. When I read Mr. Raju's letter, it appeared to me like a suicide note acquitting everyone else from any responsibility.

I must share this small discussion I had with my colleague who is active in the stock market the day-before-yesterday about Satyam. He was saying that since the company had cash, he would buy the stock if it falls to Rs.100/- as at that price it would be lucrative for other companies to takeover; my comment was that one cannot be sure how the money would be used and that may be the reason no one is yet making a serious effort to takeover and now that whole cash has vanished in to the past. We can only wait and watch what happens to MAYTAS (reverse of SATYAM)

A Very Happy New Year

2009-01-01T20:08:00.005+05:30

I always wondered why do we celebrate a New Year. Strongest association I have with a new year is that I would keep wrongly writing the year part of the date for sometime. Apart from this the zillion number of times I would repeat wish you happy new year. It feels nice that we have some reason to gift a wish and smile to each other as we tend to make good mornings formal and serious very quickly even at any place. In the bigger scheme of things I don't know how a year matters but as human beings we tend to make any kind of measure seriously and a year seems to be an important one.

Last year at ISB, I wasn't very happy with my performance, despite my diversity, dean's list, success in the most-participated-at-ISB-competition, I wasn't shortlisted by any of the consulting companies but then I have learnt my lesson in life that your plan and God's plan need not be the same and if your plan fails, God's plan will prevail - nice and easy way to excuse oneself of any sort of failure. After all human beings are supposed to be thinkers to make sense (awkward phrase).

2009 promises to be a year of different kind. Mankind screwed itself in a big way and created a catastrophe of a different kind. Will the collective intelligence succeed in coming up a with a text book solution and be able to implement it as meticulously; would be noble-prize or other-great-prize winning intellectuals be able to predict how the future would like; would be growth again or will it be sustainability or will it be the Green agenda. Lots of questions but no answers, in fact I don't think even the most powerful man can predict what route humanity is going to take in 2009.

We can take respite in one thing atleast. 2009 cannot be as bad as we are expecting it to be. Take my own case, my firm has been awarded the first ever license to build and operate a transmission line on the first day of the year and the project is going to take off even while three other project bids are under process. For me it's going to be year completely different from 2008. 2008 despite bringing me the most success in terms of money and fame has been a disappointing one from learning perspective but 2009 is already promising.

My reading has picked up and I'm reading a wide variety of books. I am reading Snowball, Stories by Sudha Murthy, some nice Telugu literature, apart from all the random readings. I have just started Snowball and I don't know why but I see lots of similarities between this book and Godfather (by Mario Puzo). Let's see how I would feel as I move further.

2009 is a year of challenge - it's going to test each and everyone of us on how we are going to take it up and handle it. Just keep the phrase "This too shall pass" in mind if you ever get bogged down

Handling difficult times - 2

2008-12-23T19:05:00.003+05:30

Though I am continuing the series, I have decided not to force myself to maintain any continuity, which means you can expect these posts to be random and readers will have to make the connection.

One very important skill necessary to handle difficult times is planning. We are experts in corporate planning and very easily make assumptions about different variables but when it comes to planning in personal life, we act in a completely different way.

We don't want to take any risk in personal life and can only visualize a straight path almost all the time. There is no contingency planning, which means even a small unforeseen event can throw us into a negative spiral. Instead if we assess the bottom of a downfall (even the stock market can't go negative) and then be prepared for it, I think the shock will be minimal and we can fight the negative spiral.

Like in corporate planning, we need to make assumptions in our personal life and should weight the probability of different outcomes and come up with the expected outcome. If we are either too optimistic or too pessimistic, then we are in for some kind of trouble.

That's all for today. Meanwhile I am back in Delhi after a whirlwind sleepless four day trip to Hyderabad. I have done some very interesting things during this trip apart from meeting my classmates at Solstice 2008 that included giving a treat to my friends by getting them all together for the first time.

Solstice 2008

2008-12-16T20:07:00.002+05:30

My trip to ISB for Solstice has been in doldrums till yesterday but all of a sudden I have decided to go.

This would be a great opportunity to meet with all my classmates,few current batch students and few alums. I will also be meeting my friends, those who know me from my school days.

I am planning to visit my native place and my grandfather. I shall continue the "Handling Difficult Times" series once I am back from this trip.

Handling difficult times - 1

2008-12-13T21:59:00.005+05:30

It was not the best of times when I was looking out for a job for the first time in 1994. I was searching for a technical job and all the job openings were in sales. I never thought twice as my objective was simple - start earning before the 100 bucks I got from my grandfather exhausted. I took up a Jr. Sales Officer job at a start up that was to publish a telugu socio-political magazine by name "Sravanthi." I had no chance to think about "how my job was related to what I studied" neither did I mull over "what's in that job that I enjoy." I just needed to get started and I did. From then my career took so many twists and turns, some driven by me and some driven by situations, in fact I never thought about going back to college till 2006 (which is 11 years after I started working).

These surely are difficult times and it is more probable that even at the top B-schools, one may not be in a position to choose but one would be in a situation to be chosen by someone. However there is no need to despair, one would not be in a position to influence the situation at all times; you will have to accept the fact and the situation and act accordingly.

This is not the end of this post, I am going to discuss how I handled difficult times and hope that the readers would benefit from this.

In thick of things

2008-11-17T21:42:00.004+05:30

Only reason for my inactivity is that I am right now in thick of things.
I have been doing donkey stuff, which does have certain value addition but also gives a feeling that you have earned your salary for the day. When I began 5 months ago, I wondered whether there would be any serious activity in the Power Transmission sector but suddenly things started rolling when every thing else seems to be slowing. This clearly shows how decoupled I'm from the main stream business, it's seriously contra-scenario here.

However the decoupling is only till the point where white paper is involved, as soon as the time comes for the other paper (Indian currency is in different colors, so can't say greenback)things are gonna change. But you have to be optimistic till the time you actually face the situation, you can be prepared for the worst though.

Solstice this year will be held on 19th and 20th Nov and I am looking forward to meeting all my classmates again. While 6 months is not a long period at work, most people would have overcome the starting troubles. I look forward to listening whether the paid holiday syndrome is over or is it still on.

Meanwhile it would be interesting to see how immune B-school admissions are from recession.

The current financial melt down is going to provide a new episode for "Commanding Heights." Uncertainty rules

Last couple of weeks

2008-11-02T13:39:00.003+05:30

I got to see how Delhi celebrates Diwali this time and I can say that it is a much bigger festival here than in South. Dasera is celebrated much better in South. Bursting of crackers started at around 8pm and went on till midnight.

I had four days of holidays for Diwali and despite all the planning, I managed to do only one thing - watch a silly movie titled Fashion. It was a welcome break however. Sometimes you just want to lie down and spend time lazily, it is a luxury nowadays considering that everyone seems to be busy and wants others to be busy too. In fact people get surprised when I say that I am able to restrict my office time between 9:30 to 5:30 except on few odd days. At the beginning of my career, I was in a similar situation and I was able to devote considerable time for my hobbies. I am able to do this again.

Another observation I made is that though some things such as, providing good service to customers are quite obvious as a customer but most service providers either forget it or don't get it right. I have experienced both Pizza Hut and Dominos service and I can clearly say that Pizza Hut is much better and will surely do well. Similarly I saw Meru Cabs doing much better than Easy Cabs.

After the B-school competition season, it is time for cv reviews. I have been getting lots of requests and trying my best to give whatever inputs I can. Those with interesting past-experience are the ones who find this process most difficult. Sometimes you feel why can't they look at me, talk to me and then give me the job. After all I am taking a bigger risk than the company in joining them - if I fail, my career will be ruined but the company can easily replace me, and if I do well both parties will benefit. However firms are more worried about many other non-sense parameters and the cost of observing your performance that they would never do this. All the talk of diversity, opportunity, risk taking etc by companies is nothing short of nonsense as they go back to their tradition of recruiting people who fit into a set mold.

Change is easy talk but difficult to implement. I have been reading a lot of books but a simple auto-biography titled "A Celebration of Youth" by Mr. Anand Mohan Lal has been the most interesting readings of all. There was no way I would have even stumbled upon this book had it not been sent to me by a friend of mine from Hyderabad.

Apart from the admission queries, cv reviews, request for a xxx report spam mails, there have been regular "I am getting married - invites" have been regular in my mail box. My Diwali greetings spam also got responses from old colleagues and friends, which was possible due to nice feature in gmail.

Weather in Delhi is at its best now. That's all for now.

Movie Review - Fashion

2008-10-29T14:32:00.002+05:30

It happened in the past and it happened again. You hear a lot about the Director, his past successes, see the promos and feel the new movie is gonna be a sure shot hit, you book your ticket and watch it on day one - phew, the movie is not upto your expectation.

This is how I felt after watching fashion. Madhur Bhandarkar surely did some research but the plot is not worth producing a movie on. While Priyanka and Kangna attempted to act, Arbaaz suited the best for his role. Photography is quite good but the script is loose and there is nothing great in the movie.

My verdict - Don't watch

Time for action

2008-10-20T19:27:00.003+05:30

I have been postponing many things in life and i always postponed them saying that i will start working on them as soon as I finish this new big adventure (mainly with my career) I have taken up.

After writing the last blogpost, I felt it is time for me write down my goals afresh and start working on them on a daily basis. It suddenly occurred to me that I have no more excuses and that I should start working.

I am preparing my list of goals and would be working on them on a daily basis. Despite being ambitious, smart (in my perception and hard working (many others would agree with this), I have never worked meticulously; rather I focused on one thing at a time. But now I think I don't have that luxury anymore. Everyday is going to be important and I need to use the time productively to live a life that I would like to. The life I would like to live includes writing blogs and even books, traveling to different places, interacting and collaborating with people on different issues etc etc. Rural India surely occupies a large portion of my mind space and social business is something that I have been thinking from quite sometime.

One simple method to overcome procrastination I have discovered is to make your goals public and to make it really happen, set a deadline (this i have learnt at ISB). This is what I am gonna do from now on.

Happy Diwali to everyone. May the gloom of recession be overcome with the light of optimism

Let us Stand Up and Take Action against Poverty

2008-10-15T21:16:00.006+05:30

If there is one thing that can separate human being from other animal species on Earth that would be elimination of Poverty.

