s u h i t a n a n t u l a . c o m

2005-02-23T06:41:00.000-08:00

I am testing the Hello software from Google. Using Picassa to send it to my blog. Wow!

Userplane Equips Flourishing Dating Site PlentyofFish With Flash-Based Communication Tools

2005-01-19T05:59:00.000-08:00

Userplane
Equips Flourishing Dating Site PlentyofFish With Flash-Based Communication Tools: "PlentyofFish (www.plentyoffish.com), a free online dating service, is expanding its communication capabilities by deploying Userplane's Instant Communicator and Web Chat to enable members to converse with each other using live audio and video."

Money from RSS

2004-12-21T19:02:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer would not like this but money is going to flow in RSS. RSS is becoming too strong a medium to remove it from the clutches of advertising.

Wired has more on this :

As soon as mainstream publishers incorporated RSS feeds into their web businesses, you knew that ideas on how to make money from them would inevitably follow. This almost always means advertising, the bane of readers' existence, but it's the reason most content on the net remains free for the asking. So while some may protest the idea of monetizing RSS, it's inevitable. The trick will be to make it as unobtrusive as possible.
Since traditional media companies move slowly when it comes to incorporating new ideas, the first ones to dip their toes into the commercial waters have been, not surprisingly, folks like Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, the parent company of Engadget, a well-trafficked tech blog, and Nick Denton, founder of Gawker and Wonkette, both of which have incorporated ads into RSS.

RSS will provides targetted and niche advertising and possibily the entry of a many small businesses who will look at this as the next big opportunity. We just need to wait and see when will the giants like Google and Yahoo will enter.

( Via Rob at BusinessPundit)

2004-12-01T21:40:00.000-08:00

Change this! is a new idea by Seth Godin. He aims to spread good ideas around using many of the techniques which he has pioneered in books like Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Idea Virus, Survival is Not Enough and Purple Cow.

The ideas are created in a format which he calls a manifesto. They are designed very well and spread as a PDF document.

I would like to point to two manifestos I received in my InBox.

The answer is Bio-Diesel :

Michael Briggs | Trade in your Prius and buy a VW! What's better than hybrids and better than fuel cells? According to UNH researcher Michael Briggs, the answer is Biodiesel. Read his manifesto to find out why biodiesel is cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to produce, ready for large-scale production, and usable in existing automobiles. The results may surprise you.

Self-Serving Social Networks

2004-11-30T00:12:00.000-08:00

I have been working on this discussion on the Deeshaa networks on how to get the network started and what is that we should be working on.

The main important thing which I have started to realise is that these networks should mean "something" to people and also that we should be able to translate that into actions.

Stephen Downes points to George Siemens blog about where he writes about Self-serving social networks.

Downes says :

The prevailing theory is that people will share because they want to contribute to the public good. This is true in some cases, but for many others, the use of a social network must satisfy some personal good. The item then reviews a few properties of successful social networks to make the point. There's something to this, though I would have worded it differently: social networks have to serve some useful purpose to the user.

It's Not the Idea. It's the Execution.

2004-10-19T02:53:00.001-07:00

"Always remember that business ideas are a dime a dozen. Just think of the dotcom era of four years ago. But what really matters is the execution and the quality of the team, something the majority of those dotcoms lacked in. I have heard many a venture capitalist say that he or she would rather have an A management team and a B business concept that an A business concept and a B management team. It is not the idea, it is the people, and their ability to execute, that matters. It is not the idea. It is the people, and their ability to execute, that matters."

This was written by:
Ryan P. Allis, 19, is an economics major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the founder of The Entrepreneurs' Coalition, a non-profit organization dedicated to building an international network of entrepreneurs, founder of www.zeromillion.com, and CEO and President of Virante, Inc. a North Carolina based software development and ebusiness consulting firm

It's Not the Idea. It's the Execution.

2004-10-19T02:53:00.000-07:00

Lending technologies

2004-10-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

Danah Boyd asks :

"Why can't i just have the digital equivalent to my little Excel file that says 'lent to XX'? Why can't i just be forced to re-acquire the book before lending it out again? I do this all the time (or i'm forced to buy a new copy myself... i'm on copy #17 of Stone Butch Blues). I want a lending solution for digital technology damnit!"

Before applying, check out the blogs

2004-10-03T21:37:00.000-07:00

"Job seekers use blogs to establish a strong online presence, display their skills and advertise their availability. For many just out of college, the blog is an essential networking tool because it is common for bloggers to link back and forth to others with recent posts. Corporate recruiters, in turn, use blogs to draw in qualified candidates, and they search for potential hires by reading bloggers who write about topics relevant to a particular industry.

A driving factor behind job market blogging is the search engine Google, said Elizabeth Lawley, associate professor of information technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. 'If you are thinking of interviewing someone, it's almost standard now to Google them online and see what you find,' Lawley said. 'If that person has a blog, it's usually the first thing that comes up.'"

So all of your MBAs out there, this is your big opportunity. Yes, some blogs have come up, written by MBAs chronicling their course details but not really serious networkers.

Again, as Networking goes, blogging basically makes it easier to have a online presence, but there is still a need to follow the basics of networking and understanding the Rule of Win-Win by Dave Winer.

The Rule of Win-Win says that by choosing to participate in the Web, I can promote my own interests, but I must acknowledge the existence of others and their interests. I don't sacrifice the truth in furthering my cause. In fact, if you accept the Rule of Win-Win, the truth is your first cause, it comes before all others.

Before applying, check out the blogs

2004-10-03T21:36:00.000-07:00

Podcasting

2004-10-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

"NBC4 adds:

Podcasting allows you to subscribe to feeds, which include links to audio programs. Every time one of your subscriptions posts a new program, it automatically downloads onto your computer. You then transfer those shows to a portable music device, listen to it throughout your house via a wireless connection or take it with you wherever you go. Think of it as a personalized radio station that you program and change whenever you want.

The technical explanation is a bit more complex. The idea originally grew out of the Apple iPod community, where Adam Curry helped develop a piece of software called iPodder. iPodder automatically routes an audio program to an iPod and makes the process relatively seamless. It wasn't long before similar solutions sprung up for use with other devices.

The programs are delivered via an RSS feed, and there are already millions of computer users subscribing to at least a few text feeds of blogs and other sites. The RSS feed contains a link, which notifies your computer that a new audio program is available and begins downloading it into a pre-selected spot on your computer.

Podcasting -- like blogging -- seems to combine the best of the Internet with the best of traditional media. It's a way for someone to create and distribute a show to 40 people. And it also would allow a media company to distribute audio content to millions."

Joel on Software - It's Not Just Usability

2004-10-01T03:48:00.000-07:00

Joel on Software - It's Not Just Usability:

"My goal today is not to whine about how usability is not important... usability is important at the margins, and there a lots of examples where bad usability kills people in small planes, creates famine and pestilence, etc.

My goal today is to talk about the next level of software design issues, after you've got the UI right: designing the social interface.

I need to explain that, I guess."

Joel on Software - Bionic Office

2004-10-01T03:46:00.000-07:00

"Well, it's my own damn company and I can do something about it, so I did."

That was Joel on his office and company. I sure want to work in a place like that. Better still do something like that for my company.

Bnoopy: Persistence Pays.

2004-10-01T03:38:00.000-07:00

Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite starts his blog on Entre. He tells a great story about Vinod Khosla.

Bnoopy: Persistence Pays. Part 1:

"The meetings we're all the same. We showed them our search technology, showed them 'concept-based' search, and showed them targeted advertising. To a firm, the first question they asked was a very reasonable one: 'great stuff guys, but what's your business plan? how are you going to make money?' Of course, being 22 years old and fresh out of college we replied, 'we thought you could help us out with that.' Apparently, that's the wrong answer. Who knew?

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Then we met Vinod...

By then, our deal had developed a certain 'smell' -- smart guys with interesting technology but an uncertain business plan. The demo to Vinod started off like they all did, but about 10 minutes into the meeting things got very different. He interrupted

'Can the technology scale? can you search a large database?'

Big Pause. It's not the money question. No one has ever asked us this before. Ummm.

'We don't know, we can't afford a hard drive big enough to test.'

Then, an amazing thing happened. Ten minutes into this meeting, his first introduction to the company and us, he pulls out his his cell phone, dials his assistant and buys us a $10,000, 10Gb hard drive."

Joel on Software - Work space quality references

2004-10-01T03:34:00.000-07:00

Joel on Software - Work space quality references: "Over the years with several changes of employer and different assignments and various office moves for each employer, I came to realize that the quality of the workspace can have quite an effect on productivity as well as job satisfaction. In fact, one wonders why anyone is concerned with implementing software development processes when most developers are having a hard time concentrating on any task for more than ten minutes between ringing telephones in the next cubicle, howling HVAC systems or any of the other myriad distractions that prevent one from just sitting down and getting a 2-3 hour task completed.

Here is my description of a good workspace for software development: A quiet private office with a door and a clear window for each individual developer. For team projects the offices should be arranged together with convenient common areas.

I happened to find the Fog Creek and JoS web sites a few years ago when doing a web search trying to find employers that provided good workspace. As anyone who has worked in the field for long knows, the employers that provide good workspace are extremely rare. The people who are in charge of facilities are usually concerned with costs, not usefulness. "

Natural Enterprise - Chapter List

2004-09-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

Natural Enterprise (chapters in the upcoming book of the same name)

The Elevator Pitch (Chapter 1, July, 2004) the business case for Natural Enterprise, and how it differs from traditional business

How the New Economy Works (Chapter 2, August, 2004) a primer on an economy in transition, and what it means to the entrepreneur

Existential Enterprise (Chapter 3, June, 2004) ten steps to creating a Natural Enterprise

Assembling the Team (Chapter 4, June, 2004) finding people you'd love to work with, with all the skills you need but without overlap

Improvisational Planning (Chapter 5, July, 2004) exploiting the agility of Natural Enterprise to plan to succeed on your own terms

Viral Marketing (Chapter 6, May, 2004) spreading the word about your product or service by customer word-of-mouth

Financing Your Business Organically (Chapter 8, July, 2004) how to need less money, and to generate what you need internally

Avoiding the Landmines in Entrepreneurial Business (Chapter 12, May, 2004) the 10 fatal errors of entrepreneurs and how to avoid them

Business Innovation (Chapters 15-17, April, 2004) history, importance, and process for business innovation

NATURAL ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

2004-09-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

As you do your research, keep asking these questions until you're highly confident that you know the answers:

* What exactly is the need?
* Who exactly is the customer (the group that has that need)?
* What are the alternative solutions to it? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each alternative? Which, all things considered, are the best, affordable alternatives?
* Who is offering, and who could easily offer, each of those solutions? Why aren't they already offering these solutions?
* What competencies and what resources would your enterprise need to have to bring the best alternatives to market?

As you do your research, keep asking these questions until you're highly confident that you know the answers:

* What exactly is the need?
* Who exactly is the customer (the group that has that need)?
* What are the alternative solutions to it? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each alternative? Which, all things considered, are the best, affordable alternatives?
* Who is offering, and who could easily offer, each of those solutions? Why aren't they already offering these solutions?
* What competencies and what resources would your enterprise need to have to bring the best alternatives to market?

You might think it takes a lot of gall to get so many people to give you so much information and to offer their opinions free of charge. But entrepreneurs and researchers I know tell me people are often glad to help, and to offer their opinion, as long as the demand on their time is modest and that the solicitation is polite and personal. That means, ideally, face-to-face, with the telephone used only to secure an interview with them. Prepare to wear out a lot of shoes doing your research.

Because business' products and services are so diverse, it's hard to generalize beyond this point about the process of Filling an Unmet Need. As the next three chapters will show, not only does going through this painstaking and time-consuming process almost guarantee you success, it can also dramatically reduce the amount of time, effort and money you need to spend promoting and marketing your product or service (you've already met a lot of your first customers, and if you fill their unmet needs they will spread the word to others -- and take some pride in having played a part in your success), and it can even reduce the amount of money you need to raise to launch the enterprise. But most importantly, you should follow this process, gruelling as it may be, because it works. If you doubt me, talk to any successful entrepreneur about the value of doing this, and you'll be convinced.

Blogging and WorldisGreen

2004-07-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately my other site, www.worldisgreen.com which I have been consistently writing for the past 8 months on rural India is down and almost out.

I was in the process of shifting the website from one hosting provider to another. In the process I did not the renew the present hosting service. I continued to use the service for about 5 days after the expiry of the service. The hosting provider stopped the service, deleted the files on his server and now I am without my website. I did not have a back-up too and here I am.

I can get back the data from the tapes of the hosting provider but it would cost me $70. I think that this is a steep price and do not want to spend that kind of money.

Google has been kind enough to archive my whole site. I saved all the files (not 300 HTML cached pages but 6 HTML pages of my categories). So I have the data but it will be tough to put it back on the website.

I will be now using wordpress, a open source publishing tool for the new website. Apart from this I was planning to change the structure of the website according to the way I want to go forward.

I guess this incident has acclerated the process. I only hope that I get my readers back. And for the Google ranking I think "we" can get it back.

The Power of Impossible Thinking

2004-07-12T21:10:00.000-07:00

Atanu points me to this wonderful article on mental models.

While not every “impossible thought” can become a reality, very often the greatest obstacle to transforming our organizations, society and personal lives is our own thinking. This may seem to be a simple idea in theory – that what we see and act upon is more a product of what is inside our heads than out in the world – but it has far-reaching implications for how we approach life and decision making. In a new book entitled, The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business, Wharton marketing professor Jerry Wind and Colin Crook, former chief technology officer at Citibank, present a process for “impossible thinking.”

This process starts with the recognition of the power of “mental models” but then offers practical approaches to challenges such as: How do you know when to jump to a new model? What do you do with the old models after the revolution? Where do you discover new models? How do you make sense of the world in an environment of overwhelming data? How do you transform your organization and the thinking of others? How do you harness the power of intuition? In a Q&A with Knowledge@Wharton, the authors offer their insights into these questions.

With fast, complex changes, making sense has become an essential skill for managers. As John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox and director of the Palo Alto Research Center, once commented, “In the old world, managers make products. In the new world, managers make sense of things.” Our book is focused on how to do this better.

Changing our thinking creates powerful opportunities for action. But to take those actions, the passengers first needed to change their hypothesis about what was going on.

One of the core issues is that we are not just data driven but we are hypothesis driven. This is a very important distinction. I now look at the underlying hypotheses in any situation. What do I think about this? Do I have a hypothesis to make sense of it? Have I examined this hypothesis or have I just looked quickly and said ‘I’ve been there and done that’ and just move on. Don’t rush to judgment and be much more mindful about the process. Once we know that the world is shaped and filtered by our own thinking, we recognize the need to constantly test our hypotheses against the world.

To challenge your thinking, you need to interact with diverse people and be able to see the potential wisdom of weird ideas.

It is amazing how malleable memory and perception can be – much more than we think. For example, in one research study subjects were standing at an airport ticket counter. The ticket agent pretended to drop something, ducked behind the counter and a different person finished the transaction. Many of the subjects didn’t even recognize the change had been made. We tune out big chunks of the environment.

We think we see the real world, but we actually see what’s already in our own minds. If we are not aware of the power of these internal models, we may just accept what we think we see as reality. This can be limiting, and sometimes even dangerous. We become very comfortable and dependent upon our current mental models.

In the book, we consider practical steps to change your thinking and the world. The first step is to become much more explicitly aware of why you see the world the way you do and what that implies. Second, you need to test the relevance of your current mental models against the changing environment. Do they still fit? If you need to change models, you need to generate new models and develop an integrated portfolio of models. Third, you need to overcome inhibitors to change by reshaping the infrastructure that supports the old models and changing the thinking of others. Finally, you need to quickly generate and act upon new models by experimenting, using intuition and continuing to assess and strengthen your models.

You also need to create a portfolio of models and use the one that works best for a particular situation.

So all the hypotheses need to be put on the table and tested. Anytime we seek to change our lives, we need to look at the underlying mental models across all aspects of our activities.

BPM: The Road Ahead :: AO

2004-06-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

Michael Brown of Battery Ventures writes about BPM: The Road Ahead in AO.

Historically, senior management's view into a company's performance was limited to the financial data and metrics produced in statements by the CFO. Needless to say, there were very little, if any, objective non-financial measures with which to manage the business, and all the financial information available was historical. This method of management is analogous to driving a car while spending a majority of time looking into the rear-view mirror…with only one eye open.

