Vistas of two mavericks

Indian Stars in Asia

2005-07-06T08:25:00.000-07:00

BusinessWeek Online in its new Asia Insider newsletter has listed 25 stars of Asia under 4 categories -

Agenda Setters (The diplomatic term for politicians)
Managers
Financers
Innovators

My guess would have been that there would be no Indian in Agenda Setters, a Manager, a Financer and probably one innovator.

A pleasant shock was that there are 4 Indians in the list of 25.
And here's who:

Agenda Setter - Mani Shankar Aiyar
The petroleum minister seems to have won some fan following for his pipeline dreams. Totally unexpected, but his efforts sure deserve accolades
Manager - Naresh Goyal
Not a very surprising choice, given that Jet and Sahara took off almost at the same time, and Jet comfortably managed to fly past Sahara. The aggressive behavior of Jet (the proposed flight to US) surely is going its way.
Financer - V.Kamath
Undoubtedly, the 'Big Guy' in Indian banking. he turned around a small credit agency to India's second largest bank in no time with his slew of ATMs which revolutionised our city landscapes. The man behind the structuring of the Reliance breakup. Truly ICICI's honcho deserves to be in the hall of fame
Innovators - Mashelkar
The Director of CSIR. From a humble upbringing to being at the helm of India's top research facilites, this man has gone places. The industry-research institutes collaboration that he brought about is changing India's R&D landscape.

One more Joseph Sigelman, CEO, OfficeTiger in Chennai is also in the list. A US entrepreneur running India's most profit making BPO firm in Asia's list of 25!

Check out the full article in the link above.

Hoping to see more Indians in that list next year.

You've got to find what you love

2005-06-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

Here's the commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple computers and Pixar animation studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford. It's an absolutely amazing speech, inspiring people not to be bogged down by failures. It captures the image of life being a roller-coaster, and how failures are to be seen as mere bitter lessons. Job seems to share many philosophical ideas with Robin S Sharma, the author of 'The monk who sold his ferrari'.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Gender blunder!

2005-06-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Came across this article which describes the way people usually think about employees at a workplace. The sharp contrast in the way a situation is interpreted, based on the sex of a worker really gave me a jerk. Man, most of it is real!
I guess, we'll have to erase out this gender blunder.

How the company views its employees. (HE VS SHE)

The family picture is on HIS desk - Ah, a solid, responsible family man.
The family picture is on HER desk - Umm, her family will come before her career.

HIS desk is cluttered - He's obviously a hard worker and a busy man.
HER desk is cluttered - She's obviously a disorganised scatterbrain

HE is talking with his co-workers - He must be discussing the latest deal
SHE is talking with her co-workers - She must be gossiping.

HE's not at his desk - He must be at a meeting
SHE's not at her desk - She must be in the ladies' room.

HE's not in the office - He's meeting with customers.
SHE's not in the office - She must be out shopping.

HE's having lunch with the boss - He's on his way up.
SHE's having lunch with the boss - They must be having an affair.

The boss criticised HIM - He'll improve his performance.
The boss criticised HER - She'll be very upset.

HE got an unfair deal - Did he get angry?
SHE got an unfair deal - Did she cry?

HE's getting married - He'll get more settled.
SHE's getting married - She'll get pregnant and leave.

HE's having a baby - He'll need a raise.
SHE's having a baby - She'll cost the company money in maternity benefits.

HE's going on a business trip - It's good for his career.
SHE's going on a business trip - What does her husband say?

HE's leaving for a better job - He knows how to recognise a good opportunity.
SHE's leaving for a better job - Women are not dependable.

Customer service - How far will you go?

2005-06-08T08:34:00.000-07:00

How much hard and how far do you go in investigating customer's complaint; even where such complaints sound unimaginable ?
Successful companies like General Motors take even the most ridiculous customer complaint very seriously.

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem.You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice cream, when I start, back from the store, my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds:
"What is there about a PONTIAC that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?"

The PONTIAC President was understandably skeptical about the letter,but sent an engineer to check it out anyway. The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighbourhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store.

It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn't start. The engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.

Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: he jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc. In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavour. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store.

Vanilla, being the most popular flavour, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. All the other flavours were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out the flavour.
Now, the question for the engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it took less time. Once time became problem - not the vanilla ice cream -Eureka! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: vapour lock.
It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavours allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start.
When the man got vanilla, the engine was still to hot for the vapourlock to dissipate.

Customer service as it should be: do you ever strive this hard?

Moral: Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real. Get involved in customers' problems, however silly it looks.

Customer is always right!

Moser Baer - setting examples...