Overcoming poverty is the first freedom that human beings would need to achieve if they have to enjoy other sorts of freedom modern society (supposedly) provides.

In absence of any other respective means, crime or politics seem to be the only way out of Poverty. This is reiterated today by Arvind Adiga, winner of Man Booker prize this year. Both the major forms of economy, communism and capitalism, aim to provide some sort of equality to all the people. One attempts to forcibly distribute the outcome while the other attempts to provide uniform opportunity for all.

So much has been said about the role of education to overcome poverty but it is a long process. And during this long process many will get crushed in poverty. It is very important that we as a Society should "Stand Up" against evils such as Poverty whatever the cause may be. Having been born in this modern era, every human being is entitled to live a respectable life.

Everywhere around the world, governments are trying to keep unemployment rates down but the cries of poor people almost always go unheard. Politicians try to manipulate numbers and statistics rather than genuinely work for the causes that would help the poor.

One of my goals is to build a home for those in distress, where everyone is welcome without any discrimination, where anyone can get their basic necessities of food, shelter and clothing fulfilled for a week and then further enter into a sustainable routine. I shall use all my resources to make this a reality and then duplicate this in as many places as possible. I urge all the readers to think about how they can contribute to eliminate poverty and stand up against it. Please leave your comment as a way to say that you would like "stand up" against poverty.

From this month, I am going to save minimum of 5% of my income towards this cause and would work few extra hours to increase this fund

Thanks for reading and contributing.

A major battle won - Update

2008-10-13T21:30:00.002+05:30

This is in continuation with my previous post with the above title. I must appreciate the telecom major for accepting my input, with resistance from the front-end though, and them taking action.

Here's the proof of their action and their attempt to cover a mishap and convert it into something positive for them:

Recession Economics

2008-10-09T11:00:00.003+05:30

Everyone is talking about financial crisis and the looming recession. However some B+ve thinkers have come up with research findings to cheer up people in this situation.

One such article talks about how people take more care about them thereby becoming more active and healthy. Another column writer talks about how trouble raises human consciousness thereby helping us to become united in the fight.

Reading all these and considering that the real interest rates are negative (inflation is more than risk free) I too started thinking that it is time to have fun rather than investing for future. All the I-bankers who must have amassed large amounts of money during the hey days should also loosen the purse strings and splurge and see if the economy will bounce back due to their increased spending.

Most of us don't get the option to choose a life style, instead we get drawn to a certain type based on what we see and what people around us say and then get trapped. This is good time for all those who thought they got trapped in a burning candle life style to get out and start a oil lamp life style.

It's time for everyone to read "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint Exupéry and examine what their world consists of. It is time to weed out unnecessary things and plant things that you always wanted to in your planet. It is time to refresh/expand/explore your own planet and also become aware that each one of us is living in a different planet.

Another interesting thought I wanted to share is about insurance and lotteries. After a discussion it suddenly occurred to me that both of them can be classified as soci-philosophical instruments. By choosing to subscribe to these instruments, the concerned individual is ready to give up a part of his hard earned money and place it in the hands of fate, allowing it to decide how to redistribute the pool, funny, ain't it.

That's all for now. Happy Dasera to all of you

The biggest need of human race (as of now)

2008-09-27T19:55:00.003+05:30

Of all the species that ever appeared on Earth, human beings are the most interesting ones. Apart from eating food, sleeping, fulfilling other similar bio-needs, procreating, growing old and finally dying, they also indulge themselves in many forms of activities that would so funny if viewed from the activities of an animal (blogging is one such thing, both writing and reading). Despite our seemingly unlimited shortcomings, we seemed to have successfully survived for quite a long period even while destroying nature and other species. We have been overloading and overusing many of the natural resources and call it development.

One of the biggest problems since last few years has been our aggression and over focus on economic development. Everyone in the world wants to grow not just at the normal pace but at a pace greater than everyone else (including me). We are ready to do anything to achieve this. As long as no one spots the mess we are creating, it's fine and we can boast our great achievements but when things go wrong we blame it on others - government should have taken care of it, rich people are to be blamed, USA/China are to be blamed, religion is surely the biggest culprit and so on and so forth. If there is a God and if he is watching us from the top (for that matter from any direction), he must be having hell a lot of fun. He must have forgotten counting our mistakes and misdeeds as much as our righteous behavior. He must be wondering how the hell is this possible, I never meant all this to happen.

Coming to a serious note, when I started writing this post, all I wanted to say is that it is time for a new religion. It has been quite sometime a messiah has appeared on Earth and taught us how to use our complex faculties and still be happy. None of the religions appear to be able to answer/solve the questions of the different types of experts and different categories of people we got divided into currently. While the oldest of the teachings are still relevant and are still meaningful if understood, we seemed to have stopped understanding simple things in life. We need a religion which uses complex formula and rituals to keep us busy throughout the time without having to do anything with nature or other people.

We seemed to have forgotten living life and seemed to be driven by things that we don't understand anymore, which are not primary to our nature.

Oh God, if you are truly watching me write this silly blogpost, please don't take this as an expression of frustration over the financial crisis or my angst about the serial bombings of Indian Mujaheddin (what is so Indian about this outfit and why Indian? any patriotic reason or is it like Unilever calling itself Hindustan Level limited, only God knows), sorry God for the digression, but please take this as a sincere prayer to you to send us a Messiah who can give us a religion that will be the most modern,is not controversial, needs no sacrifices except self-sacrifice, doesn't need large donations (or land), doesn't allow any unnatural killings (direct or indirect) except for natural needs (please don't treat this as an exhaustive list and pardon me if I excluded any other important covenants) and as I believe you know everything, I hope you will surely do a perfect job (unlike me, so many grammatical errors in this post itself) and save the human species (otherwise of all other species) from early extinction - I remain, Humbly waiting for your action, a tiny speck on a tiny speck called by us as Earth.

Difference between Real business world and B-school cases

2008-09-26T22:05:00.002+05:30

The whole world has been busy analyzing the fall of Wall St. giants and now there is divided opinion about the bail out. There have been interesting comments from different types of experts. But all this is ex-post, when everything was going right (atleast appeared to be), no one was complaining.

A year back, sitting in a B-school classroom, I was thinking that I can understand every business model, scenario and situation. But after about 4 months in the real corporate world, I still have no questions about my ability to understand business models, scenarios and situations but I realized that if there one thing that separates class room from real world then it must be "transaction costs."

While appearing to be most simple, transaction costs are the most difficult to model or come up with assumptions about. Their nature is so different that even the smartest manager cannot predict them. They are ubiquitous and they need no planning, they just happen.

A major battle won

2008-09-17T19:35:00.003+05:30

I have been fighting a battle with one of the telecom biggies for more than a month now. While I have been successful at individual level, my interaction made me feel that these guys are not that customer friendly. They were trying to be legally correct, so I decided to take them on. But then somewhere in the middle I felt that to benefit all the customers like me, I must not first try to see if something can be done without making the issue public.

And I can now claim that I have been able to convince the telecom biggie about a practice of billing postpaid customers as wrong and made them change the practice. Considering that the financial impact is in the tune of 100+ crores, I consider this as a big achievement. As I have promised confidentiality, I will not be making the name of the company public. But I suggest that you check your postpaid bills (whichever company they are from) for the months of August, September and October to verify the following:
1. The monthly charges are for the previous period (which means a bill dated 10th August has monthly charges, say for the period 8th July to 9th August and not 11th August to 10th September, which is the next period - don't worry about the day but look at the month)
2. If the charges happen to be for the next period (as explained above), then make sure they are reversed in September or October bill (no monthly charges :))
3. If the charges are not reversed write to me to know about how to approach the company and get them reversed.

I know that Rs. 250 to 500 bucks may not be much but allowing charges for next period means you are negligent and amounts to giving away your right.

Hope I didn't bore you with this encrypted message but I hope you've been able to read between the lines and decrypted the message.

Delhi Blasts 2008

2008-09-14T11:03:00.003+05:30

5 bomb blasts, 20 dead and many more injured, result of illogical attacks by god-knows-who and god-knows-why terrorists. Even after thousands of years of civilization, we, the human race, has not been able to overcome hatred and violence. Only one kind of violence is natural and acceptable (?, to me at least), which is for food and survival, everything else is inflected by contrived human thinking.

Every terrorist or naxal outfit has its roots in the suffering of people either socially or economically. Politics is the institution that society has come up to overcome this but politics in turn is aggravating social and economical gaps leading to further problems. When would our politicians stop this silly nonsense and focus and what they are really expected to do. When would people demand that the politicians do what they ought to do.

As an individual one can do whatever he chooses to and by nature is designed to be selfish. But the moment he chooses to live in a society and benefit from the outcomes of organized labor and other benefits of organized society, he has to keep in mind that some of his actions can harm others and in turn trigger a negative spiral leading to hatred and violence.

To ensure a peaceful society we have practice what I call enlightened selfishness. If you harm someone, that negative energy is going to flow and will eventually harm you back, in what proportion no one knows. If the idea that brain waves have energy and can influence circumstances, then this will be all the more true.

We just have to ensure that our actions do not trigger any negative trigger. I know this is idealistic but I think this is the only answer and as far as I know Mahatma Buddha tried to simplify implementing this by his preachings. I know I have drifted away and not kept myself to the topic at hand as taught at B-school, but what can I do, I am more of a human being than a B-school student

ISB admissions for Class of 2010 essay

2008-08-31T19:35:00.007+05:30

In the race to outsmart each other, ISB adcom seems to have come up with a tough topic for one of the admission essays. While the essence of the topics remain the same every year, the topic changes, putting the applicants in a fix. From all the requests that I have been getting I have gathered that there is an essay asking the applicant to describe what would he/she do if he becomes student body president.

Most applicants think that they have to gather as much information as possible and only then attempt the essay. I don't know how many people have approached the current and the previous GSB president.

My sincere advise and request to all the applicants is as below:

Are you expected to know everything about what happens at ISB? I don't think so, if you feel so, write to adcom to describe about the position rather than approaching alums you know. If you know too much, you will have to explain how you know in the interview, which may not be a good thing. On the other hand assuming everything may not be correct.