The implementation of large transactional systems, such as ERP, CRM, SCM, and so on, in the 1990s significantly improved the collection of both financial and non-financial data. However, the data resident in these systems delivered only marginal relative value to management because the analysis and reporting of the data were limited to each individual application or a specific subset of applications through the implementation of a data warehouse; thus, it could not provide a holistic picture of a company's performance. Given the batch-process requirements of these systems, the data was not in real time and, consequently, of limited value.

This growth trajectory is primarily driven by three macro trends in the market:

1. Large ERP foundation.
2. New generation of BPM technology.
3. External market factors.

how do analysts think the industry will evolve? Although there are several schools of thought, the two primary theories are as follows:

1. The big getting bigger. Similar to the ERP market before it, some market pundits believe the BPM industry will continue to consolidate to the point where an overwhelming majority of the economic value and/or market cap is dominated by the top three or four vendors.

2. Market bifurcation. Believers in this theory state that vendors either have to achieve scale or specialize by developing either horizontal functionality or vertical market expertise. In short, there is no middle ground for a vendor to occupy.

Regardless of how the market structure changes over time, we believe there will be both evolutionary and revolutionary innovation as it matures. From an evolutionary perspective, the market will naturally demand a greater level of verticalization. Although a handful of vendors have tailored their solutions to address the requirements of a specific industry, most of the current solutions are akin to one-size-fits-all. The issues with this approach are longer implementation schedules and higher long-term maintenance costs. As the market matures, we believe vendors and/or their partners will look to verticalization as a way to both differentiate their solutions and drive incremental market growth.

More interestingly, we believe the market will significantly benefit from the next generation of BPM, which will include revolutionary technology such as predictive analytics. Not only will BPM solutions have the ability to predict how an organization will react to external economic events, but they will also prescribe actions/solutions to senior management to address the specific situation. This level of visibility and foresight will enable management, like the driver in our analogy, to concentrate on what's ahead, while only looking back to see how far the competition has fallen.

Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride.

Art of the Start

2004-06-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

Brendon Wilson puts up the Art of the Start Guy Kawasaki conf online.

I struggled (this is the introduction chapter of the book) to come up with a Top Ten the things you really need to do to start your company off correctly. And there are not ten things - the most that I could come up with (that are crucially important) is five. So this is a top five for you - I'd like to go through these top five things and discuss them in rather great detail from The Art of the Start.

Lesson 1: Make Meaning

The first thing I learned that, you know as Bill alluded to, is that we have seen literally thousands of companies over the past six or seven years, and we have met tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and entrepreneur teams. And with hindsight, although we were honestly swept up in it as much as they were, I think the thing that we learned the top level thing you must have. If you're going to create company and that company's going to be successful, it is because the founders of the company want to make meaning. Not money. Not prestige. Not power. Not status. It is about making meaning.

I would encourage you entrepreneurs as you're contemplating your companies or forming your companies to think about what is the meaning going to be? Not the money. Money is the outcome of successful meaning-making, if you will.

Let's analyze the types of meaning - I think there are principally four types:

* One is to make the world a better place by a product or a service.
* The second is to increase the quality of life of people.
* The third is to right something that is wrong, to fix something.
* The fourth is to prevent the end of something good.

Lesson 2: Make A Mantra

Lesson number two is a passionate request from me for you to focus on making an organization mantra. Now a mantra is very different from a mission statement. A mantra is typically shorter - arguable the shortest mantra ever is "om" (the Hindu mantra) - it is a sacred verbal formula. It is thing where if you could ask any employee "what do you do?", they would understand it immediately and be able to consistently communicate the purpose and meaning of the company.

A mantra is short and sweet. Let me give you some examples.

Nike's mantra is "authentic athletic experience". If you were to ask a Nike employee "what do you do?", it is about "authentic athletic experience'. Disney is about "fun family entertainment". The Green Bay Packers football - "winning is everything". Those are mantras, they are not mission statements.

By contrast, let me give you a mission statement. Starbuck's mantra is "rewarding everyday moments". Starbuck's mission statement is: "established Starbucks as the premier provider in the world of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow". Which one do you think is easier to remember?

Lesson 3: Get Going

...to be continued

Entrepreneur's VC Pitch

2004-06-28T21:01:00.000-07:00

Rajesh points to this article on the questions a Entreprenuer should answer before pitching to a VC. This is true for starting any business.

1) WHAT IS YOUR VISION?
- What is your big vision?
- What problem are you solving and for whom?
- Where do you want to be in the future?

2) WHAT IS YOUR MARKET OPPORTUNITY AND HOW BIG IS IT?
- How big is the market opportunity you are pursuing and how fast is it growing?
- How established (or nascent) is the market?
- Do you have a credible claim on being one of the top two or three players in the market?

3) DESCRIBE YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE
- What is your product/service?
- How does it solve your customer’s problem?
- What is unique about your product/service?

4) WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER?
- Who are your existing customers?
- Who is your target customer?
- What defines an "ideal" customer prospect?
- Who actually writes you the check?
- Use specific customer examples where possible.

5) WHAT IS YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION?
- What is your value proposition to the customer?
- What kind of ROI can your customer expect by using buying your product/service?
- What pain are you eliminating?
- Are you selling vitamins, aspirin or antibiotics? (I.e. a luxury, a nice-to-have, or a need-to-have)

6) HOW ARE YOU SELLING?
- What does the sales process look like and how long is the sales cycle?
- How will you reach the target customer? What does it cost to "acquire" a customer?
- What is your sales, marketing and distribution strategy?
- What is the current sales pipeline?

7) HOW DO YOU ACQUIRE CUSTOMERS?
- What is your cost to acquire a customer?
- How will this acquisition cost change over time and why?
- What is the lifetime value of a customer?

8) WHO IS YOUR MANAGEMENT TEAM?
- Who is the management team?
- What is their experience?
- What pieces are missing and what is the plan for filling them?

9) WHAT IS YOUR REVENUE MODEL?
- How do you make money?
- What is your revenue model?
- What is required to become profitable?

10) WHAT STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT ARE YOU AT?
- What is your stage of development? Technology/product? Team? Financial metrics/revenue?
- What has been the progress to date (make reality and future clear)?
- What are your future milestones?

11) WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR FUND RAISING?
- What funds have already been raised?
- How much money are you raising and at what valuation?
- How will the money be spent?
- How long will it last and where will the company "be" on its milestones progress at that time?
- How much additional funding do you anticipate raising & when?

12) WHO IS YOUR COMPETITION?
- Who is your existing & likely competition?
- Who is adjacent to you (in the market) that could enter your market (and compete) or could be a co-opted partner?
- What are their strengths/weaknesses?
- Why are you different?

13) WHAT PARTNERSHIPS DO YOU HAVE?
- Who are your key distribution and technology partners (current & future)?
- How dependent are you on these partners?

14) HOW DO YOU FIT WITH THE PROSPECTIVE INVESTOR?
- How does this fit w/ the investor’s portfolio and expertise?
- What synergies, competition exist with the investor’s existing portfolio?

15) OTHER
- What assumptions are key to the success of the business?
- What "gotchas" could change the business overnight? New technologies, new market entrants, change in standards or regulations?
- What are your company’s weak links?

Essential Abilities of Intelligence

2004-06-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

To Respond to situation very flexibly
To take advantage of fortuitous circumstances
To make sens out of ambiguos or contradictory circumstances
To find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them
To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them
To synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways
To come up with ideas which are novel.

Source :

The Future Buddha

2004-06-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

The Future Buddha

Buddhism has been waiting for the Future
Buddha for 26 centuries.
Christians have been waiting
for the “second coming” for two millennia.

Oddly they have not figured out
the future never comes.

The Buddha, the Christ, can only come in the present.
In fact I am certain there has never been a time,
during the period of humans on this planet,
when enlightened ones have not been here.

The proprietors of religions
want us to believe
enlightened ones only come
ever few thousand years.

The future Buddha
Is the man across the street
Who leads a quiet life,
Who does not go into debt for things.
He simply begins and ends each day
In the silence of internal refuge.

The future Christ is the mother
Next door who never yells at her children.
And, before and after her day,
when all are asleep,
she communes with the Infinite.

The future Avatar works at the convenience store,
And two other jobs, to put food on the table,
while going to college.
He is always patient,
even when his customers are not,
Because, he begins and ends each day
In union with the divine.

The future prophet is never unkind.
He never raises his voice to his wife
Or children, because faces Mecca
every day at noon
in submission to the One.

The future enlightened one is not
Just one divinely inspired being,
Who Moses-like, parts the seas,
Buddha-like turns into a rainbow, or
Jesus-like, walks on water.

The future Buddha is you and me
Beginning and ending each day
In communion with what we hold as sacred
And, by connecting all of the moments
of each day with a calm and still presents,
So that we walk all of our days, upon days,
In the presence of the Shining One.

The future Avatar, Buddha, Christ is now
And, we are emerging,
not in grape-like clusters,
but thinly dispersed, like wildflowers in the desert.
It is you and me bringing our craving
To rest, and becoming living
embodiments of peace, patience and compassion
In every moment.

-- Jeff Brooks --
© 2004

Exchange is the key.

2004-06-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

Ripples provides adivce for Micro-business. His main point is that "understanding customers" and providing goods or services to them is the most important thing. Everything else just follows that.

Let me share the most basic facts I know to be true about business:

- All legitimate business is based upon the principle of exchange
- Exchange is providing something valuable and getting appropriate value in return
- Value can be established through communication with the prospective customer
- You find out what the person wants and is willing to pay for it
- If you provide exchange in abundance, that is the most certain way to grow a business as you will have customers telling others about you.

All of the other activities of a business are only there to support the creation of an exchange of goods or services with a continuing series of customers.

Exchange is the key. It is the fundamental activity of any business, especially a micro-business where you are self-employed. Many people have it backward. It's not about your product or service. What is important is: What do people need and want and how can I provide it?

If you concentrate on finding out what people want that you can provide, you will inevitably come to a point where your resources and the prospective customer's needs line up and the way to proceed will become clear. It may take a lot of research to work out how to produce a uniformly acceptable product or service, but it will all be worth it if you can deliver what is needed and wanted. The next thing to do is to become more efficient so you can start making a profit.

The important thing is that you have created an exchange. If you have chosen well, you should have more exchanges coming up. If there are no more prospects, repeat the process of finding out what people need and want until you find a need that will keep you busy for a longer period of time.

If you follow this advice, your micro-business will expand before you know it. If business start dropping off, go back and read this post again and see what has dropped out.

Marketing - Your Highest Payoff Activity

2004-06-22T21:31:00.000-07:00

Ducktape marketing suggests that you decide your PAY or Personal Average Yield and the figure out the area in which you need to concentrate on. Obviously Marketing, Innovation and Customer service comes out tops. Everything else is a cost.

You only have so much time in a day right?

So wouldn't it make sense to focus as much of your time as possible on the things that produce the highest payoff.

I don't know about you but most small business owners are do-it-yourself types and get sucked into doing the littlest silly work faster than you can say "Oh look, the copier is jammed again."

If you want to achieve any of your goals and finally start making what you are worth then you’ve got to stop doing $5/hr work. Period.
MORE...

As you might have guessed by now, I believe that every business owner's highest payoff work or best use of time is any amount of time spent doing effective marketing.

Here's a little math quiz that I suggest you play with to help drive home this point. Figure out how much money you make annually or, better yet, how much you want or need to make annually to achieve your dreams and goals.

Now, divide that number by 2080. (That's the number you get if you work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year - I know, I know, you work 80 hours a week but just work with me here.)

The answer you get is what I call your PAY(sm) or Personal Average Yield.(sm) The idea here is to pin down what you are worth an hour and realize that if you can hire someone to do any of the things you currently spend your time on for less than that number, you can't afford to do it yourself - did I mention that you could use the spare time to do some marketing.

So let's run some numbers. Let's say that you want to make $150,000 per year. Well, using our little formula that means that you need to be doing work that is worth a little over $72/hr - 8 hours a day.

But guess what...we haven't even factored in any overhead or costs of doing business. That number might really get big if you've got those as well.

This is the point at which many people finally come to understand that they are undercharging for their services…but that’s another issue all together.

So I ask you. Is fiddling with the copier, chatting with the mailman, running to the office supply store, making deliveries, or returning meaningless email paying you $72/hr? For that matter, doesn’t mowing your own grass, washing your own car, cleaning your own windows take you away from marketing your business? I know, now I’m asking you to give up most of the fun things you like to do everyday but hey, if you can get the neighbor kid to mow your grass for anything less than $100/hr, therefore giving you 3 hours to write a killer sales letter - it’s probably a steal

Figure out your PAY number, paint it on the wall in your office, and then go about setting up your business in a way that allows you to focus on the only things that can really pay that kind of money: marketing, innovation, and customer service. – cause everything else is just a cost.

High-Tech Branding: Can't Build It, Must Earn It

2004-06-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

Evelyn blogs about Branding and recommends the newsletter of David Taber. Som gems from him :

In high tech, a brand cannot be built: it has to be earned. A brand is the effect or consequence of your actions: it's your reputation boiled down to a name and a logo. The most powerful brands do not come from "marketing", but from great customer experiences: terrific product quality, creativeness in feature set selection and design, value, and consistency. Most branding exercises in high tech are a colossal waste of resources.

Although there are short-term tricks, the serious players know that the way to build a brand is to make their customers successful. The most powerful force in all branding is word-of-mouth.

10 Questions for Effective Business Planning

2004-06-22T04:28:00.000-07:00

Today in Decker Marketing we look at the business planning and some of the questions which will help us plan better.

Entrepreneur posted an article called 7 Habits for Business Success by Brian Tracy, exerpted from his book “Million Dollar Habits”.

There’s one section of the article I really like…it’s the first habit: Plan Thoroughly. It lists 10 questions for better business planning…

Plan Thoroughly

The first requirement for business success is the habit of planning. The better, more thoroughly, and more detailed that you plan your activities in advance, the faster and easier it will be for you to carry out your plans and get the results you desire once you start to work.

There is a "Six P" acronym that says, "Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance." Very often, the first 20 percent of the time that you spend developing complete plans will save you 80 percent of the time later in achieving the business goals you've set.

To plan better, develop the habit of asking and answering the following questions:

1. What exactly is my product or service?
2. Who exactly is my customer?
3. Why does my customer buy?
4. What does my customer consider value?
5. What is it that makes my product or service superior to that of my competitors?
6. Why is it that my prospective customer does not buy?
7. Why does my prospective customer buy from my competitor?
8. What value does he/she perceive in buying from my competitor?
9. How can I offset that perception and get my competitor's customers to buy from me?
10. What one thing must my customer be convinced of to buy from me, rather than from someone else?

These are applicable in a small business or for managers in a division of a large company. Yet most managers don’t stop to ask these basic questions. Planning and strategy does not have to be left to expensive consultants -- you can just ask some simple questions and get paid a lot less!

Marketing Collateral

2004-06-22T04:23:00.000-07:00

Another blockbuster article from Marketing Sherpa. This is about the need to create different marketing collateral [brochures, websites, power points etc] for different products and sales situations. Also, some advice on managing sales force.

"It used to be that the most successful organizations had a value proposition that was: We'll give you a slightly better product or service and charge you slightly more for it," says Neil Rackham, author and internationally known consultant for sales forces at companies such as IBM, Xerox, AT&T, and Citicorp.

That doesn't work anymore, he says. Today, there are two different kinds of customers looking for value in different ways: transactional vs. consultative customers.

Rackham explained to us how you can create collateral materials for each type:

Marketing to transactional customers

"The transactional customer is only concerned with cost and ease of doing business," Rackham says. "They're the ones who will see your product as pretty well substitutable with anyone else's product." With these more 'simple' sales, the customer knows the problem and the solution, and is looking for the best deal.

"I want to buy 17 laptops and I want them to have a Pentium III processor and I want them to have these characteristics. What's your price?" Rackham explains.

With transactional sales, the sales force doesn't contribute much value, because the sale is based on a product that already exists.

"A standard off-the-shelf software package doesn't need a sales person," says Rackham. In fact, sales channels for these products are moving toward call centers and the Internet. It's the marketing collateral -- brochures, Web copy, catalogs -- that shows the value of the product.