2005-05-31T08:13:00.001-07:00

I've been on the look out for some of the Indian companies that have gone out to excel in their fields globally. One such company is Moser Baer. It came to me as a surprise that Moser Baer is an Indian company, as the name isn't remotely Indian. The name sounds like German and I thought that since there's a manufacturing plant of Moser Baer in India, it must be an MNC. However, the misconception was absolved for the good, and I'm here blogging about it.
Moser Baer has gone miles since its inception and serves as an exemplar for aspirant technopreneurs. I add here a brief description of Moser Baer as in it's website.

A typical CD has a unique spiral track of data, which, if straightened, would be around 5 km long. It takes a single-minded, precise and persistent approach to lay such a path. At Moser Baer, our spiralling growth is a result of the same meticulous approach we use to make our media, applied to running our company.
The company was founded in New Delhi in 1983 with a clear vision— to operate in products with high entry barriers, from the technology as well as capital point of view. Given the fact that high obsolescence usually goes hand in hand with high technology, the risk and reward equation had to make sense. It started as a Time Recorder unit in technical collaboration with Maruzen Corporation, Japan and Moser Baer Sumiswald, Switzerland.
However, it was in 1986 that Moser Baer found its true calling. This was the time when the data storage field—the marvel of creating a memory second only to the human brain out of some plastic, specialty chemicals and dyes— caught the attention of an engineer with a masters degree in mechanical engineering from the Imperial College, London. So what if this meant breaking into what was till then the exclusive preserve of Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers, questioning the paradigm that no Indian manufacturer could be competitive in the global space and fighting the image that India was a country that borrowed technology and did not create it? Such challenges only further inspired Moser Baer founder and managing director Deepak Puri to take the company to the forefront of the optical media industry.
Undertaking its first and only diversification into the data storage industry, Moser Baer initially manufactured 5.25" Floppy Diskettes, graduating to 3.5" Micro Floppy Diskettes (MFD) in 1993. Today, Moser Baer is the world's fifth-largest manufacturer of MFDs. Its unique strength in diskette manufacturing comes from products conforming to stringent international quality standards with a cost-effectiveness that few can match.
In 1999, Moser Baer spread its wings into Recordable Optical Media, setting up a 150-million unit capacity plant to manufacture Recordable Compact Disks (CD-Rs) and Recordable Digital Versatile Disks (DVD-Rs). The strategy for the optical media project was identical to what had successfully been implemented in the diskette business—creating a facility that matched global standards in terms of size, technology, quality, product flexibility and process integration. The company is today the only large Indian manufacturer of magnetic and optical media data storage products, exporting approximately 90% of its production.
Since inception, Moser Baer has always endeavored to create its space in the international market, something that very few Indian manufacturers have been able to achieve. Aiding the company in its efforts has been a carefully-planned and sustainable model—low costs, high margins, high profits, reinvestment and capacity growth. Along the way, deep relationships have been forged with leading OEMs, with the result that today there are hardly any players in the field that Moser Baer is not associated with.

Milestones:

1983	Year of Incorporation
1985	Production of 8.0"/5.25" disks commences
1987	Production of 3.5" disks commences First Public Issue
1998	Moser Baer India gets ISO 9002 certification
1999	Production of CD-Rs commences
2000	Production of CD-RWs commences
2002	Production of cake and jewel boxes begins
2003	Entry into DVD-R formats Commissioning of the world's single-largest optical media production facility in Greater Noida Largest-ever Indian manufacturing deal with Imation Corp, USA Introduction of the 'moserbaer' brand in the Indian market
2004	Technology license agreement with Hewlett-Packard to manufacture optical media using 'Lightscribe' technology Private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC invests $149 million (about Rs 675 crore) in Moser Baer Agreement with Hewlett-Packard to manage the manufacturing, marketing and distribution of HP-branded DVD+Rs, DVD+RWs, CD-Rs and CD-RWs, storage media in India and the SAARC region

Our Values

Meticulous: To persevere till we reach quality perfection, and beyond
Open: To encourage and be accessible to new ideas and feedback
Selfless: To give back to society
Ethical: To be honest and ethical in our business
Responsible: To fulfill our commitments on time, every time

Hats off!!!

The cucumber seller from Chennai

2005-05-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

Here's something I came across. It makes you think about where you are in the scheme of things...

By SUBROTO BAGCHI (The author is co-founder & chief operating officer at MindTree Consulting.)

On a hot July day, my colleague Moses and I were trying to locate our car on Chennai’s Nungambakkam High Road in front of Nalli Silks when I saw a roadside cart laden with cucumbers. The seller was vacantly gazing at passersby. Clad in a white shirt and a dhoti worn in the traditional Chennai style, he had long hair and an unkempt beard. I did not know Tamil, and asked Moses to find out the price. One rupee apiece, came the reply. We wanted one piece each. The cucumber seller began deftly slicing them to put salt and the delectable red chilly powder on the neat halves. As we bit into the cucumber, I asked Moses to tell him that his pricing was too low, and that he should raise it. Moses conveyed this. The seller shook his head, and replied that “customer atisfaction” is more important than extra profit. The words ‘customer satisfaction’ were in English. I gulped my patronizing comment. At this time, Moses excused himself to find our car. After a few moments, the seller asked me in English where I was from. From Bangalore, I replied. What follows here is our conversation. His statements are highlighted.