If I have to attempt this essay, I would try to think about how does the student body look like (details available on ISB site), what could be challenges they face, who are the different parties the President have to address (interact and work with), what kind of approach would be good (you would be dealing with a diverse and smart peer group) etc and then put down the essay. Rather than focusing on the specifics, I suggest that essay should address the big issues.

This is more than what I wanted to share, I would take leave otherwise I may get a call from the honor(horror) committee. I wonder what to do if they take away my degree now :?

Wassup? An Update

2008-08-28T21:28:00.004+05:30

I don't know about others but I can say one thing about life after ISB, it becomes slow. At ISB so many things keep happening and you hardly can catch up with half of them but outside things move so slowly that you have to keep pushing them hard.

After watching Barack Obama and Michelle Obama talk in the convention and comparing that with the speech of Chiranjeevi, who launched a new party in Andhra Pradesh called "Praja Rajyam," I started writing a post with the title "What are we proud about, as a Nation?" but then stopped midway due to laziness. The question still remains, while Mr. and Mrs. Obama tried to inspire by talking about the values of America, American dream etc etc, Chiranjeevi could hardly inspire, instead he chose to use the cine background and inspire people. He still made an attempt to relate to people. But in India politics are all about community, caste, regionalism and criticism of the opponent but nothing what we stand as a nation and what we want to achieve as a nation. I think I'll leave it here and ask you guys to leave your comments.

On the other hand, I managed to trigger two interesting and won a small corporate battle.

As a part of our ELP we did a project and I made one innovative suggestion. Recently I came across a source that could make that idea a reality. Immediately I got in touch with the entrepreneur and linked him up with the corporate. I am helping this guy with the proposal and I'm sure it is gonna work. There is a lot of thrill in seeing one's idea take shape into reality.

Second, I got in touch with the CEO of an interesting company and started discussing about how his services could be launched in India and what could be the potential. This too is exciting as I could see how local knowledge combined with global expertise can do wonders.

Finally I won a battle with Airtel as a customer. Now I am waiting for a call from an alum with Airtel to decide whether I should turn this into a war and see how a corporate would react to an attack from a customer equipped with a B-school degree. I have already won the battle and I have the required ammunition to take them head on but I am thinking what's-in-it-for-me. However if you are an Airtel Post-paid customer I can share the details privately so that you too can benefit from what I did. Hope that raises curiosity, leave your contact details or write to me if you want a response.

There is an early morning meeting tomorrow, so I must take leave know. Bbye and good night.

Market competitive pay may not be perfect but it works

2008-08-19T21:27:00.001+05:30

I wrote this post as a contribution for another blog - http://marketcompetitivepay-pegasus.blogspot.com/ but decided to reproduce it here for the regulars

Whether it is the stock market or the job market, Market does work, though they may not be perfect as yet and may not become perfect ever. Cost-benefit analysis may not be done consciously, either by firms or individuals, it is always done.

There are many direct and indirect costs and benefits involved. What is valued, how much it is valued is different for the firm and for the individual. For example, consider office location. I know many people who are willing to take a lower salary so that their travel time is reduced. Recently I met a lady who changed the job so that her travel time is reduced but after joining she learned that the new company is also shifting to a far off location shortly. I am sure that she is going to change her job shortly, once again.

Alternative to Market Competitive Pay is to fix the compensation based on the reservation prices of the firm and the candidate. Based on the value addition, company can calculate its reservation price and similarly candidate can come up with a reservation price based on her priorities. But consider doing this for yourself or the next candidate you want to hire. It is quite difficult in both cases and one immediately tends to fall back on the market information to benchmark. Apart from this the Market Competitive Pay is the BATNA (Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement) for both the parties. Except in few cases where the company or the candidate has clear negotiating power, where we can observe negotiation happening and the compensation may not be comparable to market, in majority of cases Market Competitive pay works. Even in the minority cases, where one party can fix prices, it would lie somewhere in the bargaining zone, which is Market based.

Though HR Managers keep talking about intangible benefits, very rarely they succeed in bringing down the direct salary costs unless the claims are well accepted in the market and the candidates believe the claims to be credible. On the other hand money is credible in all circumstances and conveys lot of information when examined in combination with other information publicly available. This could be one reason, we observe that candidates tend to choose either a well-known firm or a firm that pays very well. Even the reputed firms can't go below a certain level in pay, which indicates that reputation of a firm is only marginally beneficial. Firms that are average in both pay and reputation finally end up with adverse selection issues.

The first two posts rightly identified that stage of career also affects choices of the candidate, we cannot simplify and generalize it. I have personally observed that even gender would play a part. But before we draw a conclusion, we have to verify whether these factors have statistically significant effect on choices or not.

This post clearly sounds a little (or too much) technical but I hope the readers got the essence of it. Feedback and comments would be greatly welcome.

Zidd Karo, Duniya Badlo

2008-08-14T22:56:00.006+05:30

Last time I visited PVR, one ad caught my attention and the title of this post is the punchline of that ad. The ad essentially asks people to push the system in the right direction. If you haven't seen it, here's the video for you:

I tried pushing ICICI and I found that they are far more responsive than the so-called customer savvy telecom players including Airtel and Vodafone. These telecom players must learn something from ICICI's process. May be ICICI's officers are not as trained as the CSE's of Airtel/Vodafone but they follow the process very nicely. Last time when I wrote a post about ICICI network problems, someone from the bank noticed it and requested me to make an official complaint. While the complaint was not against the people, I got a call today from the branch in question and an assurance to take care of any issues if I have any in the future. I had another issue with ICICI last week and I was surprised at the responsiveness of ICICI customer care. I got a call within 24 hours and a resolution in another 12 hours.

On the other hand Airtel has asked for seven working days to revert back to me and that too the response appeared to be an automated response. Surely ICICI is working hard and kudos to the ICICI team.

The issue that I have raised in front of Airtel is not a small one. If all goes in the way I think, it is going to create a bang. Wait for the update on that.

Meanwhile after Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra including their capitals getting flooded, looks like its time for the national capital to get flooded. Fols from Delhi had earlier warned me that I will not be able experience as many rains as in the south here but surprisingly there have been lot of rains and today's rain was really heavy. Since the drain system is not used to these kind of downpours, there is water logging at many places. I don't know if I am the only one facing trouble to drive car as the visibility becomes quite poor in rains but I am little worried about the upcoming winter. But I hope it will not be as worse as people have been telling me.

Finally Happy Independence day.

Customer Service in India

2008-08-08T19:41:00.005+05:30

I am fully aware that by writing this post, I may not only be making the readers aware about the experiences that I have gone through but the generalizations I am going to make may hurt the image of India as the Customer Service back office for the globe.

The sector that I am talking to about is the much touted and highly successful mobile telephony in India, where customer service is all about unfulfilled promises.

The first sore experience is with Vodafone, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh (earlier Hutch) and then now with Airtel Delhi.

In the case of Vodafone, the service failure started in Delhi but even the AP circle didn't handle it well. At the end I had to terminate the connection without paying the bill in protest but they have taken no action till now. In fact I wanted to publish the full mail transcript in the blog but didn't to clutter the blog with nuisance of Vodafone, which claims "Happy to Help" after spending crores of rupees but does "nothing to really help the customer." Vodafone's tagline should be "Happy to Harass" instead of "Happy to Help."

Let's come to the Airtel scene. The quality of service has been good till it came to billing. I must say that the welcome call and the series of service SMSs were all very good. But when it came to billing, things have started going wrong. My efforts to get an answer for my query resulted in nothing. Instead I ended up spending an hour to make Airtel guys understand the problem. During they process they have made wrong claims multiple times and made false promises again and again. In a single day I have encountered as many as three service failures. Finally I gave up and decided to pursue it through mail. I hope they try to learn something from this.

I will post my interactions with Vodafone shortly as they seem to be thinking "Silence and No-reply as the best Customer Service actions."

Friends, let's meet

2008-08-03T11:56:00.000+05:30

There is a saying in Telugu that says "Brothers need not be born under the same roof." I have truly experienced this in life. Time and again whenever I was in trouble, my friends have come to my rescue.

It may appear that it is easy to make friends with people who are similar to you. But this is not true; neither is the saying that opposites attract, at least in my case. My friends are so different that if I put them all together in a single they will surely wonder if it is the same Kiran that they all know.

For my schoolmates I was intelligent but bad guy. I always made friends with the back benchers and revolted against the teachers. While I never dared to bunk classes, I was the one my friends depended for their exams. Our combined studies never benefited them but they benefited me.

At college, friends came from different backgrounds. I become close I fought with initially. All my previous bosses are my good friends even today. Few others became my friends because we shared passion towards certain things in life.

I am planning to get all my friends together sometime in December this year at ISB during the Solstice week. I have not started any work on this but this is an event I am looking forward to.

If there is one thing I am surprised about friendship is that it doesn't need any reasons, similarities or commonalities except that you have spent some time together and shared some thoughts and moments together.

Happy friendship day.

Is ICICI bank's service network choking?

2008-07-22T15:23:00.003+05:30

Since I've moved to Delhi, I've been experiencing problems with ICICI bank's services, both on the internet and at the branch, leading me to feel that ICICI bank's service network is choking.

The overloading problem can be clearly seen on the faces of some ICICI employees. While some have been able to handle the constant pressure, few employees take it out on the customers. ICICI has been trying hard to keep pace with increasing customer base, their increasing demands using technology but seems like it is not being able to keep up with the pace.

I hope someone from ICICI reads this mail and takes it seriously. I am a satisfied customer of ICICI but I may not be if this continues further

Innovation in daily life: Taking advantage of Camera Phone

2008-07-18T11:13:00.004+05:30

When I had to buy my first mobile phone in 2005 (earlier I always had a company phone), I chose not to buy a camera phone. The argument I had was that camera phone may not be allowed in a company that implements ISMS and BS7799.

But recently when I had to buy a second phone, which is a CDMA phone, I had to buy Nokia 6275 that has a camera phone along with Bluetooth. I also bought a 2GB memory card for the phone.