Marketing to consultative customers

A consultative transaction is more complex: the customer has a problem but doesn't know the solution. The sales force must show the value of the product to the customer. "The role of marketing here is very different," says Rackham.

You can't produce collateral material in a traditional way on consultative sales. "Products tend to be customized so standard brochures work against you," Rackham says. "What marketing can do is understand that most of the value lies in how the sales person uses the product to solve the customer's problem."

Every major sale goes through three distinct phases from a customer's point of view. In each phase, marketing materials that support the sales force's efforts should change. For example:

o Phase one: "Do I have a problem?"

Here, the customer is considering whether changes should be made. They're saying, in essence, "I think I might have a problem. I don't really have good data on my customers and I'm wondering if I ought to do something about it," Rackham says.

In this case, a brochure on a CRM system won't help. Instead, offer analytical tools that show the customer how big the problem is. For example:

--benchmarks on what other companies in the same industry are doing, ie: 78% of companies have implemented some sort of CRM system

--10 questions to ask to see if you have a CRM problem

--data on what it's costing the company to have a CRM problem

o Phase two: "Who can solve my problem?"

By now, the customer has decided they have a problem that needs attention and is struggling to find criteria to help choose a product or service.

"At a macro level, offer ways to help customers think about how to make the decision," Rackham says. For example, IBM has been very successful producing collateral materials that help customers who have never bought a major enterprise system set criteria for how to judge systems acquisitions.

"Collateral is provided not to help them look at the product the way a brochure would," he says. "It's not interesting to a customer to know it's green and seventeen inches long," They want to know how the product compares, what it will cost to own it, what it will cost to maintain it.

Collateral material might include:

--quantified data showing cost of ownership

--analysis of your performance vs. a competitor's performance

--criteria that show how successful companies make purchasing decisions for products like yours

--steps on how to assess best performance

o Phase three: "But what if…?"

The third phase is based on fear. Customers wonder: what if the product doesn't perform, what if something goes wrong, what risks am I taking?

Marketing tools should minimize risk in the mind of the customer, and case studies can be very powerful tools. "Show what you do that makes implementation successful," Rackham suggests, such as a case study that illustrates how you manage to install your product without disrupting the workflow.

Testimonials also minimize perceived risk in this phase.

How to get the sales force to use marketing materials properly

"Sales people have a phenomenal capability of snatching confusion from the jaws of clarity," Rackham says. "You may believe you have created very clear tools, but the evidence is that sales people will be highly confused."

To keep this from happening, he suggests two techniques:

o Technique #1. Go on sales calls

Introduce your tools by working through an actual major sale with the sales team.

"Have a direct involvement with selling, almost in an apprenticeship way," he says. This helps the sales team understand how to use the tools, and helps you to know which tools work better than others.

With transactional sales, marketers don't particularly need to go out in the field -- you can get a picture of the market by surveys and other research. But in a consultative sale it's very much "one-on-one, so the best marketing departments are actively involved with sales to get close to the customer."

o Technique #2. A "solemn vow"

The relationship between sales and marketing is relatively uneasy these days, Rackham says. "Too many marketing people sit in an ivory tower when it comes to tools. They provide wonderfully analytical and beautiful PowerPoints, none of which mean much to sales or customers."

Without an understanding between sales and marketing, it may be difficult to get the sales force's buy-in to allow marketing to go on sales calls.

"A lot of companies right now are experimenting with new ways to put sales and marketing together, and the first step is that the most senior group in sales and marketing have to get together and make a solemn vow that they're going to be on the same page," says Rackham. "If they start there, there is hope."

Don't ask sales to gather information from the field and report back: reporting and the filling out of forms take time away from the business of selling. Rather, position marketing as a means to provide the sales team with the tools to help them succeed.

"Top sales managers are feeling that the only people selling are the rock-star sales people, and nobody knows how they're doing it. The answer is that marketing works with them to provide tools to allow ordinary mortals to succeed."

In order to qualify as a genius....

2004-06-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

.......you have to have at least two great ideas in your lifetime.

Wally Bock in his latest post card profiles Tim-Berners lee, the inventor of the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee: Good Guy and Possible Genius

Tim Berners-Lee has been called a genius by a lot of people.
He's also one of the good guys. This month, in Helsinki, he
receives the first Millennium Technology Prize, given by the
Finnish Technology Award Foundation.

In case you don't know, Tim Berners-Lee is the fellow who
invented the World Wide Web. And, in case you're wondering,
unlike Al Gore's claim to inventing the Internet, Berners-Lee's
credential is real and undisputed.

Here's how it happened. Back in 1980, Berners-Lee was working at
CERN, the physics research lab in Switzerland. He noticed that
scientists who worked there often had trouble sharing information
over the lab's computer network.

The scientists who worked at CERN came from many countries and
spoke several different languages. They called lots of different
educational and research institutions home and those institutions
all had different computer systems. The computer systems they
used didn't make it easy to get information even on your own
computer in your own language.

The inspiration for Berners-Lee's solution to the information
sharing problem came from two sources. The first was a Victorian
Era self-help guide that he remembered from the library in the
home outside London where he grew up during the Sixties. The book
was called "Enquire Within Upon Everything."

The other inspiration was Berners-Lee's own experience of how the
human brain works. Your brain doesn't need elaborate programming
commands. Instead the brain easily makes connections between
different bits of information.

In 1989 Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to the powers that be to
use existing tools such as hypertext linking to create the system
that would help CERN's scientists easily share all kinds of
information. The powers that be thought it was a dumb idea. But
with the help of a creative boss Berners-Lee persevered to
develop what became the World Wide Web.

The Finnish Technology Award Foundation isn't the only group
that's recognized him for his invention. Last year Queen
Elizabeth knighted him. Time Magazine called him one of the 100
greatest minds of the 20th century. He's received the Japan Prize
and a Macarthur Foundation "genius grant."

Some of those honors come with pretty big money. The Macarthur
grant is worth a million bucks. The Finns are giving him more
than that.

Between those awards and what he's paid for his work, Mr.
Berners-Lee and his family are probably quite comfortable. But
he would have been rich beyond counting if he'd chosen to patent
his invention. He didn't.

The reasons he gives sound simple and even corny. He has no
desire to amass great wealth. He wants to make the world a
better place. So, in effect, he gave all of us his invention and
it's changed our lives.

What do you do for an encore when you invent the something like
the Web and you're still in your thirties? Mr. Berners-Lee is
doing what he loves to do.

He's teaching at MIT. He's the Director of the World Wide Web
Consortium, the body that coordinates Web development and
technical standards around the globe. And he's working on
something he calls the Semantic Web.

Mr. Berners-Lee thinks that his Semantic Web concept will be a
dramatic improvement on the current Web. He thinks it might just
be more important than his original Web idea. He may be right.
We'll have to wait and see.

Is Tim Berners-Lee a genius? According to one definition, in
order to qualify as a genius you have to have at least two great
ideas in your lifetime. If that's the test, then the jury is
still out on Mr. Berners-Lee, but he's looking good so far.

While we're waiting for someone else to decide if the man's a
genius, we can enjoy the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee's great
invention and great gift to us all. And we can revel in his
success. It's nice to see one of the good guys win.

“Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”

2004-06-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

I found this great site for Entreprenuers, Entrepreneur America. It is a place where you can ask and get answers for the basics in business. This article is about how Sales is Job # 1. Greg Gianforte, CEO and Founder RightNow Technologies makes a great case for Sales.

There's a sign that I keep on the wall of my office. It says simply, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” In other words, sales is where your business begins. Sure, you may have a great product or service that you’ve worked hard to develop. You may have hired a fantastic staff. You may have cash in the bank, a logo and letterhead, a beautiful office, computers on the desks, all those things that come to mind when we picture a business. But that’s not what makes a business. Only sales can do that.

This is good news for bootstrappers. Bootstrappers can’t afford fancy offices or big staffs. They may not even have a finished product yet. But the bootstrapper doesn’t need those things to get started. As soon as you can start selling—that is, go out and find customers willing to buy his product or service—you have a business.

So when you’re bootstrapping a business, you don’t worry about the nonessentials at first. Your first concern is sales. Everything else can come later, and sometimes that includes the product or service that you’re selling. In fact, if you approach it the right way, sales is the best way to come up with a product that people will buy.

In other words, I used the sales process to do my market research. Had I been awash in start-up capital, I could have hired a marketing firm to run some focus groups and do some surveys of potential customers to figure out what the market wanted. But my way didn’t cost anything, and when I was done, I had a stack of orders. If the reverse had happened, if no one wanted to buy my product, I would have learned quickly and relatively painlessly that I didn’t have a viable business idea. Rejection isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than raising money, renting office space, hiring staff, producing product—and then going out of business because your brilliant idea didn’t pan out in the marketplace.

In fact, I would argue that going out and talking to customers myself taught me more about my market than a dozen surveys or focus groups. For an entrepreneur, real learning doesn't start until you actually have real customers. So the goal of the bootstrapper is to get a real customer as quickly as possible.

At first I didn’t charge for it. It was more important for me to get the software into the hands of real customers, so that I could find out what they liked and didn’t like about the product, and then fix it.

The beauty of it was that I got a lot of feedback at first. So I ran really fast and I kept dropping in changes, and eventually I heard the response, "I'm not happy because...” less and less. That’s when I knew that I was starting to get a mature product. It probably took about ten months of iterations to get a mature product.

In other words, I used the sales process to do my market research. Had I been awash in start-up capital, I could have hired a marketing firm to run some focus groups and do some surveys of potential customers to figure out what the market wanted. But my way didn’t cost anything, and when I was done, I had a stack of orders. If the reverse had happened, if no one wanted to buy my product, I would have learned quickly and relatively painlessly that I didn’t have a viable business idea. Rejection isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than raising money, renting office space, hiring staff, producing product—and then going out of business because your brilliant idea didn’t pan out in the marketplace.

In fact, I would argue that going out and talking to customers myself taught me more about my market than a dozen surveys or focus groups. For an entrepreneur, real learning doesn't start until you actually have real customers. So the goal of the bootstrapper is to get a real customer as quickly as possible.

I really believe that sales is the only job that has to be done well in building a business. There's no more important thing. A lot of companies think sales is like a necessary evil, but it's actually the life blood of your company. I'd much rather have great sales and a good product than a great product and good sales. Now, realistically, you've got to have both. But given a choice, I'd always take great sales.

No One Gets it Right the First Time

2004-06-14T23:23:00.000-07:00

In The Rhythm of Business Jeffrey Shuman writes about how nobody can get it right the first time you start the business.

Entrepreneurship has never been more popular or more important. By some estimates more than 4.5 million new businesses are started every year in the United States. That's more than 12,000 every day of the year--one every 7 seconds!

But there's a dark side to these statistics. About 80 percent of these businesses, more than 3.5 million, do not survive to their 5th birthday.

Why? Is it because the entrepreneurs were unlucky or lacked some other quality such as determination or tolerance for risk?

I don't think so. It is my belief that the number one reason businesses fail is because entrepreneurs are focused on starting a business--a very specific type of business, no matter what. The 20 percent of businesses that survive, I believe, succeed because the entrepreneurs who run these businesses don't start a business. They start a process.

Let me explain what I mean. The number one reason so many startups fail is because the entrepreneurs follow the "convention wisdom" and make a very simple assumption. They think they can get "it" right the first time. That is, they are willing to "bet the ranch" that the business they are starting is THE RIGHT business. One which will satisfy their customers wants and needs better than any other business in the world. And they are wrong. You simply can't get it right the first time!

Peter Drucker, the famed business guru, once said, "When a new venture does succeed more often than not it is in a market other than the one it was originally intended to serve, with products or services not quite those with which it had set out, bought in large part by customers it did not even think of when started, and used for a host of purposes besides the ones for which the products were first designed."

In other words, change is intrinsic to business. And change means rhythm--The Rhythm of Business. In order for you to be successful in business, you've got to listen to that rhythm or you are soon going to end up out of business.

Here's a couple of examples. In a recent Boston Business Journal (3/13-19/98, pp.12), I read a story about Virtual Knowledge, Inc., a company that develops and markets the Sylvan Children's Skill Test, a CD-ROM-based exam which allows parents to measure their children's academic skills at home. When first introduced the product was marketed as a quasi-IQ test and sold poorly because as David Blohm, the owner and CEO found out, parents were less interested in knowing their children's IQ and more interested in measuring and improving their children's skills. After analyzing his customer feedback and quickly repositioning and relaunching his product last September, Virtual Knowledge has sold over 200,000 copies and is on target to hit the $5 million revenue mark by years end.

And then there's Top of the Tree Baking Company of Londonderry, New Hampshire, a company I heard about just a few days ago. While the company is currently flourishing, that wasn't always the case. Three years ago when Gordon Weinberger started the company, he insisted that all pies be made in his own baking facility. But two days before an investor was supposed to give him the money for a new, more efficient facility, the investor backed out. It was a devastating blow. The vision Weinberger had spent nights and days building was gone in one short phone call. He couldn't make enough money to survive in his old facilities. Depressed, he piled his wife, kids and dog in the family car and went away for a long weekend, convinced he was going out of business. However, by Monday, he had a new plan. He'd outsource the baking. His fresh apples wouldn't come from New Hampshire any more, but from New York. The baking would no longer be done in Londonderry, but in plants in Quebec and in U.S. locations outside New England. And in just a few short months he went from losing money on sales of $500,000 to a profit on annual sales over $3 million.

So, what's the message? It's not persistence or luck. The message is: In business, no one gets it right the first time! Virtual Knowledge had the wrong understanding of its customers and Top of the Tree had the wrong understanding of how to produce its pies. Both of these examples clearly illustrate the simple but critical point--most companies do not succeed with the idea with which they began.

So, how do you get it right, eventually? The answer is pretty straightforward. You must understand that every business goes through a natural development process; a natural development process which requires change. This is the Rhythm of Business.

How do you follow this rhythm? In this column, I'll continually point that out but the short answer is you have to listen to your customers, listen to your employees, listen to your vendors, listen to your investors and, eventually, you will succeed most likely in a different market than the one you started, with different products and services sold to different customers than those with which you originally set out but most importantly with a profit!

As David Blohm of Virtual Knowledge remarked to me on the phone the other day, "If you have the mind set of listening to customers and keeping yourself nimble enough to make the changes, you can succeed."

That's the Rhythm of Business. That's the dance. And it's a dance where the customer always leads.

Munger Goes Mental

2004-06-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

Atanu Dey passed on a speech by Charlie Munger to me. I tried to find the source and of course it was Whitney Tilson of Tilson funds who has been writing his notes and commentary in the Fool on everything Buffet, Munger and Hathway. Some notes from the transcript. You can find the transcript here.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are undoubtedly the greatest investment duo ever, so I think any sensible investor should try to learn as much as possible about these two men and how they achieved their success. In the case of Buffett, it's not hard -- there are many books about him, he's published lengthy annual letters for decades (you can read the last 27 of them for free on Berkshire's website), and he gives speeches and makes public appearances regularly. But Munger is more private; there are only two books about him, he is a far less prolific writer, and rarely gives speeches.

Thus, my heart skipped a beat when a friend gave me a recording of a speech Munger gave to the economics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara last Oct. 3. It's 85 minutes long and entitled, "Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults After Considering Interdisciplinary Needs."

With that kind of title, it sounds like a real snoozer, eh? But it's not. In this speech, Munger applies his famous mental models approach to critiquing how economics is taught and practiced, and I think the lessons he teaches are profound -- both for investors as well as anyone who seeks to be a better, clearer thinker.

Munger is the best when it goes to explaining mental models and helping us understand the use of them. Nobody else comes anywhere near that. So get a hold of the transcript and read it in its entirety.

Tilson ends with this:

I'll conclude this column with a bit of classic Munger humor: While Buffett bends over backward to appear humble, Munger's the opposite -- he jokes about his big ego. In his opening remarks, he said:

As I talk about strengths and weaknesses in academic economics, one interesting fact you are entitled to know is that I never took a course in economics. And with this striking lack of credentials, you may wonder why I have the chutzpah to be up here giving this talk. The answer is I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it.

For more on Tilsons collection of speeches, check it out here.

Salesforce.com - The New ASP model for business software

2004-06-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

You work in the software industry, say in the second largest software company in the world, work your way up and start a company called Siebel. You the big daddy in your vertical now and can call the shots. Your previous boss and colleague start a new upstart called Salesforce.com which is exactly opposite to what the leaders do.