Having a camera phone with enough memory in sunk cost led to a innovative usage that I want to share with you all in this post. But the idea is not new as I have used it at ISB few times. I used my 6 mp Sony camera to take pictures of documents and store them. Once I used the camera to click few pages that I wanted to read later (as per my knowledge, this is not copyright violation as long as you don't copy more than 10% and not use it for commercial purposes).

After moving to Delhi, I have noticed that whenever you are sending a hard copy document to someone, it becomes necessary to keep a copy with you for filing or as a proof. Generally photocopying is done and in some cases the document is scanned and kept. While scanning is a very good, low (direct)cost, paper-saving option, it takes certain amount of time and effort, making it not-so-preferred all the time. In such cases photocopying is done. I wanted to avoid the photocopying and the wastage of paper in the process and started using my camera phone to click the document and copy it to my laptop. This may appear to be a dangerous thing to do as people may use it to copy sensitive documents but if someone wants to steal there are many other easy and powerful ways. This is one innovative usage.

The next one is outside office. Whenever you are assigning a auto guy to carry luggage without you or a lady is going alone in the auto, a simple safety measure is to click the auto regn number and the driver's photo. This should to a great extent introduce fear in the auto guy and restrain him from doing any non-sense. You can't really do much in extreme cases anyway but in most cases you can reduce the probability of problem by saving the photo and letting the guy know about it.

This can be used for handling domestic help, plumbers, electricians, other repairmen too. I am sure that if women use this, they can be little more secure at home and office.

I noticed another such innovative use yesterday. Maharastra Electricity Distribution company (Mahavitaran) is using photo bills in which the photo of the bill with reading is printed in the bill to avoid any disputes related to billing. Imagine the amount of savings achieved in this manner.

Interesting, I thought and decided to share it with you all. Cheers

At peace with life

2008-07-12T16:55:00.000+05:30

I don't remember any other time in my career till now when I was more peaceful with life than now. I am surprised with myself about this. Let me describe the state first. I am getting up at 6AM, going for a jog for half an hour, reaching office early and then doing some sector specific reading, attending a meeting or two, discussing specific issues with a colleague (another B-school recruit), leaving office early, catching a bus (Delhi even has air-conditioned buses and though the fare is double the normal, who would complain when it is only 5 bucks) and then spending some relaxed time, watching no TV, read old telugu chandamama (Chandamama has put up old archives on their site for free, Thank you Chandamama publishers) and going to bed by 10PM. No tension about things that I am not doing, no tension about things that are not happening in the way they ought to be, no tension about anyone, I know that you are growing jealous, but that's the truth.

I have collected some 200+ movies in one shot from a colleague and that is another addition to my collection. One of the advantages of your office being located at Nehru Place is that you can buy anything related to computers in minutes if not in seconds. I bought a 500GB seagate external hard drive for 5k and I can keep all my stuff on that.

PVR is at walkable distance except that the cost has gone up tremendously. Earlier it used to cost 30-40 bucks in Hyderabad in a normal theatre and at Imax it would be 100 bucks but here it costs you 200 bucks but there is convenience for me, no vehicle required so no parking hassles, no travel time required and I can watch a movie even on a working day. That's very good.

That's all for now.

Delhi Auto blogging

2008-07-04T12:12:00.000+05:30

Can i Call this auto blogging.Don't jump to the conclusion that I have come up with some way to blog automatically, all I am saying is that I have started this blogpost in a Delhi auto and wouldn't know if I will be able to finish it by the time I reach Nehru Place from Saket.

It has been a mixed experience till now with Delhi. It has a lot of traffic but the density of houses is quite low compared to other cities. In the colony that I stay I get to hear and see a full grown peacock to which my initial reaction was disbelief and then that of surprise. Initially I thought it was ISB hangover, which is making me hear the sound of another bird as that of peacock's but then I couldn't disbelieve my eyes. Surprisingly Delhi has lots of parks and wide roads except that they are not well utilized. Delhi has umpteen radio stations and if you have a FM radio then you have movie music almost all the time except FIR FM radio that broadcasts different stuff.

Few things are difficult to find in Delhi that you would be able find without effort in Hyderabad. Such things include Idly rawa, groundnuts, curry leaves, sona masoori rice while it is so easy to get fruits and vegetables here. With the help of another telugu guy I have been able to find almost everything that I need.

It took me a month to find a decent house in Delhi despite the fact that there are so many real estate agents and almost all the renting happens through them. One surprising fact is that the trust levels are very low here. In Hyderabad one doesn't need anything excpet being able to pay two months rent in advance and convince the owner that you are a decent guy. But in Delhi you have to show your appointment letter, your identity card and even get your employer to lease the house on your behalf. I had two sour experiences before I met my current house owner who happened to be a very nice guy. One complaint that I have with ISB brand is not working that well with House owners in Delhi, hehehe, in fact even IIMs wouldn't matter too in this case. Due to the love of Indian employers for expats wherein an Indian gets paid lesser than an expat, which would be the opposite in US, living costs are rising in Delhi. Both house ownners and rental agents seem to be thrilled with white-skin and would serve an Indian only if he happens to belong to the elite group. I also found that there are few organized local firms in Delhi that are quite good and one that is worth mentioning is Gulshan properties. If you go to magicbricks.com you will find that most of the ads are placed by them and they have a very good model.

There are too many cars in Delhi and the cause could be anything ranging from lack of public transport, lower fuel costs, lesser taxes on automobiles, wide spread geography of Delhi etc etc. Surely the number of vehicles per person in Delhi would be the highest in the country.Urban agglomeration is not working well in case of Delhi Transport due to distortions created by the system.

Nothing great is happening at work so I am able to spend time on settling. Thanks to BRT corridor, I still have few more minutes to complete this blogpost. At ISB it seems that there are some changes happening with ELP and PAEV. Surely Sarmaji is making things happen. Quite a few ELP projects are sponsored by ISB alum entreprenuers and few have been pushed by alums working in senior positions. One big advantage of having experienced guys in a batch is that they move into senior positions, they understand the benefits of tools well and contribute to the school in a different way.

Finally I managed to finish this post 4 hours after getting down from the auto so I can't call this fully auto blogging but it is only partial-auto-blogpost. Cheers

Life after B-School

2008-07-02T10:50:00.003+05:30

The biggest challenge after B-School is handling reality of the corporate world. While I can't speak for others, the key challenge is to manage the gap between your expectations about work and what exactly is offered to you. The next challenge is handling different species that one gets to see at office. While there are as many complex species at B-school because of the intense focus, competition and time pressure you don't get to see all the different attributes of everyone. But at work there is so much time that they people get into their comfort zone and start displaying exotic attributes.

Another important that everyone looks forward after B-school is the first paycheck day. Despite this being the happiest day of the month, there will be some shocking reactions when people get to see the bottom line, which is the net pay, as there will be so many deductions under complicated heads and one of the monsters being Income Tax.

Things that I miss the most after ISB are Rec center and ISB spam.Things are looking up in the external world and this may be the time to hold on and use a wait and watch approach. One big question for ISBians and all other B-school students would be about the impact of the current Macro-economic scenario on placements

Comparison of cities and My take on Real Estate in India

2008-06-26T11:22:00.006+05:30

While I am settling in Delhi, I keep comparing it with Mumbai and Hyderabad. While Hyderabad is my hometown, Mumbai is a city I liked a lot. I have spent first week of June at Mumbai and then moved to Delhi, so I've some recent Mumbai experience that I can use for comparison.

If I have to say it in short, it will be like this - Delhi is comparable to Hyderabad in terms of weather, locality, attitude of people etc and is comparable to Mumbai (atleast Navi Mumbai) in terms of cost of living, diversity of people, footpath business etc. What Delhi lacks is the attitude of Mumbaikars. Despite having smaller roads, heavy rains and many other problems, Mumbai people live on and are very nice. You would see innovation in everything at Mumbai and the quality of things is much better in Mumbai. People are quite aggressive and proud in Delhi but they are not better in anyway when compared to people in Hyderabad. You can observe these things with the Autowallahs, rentals agents, house owners, craftsmen, bank employees, bus conductors and drivers. Mumbai people are highly efficient and always focus on getting things done quickly while Delhi guys talk big but do little.

I have been disappointed by the service I get despite paying premium, which is comparable to what I would pay in Mumbai. At this cost I get much better service in Mumbai. Hyderabad, on the other hand, is slowly moving towards Delhi in the sense that all the service providers started demanding premium without improving the service in anyway. In Mumbai you atleast get better service. Hyderbadis are known to be laid back people but because of IT and ITes boom, things are getting expensive in Hyderabad.

One unrelated but nevertheless serious one is about the real estate scenario in India. I was going through the Knowledge at Wharton's latest article and felt that Indian Real estate has gone through very similar cycle with certain minor exceptions and excesses. While the Indian financial sector has not gone as far as US guys did due to various reasons including market not being fully developed, they followed their US counterparts in many things. They have been overlending beyond the normal limit of 80% but inflating the property value. The cap rate in India is quite high compared to any other similar market making it vulnerable for a fall. But there is a significant difference between US and Indian cultures that would not allow a big crisis to happen here. First Indians believe in lifetime employment and generally wouldn't leave jobs in difficult time. Though most of the service sector jobs are dependent on global market, predominantly US, these firms are trying hard to diversify and they are still competitive despite talks about US recession and weak dollar. Indian non-services sector has also been going global particularly non-US, which can insulate it to certain extent from US recession.

But as the interest rates go up, and new job creation slowing down, there will be pressure on rentals and new real estate purchases, which would lead to drop in property prices. While most of the deals that are underway may sail safely, some may have to face rough weather. New deals would be delayed and may not happen at previously projected figures and this would be first indication of the change.

I have been an investor in the real estate and though I see property rates coming down, I don't foresee loosing much as I have entered it 3 years back. But those entering now or have entered in the last two years will see some erosion in value.

While most of India will be able to manage slight slowdown and would be happy inflation coming down, there is a limit to what it can handle.

All these developments hint at a grim situation, which can only change if the political forces join hands with the intellectuals and don't get carried away into any one path too deep. Patience, prudence and judgment are required. I hope the Man of India comes up with some magic and save us all.

Random thoughts about Politics, Economics, and Society

2008-06-24T10:19:00.005+05:30

Finally the last major party in AP that was not supporting Telangana has a rift. Devender Goud decided to resign and come out of TDP and pursue telangana on his own. This puts a big question on Naidu's hope to come back in the next elections. While Devender Goud is not a big crowd puller, he can get all the telangana guys in TDP and weaken the party. Devender Goud must be fancying his chances after KCR's TRS failed miserably in the recent bye elections.

One question that occurred to me while thinking about this issue is - How are these politicians able to get so many supporters. I guess the reason is totally economical and then sociological in nature. One side of India's story is that more and more youngsters are getting educated and getting good jobs. On the other hand there are many others for whom life has not changed in any way, in fact it becoming worse for them. While democracy provides the biggest intangible benefit of "freedom" though curtailed due to different forces, tangibles are becoming a problem. The free market economy that is talked about is non-existent in its ideal state anywhere in the world. Even the so-called free market proponent's - UK and US, are not allowing free market fully. The social objectives are not being met by Democracy fully due to the individual indiscipline.

Think about a middle-aged guy who studied till high school and couldn't further it due to various issues - self, family, society etc etc. What can he do in today's economic scenario? Many times his life is stagnant and he is looking for something that he can do enthusiastically, something that can give him social and economic benefits and participation in political action seems to fit the bill accurately. This exactly works in the opposite for a young and educated person in India, which is why we don't see any smart guys entering politics. As the economic divide is becoming bigger and bigger, there will be different forces that try to reduce the disparity, some of them are quite crude. The form of these forces include corruption, theft, cheating, mafia, terrorism, corrupted and self serving politicians etc and etc. Only after the scenario becomes worse by which time the loss from these forces is more than the benefit of ignoring them, educated people would take action to eliminate these forces.

While corruption, theft, crime, mafia, terrorism, naxalism are all viewed negatively, one must keep in mind that all these are due to the failure of political system in achieving social objectives that they are entrusted with.

End of the day what does every human being living wants? They want a happy life, while the "happy" word has different definitions and meanings to different people but broadly everyone should be able to lead a life that he/she would like to as long as their actions do not harm others. Others should not only include human beings but also all other things on earth. The word "Survival" generally indicates a short-termness in nature but similar to "life" it is continuous in nature. One survives or lives every moment, so there is no short-term or long-term to it, it is only our limited knowledge and thinking capabilities that make it short-term or long-term.

There is so much that we human beings have no clue about - including the environment about which there is so much of "green talk" happening, that our ability to take decisions that are good for Earth can be questioned.

As a race we have moved so much away from "basic living" that we have forgot why we are doing all these things. One side is the inquisitive nature of ours that keeps pushing us to explore and understand everything, on the other side we have the pleasure seeking nature that keeps us at work and trying to improve things of comfort. The pleasure seeking nature is the main fuel behind the business world and therefore the search is endless.

Sometimes I wonder that we are forgetting what we need basically need and instead take things for granted. For some reason, human race has chosen to live together and thus created the "Society," which is constantly evolving and the increasing population is a proof that it has been successful so far but the miseries of so many human beings alive is also an indication of its shortcomings. In earlier days, religion attempted to correct the social shortcomings but now religion seems to have lost this capability due to overuse and increasing knowledge.

Looks like it's time for us to cool down a bit and think why we are doing what we are doing and then take a call about what to do next. I know that one person thinking wouldn't make a difference but it can make a beginning. Let's think about this and do something that makes sense.

I know that this post is quite long, complicated and intertwined but I would greatly appreciate thoughts from the readers. Have fun

Random thoughts - mergers, synergy, markstrat etc

2008-06-18T10:31:00.003+05:30

The key reason given by business leaders and consultants for acquisitions is "Synergy." Synergy could be in different areas - operations, marketing, financial, value chain, strategic, competitive scenario and so on. One question that I have is, who actually gains from the Synergy - Shareholders of the acquiring firm, shareholders of the acquired firm? If the findings support that no one is worse off, then there is a case for supporting acquisitions and developing specific competence.

CEO's constantly strive to see that they are not a target and spend lot of resources towards this. Consultants keep coming up with different strategies to keep big firms away. But my question is - is it worth all this effort? If higher value is being created overall, then isn't it fine to be get acquired or go and acquire someone else. Yeah, some individuals loose every time an acquisition gets through, so what? Aren't we more bothered about collective welfare than individual welfare

Information asymmetry, integration blues, overestimations that make most of the merger proposals questionable but if more effort is put in this area, it may improve the overall welfare surely.

It must be Markstrat time at ISB and I know that people would be aggressively searching for solutions. My advise is not to search for solutions but search for information and come up with solutions. After one year your job would be to come up with solutions than cookie-cutting. There will be lot information but identifying what is useful and what is not and then taking decisions sensibly is all Markstrat about. Our group was going down steadily during the first three quarters but then we made a turnaround and stood at the top by the end. Good luck for all those trying to sell Sonites and Vodites.

Say bye bye to Incandescent lamps

2008-06-17T15:45:00.002+05:30

It's high time that we say good-bye to incandescent lamps and replace them either with CFL or a tube light. Whoever is reading this blog post, I request them to see that if they find any incandescent lamp in use and ensure that they are replaced with a CFL or a tube light, whichever is suitable.

And to ensure that it is done 100%, I think it would be great if the government mandates this by making:
1. Ban usage of incandescent lamps and restrict sales only to medical and measuring devices. It may be useful to levy high tax on these lamps and see that they are not available in the market easily
2. Reduce sales tax on CFL's
3. Provide incentives for incandescent lamp manufacturer's to set up CFL manufacturing by providing them replacement incentive

One question I always had about government's role is about the usage of tax collected. While there is certain level of income distribution/leveling is happening, many times tax is not being used properly. For example huge amount of tax is collected on Oil and other petro product sales however government spends nothing on efforts that will lead to re-creation of these natural resources. While it is fine to utilize some portion of taxes towards welfare, it also important to maintain a ecological balance. You can't keep on drawing like this forever.

10 days in Delhi - House search, guest house, movies, rain, spam etc

2008-06-17T12:41:00.006+05:30

I landed here on 8th June and it is ten days in Delhi now. As the title says my time is divided between house search, guest house, movies, rain, spam etc. Looks like there will be no respite for me for another 10 days or so.

I managed to push myself into a movie theater this Sunday to watch Sarkar Raj. The previews were good and it appeared quite neat. After Aag, lot of people started thinking that RMV has lost the touch. After hearing such comments my expectations were quite low from the film. The movie is well made drama and is a good watch. Background music and photography are good and incidentally sub-plot of this movie happens to be about a power plant in Maharastra. Suddenly everything around me seems to be linked to power in some way.

Monsoon has arrived early in Delhi and it rained quite heavily on Sunday and Monday. After the movie when I stepped out, I was in the feeling that I am in Mumbai. Hang over from the one-week induction and the plot being in Maharastra seems to have affected me.

There was an excellent article on CSR in ET yesterday. I was surprised to see lot of MBA's talking about CSR in a way that is contrary to economical rationale. This article is a must read for all the MBA's without work ex. Here's quote from the article:
The real meaning of CSR
"The corporate social responsibility must aim at achieving the targets for which companies were set up, without incurring cost and time overruns" - R C Bhargava, Chairman, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.

Yesterday night I watched "Scent of a woman" and was quite impressed. I have been saving this movie for a day when I totally bored day and yesterday happened to be the day. I regret not having watched this movie long back. It's an amazing movie and a must watch. I must thank my ISB classmate Sasi who is currently in Egypt for introducing me to English Classic movies. Thank you buddy.

After the hectic one-year it's time to learn how to live life fully. Lot of things have changed and things are becoming more and more interesting. Many of classmates including me have started feeling that MBA sets lot of expectations but in reality things move very slow and all is not what it appears to be from a B- School lens. Welcome to reality.

Using Solar Power in business world

2008-06-12T12:52:00.003+05:30

One of the key limitations to use solar energy apart from availability is the requirement of batteries to store energy. I was thinking on these lines and suddenly it occurred to me that there is a low hanging fruit.

Today almost all the offices, small or big, have UPSs and they all have batteries attached to them. These batteries are always connected to power and will be on trickle charge all the time. They would surely be ticking the energy meter.

If one uses solar panels to keep the batteries on trickle charge and use grid power only when needed, then you can reduce the energy consumption. If you do a cost-benefit analysis based on this set up, I'm sure solar would be more viable. I am gonna get in touch with my old colleagues who are in maintenance and the new colleagues in the infratel business to prepare a viability report shortly on this.

First week at work

2008-06-11T07:53:00.002+05:30

Despite strong attempt to get immersed in work, ISB still is occupying majority of conversations. I think this is one experience that will play a dominant role in my life from now, not just academics but friends, life and everything else.

ISB's website has been redone and it is looking quite beautiful now and here's link to the Graduation ceremony coverage.
ISB Scholar's of excellence. I'm happy to see my name in print.

Now that my induction is over, I have moved to Delhi. Delhi while appearing to be a different place from Hyderabad it shares lots of similar characteristics. More about them later. I'm now on the net most of the time using my mobile to connect through bluetooth. I am liking this technology.

It's time now to get ready for office. Will come back shortly

Number changed

2008-06-10T17:50:00.002+05:30

One of the most difficult things these days is updating your mobile number everytime you relocate or change your service provider and I am facing this challenge now.

Those of you who want my new number, request you to mail me - I'm sure you have my mail id

Hyderabad, Mera pyaara Hyderabad

2008-05-31T09:15:00.003+05:30

My association with Hyderabad has been a long one. I started my schooling here but had to go back to my native place due to a unfortunate event. But I came back again in 1983 to Hyderabad and joined United High School, which is non-existent today. I studied in that school till 8th class and then moved to Unique Public School now known as Unique High School.

Hyderabad was quite different in those days. It used to be dry and hot during summers but rains came pretty quickly. Whenever there used to be a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal it used to rain continuously for a week or so but it was more of a drizzle rather than heavy downpour. There used to be few kirana and general stores and one or two medical shops in the IDPL colony area. Ration Shop or the Fair Price Distribution Shop was an important part of life apart from the lending library that I used to visit almost everyday.