This is the story of how two employees of Oracle have created two of the best known CRM companies - Siebel and Salesforce.com.

Like all good Silicon Valley brawls, this one is complicated by the intertwined personal histories of the executives.

A Salesforce representative said several weeks ago that the company could not comment for this story because of the quiet period before its IPO -- despite Benioff's interview with the New York Times.

Benioff and Siebel both got their starts working at Oracle for Larry Ellison. Siebel left in the early 1990s after a falling out and founded his company.

Benioff continued to climb the executive ladder at Oracle, but he was also an early investor in Siebel's company, which -- along with his Oracle options -- made him fabulously rich by his mid-30s.

All that money caused what Benioff has described as a personal spiritual crisis. In the late 1990s, he took a leave from Oracle to find himself, which is when he also hatched the idea for Salesforce. The company was founded in February 1999. Ellison invested more than $1 million and became a board member.

Now Salesforce.com is trying to go public and is fighting a whole lot of companies which is following its business model including Siebel.

It will be interesting to see how things shape up and the market for other ASP companies too.

Microsoft starts PPP pricing

2004-06-07T20:19:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has started providing its Windows OS and Office suite of software at "low low" prices of $40 in Thailand and Malaysia for government sponsored programs.

This is the first step by the Redmond giant to change its pricing policy, which could be a bold step, and has many repurcursions.

But in Southeast Asia, the software giant seems more like an ardent suitor, wooing governments with sweet promises and gifts - such as unprecedented bargain prices on its Windows operating system.

Microsoft executives suggest that pricing policies for government-promoted PC sales pioneered last year in Thailand and used again in Malaysia this year presage a new marketing approach for emerging markets.

So far, the localized versions consist of Windows XP minus English language support. The company also has hinted that it's developing a kind of "XP Lite," a leaner Windows with features more appropriate to developing countries where "high tech" is not a reality of everyday life.

Microsoft executives are themselves being lean with details, citing competitive strategy. But they're willing to discuss the concept.

"This is a new market with very different needs, from an economic perspective, from a social perspective, from a technical perspective," Barry Goff, group product manager for Windows Client group, said in a telephone interview from company headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Setting prices based on geography is not new in other industries. Pharmaceutical firms charge lower prices in developing markets like Africa than in mature ones like the United States. Even McDonald's sets different prices for Big Macs based on geography.

But the software industry is just beginning to move beyond a one-price-fits-all strategy.

Company Parties

2004-06-06T21:20:00.000-07:00

We used to have a lot of company parties at my previous employer, ADP Wilco. It was a young crowd which was ready to enjoy and dance and drink into the wee hours of the night. [The company was good enough to understand the needs of the female members and provided company cars which would leave the ladies home at the end of the party. This obviously had a direct impact on the party, we had more variety!]The organization understood the importance of parties because we used to have a lot of them, mostly at expensive restaurants accompanied with some good Disco Jockeys helping providing the "beat" for out steps. Not that it was needed, we would have anyway danced!

The parties providing us with a opportunity to meet and talk to our colleagues in an atomosphere which was more open and inviting than a office setting. This increased the comradrie among us and made us into one strong team. This has a direct effort on performance. Ultimately working in a organization is working with people. Working together. Winning and losing together. It helps if you know these people better.

We had a similar party and I had a hell of a time. Due to my job profile here I do not interact with the software development team. This was my great chance to be with these people, dance and drink with them and have fun. It was a good bonding exercise.

Partying is one of the best team building exercises! So what are you waiting for, lets party.

Freedom isn't free

2004-06-06T20:41:00.000-07:00

Eammon writes a wonderful piece on Freedom.

I come from a country that opted for neutrality in the existential 20th-century fight to save Europe from fascism, and I live in the country that had to be defeated in this fight, so you can be sure that on this anniversary of D-Day I have some pretty strong feelings about freedom.

First, my homeland, Ireland. Its decision to stay neutral in the Second World War was based on the memories of its war against Britain for independence, its grievances over the partition of the island and a fear of Republican insurrection. It was this domestic agenda that led Eamon de Valera, the Irish Prime Minister, to remain neutral. Churchill, in his 13 May 1945 victory speech, vented his anger at the Irish stance, when he reminded his listeners of how perilous Britain's situation was in the early phase of the war. If things had taken a turn for the worse because of Ireland's resolve, he said, "we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr. de Valera, or perish from the earth. However, with a restraint and poise to which, I venture to say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty's Government never laid a violent hand upon them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the de Valera Government to frolic with the German and later with the Japanese representatives to their heart's content."

That latter jab about frolicking was, not doubt, provoked by the 30 April decision by de Valera to visit the German embassy in Dublin and sign a book of condolences memorializing the death of Hitler. De Valera regarded his gesture as a perfunctory diplomatic act by a neutral government. However, despite his ghastly observance of diplomatic niceties, and despite Ireland's adherence to a policy that threatened Allied security, there were Irish people who had the courage to act. Some 43,000 from the south and 38,000 from the north joined the British forces and fought the good fight.

As regards Germany, the participation of the German Chancellor in today's ceremonies is Normandy is to be welcomed as it should help put to an end the debate within Germany about whether 1945 represented Besatzung (occupation) or Befreiung (liberation). The fact is that the Allies liberated Germany from itself, and freed Europe forever from the nightmare of Germany's desire to be a superpower.

Today, we should remember and honour those who paid the ultimate price that Europe might be free. How high that price was can be measured by the numbers who died on the beaches of Normandy, but it is also transmitted to those of us who were born long after D-Day in a more accessible way, in a book, a bestseller in France, called L'Américain, by Franz-Olivier Giesbert.

Giesbert's father was a former GI who never recovered from the trauma of D-Day. "He remained all his life in a state of shock, scarcely able to smile, his soul wounded to the core, for having survived by leaving behind him the dying carcasses of so many friends." As the young GI Giesbert and his comrades advanced along the beach, forming "floods of fresh flesh," they experienced a horror we can scarce comprehend. "Behind them, the beach was filled with remorse that would never cease to torment my father." The result was that the GI who survived beat the author mercilessly throughout his childhood.

It's easy to say that the best things in life are free. Well, freedom isn't one of them. It has to be defended. And, at times, fought for. We owe an outstanding and permanent debt to those who fought and suffered and died for our freedom on 6 June 1944.

Absurd Patents

2004-06-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

Wired reports that Microsoft has been awarded patents on "double clicking" and holding down a button on Palm PCs

A patent recently obtained by Microsoft for its Palm-sized PC product line is raising concerns among intellectual property experts who say it could be used to demand licensing fees from other mobile-device makers.

The patent, issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 27, covers what Microsoft calls a "time-based hardware button for application launch." Microsoft said the technology was developed for use in handheld computers, such as its Palm-size PC, which use buttons to open files and start programs.

But the wording of the patent is drawing fire from some critics of the patent office, who view it as another example of how companies are obtaining patents that are either overly broad or apply to technologies already widely in use.

"What was the patent office thinking?" wondered Brandon Shalton, founder of Fight the Patent, a site that protests questionable patents. "I'm just kind of amazed that this patent was filed so late and was approved. It's a double-click. It was novel and unique 10 to 15 years ago."

Microsoft filed for the patent in July of 2002, but its application includes content from an earlier filing, made in 1999, which was subsequently abandoned.
Moreover, Bernstein said, it's possible that Microsoft will never attempt to enforce its patent. Instead, the company may merely use the patent defensively to ward off suits from holders of similar intellectual property claims.

Of course, Bernstein could also envision the software company taking a different approach.

"If Microsoft were to become more aggressive in its Pocket PC business, I could see them asserting this patent offensively," he said.

Analysts Reports - Hype or Education

2004-06-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

Richard Luhr writes a very good piece in the ALways-On network on Analyts. His main contention is that the "forecasts" are highlighted to sell the reports whereas one of the impportant jobs of a analyst is to provide education and a balanced view.

Many people think that analyst reports are all about forecasts. After all, the big flashy forecast is inevitably what leads the press release or news articles. In truth, forecasts are often the least useful part of any analyst report.

Education is the most valuable service an analyst can provide. For without educating the reader, forecasts have no context—and hence no real meaning. Unfortunately, education doesn't sell well. So even great studies with exceptional explanations of context and subtlety tend to get marketed with an emphasis on forecasts.

Hey, trends are good. Trends are where the money is, and bean-counting is an important discipline. But before you get excited about how much money there is to be made in an industry sector, shouldn't you first understand what the heck people are talking about?

Let me explain why the lack of emphasis on education and over-emphasis on forecasts are unfortunate.

First, because in many cases there's a much greater need for education than forecasting. For example, when reading various news reports on wireless technologies, I inevitably see a lot of energy wasted in endless debates of which technology fits where. Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Bluetooth, Ultrawideband (UWB), and Zigbee (just to name a few examples) clearly have distinct roles. It may be tempting to compare Wi-Fi to Wi-Max, but in a few paragraphs, any analyst worth paying can easily differentiate the two—and save everyone a lot of time.

Good analysts have always done this, and there are many customers who specifically buy analyst reports to rapidly get up to speed on a subject. I just wish that the marketing departments of the analysis firms would recognize this need and emphasize the clear-spoken educational nature of some of their studies, rather than always leading with the tried-and-true "big forecast."

There's another reason why leading with forecasts is "unfortunate." It's because technology subjects without (in the eyes of an analyst) great forecasting opportunities tend to get short shrift in the marketplace. This is about competitiveness—it's hard to sell a report which doesn't say something unique. Education is perceived as a low-value product, something "everyone can do."

Dave Cappuccio provides a valuable comment in which he explains the difference between two type of analysts.

Richard,

I would add that there are two distinct types of analysis that folks generally get confused about. Quantitative analysis are the numbers folks who continually put out charts for the trade magazines to use and base their analysis on widgits built, sales projections and trend analysis. Generally called Market Research, some have called it steering by the wake. It's good advice based on known values - which precludes getting solid advice (or education) on the unknown values.

The second group are usually called Advisory Analysts and base their research on conversations with trend setters, early adopters, vendor labs and the like. Sometimes called opinion based research, this is more qualitative and generally results in a longer term but more speculative view of the world.

The real problem of late is that both these research categories are getting melded together in the publics mind (and in some cases the research houses), so that all questions about industry trends and directions result in the same answer; "it depends".

So, who should we believe? None of them completely, but like you said, they should be used as part of our education, and like a good textbook the data gathered becomes one small piece in the overall education process.

Web users to gain Creative Commons access to the BBC

2004-06-04T00:28:00.000-07:00

Web users can now download the BBC's programs for free from the BBC Creative archive. This is a major initiative by the BBC to provide digital content to geenral public.

The BBC's decision to let British surfers download TV footage and share it between friends could help to drive broadband and the take-up of new, faster PCs

The BBC has given a major boost to the Creative Commons movement this week by revealing how it plans to open up its archive of broadcasting material to UK Internet users.

The corporation has decided to allow surfers to download, distribute and modify digital clips of BBC television programmes through an initiative called the Creative Archive.

While users won't be allowed to resell the material, they will enjoy increased access to content that many potential users effectively paid the BBC to create through their licence fees.

A Creative Commons licence allows content creators to dictate whether or not anyone can copy their own work, creative derivative works from it, or use it for commercial purposes. It is an attempt to create a middle-ground rather than making content owners choose between putting something fully into the public domain or controlling it tightly through copyright.

The BBC's decision to let British surfers download TV footage and share it between friends could help to drive broadband and the take-up of new, faster PCs

The BBC has given a major boost to the Creative Commons movement this week by revealing how it plans to open up its archive of broadcasting material to UK Internet users.

The corporation has decided to allow surfers to download, distribute and modify digital clips of BBC television programmes through an initiative called the Creative Archive.

While users won't be allowed to resell the material, they will enjoy increased access to content that many potential users effectively paid the BBC to create through their licence fees.

A Creative Commons licence allows content creators to dictate whether or not anyone can copy their own work, creative derivative works from it, or use it for commercial purposes. It is an attempt to create a middle-ground rather than making content owners choose between putting something fully into the public domain or controlling it tightly through copyright.

Really Simple Explanation to Really Simple Syndication

2004-06-04T00:21:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer launches a new site on RSS for non-techies and explains in simple terms what RSS is.

RSS is...

1. A format.

2. Content management tools that generate feeds in the format.

3. Aggregators and readers that subscribe to the feeds.

4. Search engines and utilities that crunch the information and ideas.

5. Services from technology companies like Microsoft and Apple.

6. Authoritative publications like the BBC, The New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, PC World, Time, Wired, Salon, Yahoo, Reuters -- that distribute news and opinion in RSS.

7. Many thousands of weblogs covering virtually every aspect of life on this planet.

8. A vast and growing community of thinkers, writers, educators, public servants, and technologists.

The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available.

RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It's big. A lot bigger than a format.

This is the inaugural post for a new website devoted to the community of people who create and use RSS. It's just a beginning.

Let's have fun!

there are only two kinds of VCs

2004-06-03T05:02:00.000-07:00

Guy Kawasaki explains the different kinds of VCs.

Fundamentally, there are only two kinds of VCs: those that will invest in you and those that won't. That's the most important distinction. Your job is to increase the likelihood of an investment. To do this, you should look at several high-level characteristics:

* Are you in the right geographic region for the VC? Most VCs don't want to fly around the world for a board meeting.

* Is your company in the right stage? Some VCs want "proven" companies that already have revenue. Others will take a flier with dropouts sketching out business plans on the back of envelopes.

* Are you in a sector that matches the VC's interest? For example, if you're a semiconductor company, don't go to a VC that specializes in life sciences companies.

* Do you like the VC partner that you're dealing with? Your relationship with the firm will be primarily with this one person.

If you want to Write

2004-06-03T04:12:00.000-07:00

Guy Kawasaki mentions the book If you want to write by Brenda Ueland as the best explanation of entrepreneurship that I've ever read. He asks us to trust him.

I tried to find the review to this book and this is what I found.

If you want to write, this is the book to read right after Brande's "Becoming A Writer." The similarities between Brande and Ueland are striking: both are female, both are writing on the same subject, and both wrote their books for publication in 1934. Both are worth reading, studying, and most of all following the directions they give for the free-writing process, the early morning writing, and the setting of writing appointments with yourself. These work, but only if you do them, so either be serious about your writing and do free-writing for a year or admit to yourself that you want to be a writer but you don't want to become one.

Note how carefully the two titles are chosen: Becoming A Writer is for people who want to write and need some hints about getting started. If You Want To Write is for people who want to become writers and need some hints on how to channel their desire to write in productive ways. Both of these writers understand how the unconscious can be tapped by the conscious mind. One cannot find material in either of their books that dated them (except the reference to reducing a meat budget for a household for a year by $3.70). Their psychological insights are as pertinent today as any NLP Master Track graduate might conjure up. One of the major insights for me was that following the process for a long period of time was a prerequisite for judging whether the process worked. There is no other way. Since I had been free-writing for a year before reading these two books, I was in a position to attest to the efficacy of the suggested exercises from personal experience.

Very interesting. Here's his reply to classroom learning helping Entre.

If I had to weight the major factors, I'd say experience is 20%, classroom learning is 10%, hard work is 30% and luck is 40%.

800CEORead Blog

2004-06-03T04:03:00.000-07:00

Evelyn points to this blog. It provides new book ideas and blogs about the authors and of course books.

I found some links really fantastic.

1. Guy Kawasaki. - This guy is one of the best writes I have seen on Entre. He is really straight forward.

He writes this article Art of the Start in Forbes. Here's a link to his articles.

2. Another quote from Kawasaki.

Q:Who do you think is a good role model as an entrepreneur?

Let me answer this in a different way. Here's the best book you can read about being an entrepreneur: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. Suspend your disbelief and buy/read this book. Trust me, it's the best explanation of entrepreneurship that I've ever read.

This is really interesting.

The Curse of Great Expectations

2004-06-01T23:18:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin writes what could be his best blog entry till date. You can follow from where Seth would have got this idea. What is interesting is that Seth has been working on his basic idea of Permission marketing and has extended it.

Now we know how to spread a idea virus and more importantly ideas are everything. We also understand memes and how an organization can use that. From that we have moved to the "Purple Cow" and how the product we create has to be the most remarkable or else it will not be noted in the clutter of the market. Then he teaches us that a Free Prize Inside provides an easy way to start spreading an idea.