We used to play cricket everywhere as there was so much open space. My travel into the city was either to the railway station at secunderabad or to the bus station at gowliguda to travel to my native place and that usually happened in the summer. But then after I finished my schooling things took a dramatic turn. The student general bus pass was such a boon in those days. You pay about 32 bucks and you can travel on any bus at any time free of cost. It was during this time that I explored Hyderabad as much as possible. Me and my friends used to go to Afzalgunj or Chikkadpally to visit the Central Library. Books always were my good friends and always gave hope that there are great things somewhere and you will get to experience them someday.

Many times when we had no classes we used to stand in the bus stop and based on the route of the bus that comes first we used to choose between a movie or library. I managed to see all the bond movies during this time. Telugu movies were considered only they were big hits or were directed by Ramgopal Varma, Maniratnam etc or were of heroes like Chiru and Nag. Hindi movies were rare and of the few I remember Khalnayak and Baazigar were the best.

Life suddenly changed with job and the routine changed totally. I got into the book collection hobby in a big way during the first two years of my career. I even got myself photographed with the books standing on my side - hehehe. My first visit outside Andhra Pradesh was to Mumbai. My good friend Jeelani Basha was with me and we enjoyed that trip so much. We were attending a training program at Voltas, Thane and we stayed in a hotel near VT, which is now known as CST. I liked Mumbai so much for everything it is, it's such an interesting place but I liked Hyderabad much more. Hyderabad is a relaxed, warm, calm and laid back city but Mumbai is a place where everything and everyone is in some urgency. It's about 3 years since I went to Mumbai and I am sure nothing much have changed in the main city.

There are lot of things that are quite Hyderabadi, which you can find only in Hyderabad, in my profile - My school and college, Bakelite Hylam, Middle Earth, Ivy Comptech and Sierra and finally ISB. If ISB opens second campus at Mohali then it is a different story but as of now ISB still is exclusive to Hyderabad.

This move is the most significant one but I'm looking forward to it mainly because two of my good friends are in Delhi

Predicting career progression using multiple regression

2008-05-29T12:47:00.003+05:30

If my stats Professors - Bob Stine or Richard Waterman happens to read this blog, I'm sure they will be amused about how people like me misuse statistical methods. The title of the post is quite misleading as my intention behind post is not to come up with a regression equation that can predict one's salary after ISB based on some variables.

Swami Vivekananda talked a bit about comparison and the grief attached to it in the book "What Religion is." In that book he says that the most common reason for sadness among people is that they are not better than others in comparison and not that they are doing well. This is the same with almost everyone who is doing this comparison thing. I too have spent many hours in grief by comparing myself with others but slowly realized that comparison is useful only when the subjects are manmade but not men themselves; a little philosophical thought.

But then after finishing MBA and having been exposed to stats and other concepts along with the MBA jargon, I felt that I can do a little better. While there is no change in my opinion that "Comparing oneself with others" is powerful enough to take away all the happiness and confidence in you and in its place fill you either with frustration or overconfidence, which surely will lead to more problems.

Yesterday during the gyan session while people were asking about the roles and salaries, I suddenly realized that each person was trying to compare himself with someone similar and then predict their future based on that. At that point it occurred to me that if we plot the results each student got at ISB after few years, the dots will be all over the place. Not just in two dimensions that we can see but in huge number of dimensions. If we attempt to fit a line through these results we will come up with numbers that are like the average salary, highest domestic salary etc etc. Even to come up with something like that we need to use so many variables and I doubt if any of the factors that we can think of can significantly explain the differences.

Each of us is unique and it is not quite possible to compare us with others. Just look at the stars in the sky. Each one of them is unique; while you may compare them with some simple dimensions such as size, distance from earth, if one considers the fact that the light we are seeing is not the present but surely the past and it is at different time frames, you will understand how silly it is to compare the stars. I think comparing yourself with others or others with you is equally silly and stupid. There are so many variables and some about which we have no clue about and any attempt to fit a line would be in vain.

Only message I want to pass on through this post is, whoever you are, whatever you are and whatever your goals are - you are unique and you cannot measure your happiness and success in comparison with others, you should measure it in your own terms and one's conscience is the best scale that will say it all without even asking. So friends, next time when you say you're doing good/bad/ok etc, ask your conscience what would it say. Only thing you need to do is to know about yourself to gain some meaning from what your conscience says.

I'm not sure if my idea is clear enough and would definitely like to hear what you think

Cheers

Few more days of freedom

2008-05-27T21:58:00.003+05:30

Another 4 days and I'm going to thrown back into the corporate world once again. Due to my past HR experience I know that as a campus recruit, I will be treated better and have some breathing space initially. I'm not expecting anything great in the first one month to happen. Campus recruitment team at ADAG seems to be quite efficient in terms of follow up and I hope it would be the same with other departments.

Few guys from Co 09 have requested me to give some gyan about general management and I will be on campus tomorrow at 9 pm. Giving gyan as an alum is different from conducting soft-skills training program. All these efforts are to reduce the information asymmetry and make people ready for tomorrow. I think this "trying to be ready/prepared for tomorrow" is a universal phenomenon with human beings. But many times I have observed that we overdo this preparation and end up spend up today completely waiting for tomorrow and tomorrow never comes because it becomes today as soon as it comes. We end up putting ourselves on the treadmill without even realizing it. I have done this mistake many times and one the most important learning I'm carrying with me from ISB is about living in the current.

Another thing I have realized during the last one year is about balance between short-term and long-term. In the past I have sacrificed short-term for long-term but now I have realized that if I am not happy and doing well in the short term there is no way I would do well in the long-term. We've got certain amount of time on this earth and we ought to do what we want to and what we can best and have fun. It's all about happiness and one must enjoy present as much as you invest for future happiness.

Before I close I must admit that initially I thought it will be difficult to survive without work for two months but surprisingly I seemed to have adapted to this nicely and now I am wondering how would work be after such a long break of 14 months. Adios

Friends, friends and friends

2008-05-25T12:02:00.004+05:30

Last two weeks I have spent meeting all my friends. Friends from school, from college, from my village, ex-colleagues, ex-bosses. This whole thing proved one important thing - world is small and circular and that "6 degrees of separation" is quite practical.

Read more about "Six degrees of separation" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It also bought back all the memories and highlighted the changes that I had seen in last 18 years. I passed SSC (or Xth) in 1990 from a school named Unique Public School, which was established in 1988, located at Suryanagar, near Chintal in Hyderabad. That school was pretty small then but now it is doing very good. It was setup by a set of teachers and I heard that it is the best school in that area.

And yesterday I met my colleagues from Middle Earth Consultants. We had so much fun.

Every time I meet someone new I am able to find some connection almost always and it reinforces the world is small notion every time. And I expect the same in Delhi now and this makes Delhi more familiar that it is.

After a break of 50 odd days, I'm looking forward to some work and some money too :). I hope things would be smooth at Mumbai and then at Delhi. While there is so much to do, it is important that the basic things are taken care.

Having nothing to do, I started reading Chronicles of Narnia and I am quite enjoying the stories. The stories are definitely better than the movie. When you are reading such kind of stories, your imagination is much more powerful than what could be created on film. While the efforts of bringing such stories to movie screens is quite commendable, it never matches one's imagination. This is what I like about reading.

What happens if price of oil hits $200 a barrel?

2008-05-23T21:52:00.003+05:30

This is an interesting question. While the $200 may sound an alarm, I feel that it will potentially change the automobile game. All the renewable energy based projects would become viable and would increase investments in that area and the stock prices of organizations working in that area. It may also reduce business travel and may lead to more people working from home.

Adaptation seems to be name of the game and I'm sure all of us will adapt to the increasing prices in different ways

ISB info sessions for 2009-10 admission

2008-05-23T21:33:00.002+05:30

This year the admissions department of the ISB plans to conduct over 50 information sessions across India.

To register click on http://www.isb.edu/pgp/AdmissionEvents.Shtml?menuid=109

City Venue Date Timings
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 30-May-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Kolkata Taj Bengal 1-Jun-08 10:00 AM - 12 noon
Kolkata Taj Bengal 1-Jun-08 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Pune Taj Blue Diamond 1-Jun-08 10:00 AM - 12Noon
Pune Taj Blue Diamond 1-Jun-08 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 6-Jun-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Chandigarh Reliance Web World @ Sector 9 D 7-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Indore Reliance Web World @ MG Road 7-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Jamshedpur Reliance Web World @ Jamshedpur 7-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Ludhiana Reliance Web World @ Chaura Bazaar 7-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Raipur Reliance Web World @ Krishna Complex 7-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 13-Jun-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Chandigarh Reliance Web World @ Sector 9 D 14-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Amritsar Reliance Web World @ Mall 14-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Bhopal Reliance Web World @ Bhopal Bitten Market 14-Jun-08 5:30 PM-7:00PM
Nagpur Reliance Web World @ CA Road 14-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Lucknow Reliance Web World @ Faizadabad Road 14-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 20-Jun-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Coimbatore Reliance Web World @ Gandhipuram 21-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Madurai Reliance Web World @ Annanagar 21-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Pondicherry Reliance Web World @ Kamraj Salai 21-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Visakhapatnam Reliance Web World @ Dwaraka nagar 21-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 27-Jun-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Allahabad Reliance Web World @ Balson 28-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Gwalior Reliance Web World @ Gwalior 28-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Agra Reliance Web World @ Kamla Nagar 28-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Patna Reliance Web World @ Fraser Road 28-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Ranchi Reliance Web World @ Club Complex 28-Jun-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 4-Jul-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Kolhapur Reliance Web World @ Kolhapur 5-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Aurangabad Reliance Web World @ Aurangabad City 5-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Nasik Reliance Web World @ Nasik Road 5-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Belgaum Reliance Web World @ Belgaum 5-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Sholapur Reliance Web World @ Sholapur 5-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 11-Jul-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Ahmadabad Reliance Web World @ CG Road 12-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Vadodara(Baroda)Reliance Web World @ Fatehgunj Baroda 12-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Surat Reliance Web World @ Parle Point 12-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Rajkot Reliance Web World @ Neptune Towers 12-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Jaipur Reliance Web World @ City Center 12-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 18-Jul-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Cochin Reliance Web World @ Alwaye 19-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Trivandrum Reliance Web World @ Vazhutacaud 19-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Mangalore Reliance Web World @ Bunts Hostel Circle19-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Mysore Reliance Web World @ Devraj Urs Road 19-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Bhubaneswar Reliance Web World @ Fortune Towers 19-Jul-08 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 25-Jul-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 1-Aug-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 8-Aug-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 22-Aug-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 29-Aug-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 5-Sep-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 19-Sep-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 26-Sep-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 3-Oct-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 10-Oct-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 17-Oct-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 24-Oct-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 31-Oct-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 7-Nov-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 14-Nov-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 21-Nov-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM
Hyderabad ISB, Hyderabad 28-Nov-08 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM

For ISB aspirants who woke up just now

2008-05-19T11:09:00.004+05:30

Yesterday I received a call from a guy based out of Warangal, my hometown. After speaking to him, I have decided to write this post so that all those with basic questions about ISB admission can benefit.