Now keeping this background Seth tries to understand how can a individual create something remarkable. What follows is the answer to this question.

The Curse of Great Expectations
By Seth Godin

I can benchmark everything now.

I can benchmark my morning workout. The rowing machine tells me if today’s workout was a personal best. Even better, I can go online and compare my workout to the efforts of thousands of other people.

On my way to work, I can track my mileage. (My record is 89 mpg). Once there, I can watch the status of my books on Amazon, comparing their sales to every other book published in the English language… and then go check out JungleScan.com, where I can track the book’s performance over the last 90 days.

The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much. Who wants to know that they will never again be able to beat their personal best rowing time? What entrepreneur wants to embrace the fact that the wait time at her new restaurant franchise is 20% behind the leader—and there’s no obvious way to improve it?

Our interconnected, 500-channel world lets us be picky. We can want a husband who is as tall as that guy, as rich as this guy and as loyal as my brother-in-law. We can ask for an apartment that is in just the right location, with just the right view and just the right rent—and then reject it because the carpeting in the hallway isn’t as nice as the one in the building next door. Monster lets us see 5,000 resumes for every job opening… and imagine that we can find someone with this guy’s education and that woman’s professional experience—who works as cheap as this person and is as local as that one.

In the old days, data was a lot harder to come by. You didn’t know everything about everyone. All the options weren’t right there, laid out in Froogle and compared by epinions.com. We didn’t have reality TV shows where each and every component of a singer’s presentation or a bridal prospect’s shtick were painstakingly compared.

Yes, benchmarking is terrific. Benchmarking is the reason that cars got so much better over the last twenty years. Benchmarking has the inexorable ability to make the mediocre better than average, and it pushes us to always outperform.

But it stresses us out. A benchmarked service business or product (or even a benchmarked relationship) is always under pressure. It’s hard to be number one, and even harder when the universe we choose to compare our options against is, in fact, the entire universe.

Of course, the boomers have this problem even worse (and we’re all boomers, aren’t we? Even if you’re not, we don’t care—it’s all about us). Boomers are getting older. We can benchmark our eyesight, our rowing speed, our memory or even our ability to come up with great ideas at a moment’s notice. As a result, we benchmark ourselves into a funk. We get stressed because we have to acknowledge that nothing is as good as it was.

In addition to the stress, benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing. The folks who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didn’t benchmark their way to the edges. Comparing themselves to other cars would never have created these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having everything being up to spec… what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING.

So, I’m officially letting go. I’m going to stop comparing everything to my all time best, to your all time best, to everyone’s all time best. Instead of benchmarking everything, perhaps we win when we accept that the best we can do is the best we can do—and then try to find the guts to do one thing that’s remarkable.

Was this my best blog entry ever, or what?

Serial entrepreneurship is easy

2004-05-31T06:49:00.000-07:00

Eirepreneur writes about Stelios Haji-Ioannou. This guy is a serial entrepreneur based in the UK like Richard Branson of the Virgin group. In fact this guy is a fan of the original, but he thinks he is better.

easyMobile seems to be the latest addition to the family and you've got to admire the guy's neck in rebuffing Richard Branson, that other serial entrepreneur -

"I have never made a secret of the fact that Richard Branson has been my inspiration on many of my ventures. At the same time, I think one has to recognize that nobody has a monopoly on good ideas and in this day and age business models and best of class practice change within a matter of a few years."

His CV is worth a look.

28 going on £4m

2004-05-31T04:16:00.000-07:00

Eirepreneur writes about this young guy who is all of 28.

He writes Matt Stevenson, founder of Reef One, seems to echo my 'Touching the Void' thoughts in today's 'How I made it' article from the Sunday Times -

“Most of my friends thought I was mad because they were all going off to earn decent amounts of money. I got a first-class degree, which meant I could have had a well-paid job straight away, but I didn’t want to do that. I knew that what I had was good and that if I did it properly it could become a substantial business, so I could reap the rewards later on.”

At the age of 28 Matt now oversees a company with 15 full-time employees and projected sales for this year of £4m. You'd have to admire the guy.

I like his thinking. Simple and straight. You need to believe in this idea and go ahead and do it.

EBay

2004-05-31T04:08:00.000-07:00

Rajesh Links to some ebay articles and blog posts. Ebay has always fascinated me because it is one of the successful business models on the Internet and it is based on a simple fact that "making ineffcient markets efficient" is money making.

Robert Scoble talkd to an eBay exeuctive on a flight and gathered this info:

# $7 to $8 billion runs through the eBay platform (yes, he called eBay a "platform") every quarter.

# Every hour eBay registers 3000 to 4000 new users.

# This year they are expecting somewhere around $3.5 billion in revenues. That's above expectations.

# Every day about a terabyte of data courses through eBay's data centers (most of the machines running eBay are running Windows, he told me. The back end they use is running on Sun Microsystems computers).

# eBay has a high degree of customer lockin. How? Well, for one, many of their customers are getting rich (he says he knows a few power sellers who have already retired). Second, the more you buy and sell on eBay, the better your ratings, and those aren't transferable to other auction systems.

Bill Miller on Ebay :

What is eBay's business? If it is an auction site where individuals, mostly, sell unwanted items — sort of like an Internet enabled flea market — then it probably is fully priced. That is not how the company describes its business, though. Here is eBay's description of what it does: "We make inefficient markets efficient." For those who can size markets, that is all you need to know, if you believe it.

1Tb from GMail is a Rumour

2004-05-21T03:16:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer quotes this Wired article.

Wired: "Rumors that Google is offering users of its Gmail service an unprecedented 1 terabyte of storage space are untrue, the company said Wednesday, blaming a bug in the system for the confusion."

Now we can all sleep tight. Google is not all that foolish.

Social Innovations!

2004-05-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

Evelyn Rodriguez quotes Jim Collins.

"Some of the most amazing inventions in history are not technology or products; they're social inventions," says Jim Collins, the management guru and author of the bestsellers "Built to Last" and "Good to Great. "Imagine inventing the idea of the U.S. Constitution..."

My first idea of a invention or a innovation was related to technology. From the automobile,, TV, computer and anything mechanial or electrical. I used to connect invention with technology. Then I started reading Peter Drucker.

Drucker was the first person, whom I read, started talking about the difference between a Innovation and a Invention and the importance of Social Innovation.

Social Innovations, I have come to understand are more important and more useful than technological innovation. The first example of this which I strongly remember is the idea of "instalment credit". This powerful idea made many a technological innovations to be solved.

The ability to understand his brought in another change in me. Since I was not a "engineer" I started to wonder what I can create. Suddenly I saw the possibility of working for and creating a social innovation. This it seemed had a chance for great impact on society and which could be possible for a non-engineer.

As I started thinking of the problems in India and especially in Rural India I started appreciating the fact that Social Innovations are so more important for making a difference.

We all have a chance to Innovate and make a difference.

Jut Do It

2004-05-21T02:51:00.000-07:00

The Nike tagline of Just do It is a powerful idea. The reason Nike's brand is so famous because "Just Do it" is a concept which is dear to a lot of people mainly because we cannot do it.

This is the interesting part. Anita Campbell quotes an idea which is useful to all but definitely to Entrepreneurs.

"What I like about this story, is that I could have given up at any point since there was a large problem ahead of me: a problem I had no answers to. And I see this with many free software developers, students and even in normal social situations: people stop doing things because they see a big problem ahead of them that they can not possibly conceive working around. My advise to every young programmer is to start writing code and delay addressing imaginary problems until they become real. There's a lesson that for folks in lots of areas, not just software development. Even life in general."

Most of the times we just need to start doing it. Starting is the most important thing. Dealing with uncertainity is also related to starting.

So Just Do It

Credit your Voice

2004-05-21T02:48:00.000-07:00

Smart Mobs connects to a Nytimes article on a new credit card security feature which works with your voice.

Enclosed in the card is a tiny microphone, a loudspeaker and a chip with voice recognition chip. To use the card, its owner must speak a password, which the chip compares with a sample recorded on the card. If the voices match, the card emits a set of beeps that authorize the transaction over the telephone or through a microphone on the shopper's computer. If the voiceprints don't agree, the card will not beep.

This is the next level of technology security and certainly lowers the RISK.

Five Years from Now

2004-05-21T02:19:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin looks into the future and this is what he sees...

Assume that:

Hard drive space is free

Wifi like connections are everywhere

Connections speeds are 10 to 100 times faster

Everyone has a digital camera

Everyone carries a device that is sort of like a laptop, but cheap and tiny

The number of new products introduced every day is five times greater than now

Wal-Mart's sales are three times as big

Any manufactured product that's more than five years old in design sells at commodity pricing

The retirement age will be five years higher than it is now

Your current profession will either be gone or totally different

What then?

We will all have network computers broadbanded to the Internet and the GoogleOS or a similar thing. We will be always-on and will have the ability to reach anybody anywhere. If you combine Laptops and Wifi, mostly in the developed countries then you can be anywhere and connnect to anybody.

This brings up a huge amount of possibilities which are not happenning now. More importantly this will bring in a cultural revolution.

Can I work from home? If so, how will the company policies change. Will I be allowed. Who will be and who cannot be. Will the sales man need to come to office. Can he be online on Wifi with VoIP and can connect and talk and work from everywhere. If this is possible and is required then what are the demands on the companies. How will the managers manage?

technology is bringing in the possibilities of change, but to make these reality we need to make a cultural and social change. Soft changes need to follow hard changes!

The white woman and India

2004-05-21T02:04:00.000-07:00

Francois Gautier,writes in Rediff, what he terms has India's love for the white skin. He says this has its origins in the way the British has powered the Aryan Invasion theory.

This paragrah says everything :

Wake up O Indians: you are as great, if not greater than the white man. You can do as well, if not better than the white man. Not only did your forefathers devise some of the basic principles of mathematics, astrology, and surgical medicine, not only are your people among the most brilliant in the world today -- half of Silicon Valley is of Indian origin, 30 percent of the United Kingdom's doctors are Indians -- but you still hold within yourselves a unique spiritual knowledge, which once roamed the world but which has now disappeared, replaced by the intolerant creed of the two major monotheistic religions which say: 'if you don't believe in my true God, I will either kill you or convert you'.

The spectacle on the night of May 18, of all these Congress leaders, many of them intelligent men and women, debasing themselves in front of Sonia Gandhi, pleading with her to lead the country, made me feel sick. If Sonia had any dignity, she would have stopped it, but she just listened, with a slightly bored expression, right till the last Congressman and woman had wallowed in dirt before her.

And again I asked myself the question which has baffled me for 35 years, although I am myself a white man and a born Christian: why do Indians have such an attraction towards the white skin?

After reading the newspapers on Wednesday morning and seeing how newspapers such as The Times of India still root for Sonia Gandhi, with columnists such as Dileep Padgaonkar saying that her becoming prime minister would be in tune 'with the highest Vedantic ideals,' I wonder: does India, one of the most ancient civilizations on the planet, need a white woman to govern her?

I am sure Sonia has great qualities, but are Indians so dumb, stupid and backward, that they cannot find among themselves someone intelligent enough, non-corrupt enough, to lead them? And what about this craze for Mother Teresa? She may have been a saint, but nobody has harmed India's image in the 20th century so much: when you say India in the West, their eyes light up and they answer: 'Mother Teresa/ Kolkata/ poor people/ dumb people/ starving people/ who do not know how to care after their own underprivileged/ who need a white woman to show them how to pick up the dying from the streets/ to look after orphans'!

Is this the image Indians want today? An image that is harming them, which is stopping Western investors from investing in India? Yet, Mother Teresa is worshipped here, from Kolkata to Chennai, from Delhi to Bangalore, and when she will be made a saint by the Vatican, perpetuating this colonial, superior-minded, Christian symbol of white superiority over the brown/black man, all the Indian media will rejoice in its own mental slavery and the Indian government will probably declare a national holiday!

Why don't Indians understand that brown is beautiful? White people spend hours on the beach and put on a hundred creams to get tanned. And in winter they even artificially lie under infrared lamps in beauty parlors to get brown! Why this obsession for the Indian woman to have white skin?

Wisdom for Graduates

2004-05-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

Gary @ The Mises Blog has a great post on imparting wisdom to young minds.

Graduation season is in full swing. The famous and generous are giving graduates words of wisdom about what they now face in the "real world." The best provide real insight, but many fail to go beyond platitudes. And having attended many graduations, I have a guess as to why.

It is very difficult to impart universal insights from humanity's accumulated wisdom in a graduation speech because every proverb, aphorism or saying is contradicted by a different one, as if every proverb has an equal and opposite proverb. So what can be expressed by simple rules will often be wrong and therefore must be qualified in many ways to be useful.

All things come to him who waits and look before you leap; but he who hesitates is lost.

Haste makes waste and fools rush in where angels fear to tread; but time waits for no man, seize the day, and strike while the iron is hot.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained; but its better to be safe than sorry and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and where there's a will, there's a way; but don't keep beating your head against a wall and where there's a will there's a won't.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts; but don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

[There are a lot more on the post]

He is right. Wisdom cannot be provided in a speech and experience is the best way to learn. That does not take away from the fact that there are some guidelines can be provided. He concludes :

The world graduates are entering is one of clarity and confusion, certainty and contradictions, cooperation and competition, etc. But what each does have is the ability to choose. So the best advice may be to follow that famous instruction to Indiana Jones: "Choose wisely." After all, despite the fact that whatever will be will be, life is what we make it.

The Great American Leadership Database

2004-05-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

HBS has created this database after working for two years on that.

From the Intro :

The Great American Business Leaders database was compiled over a two-year period in an effort to identify and chronicle the lives of individuals whose business leadership in the twentieth century shaped the way people live, work, and interact. The impetus for the creation of the database stemmed from the Leadership Initiative's desire to better understand how business leadership legacies are developed and nurtured over time. Understanding what we can learn from the past will undoubtedly assist us in better preparing leaders for tomorrow.

[You cannot access the full database. For that you need to fill this form.]

Financing Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs

2004-05-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

The INC Blog provides insights into funding for the first-time entrepreneurs, which is most of us. ;-)

The most important thing to understand that most of the time we need to get the money from our savings, friends or family. Banking our ideas on VCs, angel funding etc does not yield results as a very few percentage of all start-ups get this. This may sound as a hard way but this is generally the only way to start the show.

INC says, "Many business owners who lack a proven track record as business owners are still finding financing hard to come by, notes Lawrence Gennari in his Boston Business Journal column, "New at the game? Financing tips for first-time entrepreneurs."

Here are a few of his few basic rules emerging businesses should follow when trying to find first-time financing:

Recognize the odds. Venture financing frequently is not the answer. He cites Inc.'s 2003 Inc. 500 list as an example: of the 500 companies that made the list, approximately 2% cited VC as a source for start-up capital.

Pursue parallel sources. Tap VCs, angel investors, friends and family, etc., simultaneously.

Plan to fund to benchmarks. Many entrepreneurs seek more than they really need to start-up. Seek to fund milestones, not the entire lifespan of your business.

Develop a strategy beyond serendipity. Introductions get your foot in the door, but don't ignore having the right fit with potential investors.

Surround yourself with experience. Advisers, directors, etc.

Avoid simple business plan mistakes. Don't forget the basics: size of target market, logic and soundness of revenue model, and experience of management.

Recognize the value in rejection. Feedback is priceless, regardless of whether you secured the capital.

Pitch Tim Draper on Your Billion-Dollar Idea'

2004-05-19T22:24:00.000-07:00

Tim Draper, a managing partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is asking Always-On readers for their Billion Dollar Idea. If they like it they will find it.

So what are they looking for.

Here is a reminder of what I'm looking to receive from you:
-What is your billion-dollar idea?
-Tell me a bit about yourself (background, education, experience, and so on).
-What is unique? Why are you excited about it?

So do you have one?

This was conducted once before in 2003. Tim says,"At the end of 2003, I invited entrepreneurs from all over the world to post their ideas to my AlwaysOn blog. I then selected 10 entries from over 110 postings, and these winning entrepreneurs had the opportunity to pitch their ideas to me face-to-face, using VidiTel's videoconferencing."

Its worth following the Blog post from time to time as the comments are already coming.

Scientist President and Economist Prime Minister

2004-05-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

Rajesh's title, which I have taken, says everything about what is happening in India.

Hopefully this is for good. What India needs now is technological and economic advancement and nothing else matters.