ISB has been in Media recently for FT ranking and then after that about the graduation ceremony and all the telugu channels decided to telecast the same with vengeance. This led to high levels of recognition and awareness among people in Andhra. Lot of people who approach me think that if they can get into ISB their life is made. I can't say whether it is correct or not as I believe that ISB is just a vehicle and one needs to know how to drive that vehicle to achieve career goals.

Anyways let me get back to the topic at hand. For all the aspirants, if you want to get basic information, don't call people instead do your research first, join isb-pgp yahoo group and then if you have specific queries about your profile and about opportunities after ISB and life at ISB etc, you can approach ISB alums. That way you will get a better picture. Let's look at the resources that you have:

1. First of all visit www.isb.edu and got the PGP program details link, which is isb.edu/pgp. You will get all the basic details that you would want about the program in the FAQs section.

2. The next big question is about GMAT. To know more about GMAT, you should start with the official site www.mba.com. Register yourself as you need not pay any fees at the beginning, in fact until you decide the date you need not pay any money. In the site you will find all the basic information about GMAT and you can download "Free GMATPrep Test-Preparation Software." This software gives you all the necessary details about GMAT sections and it even has couple of sample tests that are greatly helpful. Once you go through this software, then you can decided for yourself whether you need coaching or not. There are ample number of groups and resources both free and paid available on the internet to begin with. While GMAT score is not the most important factor, it acts as an entry barrier. As far as I know one should target 720+, while 720+ doesn't assure interview call, it increases your chances. Don't panic, there are students with scores in the range of 650 but they do have extraordinary achievements behind them.

3. ISB Application: ISB opens its online application sometime in July. Initial registration is free and you need to pay application fee only when you are ready to submit it. THe process is same for R1 and R2, so register at the earliest and access the form. You will have some work to do in the form of essays and getting evaluation letters apart from filling all the forms. It would be nice to have at least one month between GMAT and application deadline, so plan accordingly.

4. While you are doing all this, get on to the isb-pgp yahoo group and keep posing your questions. But remember, do your research and don't ask questions like "What is GMAT" or "When is R1 deadline" etc. Use the group for discussions about profile and to meet up with other applicants from your city who may be able to help you. You can pose questions specifically related to ISB and there will be alums who would answer them.

Once you submit the application, all you can do is wait for interview and after interview wait for the result. But before I close, I strongly recommend that "don't start with ISB as the only option," there are excellent schools around the world and some of them may be more suitable to you than ISB. ISB is better placed in terms of location, fees, FT ranking, infrastructure etc but by studying abroad you will learn outside the school too. ISB offers a one-year program and needs atleast 2-years work experience, while work experience is necessary to get maximum benefit from MBA, one year duration does put constraints on you and increases the work load tremendously. Make an informed decision and I'm sure your career will be transformed. Good luck

PAEV opportunity

2008-05-15T17:45:00.003+05:30

According to Prof. Ram at ISB, every new business idea has to solve a pain and the higher the pain, better the chances of success.

After getting placed and deciding to relocate from Hyd to Delhi, I went through one such pain and it gave me a very good business idea. It is quite early for the Co 09 to think about PaEV (or Planning an Entrepreneurial Venture), which happens only after core terms, I decided to share my idea to all those who read this blog.

I don't want any credits or equity or anything from whoever decides to follow up on this business idea, in fact I would be more than happy to provide support for such enthusiast. Let's get back to the pain and the business opportunity related to it.

From the second para you must have been able to guess that it must be something related to relocation. Yes, I am referring to the pains that I had to go through while relocating from Hyderabad to Delhi. There is a strong need for a service that can assist working population in the private sector in relocating. In fact companies today are paying more than required price for hiring employees from other locations and if a reliable service is available that has pan-India presence (international can come a little later), everyone would benefit from the same.

The service can solve issues that arise mainly due to:
1. Lack of information
2. Lack of reliable service providers
3. Lack of expertise

Working population today in India is quite mobile and people are changing jobs left and right. In IT and ITeS sectors, from what I have heard, average tenure is anywhere between 6 months to 2 years. Not that everyone is moving from city to city but may be they are moving from city to city because there is no "Relocation Assistance Service" available currently. This absence is today reducing the choices of working public in private sector (public sector seems to have some support in this area) and is creating inefficiencies in the system. Companies can definitely reduce their salary costs by at least 10% as they can hire talented people from smaller cities and towns and help them move easily into the metros. Even individuals can earn more (they may have to spend a little more) and definitely save more. A unfilled position is a negative NPV both for the firm and for the nation and the effect is magnified when it comes to metros.

While writing this blog post, the idea became far more clear now than it was earlier and I think I am inspired to pick some suitable guy in Delhi and get this started shortly. Next year if you are relocating to Delhi, I think you will find it easy - you may where to knock and whom to call.

Let's see

Can ISB transform you?

2008-05-14T08:42:00.000+05:30

Since I got admission to ISB, several people have been requesting me to guide them about getting admission into ISB. Before going into the title subject, let me draw out the admission cycles of ISB. ISB has two application rounds - R1 and R2. R1 deadline for 2009-10 is 15th Sept and R2 deadline is 1st December. If one has not taken GMAT, I suggest that you finish it before August, so that you have enough time to write your essays and get the evaluation letters.

Now let's come back to the main topic. The common motive of all those who bug about getting into ISB is to get transformed, to be taken care for life. This perception of people about ISB resurfaced again yesterday when I met a old colleague of mine and she asked me "is your career transformed" and I had to say "Yes." I couldn't tell her that I still have to go work and face the same challenges any other person would face at work and I am yet to test my newly acquired knowledge and skills.

This whole thing brought back the question - Can ISB transform you? My answer would be may be Yes, may be No, it depends! Yeah, actually it depends on no one else but you. The difference is actually not made at ISB but it happens long before when you made that decision to get into a reputed B-School. The opportunity is open to everyone but only few take that decision to pursue it seriously and give their best. Every decision you take and the follow up effort you make, transforms you bit by bit. It's like hatching of the egg, during the 21 days of hatching, one doesn't see any change from outside but the transformation is happening inside and it shows up on one final day. Similarly transformation is happening every moment; whether you would follow it up till the time it shows up externally is a different matter and that's the big issue. We keep initiating so many things but don't follow up on them till we get the result that we want.

I would like to conclude that there is nothing in the world that can transform you, except "you." ISb does indeed open lots of new doors but it's up to you which one to take and what to do next. So next time when you ask me, "Did ISB transform you?," you know the answer.

Back with a bang

2008-05-12T12:20:00.000+05:30

After taking a long break from active blogging, I have realized its time to get back.

I had been to Delhi twice during this time searched for a 2-bedroom flat in South Delhi successfully. I roamed around in the buses of Delhi on the Rapid Transit system and also in the expensive Delhi Autos apart from cabs.

Some things that I learned during this one month :
1. Why information has value
2. Ego is negative NPV
3. Brands are positive NPV and convey lot of hidden information. But there could be large gap between what your ad campaign says and what happens at ground zero.
4.

I am attempting to see if individuals like you and me can yield the corporate processes for everyone's benefit.

All in all Delhi was a mixed experience and I hope to see the better part of it when I move there in June.

I have been regularly going to ISB whenever I am in Hyd. Everytime I enter the campus, I feel I am entering a different world and after the Delhi trip more so. Class of 2009 is totally different from our batch.

Lots to write but nothing solid, anyways I made a restart and I hope to be regular.

Student to Alum

2008-04-14T19:34:00.002+05:30

The transformation from being a student to an alum has been quite a difficult one. You are stripped of all your privileges at ISB and you are just like another visitor. But there is an advantage of being a "local" and I am taking advantage of that fully by landing in the campus every other day and I managed to play squash after about three months.

I have lot of stuff to write but limited net access, which I will get in a day or two. Meanwhile I am re-reading Deathly Hollows and spending my time.

The day before graduation

2008-04-05T00:37:00.003+05:30

This might be my last post from ISB. The whole thing seems to have reached the end too quickly. Most people are reluctant to pack and move but some have already got out of this place. 2007 would be a year that I wouldn't forget for a longtime to come. It has been a tremendous experience.

I have been reading JK and it definitely disoriented my thought process. I am planning to go to Delhi next week to do some pre-shifting prep work.

Another amazing thing that this student community has successfully done is the Year Book. They have put in excellent effort and Savio Barretto Wesley must be appreciated for it; I should also thank Maria George from Sec E for pushing all of us to do the necessary work. Even this blog managed to grab some space in the year book.

Latest addition to ISB campus is the events lounge and Class of 2008 will be remembered for this. Nidhi Reddy, in particular, has to be appreciated for the SLC initiatives, I can definitely say that we had so much fun because of Nidhi - three cheers to Nidhi.

ISB is getting ready for Co 09 and it's going to be their time. I'm planning to drop in during the orientation week and may be do couple of sessions on "Coping with studies," "How to make it to the Dean's list even though it may not be useful" etc :) and may be something like "What I couldn't do but you should definitely try" type of stuff. There is so much to give gyaan about - hehehe.

That's all for now. I have two months of free time and I am going to chill off completely and try visiting few places during this time. Cheers

Last exam to go

2008-03-28T13:05:00.002+05:30

Yesterday was the last day of classes for Co 08 and by tomorrow evening we will be done with our exams too and all related academic work. On one hand we are going to miss this place on the other hand we are all looking forward to get in to real business world.