For a Profile of Manmohan Singh, the new PM check this and this.

Update : A Manmohan Singh interview on PBS.

Google plans Desktop Search

2004-05-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

Rajesh points to a NYtimes article on how Google is entering the desktop space. This is making the whole search business interesting.

The Google software project, which is code-named Puffin and which will be available as a free download from Google's Web site, has been running internally at the company for about a year.

The project was started, in part, to prepare Google for competing with Windows Longhorn, which according to industry analysts will dispense with the need for a stand-alone browser.

The disappearance of the Web browser and the integration of both Web search and PC search into the Windows operating system could potentially marginalize Google's search engine. Google, well aware of this threat, hired a Microsoft product manager last year to oversee the Puffin project as part of its strategy to compete with Microsoft's incursion into its territory.

Google's strategy is to move quickly while Microsoft is still developing its Longhorn version of Windows, adding programs and services like its recently announced Gmail electronic mail program. The intent, say people who are aware of the company's strategy, is to lower its vulnerability to Microsoft by adding businesses that are "sticky" - in other words, businesses that create strong customer loyalty or are hard to switch away from.

Interestingly Rafat Ali thinks that this is all pre-IPO hype and nothing else.

E-Book on Google Ads

2004-05-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

Rich at Start-up Skills is coming out with a book on Google Ads. In this permission-marketing economy Google targetted and relevant ads are becoming an important part of a marketing campaign.

This should be a good book. What can you find this book?

* about the four basic types of Google advertising campaigns
* what questions you need to ask yourself in order to successfully run each type
* what the "AdWords Grid" is, and how it can help you make or save money in AdWords immediately
* when to increase your cost per click and when to decrease it
* how your competitors' actions impact the effectiveness of your campaign
* how to monitor your competitors actions and adjust your campaigns to keep them working for you over time.

The book is free, but there is a limit on the first edition. So if you want the book you can e-mail Rich for it.

A VC Day

2004-05-19T21:52:00.000-07:00

David Hornik in his Venture Blog provides a hilarious commentary of a VCs calender.

5:45am - Alarm clock. Pick up Blackberry from night-stand, fire off an email to portfolio company CEO to demonstrate "round-the-clock" vigilance. Go back to sleep.

8:30am - Wake up. Decide whether to have breakfast in the kitchen, dining room, sunroom, veranda, or gazebo. Have "breakfast meeting" with Rex and Fido.

9:45am - Drop child off at nursery school. Banter with child's teacher. Haha, that teacher doesn't make in a year what I spent in Lanai over New Year's. Wow. I haven't been to Hawaii in three months. Call assistant, re: technology conferences in Hawaii.

10:30am - Arrive at office, remark loudly that these breakfast meetings are killing you. It's been `go, go, go' all year. The pace is killing you. Makes you wish it was 2002 again.

10:45am - Call CEO of semi-conductor portfolio company. Ask if he's considered building a Services component to his business.

11:45am - Damn. Late for lunch. Sometimes they run out of the olive bread at Il Fornaio. Gotta run. Thank god for the Carrera. That damn 545 didn't have any giddy-up.

1:15pm -- Call CRM portfolio company CEO, remind him that blogging is hot. Has he ever thought about Customer Support blogs? That'd be cool.

1:30pm - Oops. Late for meeting with entrepreneur looking for funding. Hee. Finish game of "Minesweeper".

1:45pm - Apologize for being late. It's been `go, go, go' lately. The pace is killing me. Our firm is a little different... all of our partners were operators, so we know what it's like to run a company. We're pretty conservative investors here - we only put money to work where we can really make a difference and add some strategic value. We try to be respectful of your time, so we'll give you a "quick no" if this isn't something that interests us...

2:30pm - Wow. 15 voicemails from entrepreneurs. "What's the next step?" Why does everyone need to know what the "next" step is? I'll tell you what my next step is... out my office door to the lunchroom. Ooo. Blackberry Odwalla. I love Blackberry Odwalla. Note to self: have wife buy See's candy for the Office Manager who buys the juice next Christmas. Odwalla, Odwalla, Odwalla. I love Odwalla.

2:45pm - Shit. Sequoia has a term sheet out to Acme Intangibles. Find Associate. Why the hell didn't we look at Acme? That fucking company is hot. Instead, you bring me this piece of shit company in storage management? Christ. Goddamn Associates never see the big picture. Oooooo... The TED conference. When is TED? Gotta get into the Monterey Plaza. Margaret stuck me at the Marriott last year. How much did that suck?

3:15pm - Fax term sheet to Acme. Wonder what the hell they do? No worries. Those guys at Sequoia diligence the hell out of deals.

3:45pm - Isn't there any political candidate who still needs a fundraiser? How the hell did Gorenberg get Kerry? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Should've snagged Kerry back in December. What about the Senate? There must be a senator who needs electing.

4:15pm - Sharon Heights. Networking. Bob said the monthly dues are deductible, right? Bob rocks. Best accountant ever.

8:15pm - Sorry I'm late honey. It's been `go, go, go' all year. Can't do this too much longer. Can Isabel stay late tonight to make some dinner?

Chat Room Live

2004-05-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

Anita Campbell continues with her popular Power Blog series. This week she has review Chris Separ's Chat Room Live, a popular technology blog.

The Power: The Power of the Chat Room LIVE weblog is in its coverage of technology from a business perspective, and the wide range of topics the blog format allows it to cover -- well beyond a formal column.

Anita pointed out Chris's new experiment on the Gmail service. The one thing I liked was how he is trying to use the Gmail popularity to increase his readership.

He says I’m using Gmail so you don’t have to. Visit my Weblog regularly to get an idea of Google’s new Gmail service. Help me with my experiment by e-mailing me at chrisseper@gmail.com

That's a cool idea.

Seth's New Book

2004-05-19T21:34:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin has launched his new book, Free Prize Inside, which seems like an extension to his concepts on Purple Cow. Here he shows that providing a Free Prize inside is one of the ways to make the product remarkable.

As always he applies his concepts to his work. The book comes in a Cereal Box which is expected to start the conversation about the book easily and convert the idea into a virus and spread.

The important thing is how the blogging world is contributing to the entire thing. He is blogging on the business blog tour and that is increasing the popularity of the book.

Now, there is also a Free Prize inside contest blog.

2004-05-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

eWeek reports that Dave Winer is opening up his blogging technology, Frontier, which is behind the popular Radio and Manila platforms for open source.

And his reason "I want to make sure it lives forever," Winer said, in an interview with eWEEK.com. "It's not the kind of thing that a company does a good job with. … What people pay for are products, services and support. It wasn't clear people would pay for it, and it's not easy to fund development for it."

This is good for the blogging community as Movable Type is costly now with its new licensing norms.

2004-05-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer posts that GMail is now providing 1 Terabyte of space. What will anybody do with all this space? He even has a screenshot of it.

2003-11-30T23:01:00.000-08:00

World is Green

I have shifted to my new website powered my Movable Type.

World is Green

Please visit the new site focussed on Rural India.

2003-06-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

Why Xanga?

Now considering that this is my first post in Xanga let me say why I am here?

I have been a blogger for the past few months on Blogger(Where Else) but was always not confortable with the amount of HTML I have to use. For one I was a non-geek and wanted to make the full of use of the weblog.

I have always admired the other websites and how they have designed them. For me I am a design loving person - aeasthetically, fuctionally. And Xanga proved to be cool enough to do all that.

I wanted to have comments, which I have got from Enetation and had to struggle to get it there (i.e. on my weblog). Then beliveing that weblog would be a great Knowledge Management system I wanted categorization. For this I tried to look at Radio but anyway could not pay for it nor use it. Then did the same with other free stuff and at last found an Indian website Rediff Blogs which incidently is learning fast and provided comments, RSS and categorization.

This made me to jump for that. But I was thinking that I had made my site popular (very little surely) but now Xanga made me jump and I am jumping.

And thanks to Robin Good's Weblog I found this site.

Need to explore more and a next post will provide the rest of the reviews.

So I am going to Xanga.

And for all those who have taken pains to reach this please reach my new site Suhit's Green Log.

Cheers,
Suhit.

2003-06-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

31 Favors of Blog and 31 different people

Source: Roland Tanglao's Weblog

This 31 Flavors of Blog article looks at various blogs themselves and from then defines what they are.

What is a blog? What role do blogs play on this ever-changing, ever-expanding stage we call the Web? Will blogs forever alter the way we communicate or merely fade into oblivion?

31 Flavors of Blog examines thirty-one distinctly different blogs and displays the diverse and innovative ways blogs are being used to communicate, educate and entertain. Each "flavor" provides a sampling of the incredible variety of blogs on the Web.

The Interesting part of this is that I got a chance to look at many blogs which are vastly different in character and their target audience and many had a very specific personal goal for themselves. There was a wide variety - cookery,Iraq,Porno,news etc but the ones I liked are two personal goals which were put on the Blog and how they are going about attaining them.

The first one Making a Restaurant Blog is about two guys decide to start a restaurant in 5 to 10 years. Inspired by some "very good" meals in Chicago they decide to start a blog to keep track of their ideas. The blog provides the traditional elements: comments, links and personal experiences mixed with a bit of humor.

The really cool thing about a site like this is you can see the idea begin to take shape and solidify into something real and hopefully profitable. This can serve as inspiration for others who are hesitant to start their own restaurant or any other business for that matter. Will it succeed? Will it fail?

This is such a cool idea and considering that the idea is to execute in 5-10 years. The blog itself is detailed with marketing ideas, views on other restaurants, chefs etc. I would love to start something similar when I start from new Entrepreneurial venture.

The second blog is
Hollie The Marathon Blogger . This is all about her goal of training for a marathon and she is very specific about her training including aily reports on her diet, workouts, equipment, and even body measurements. It shows the focus of the person and her commitment to it. A must read for inspiration and learning to focus and if you want to know what it takes to run a marathon.

2003-06-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

Abundance Mentality

Just read this post about the right mental attitude required for Blogging for a person and for a company in WIndley's Enterprise Computing Weblog.

She says:

Brent makes a good point. Blogging requires what is called an "abundance mentality." If you don't approach it with the mental attitude that there's plenty to go around, you're less likely to share, which is at the heart of blogging. The cynical side of me wonders if this might not be blogging's fatal flaw: it requires a fair amount of altruistic behavior.

And the next one on Enterprise Blogging

On the other hand, I've observed that having an abundance mentality is crucial to a high performance organization. Leaders don't need to cultivate an abundance mentality to promote blogging, they need to promote an abundance mentality because that how you create an organization that works. The lack of an abundance mentality leads to an organization that doesn't communicate, doesn't act like a team, and eventually doesn't accomplish very much.

And at the end she has some more interesting links to more articles on "Abundance Mentality".

2003-06-17T16:56:00.000-07:00

The Future of the BPO industry - People Problem - 2

The Human resource management will be the key to the future success of the BPO industry. For the problems highlighted in my previous article lets look at some of the solutions.

Raman Roy- called the father of the BPO industry - had this to say in a recent Knowledge @ Wharton article

A second aspect is handling the Indian work force, which has its own idiosyncrasies. Indians who work in such jobs are well qualified, highly educated people. They are not a transient workforce marking time while waiting for other things to happen. For them, BPO is a full-time career and they expect some serious thinking on the part of the employers vis-à-vis career paths for them. They also believe that holding on to a job is important, and therefore, what they ask for in a job and in a working environment is very different from the expectations and needs of workers doing similar work in other markets.

So how do we make these highly educated work force to take this as a career. I think this is the right process of thinking. These are not just Jobs - how do we make them a career.

First lets look at the difference between the two:

Some have jobs, others pursue careers.

If you say you have a career, that implies that you have conscientiously chosen this field of work and that each job you take helps you advance to higher and higher levels. Careers involve long-range planning.

And what else goes into making a Job a Career

Satisfaction and Passion

Environment

Growth

Lets assume that we need only 30% of the workforce to stay with the company in the long-term and the rest can leave the company in 1-3 years. This is safe to assumen since most of these jobs are preferred by young fresh graduates who want a stop-gap arrangement before they go on to further education (hopefully) or other avenues. And also the company cannnot sustain all the workforce to stay and accomodate the growth for everybody.

How do we address this 30% workforce and how do we deal with the 70% workforce?

For both these kind of employees (long-range & short-range/career & job) there are some aspects of the job which will be common. We need to provide these common aspects for everybody and then think of the separate needs of each.

Lets start addressing the problems common to both.

Nigh-Shift and Stress

Prevention and Care. The company need to provide specific medical guidance to prevent known problems from occuring and helping to cure health problems (professional hazard) of employees through insurance, medical expenses subsidy, leave provision etc.

Job classification

The BPO jobs need to be considered more like manufacturing jobs rather than software jobs. Since most of the software companies are moving into BPO they tend to treat the performance and requirements startdard nearer to a software job rather than a manufacturing job. This change of perception will create HR policies like Overtime, productivity based bonus, appropriate quality techniques, recruiting policies, training programs etc.

Now lets look at how we can make these jobs more attractive and also make a career out of them.

Training and Knowledge Enhancement - Satisfaction

The best example for this is the process followed in the Toyota production System in making the plant workers trained in various job roles (thus removing monotony and increasing job rotation and also helping in managing absenteism), providing responsibilities in changing and suggesting improvements in process (thus helping themselves and the company), training in various domain and technical programs for knowledge enhancement.

Environment

The goal should be client satisfaction but provide a lot of fun loving and casual atmosphere. This will match with the young just-out-of-college crowd and also help in overcoming the stress of the job. Good infrastructure which most of the companies do provide. And confident and good leadership expecially in the middle management level.

Growth

This should be achieved through professional growth in responsibilities in terms of promotion accompanying authority and also knowledge growth via training, and for the "career" employees funding distance/part-time courses like MBA,CFA etc which should also help the company when these employees can become managers rather than importing from outside.

This is an important aspect as the the people who have grown through the ranks (similar to manufacturing) are more effective leaders than MBA imports.

These are some of the areas to look at. More importantly I have tried to suggest perception changes which I believe should take care of correct HR and Management policies.

2003-06-10T12:35:00.001-07:00

Knowing-Doing Gap?

I have always been thinking about the gap between idea generation and actually implementing something. I believe that one of the main things in my life has been the ability to think but never going ahead and actually starting something.

One of the main reasons for this has been my earlier belief that something 'big' (and I have always wanted to do something big) can only be achieved by a big idea. And I was always wary about these big ideas and how to start and always evaluating about the problems related to this. But, as I have strated to know and read about various successful people and companies - everybody whatever their vision have never strated anything big - but have grown big - and very few people or companies have actually stayed with their original business vision/idea but have tweaked with it and worked on changing the things as and when we go ahead.

Now the 'big' idea is this - Execution. Do something - whatever - however. But do something. I want to now start something and work on it and do it. Does not matter what that is and how big or small it is. I am not trying to understand at the starting phase if I can do it or not nor evaluating the pros and cons of it much through analysis.

I want to make the initial decision on some important factors - not bale to verbalise these now - and then once I commit myself to it go through an initial phase of effort and then go to the next growth phase. Also, once I have decided to be an Entrepreneur I have started working on understanding and reading the relavant literature on this subject - especially the personality of the person. And I have encountered this concept of "effectuation" which says " I will learn and do it as I go forward" rather than able to know and understand everything at the starting phase.

I have already started to do this in the "Kalam" thing and what I thought was tough - like translation and voice over - I have already the contacts to make it happen. I need to now go about selecting the people and actually negotiate the contracts. (An area of immense learning for me).

So coming back to Execution - I think starting something especially small will give me a chance to learn and grow and make mistakes ( I fear that, I need to go over that) and learn from them and go forward.

So this making and doing stuff will be the concentration for me for this year. On the professional and personal from too.

2003-06-10T12:35:00.000-07:00

Rural Marketing

The goal in this area is to understand the Indian 'rural' customer and his personality.

The way of life in villages,
the aspirations,
the business cycles (agriculture in particular),
distribution channels,
advertisement mediums (like video vans, jeeps with microphones etc),
understanding the way the districts, mandals, villages etc are structured,
the important people/decision influencers in these areas,
the cost realities.

2003-06-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

The Future of the BPO industry - 1

The Business Process Outsourcing industry - considered the next growth engine for India - is the point of discussion in many places around the country. I will try to analyze the industry and look at problem areas and possible solutions.