Currently we are in the middle of exchanging personal ids and expecting to be in touch in future. I don't know how many would actually be in touch. One advantage I had seen with gtalk is that whenever you see someone online you feel you are in touch with that person and I think this is the basic level of online presence while facebook, linkedin etc are enhancements.

Last week we have celebrated Holi and I must mention that it was the best Holi I had ever celebrated and I would remember it for years to come. It was a crazy crazy day. I could see what's the power of a community. I feel this is one thing that is missing in urban life these days as people are not spending enough time to build trust and relationships and constantly trying to outdo others and win the endless race. You live life now not in the past or in the future. You must live each moment for that moment and stop worrying about past or waiting for future.

In term 8, I liked Microfinance and PRFI courses and the other two subjects appeared to be a little drag though there was some learning. All the professors were excellent but I think there is a lack of motivation from my side not because I am already placed but because there is no space left in my mind. Prof. Shamika Ravi who taught MFIN has lots of passion and interest towards the subject.

Lots of people have been asking me if it was worth it and the response from me would be a resounding Yes - ISB is worth it.

Two more weeks to go

2008-03-15T17:34:00.002+05:30

We are slowly drifting towards the last day of studies and then graduation day. I really need a break from studies, reading and assignments but there seems to be no respite for another two weeks.

Lots of parties, movie screenings and outings are happening in campus but I would say it is quite silent here. People are really chilling out enjoying the evening breeze in Hyderabad. Temperature during the day is increasing everyday. While lot of people have been warning me of Delhi's weather, I am not concerned so much, after all there are enough people living there and I am no worse than them in terms of adapting to new weather. Next five years, I am planning to finish exploring north completely while I am in Delhi and then head southwards (all this is ex-ante though!).
Placements stats are being released by different B-schools and raising aspirations. Going to B-school is like inorganic growth these days; while everyone is fully aware and bullish about the upside, they are fully ignoring the downside of inorganic growth. There are many things in career apart from money, brands and fancy roles. Career is a small part of life and one should understand how much it matters to him.

Recently while speaking to a senior colleague of mine, he suggested that I become a career consultant considering the number of switches I have made in my career. While the principles behind career planning are simple they are not easy to fully understand. It takes years before an individual realizes what he/she is passionate about. Best way to start is by giving your best to any opportunity that comes across to you. Once you make your mark you will be in a better position to judge whether that particular track is for you or not. Many people decide that a particular line is not for them if they are not making progress. But I would say that one is always in a better position only after you do well in that position. Also it would be easy for others to bet on you if you've been successful in something already and your abilities are proven. Think about it.

As I mentioned in one of the mails earlier, people are going through different emotions about their jobs but everyone is unanimous about one thing - no more assignments please.

Things that I didn't try at ISB

2008-03-11T20:50:00.002+05:30

While I tried to do as many things as possible at ISB, there are few things that I didn't touch at all during the last one year at ISB. Here's the list of those things:
1. Be at LRC till 2 am in the night
2. Contest for some election - clubs or gsb
3. Feature in media photos or videos
4. Go for a Goa trip in any of the breaks (This is one thing, I wanted to do)
5. Try fishing in the ISB lake (I'm not sure if there are any fish in the lake though)
6. Bunk a class
7. Explore the wild forest (I still have time for this and I am going to do this surely)

I will post more such trivia in the coming days. Have fun.

Assessing creativity using dumb-charades

2008-03-09T19:06:00.003+05:30

Day before we had a small gathering in SV1. We had nice food and enthusiasts also had booze after which we played some nice games. While playing dumb-charades I realized that this game requires lots of imagination and creativity and non-verbal communication skills. It also requires the ability to relate with people.

It would be good idea to use this game as an assessment tool in informal settings and verify findings from other activities.

Today I attended my diploma classmate's marriage at Champapet. This place is about 30kms from Gachibowli and it took me an hour to go there. I met some old colleagues from Bakelite Hylam, Nacharam apart from my JNGP classmates and collegemates. It was interesting to see people who are working in so many diverse areas.

At ISB we are struggling to finish the last few assignments. I can now say that some courses in Term 8 is a little drag. ISB is getting ready for the next batch and I am sure they must be raring to go. My only suggestion for Co 09 is to have fun till April comes.

It's fun-time at ISB

2008-03-01T22:47:00.002+05:30

Our galli cricket has now triggered a ISB-wide night cricket tournament. Apart from the funny rules, people are also organizing beers, music etc.

Our energetic captain Amit Goel responded to the RFP and put up a team together. The first match of the tournament was between our team and F2 team. We really had a bad start with our batting but then Jassi, Suhail and Puneet Arora played some excellent shots and we managed to put a decent score of 67 in 10 overs. Our bowling clicked much better and we restricted the opposition to 38. Sec E definitely rocks when it comes to any team event. Our team was there in time with all the eight players while the other team was searching for players and their captain was making frantic calls for players.

Sec E is also busy in writing testimonials for each other. Believe me each person in the section is a gem - Section E is truly the best. I would never forget the core terms and the fun we had. More fun follows in the next two days in the form of night cricket.

Silence before the storm

2008-02-27T12:23:00.002+05:30

It's eight term and today is day 3 - post sample drop and addition day and no classes. Campus is completely silent, people are going through different sorts of emotions. The goal with which people have come here is more or less achieved. Even someone is not happy with what he/she got nothing can be done for the next 5 months, so it's kind of a vacuum period.

This is an interesting time, some people will enjoy this "no responsibilities or commitments time," some will suddenly feel lost due to "no visible enemy (or goal)," few are excited about "great time that is ahead," some will be wondering how to handle the "change of guard" and so on and so forth.

It'll be interesting to see how far this batch is gonna travel both in terms of geographical and achievements distance. We all came here for a year to learn together and we all will get separated now. While I wouldn't say that I have created strong bonds with many batchmates I can definitely say I have started forming with many.

There must be a lot of people outside wanting to know more about placements but they will have to wait for the official statement that will come sometime in mid-March. But I can say that it has been quite smooth and satisfactory.

We have some very interesting courses and one of those that I have opted for is Microfinance. The learning here has definitely clarified lots of questions and has shown lots of paths to achieve my goals. I can say I am more clear now than a year before about how I would spend the rest of my life. I can safely say that I have finished one-third of my life (optimistic estimated life span of 90 years) and now I am determined to make each day in my life count. I am in the process of identifying key aspects in which I would like to make a difference and will take a count at the end of the day everyday and wouldn't loose track.

You can guess my mood from what I wrote above and I'll take leave till the time there is more to report or a compelling thought pushes me to write.

Excellent ad campaign

2008-02-22T10:33:00.004+05:30

GMR - Getting ready for India ad campaign really impresses - it's a well thought and executed ad. After a long time, I saw a nice ad campaign and this campaign will surely improve the brand equity and recall of GMR group, which is generally confused with GVK group.

This is the right time for this campaign considering that the Hyderabad International airport is getting ready and that many people will come across GMR name there, this campaign will leverage that exposure fully. Another thing this campaign will surely do is improve GMR's standing with its future employees. After seeing the ads, I felt that I should approach the company to know who is behind this campaign and was open to explore career opportunities.

Here is one of those ads:

Despite politicians India is increasingly becoming attractive for people from other countries for various reasons, apart from the IT and ITeS outsourcing partnerships, we have Medical Tourism, Diamond exports, large middle class, and even MBA Education (I am expecting that for the batch of 2010 there will be a large number of international applicants to ISB considering the recent FT ranking) and many more. India is definitely an attractive destination despite politics is what I can sum it up. A warning for Indians - The increasing focus from foreigners is going to change the Indian Game for Indians too, so be ready to face it.

Change in Direction

2008-02-20T20:58:00.002+05:30

Having managed to make a transition once again, I am not sure what I would writing on this blog that would continue to appeal to the readers. But in general I am interested in the following areas:
1. Self-development
2. Systems thinking
3. Environment
4. Social issues
5. Communication
6. New Business models and
7. ISB

I would appreciate if the readers of this blog take a couple of minutes and give me feedback about what they liked in this blog and what areas would interest you. After all this blog is about me, you and we together.

Before closing lemme add that placements are on even today and it seems that Satyam has made some very good offers. Hope that all my classmates are placed well and everyone is out from the placement process.

Cheers

Day 3

2008-02-18T21:51:00.002+05:30

I am officially out of the placement process now. I have taken the offer from Reliance Energy. To sum it up I have been able to achieve both my goals - switch to core business and get a financial breakthrough, and I am quite happy with the outcome.

By tomorrow morning three fourth of the batch would have at least one offer. I urgently need a good night sleep and would be back tomorrow with more details.

Day 2

2008-02-17T22:42:00.004+05:30

Finally after all the big fuss, I have got an offer. I have one more important interview tomorrow and I have time till tomorrow evening to take a call on the first one.

I think one third of the students got placed by now and the rest are little concerned by now. But I see no reason they should worry. From tomorrow it will be literally a issue of fit and not much of anything else. Making a choice is the most difficult thing at ISB - More than the assignments and the exams, and that's where the biggest difficulty in life is.

I am kind of cutoff from the main scene as I was busy myself and would remain so tomorrow also; I will get a clear picture only on the day-after. Till then, keep guessing

Bad Ad - Standard Electricals

2008-02-17T12:54:00.002+05:30

This is a deviation from ISB placements topic. But I felt that I must express my opinion about the ad of Standard Electricals that is being currently aired.

I have worked in engineering and remember those old days when engineers used to take pride in their professions and say leave it to experts. But slowly their expertise became a commodity and they had to become customer oriented (internal) and work according the requirements of customers. And this was way back in 1995.

Whoever has advised Standard Electricals to use the "Expert ka kaam expert pe chod dena chahiye" is completely wrong and has drowned lot of money down the drain. The ad leaves a negative feeling even to someone who is an engineer because the electrician character speaks all rubbish in the ad. I don't who is the ad maker trying to appeal to, is he appealing to the consumer by insulting him or is he appealing to the electrician, supposedly the expert.

Consumer awareness has gone up significantly and one can find information about everything from google or wikis and can make sense of common appliances and this ad concept is completely flawed. Whoever is behind this ad, are you listening?