The 5 things important to this industry is

Organizational Expertise
Domain knowledge and Project execution capabilities
People â€“ Expertise building and Human Resource Management.
Client Management - Building relationships
Service delivery - Meeting and exceeding accepted measurements and delivery standards.

One of the aspects of this Industry is that India does not have any experience in working with long-term(5-10 years) and super longterm (>10 yrs) kind of projects. Say, we have never had any manufacturing bases or service industry to support other countries over an extended period and supporting other countries in their work. This kind of experience is very valuable.

The BPO projects in the country are of this nature. They are people and labour intensive but they are also long-term(5-10 years) and super longterm (>10 yrs) kind of projects. Also, most of these projects are indispensable for the organization which has outsourced the project. The implications of this is something which needs to be thought off.

The other important aspect of these projects is the real-time processing and completing aspects of the job. The service delivery standards are around 15 min - 4 hours and not 2 weeks to 5 months and more in relation to software projects. This is important to understand in terms of the project management skills and training required for the personnel.

The third aspect is "night shift". This has a tremondous impact on the people who work on these projects and for how long. What does these mean to the growth of the Industry?

I will first look at the "People" problem.

The kind of people who work on these projects in the US are mostly X or XII standard pass/fail people with team/projects lead undergrads or graduates. In India the most common qualification is undergraduation and post-graduation going to MBAs etc. Due to the longevity of the projects - some of the projects have been in the US for 40 yrs before they were outsourced to India - the personnel working in the project need to work longterm to stabilise the project. Due to the mismatch in the qualifications and job profiles this cannot be expected to happen in India.

These projects are also cyclical - the business volume is not the same all through the year - this was solved in the US through the "temp" worker. This concept is alien to the Indian BPO and IT business community and for graduates this proposition cannot be accepted.

Now comes the stress of the job - repetitive, transaction based, on computer jobs - with small turnaround time and high quality expectations. This will create a stress job role which is not possible to continue for long. Add to this the "night shift" aspect with its own set of related problems and you have a major people problem.

You can also add poaching by other companies, high turnover rates, salary pressures inturn margin pressure etc.

Considering this scenario what shold be the possible HR efforts required?

To be Continued

2003-06-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Leadership for the Entrepreneur

The Inc! article on Leadership is very interesting. It is especially geared towards understanding the concept of Leadership style for the entrepreneur, and this questioning itself is novel beacuse you have leadership styles for various leaders and companies like what Ken Blanchard says.

And now the author Michael S. Hopkins concentrates on what is called "charismatic" leadership and debunks the idea and provides some good explanation (well known though and most famously brought to light by the research efforts of Jim "Built to Last" Collins in his latest book Good to Great). But then he gets more interesting. I expected this to be a extension of non-charismatic leadership style but I was wrong.

He says:
But that's what charismatic leadership does in private businesses. It eats its young. It demands of leaders far more than it gives back. For entrepreneurs, it's toxic.

Then he concentrates on a question I have never seen asked before -- What's good for the leader?. To understand this question better he provides example of Pringle who was the co-founder and charismatic leader of a successful Atlanta ad agency in the '90s. He says "The question is different because, in the case of a private company, the needs and aims of the leader are different, as are the requirements made of him or her." and provides an example like "For one thing, the point of most new businesses is to foster the life the founder wants.".

He continues

For another thing, it can be argued that in a private company what's best for the founder/leader turns out to be what's best for the organization as a whole. In such companies the founder, after all, is almost always the organization's key asset and contributor, the most indispensable piece of the puzzle; why wouldn't an organization want to do everything it could to nurture, protect, and maintain its most valuable asset? Plus, unlike elected leaders with their circumscribed terms and Fortune 500 CEOs with their ever-shrinking job tenures, entrepreneurs typically hope to stick around. They hope to achieve and enjoy the imagined life they set out to make real and to reap the recurring rewards (psychic, material, logistical, social) they set out to earn. Entrepreneurs hope to last, and they need a leadership style that enables them to do so. They need a leadership style that feeds them. And their organizations need a style that feeds them, too.

He now comes to the answer to this question in what he calles the "antiheroic" leadership.

The idea of "antiheroic" leadership has emerged in parts, by accretion, over recent years -- each aspect the product of some entrepreneur's or theorist's small response to requirements and desires that charismatic leadership didn't meet. As a whole the idea is still taking form. For now, though, the best way to describe what antiheroic leadership is -- and how to practice it -- is to describe the four rules that guide leaders putting it to use:

Antihero's Rule No. 1:
Ask why you're here. Know what you want. Don't apologize.

"The sole reason for your company to exist is to meet your needs," says Lanny Goodman, the country's best thinker on this aspect of leadership.Goodman recommends that business owners ask -- and act on the answers to -- four basic questions: What do I need and want out of life? How can my company help me accomplish that? What would such a company look like? And how do we get it to look like that?.

The antiheroic way of leading has nothing to do with being infallible or superhuman or invulnerable or dauntless. It has to do with being true, the root of trust.

Unembarrassed honesty about one's own personal needs, wants, and -- as we'll see -- capabilities is the bedrock that antiheroic leadership is built on. It promotes in its practitioner three surprising and powerful qualities: authenticity, generosity, and a nascent potential for creating a sense of meaning.

Antihero's Rule No. 2:
Don't ask "How?" Ask "Who?" Assume you're not the answer.

So the second rule is to put the right people in the right palces with the right skills rather that DIY kind of thinking and as if everybody else is just supporting cast.

He provides a good example by Jim "Built to Last" Collins:

Management analyst Jim Collins (author of Built to Last and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't) approaches the idea slightly differently. Likening the leader of an organization to the driver of a bus, Collins says that the bus driver's job is not to decide where the bus should go or how to drive it there, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place -- as well as to get the wrong people off the bus, and ultimately to get the right people into the right seats. The right people then will help the leader figure out where to drive and how to drive there. What's more, the right people will attract other right people and inspire them to stick around, diminishing the burden and anxiety felt by leaders who are in the position of having to beguile their flock by themselves.

Antihero's Rule No. 3:
Embrace the difference between "I am my company" and "I have a company."

What this rule amounts to is: Make room. In order for the who-not-how discipline to work, and for the earned authenticity of Rule No. 1 to have its effect, an organization has to have space for others. Even though a company must first satisfy the needs of its owner, an antiheroic leader never behaves as though he or she is the company's face, voice, or embodiment.

Instead of the parent-child relationship that exists between charismatic leaders and their followers, the antiheroic leader ends up with an organization of adults.

Antihero's Rule No. 4:
Forget superman. Be a part of something.

And finally, here's the command to resist emotional temptation -- because the adulation that comes with leading charismatically is seductive. And when you stop building a charismatic/heroic organization, what you will lose is easy to see: You don't get to be a hero anymore. You'll lose something else, too, though. You'll lose your isolation.

"Forget the hero stuff," Mellinger said. "I don't want a hero mentality anywhere in our business -- anywhere in my life. Everybody thinks you have to be a hero to build something. Bull. Do it together. Ask the right questions. Stuff doesn't have to be so hard."

If what you lose is obvious, then so is what you gain: Give up being a hero and, suddenly, you don't always have to perform like one anymore. Not only don't you have to supply all the momentum, all the know-how, all the emotion, you also don't have to fear that if you stop, so will everything else. When it's all about you -- the cult of the charismatic CEO -- you're separated from others. Being a hero is lonely. As an antihero, you get to be a part of what you've created. You get to be fed. At a time in American life when it may be what people crave as much as anything, you get to be part of a community.

2003-02-16T01:47:00.000-08:00

K Logs

In the short time that I have been Blogging the most powerful utilization of this phenomenon would be Knowledge Management. KM is has been in the world for a long time and a lot of organizations have been working on building the systems and tools needed to make this happen. I was introduced into this world 2 years back from the website Brint.com.

Rajesh Jain has been writing about this in his Blog and through the blog I have been introduced to the concept of using Blogging as a tool for facilitating Knowledge management. He has been talking of a concept called Digital Dashboard. I will be providing a set of links to start understanding the way to go forward for Knwoledge management.

Links:

K-Logs - Knowledge Management Weblogs - in Yahoo Groups

Two artcicles on personal knowledge publishing by Sébastien Paquet, Université de Montréal. Part 1 and Part 2.

2003-02-14T15:51:00.000-08:00

Advertising - Kamasutra

Kamasutra - the leading condom manufacturer in India ( exclusing the government distributed Nirodh) has been a kind of bold experimentor in Indian advertising. The ads sarted showing people having Sex and a lot of stuff was not correct for young children. But anyway it was direct and was also mostly right on what it wanted people to do - go and buy.

But lately the company has strated making the ads very subtle and have taken a different kind of line.

Sample:

A man and women sit in a restautant - and the womesn thighs are shown generously which the man is watching and the waiter is opening a bottle with a cork and the man starts getting ideas.

A second ad is based in the hospital where a man is on the bed and he is looking at a nurse who is repeatedly putting a pen inside its cap and removing it and the man is getting his ideas again.

Now the reason for me explaining these ads are that this is effecting childern more so. My wife teaches in a high school and she was explaining the other day about an incident in VIII standard where a child was imitating the second ad described above in the classroom. The child beside him was not comfortable and complained to the teacher. the teacher when faced with the confronting the child could not answer to him when he said what is that I am doing wrong, can you explain?

This is tough to handle for the teacher and questions the ads. Is this the right kind of advertising. This kind of incidents are totally not expected and not wanted but should'nt we follow some kind of standards!!

2003-02-13T15:42:00.000-08:00

Love Is the Killer App

Tim Sanders talks about love as the killer app in his new book for business. Fast Company.com has an article by Tim.

From the Intro:

If you want to fix your future, start by fixing yourself. In the face of war and recession, what the business world needs is less greed -- and more love. So says Yahoo senior executive Tim Sanders, who argues that now more than ever, the road to prosperity is paved with a commitment to generosity

2003-02-13T08:31:00.000-08:00

Global corporations, local standards

Kanika Datta in Business Standard writes about the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) expose on bottled water industry.
She focuses on the MNC's who provide the safe and pure drinking water but do not follow the standards which they follow in Europe and the US. Most of these companies always try to get away with just following within the local standards even when they have the best technology and standards in other parts of the world.

This is a pity and the Indian and emerging markets should have tougher laws and work against these guys and the MNCs shouldstop advertising that they have the best products etc.

2003-02-12T12:02:00.000-08:00

Warnie faces an unplayable ball

Shane Warne, one of greatest cricketers especially a leg spinner is gone from the World Cup and may effect the chances of Australia winning the cup. All this because he has taken some "drugs" which is banned for weightlifters and reduces weight and water. This is most detrimental to cricketer who needs stamina and lots of water to turn off dehydration. The ICC has copied the Olympic assoications testing of all banned substances even though officially it says that the "drugs" checked for ar only which are beneficiely to cricket.

2003-02-12T11:20:00.000-08:00

Does the non-profit sector matter?

Rajesh Tandon, President of PRIA in business standard writes about the non-profit sector in India. He presents some very interesting facts from a nationwide survey conducted by PRIA about the size and the scale of the non-profit sector in India and concludes that this sector as a whole is neglected by the government. Some excerpts:

The most significant findings of the study relate to employment. The survey estimates that nearly 20 million people work on a paid or volunteer basis in NPOs. Full-time equivalent paid employment in NPOs is nearly six million.

Just note that full-time paid employment in NPOs is nearly four-fifth of all central government employees. But is there a pay commission for NPO employees? NPO employees (full-time equivalent) constitute 25 per cent of all central and state government employees taken together and 14 per cent of employment in the organised private sector.

In Delhi, paid employees in NPOs constitute nearly a quarter of the relatively large non-agricultural employment

On the revenue front, the survey estimates that NPOs generated receipts of nearly Rs 18,000 crore in 1999-2000. More than half of these receipts were self-generated; government funds constituted a third, and the rest were private contributions.

The survey findings explode the myth of foreign funding too ? only 7.4 per cent of all receipts were from foreign sources.

Thus, the contribution of NPOs to the Indian economy is significant. Total receipts of NPOs are equivalent to 7.7 per cent of total central government expenditure on social services during 1999-2000.

And he raises some valid questions:

Do the state governments pay any attention to NPOs?

But is there a pay commission for NPO employees?

But is there a social security system for them?

But do national policy-makers, macro-economists or the Planning Commission care about the contributions of the NPOs to Indian economy?

The Not for Profit sector is one of the most important sectors in the country. After the Agricultural, Government and Coprorate sector this is the sector which has the most number of employees and due to its concentration on educational and health institutions, welfare organisations, cultural and sports organisations, research and training institutes, development organisations, etc makes it valuable for what human beings most care for. The sector also provides a lot of satisfaction and as Peter Drucker calls it a second career for many through volunteering and part time jobs.

2003-02-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

Taxes

Dan Gilmore in an article on taxes explains the importance of paying taxes. He quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes :

Taxes, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote long ago, are ``the price we pay for a civilized society.'' Those words have been twisted by everyone on every side of a basic question -- namely, whether we pay too much in taxes -- but their fundamental truth remains unchallenged.

He explains some of the reasons why we should be paying the taxes and why the government need them.

First, government is not our enemy, at least not most of the time. We demand services, and eventually we have to pay for them.

and adds some more. The rest of the article is more for the US but looking at the Indian perspective I feel that as a country we need to think and understand the importance of paying taxes. The kelkar report has generated the maximum reviews, opinions and debugging in the recent times. A recent article in the Business Standard provides some statistics vis-a-vis other countries in comparison to tax rates, tax slabs and tax payments.

The Kelkar committee has recommended that the exemption limit be raised from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1,00,000. If we look at it from the point of view of subsistence-level requirements, then it is justifiable that at least Rs 1,00,000 a year should be tax-free so that an individual fulfils his minimum requirements.

However, considering that currently only around three per cent of the population are taxpayers in India, as against 46 per cent in the US, 48 per cent in the UK and around 53 per cent in Australia, the ratio of individual taxpayers in India to total population, which is quite low, will drop further with the proposed increase in the exemption limit to Rs 1,00,000.

The present exemption limit of Rs 50,000 is already more than the per capita GDP. If the exemption limit is raised to Rs 1,00,000, the gap between per capita GDP and exemption limit will increase. In the UK, US, Australia and even in Malaysia, the basic exemption limit is much lower than per capita GDP.

As far as the personal income tax rate structure goes, these countries follow a progressive tax rate schedule. The number of slabs in general is four or more. Although the maximum marginal tax rate varies from 28 per cent in Malaysia to 47 per cent in Australia, the level of income at which the maximum tax rate is applicable in India is much lower than the level of income at which such rates apply in other countries.

There are variations in the minimum tax rates as well, ranging from 1 per cent in Malaysia to 17 per cent in Australia. It appears that most countries have followed the ?ability to pay? principle. The Kelkar committee recommendation to raise the exemption limit from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1,00,000 and to reduce the number of slabs from three to just two does not fulfil either the ability to pay principle or the revenue consideration.

The conclusion of the arcile makes most sense but it remains the toughest agenda for any government.

Thus, the Kelkar committee?s recommendation to reduce the number of slabs from three to two does not seem logical. Instead of making the tax rate structure inequitable and inconsistent with the trend in other countries, the government should ensure better taxpayer compliance and create confidence among taxpayers that it will utilise the money for the welfare of the general public.

2003-02-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

Radio Ujjas

A very good article in The Nation. Radio Ujjas is a radio show produced by the people of Kutch (a desolate place of India near pakistan) which in three years has become a major sensation.

It says:

It is Radio Ujjas, and in the past three years it has transformed Kutchi village life. In their efforts to communicate with the thousand-some villages of Kutch, a rural women's group called Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, or KMVS, hit upon the idea of radio. They got together with a collective of media professionals and taught themselves the ins and outs of radio production. Securing assistance from Gujarat's Indian Institute of Management, they got the show off the ground. Now the project is supported by the UN Development Program and the Indian government. They bought time from the state-owned All India Radio, which has an almost complete monopoly on India's airwaves but is willing to sell air and studio time as long as it can vet the content each week before a show airs. What emerged was a village radio show that uses local language, song and soap opera-style dramas to raise social awareness.

The article explains about a popular investigative program called "Parda Faash," which literally means "lifting the veil"--it explains the success of this program and says

It continues:

The program has gained such a reputation that sometimes when a reporter starts sniffing around a village, the problem will be cleared up before she can even come back to report on it. KMVS always follows up on its stories, and the staff answers every letter they receive.

I have been listening to the Radio for sometime now. There are two reasons for this. First someitme back I remembered the Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda who said that India lived in the villages. Secondly, I was reading the books of Peter Drucker and especially his commentry on how the world is changing. His analysis has made me look at the demographics of a country when trying to understand the society and its changes. The Radio programs provided a vital clue into the changes affecting rural India and understanding of the real issues. Once i got hooked into the programs and also the ads (this provides a very idea on what the rural people are looking for).

One of the main ideas being promoted by the Andhra Pradesh government (the radio programs are broken up into national and regional ones and each of the states,mostly linguistic division have different programs) are on AIDS. The ideas are promoted directly through ads and small dialogue stories where the importance of understading the problem etc are shown. Apart from this there are programs concentrated on the villages which try to provide some limelight the issues and other comments and queries which the people have. This is also mainly concentrated by the goverment information.

But, one thing is sure that radio is a powerful way to reach a mass audience and can definately as provided in the article in the nation is a "highly effective" one.

I will talk about the Radio programs in the US and gulf.

2003-02-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

WiKi

Saw this information on WiKi from VeerChand Bothra's Blog. This a very interesting concept and looks like the best way to have a page in which anybody can edit the informatioin. He provides a link to the article susning.nu's founder, Lars Aronsson summarizes the experience from the first nine months of operation of Sweden's biggest Wiki website. From the article

A Wiki website is a hypertext on steroids. Any user can create or edit any page on the site using a simple web browser, and all information processing is done on the server side. Wiki sites are powerful tools for collaboration in closed work groups, but can also be used for the general public on the open Internet.

The article provides a very good introduction and history to the WiKi movement.

2003-02-09T00:39:00.000-08:00

A Week in BlogWorld

It's been just over a week since I have strarted writing my Blog. I read a lot of stuff everyday through the Net, Papers and magazines. I have always wanted a way to manage the stuff the read, go back to them whenever I can and also able to let others see that. A web page was a good alternative - and I have even tried making one- but that was not easy for me. And then I got a chance to look at blogging. This was made for me. it contained everything which I wanted and thanks to sites like Blogger and BlogSpot i am able to Blog for free.

So what has been my experience in the past week.

I have started experiencing a new kind of Joy for the first time after many years

The ability to write about the various issues and subjects which I have read is very exciting and in the process I believe I will learn a lot about myself

I have strated learning HTMl - to make these bullets, titles etc

I have strated thinking about the various aspects of my life which are important and the way to achieve them

I have started to read other Blog's like Rajesh Jains' and in turn a lot of other people where I am able to read opinionated stuff rather than the massaged politicized news you get to read in magazines and papers

I will continue to post and develop myself and in the future will develop a better site using may be Blogger Pro,
Radio or a new software which is going to come called Text Pattern.

And thanks to UT Austin the for the HTML I have learned.

2003-02-07T09:25:00.000-08:00

Google + Blog = Personal Knowledge Management System

Rajesh Jain on his blog www.emergic.org has written a fantastic piece on the means of maintaining a Personal KNowledge management system. He provides a combination of Google (search needs), Blog (tertiary memory), and the other Digital Dashboard components (RSS Aggregator, outlines, directories and filters).

Also he talks about the the private blog

What I would like is a private blog, which becomes a superset of the public blog and a part which I only keep to myself. This way, I can post all my notes, meeting summaries, etc. on this blog, knowing fully well that I can find them again (and get the context). Searching paper notes can be quite hard -- they become like a black hole, difficult to get anything out of them. So, now, I am using my notebook (the paper one) for doodling and thinking. When I am somewhat ready, I post on my blog (like I am doing now).

And then the assimilation of the this information knowledge will hopefullly lead to new innovations and higher productivity.

2003-02-06T10:33:00.000-08:00

Six degrees of separation

Through just five or six intermediaries, you could be linked to millions of others. It is the notion behind what has been dubbed the small world effect. Robert Matthews explains how the theory affects us

The article explains the experiments conducted by The US psychologist Stanley Milgram. It then goes on to explain the various conclusions from this and in the section They're everywhere the various examples of this rather bizzarre fact is used in movie business

The world of showbiz is now recognised as a classic small world.
That is, it is made up of lots of little cliques of actors, most of whom
stay in their own patch of the industry, mixed in with a few highly
versatile ones with random links right across the acting network
who thus link every actor to every other via very few steps.

and the "Germany's biggest firms actually form a cosy small world.".

2003-02-06T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Telegraph - Nissan man

The most famous and one of the great automobile managers in recent times - Carlos Ghosn - of Nissan.

"Such is Carlos Ghosn's reputation that analysts once joked that he could write his own pay cheque if he ever defected to the troubled Ford Motor Company. The billion-dollar boost to Ford's stock price that heralded his arrival would more than cover his remuneration. In Japan, where business leaders are revered, Ghosn is the subject of a Manga cartoon comic: The True Life Of Carlos Ghosn, a series that sold more than half a million copies per issue. He's even had a book written about him: TURNAROUND - How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan, by David Magee. This is hagiography, and by the time you've read through all 240 pages you'd think Ghosn could turn base metal into gold. It does his burgeoning reputation no harm, however.

How different it all was on October 19 1999, just seven months after Renault had taken a $56.4 billion (£34.3 billion), 36.8 per cent stake in the seemingly doomed Nissan company. The once high-flying Japanese car maker's stock was about to be reduced to junk bond status, its domestic sales share had fallen from 34 per cent in 1974 to just 19 per cent in 1999 and it was $22 billion (£13.5 billion) in debt."

The results of Ghosn's revival plan are undeniable, however, and are now automotive legend. Operating costs slashed by one trillion yen (£5.2 billion), the number of suppliers halved, purchasing costs cut by more than 20 per cent, rising profits - $2.98 billion net (£1.82 billion) in 2001, up from a $5.7 billion (£3.42 billion) loss in 1999 - and debt cut to $3.48 billion (£2.21 billion); all a year earlier than planned

The remarkable thing about all this is that Ghosn has done it all before, albeit on a smaller scale. At Michelin in Brazil and America, and then at Renault, this 58-year-old, Brazilian-born father of four has effected remarkable turnarounds with his evolving strategy of cross-functional teams, aggressive but precise targets, fact-based evaluation and empowerment of middle management. If his tactics of listening carefully, eschewing vagueness, working fast and improving transparency and communication across the company looks like common sense, it's the sort of common sense that is only referred to as common sense when someone's done it before.

2003-02-06T06:27:00.000-08:00

Sovereign risk rating systems

The article in Business Standard raises the issue of the competency of the Moody's and other rating agencies in rating sovereign risk. It also provides valid points on how the rating agencies "which do not rate the US Treasury bonds and Bills and always assigns them AAA as they are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government which has the ability to raise taxes andpay the bonds" against using the same logic for the other sovereign agencies.

Also, the author provides a valid framework for rating the sovereign debt which he says "The main lacuna in the rating agencies argument is that they have not distinguished between sovereign debt financed domestically and sovereign debt financed internationally"

In all he questions the validity of the ratings as well as their downgrades and upgrades.

2003-02-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

How safe are NASA missions?

A good article in the Business Standard about the safety of the NASA missions. The interesting part of the article is that

In 35 years of manned NASA missions, there have been only three big disasters. On each occasion, NASA chose to disregard prior warning signs. In the 1967 Apollo 1 explosion, caused by an electrical short-circuit, NASA was indicted for poor workmanship.

2003-02-04T23:38:00.000-08:00

Success

I found this quote from Desh Deshpande (the co-brother of Narayana Murthy) on the blog site http://shrikant.emergic.org/

At age 4, success is not peeing in your pants.
At age 16, success is having a drivers licence.
At age 20, success is having sex.
At age 35, success is having a good job.
At age 55, success is having money.
At age 70, success is having sex.
At age 80, success is having a drivers licence.
At age 90, success is not peeing in your pants.

Success is defined by oneself and it is upto us to fulfill it.

I beleive is Success is realised when you gain satisfaction, add value, and be at peace with yourself after reaching it.

2003-02-03T15:58:00.000-08:00

Sam's 10 Rules for running a Business

“To fulfil a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labour, to be given a
chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.”

Bette Davis
The Lonely Life

We will look at Sam’s 10 rules for running and businees. After every Rule I have tried to provide examples from his book Made in America and my opinions on these.

One of today’s most talked about success stories, is Wal-Mart. If Sam Walton (1918-1992) can do it, why not you? Here are Sam’s rules for building a business.

Rule 1: Commit to your business. Believe in it more that anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don’t know if you’re born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. If you love your work, you’ll be there every day trying to do it the best you possible can, and pretty soon everybody around
will catch the passion from you like a fever.

Sam would always try to check out the competitors (small or big) and learn any new ideas he can from them. On his own account he has flown thousands of miles every year to visit as many stores as possible.

Rule 2. Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation if you like, but behave as a servant leader in a partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company. Offer discount stock and grant them stock for their retirement. It’s the single best
thing we ever did.

This was something Sam learned from this wife. She questioned him anout why the wealth should not be created for everybody. The best part about Sam is that once he is stuck onto an idea then he is bent upon giving it his best shot. He provides sn example of a truck driver who after working for Wal mart for more than 14 years has more than $400,000 with him. Sam has created a very fair compensation system.

Rule 3. Motivate your partners. Money and ownership alone aren’t enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and
challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have
managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.

Sam was one of the most shrewd motivators. He was tough yes, but he also knew that only when people are put into the the toughest kind of roles they would give their best. Also, he is great believer of competition – internal and external. And one of the best things he has used is the ability to keep people guessing sbout his views, dislikes and likes. He never committed himself easily.

Rule 4. Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand the more they’ll
care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them. If you don’t trust your associates to know what’s going on, they’ll know you don’t really consider them partners.
Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competition.

He is a master communicator. I mean in terms of verbal communication with his employees – like investing millions of dollars in satellite technology and whenever necessary communicating with all his stores directly. But communication in terms of Information – performance information – sales, revenue, profits, inventory, successful plans etc, to the minutest level of detail and also being very open in sharing information with this employees. He ackowledges that this would provide a avenue for his competitors to know more about his company but the empowrement would more or less offset for this.

Rule 5: Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. A paycheque and a stock option will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for him or her. We like to hear it often, and
especially when we have done something we’re really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re
absolutely free – and worth a fortune.

Rule 6. Celebrate your successes. Find some humour in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasmalways. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly
song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don’t do a hula on Wall Street. It's been done. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools the competition. “Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?”

Sam would appreciate everything he would get a chance to appreciate. Not only this he has institutionalized this in the company. The store managers, the department heads, the hourly employees all are encouraged to cheer – say by announcing in the public address system in the store about a new record, a milestone etc – but in having departmental and store competitions etc.

Rule 7. Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines-the ones who actually talk to the customers-are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what
they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you
MUST listen to what your associates (and customers) are telling you.

This ability to Listen for me would be the single most important character of Sam. He was always ready to listen to everything. In fact he had the ability to listen so well that he would change his own opinion if he liked what he heard. In fact the famed Walmart distribution system was not Sam’s idea but it was implemented and successful because sam listened.

Rule 8. Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want-and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don’t make excuses-apologize. Stand
behind everything you do. The two most important words I ever wrote on that first Wal-Mart sign: “ Satisfaction Guaranteed.” They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.

From driving his pick up every week 10s of miles to get that extra penny saving which he can pass on to his customers in the early days of his retails life, Sam has always wanted to provide the best to the customer and in fact exceed his expectations.

Rule 9. Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running, long
before Wal-Mart was known as the nation’s largest retailer-we ranked number one in our industry for the lowest ration of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.

Thrift. Thrift and Thrift. This was one of the most important competitive advantage. Sam worked hard and also made everybody else work hard to cut down costs – like cutting down on pilfretion, having a computerised inventory system, matching sales and projected sales to distribution, operating on less or zero debt.

Rule 10. Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing one way, there a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.” SAM WALTON.

Yes, he went against the conventional wisdon but I believe this is because he knew that he was mostly right. He took his chances but the conventinal wisdom was wrong than he was against it.

2003-02-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

CoverStory: Innovative schools are gaining ground over formal schools. And kids just love them, Feb 9, 2003 The Week

The latest story in Week is very informative. It is showing the silent revolution happening in 10s of small schools - the schools which are breaking the century long traditions of trying to make students who are in the Six Sigma quality range - all as same as the shoes they were, the books they read. The schools are trying to make Individuals out of them.

The Mass customization of this era in manufacturing (dell for example) is needed in the schools. More importantly the schools are trying to prepare the students for the future - the skills needed to live and work. Sample this:

"Instead of juggling with 40-minute periods like their contemporaries in formal schools, I-school students are allowed to plan their lessons for the day. The management spells out the syllabus at the beginning of the term, leaving the students to decide how they want to space their learning. Impromptu tests conducted by the staff show up the laggards. A word of encouragement here, a note of caution there, is all that is needed to spur them on."

What might bother parents with children in I-schools is the child's adjustment to a formal setup in college. "Individual attention at a young age enables them to develop the qualities needed to cope with any environment," says Sheridan Wilson, secretary of the foundation that runs AMS. "When children from a very young age make their own decisions and plan their own activities and feel confident, this confidence lasts throughout their life."

What prompts the rush to I-schools? "The promise of a strong foundation, emphasis on holistic development and individual attention," says Mallika whose son Arun studied at Headstart.

I think the best would be this example of the Success of I-schools.

At the graduation ceremony at AMS, children were asked to talk about their feelings on leaving school. One girl's presentation shattered hearts. She said: "I feel like a bride leaving her home." Such nostalgia needs to be earned.

2003-02-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

Tollywood Cup

The Telugu filem industry (one of the big film language clusters in India) just celebrated a wonderful Sunday. The stars (consisting of 4 teams) and headed by 4 captains (Chiranjeevi, Balakrishna, nagarjuna and Venkatesh) - these are the heroes who have been ruling the film industry for the past 12-17 years or so - and followed by a huge number of youngsters who have joined the industry in the past 2 years. The starts have showed a wonderful togethernesss and there was a no hint of competiotion (these are the guys who fight at the Bix office records).

Secondly, this was for two causes. One was to cheer and support the Indian cricket team in their endeavour to Win the world cup in South Africa. The second more practical and far more effective was an effort which collected a sum of Rs. 1 Crore (Rs. 10 million) which will earn an interest of Rs.90,000 every month and will help the poor film artistes (in this case the side actors, character artists, comedians etc) in supporting them economically. This is a wonderful act.

Also, the cricket itlsef was competitive and played with a lot of high spirit and camaradrie. This event (one of a kind in India) will definately get unnoticed by the national media 9which are all based in the North or West). For them the film industry is bollywood only. Considering that Tollywood (telugu film industry) and Kollywood (the tamil film industry) produce more films than bollywood and also better films.

I hope that this is a good beginning and the best thing would be oging forward we can have a match eevery year and we will sure will find a good cause once a year.

2003-01-30T16:08:00.000-08:00

Web Logs - History etc

As I always do with anything new that I encounter with I like to find out the history behind it. So I have found a few articles which provide a good background to the history of Blogging. Also, I am attaching a link of the software w.blogger which is a MS Office interface which rests on your PC and you can use it to publish to many blogger sites.

Just Blog It from ZD Net

http://www.zdnet.com.au/builder/program/web/story/0,2000034810,20267672,00.htm"

The history of weblogs
http://www.userland.com/theHistoryOfWeblogs"

W.bloggar 2.03

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2068-10130319.html

A Blogger manifesto by Andrew Sullivan

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/culture.php?artnum=20020224

2003-01-30T10:57:00.000-08:00

Emergic.org

E M E R G I C . o r g: Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets

Rajesh jain the man who came into prominence after the spectacular sale of IndiaWorld to Satyam at a mind boggling Rs.500 crores.

And I have discovered him recently and reached his website which is also his Blog. He writes well and whatever I have read of him makes a lot of sense. But he is a minority, of the Indians who shares his ideas free of cost (including his business plans).

His site has motivated me to make my blog and start writing especially the one Why do I Blog?

Good time ahead for Bloggers and especially more for india focussed ones.

2003-01-30T09:54:00.000-08:00

This is my first post and my entry to the world of Blogging. I will try to make the site as interesting as possible but more imporatantly this will be an archived think aloud sort of place for me. This is going to fun.