Isn’t the Karnataka budget due to be presented tomorrow?
Yes, that is true. Living in Karnataka, it was easy for me to concur on this.

I wonder how the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu will ever solve the watersharing problem. Man cannot solve this problem. It has to be God. After all, it is an issue of how much rain is going to fall! I nodded. I was not sure if I had a view at all.

See the way the monsoon is progressing. It does not look good. The progress of the rains is leaving a ‘V’ of a dry patch as the clouds move north. Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and the states up north will have problems. Politicians are the ones who use such problems to create a divide among people. They always do it. They use water, religion, anything they can, to create a divide. Look at the way Amarinder Singh of Punjab is taking a stand. I looked at him, in part admiration and part disbelief.

You’re from Bangalore. Things are going well for you folks. But I don’t understand how people with shady business interests can become representatives of public opinion there. It was part complaint and part observation.

At this point, a fellow peddler arrived — helped himself to some of the cucumber, and the two had a quick conversation on some issue I did not understand. After the other person left, I asked him if selling cucumber was his full-time vocation. He told me that right now it was. Earlier, he sold lottery tickets, the trading of which has since been banned. As a result he had to switch his business to selling cucumbers on the wheeled cart. No complaints and no issues. Meaning to engage him further, I asked him his religion. This drew an instant look of disappointment from him: “Sir, I am an Indian. That is my religion. In my eyes, all people are equal, and it does not matter to me at all.”

The clarity of his response and his conviction took me completely by surprise. His net worth was probably equal to his day’s turnover. The newspaper and magazines he reads, to keep abreast of things, wipe off the disposable income he generates. Bare feet on this busy, dusty road, he sold a low-value, perishable product from a rickety cart. At peace with himself and with the world rushing past, this man was dressed in poverty. But in his presence, it was I who felt poor.

We are not complete if we are not connected. It is only when we are connected that things make sense. Only when things make sense, we can form an opinion. Standing there, I wondered how many in the corporate world know who the chief minister of Punjab is, and about the progress of the monsoon! How many have an informed view on river water politics and budget proceedings of another state.

Soon, Moses appeared with our car. It was time for me to go. I shook hands with the nameless cucumber seller of Chennai. Actually, I wanted to touch his feet.

The cucumber seller's conviction is close to ideal. I think Indians are gradually, but steadily looking at things in the right perspective. This is a truly inspiring article and there is something for everyone in it.

The Entrepreneur's Sacrifice

2005-05-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Entrepreneur's Sacrifice: "A great tale about the entrepreneur's sacrifice:

Rob Shostak, a long-time entrepreneur and founder of five-year-old startup Vocera, told a story about meeting one of the founders of software maker Lotus Development Corp. shortly after it had gone public. The guy had just cashed out $18 million of stock and invited Shostak back to his apartment to see a present he had bought himself. It turned out to be a modest Jeep Cherokee. Shostak followed the founder up to his apartment, expecting to find a palatial penthouse. But it was an average place furnished with only a mattress on the floor. 'I was kind of dumbfounded when he volunteered, 'Actually, they just took all the furniture out to go to my ex-wife's place,'' Shostak said. 'It was a striking and poignant moment for me to realize the cost of his commitment to the company.'

It's a more common story than you might think. The long hours, low pay, and volatility of startup life takes a toll on the people who are close to entrepreneurs. 'Make sure if you value the relationship with the person you’re living with that they’re up for this,' Shostak said. In addition, make sure that you choose your co-founders carefully. 'You literally will be seeing these people more than you’ll be seeing your spouse,' Shostak added.

Choosing this way of life is seriously not normal. But it sure seems like it when you are working on something you believe in. The easiest rule to forget is to pay yourself. The easiest sacrifice is de-prioritizing everything outside your business, even the things you are really working for -- like yourself, friends and family."

Idea Change ..not Creativity

2005-05-10T07:53:00.000-07:00

Renee Hopkins Callahan writes in
Coranteabout the annual conference of the American Creativity Association where Edward De Bono gave a keynote speech.

The summary she says :
"Creativity" is too large a word and "design" is too small a word.

For De Bono, "creativity" is not a focused enough word. He prefers "idea change," which he says better captures the "skill in thinking" aspectof creativity, as opposed to considering creativity as a gift or something that manifests itself only in certain circumstances.

"Design" is too small a word for De Bono because he considers "design" as more than just putting together visual elements. He uses the word "design" to describe the process of deliberately putting together new ideas in order to deliver value.

Check out Bono's book 'Serious Creativity'. Awesome read !

The bottom of the pyramid

2005-05-07T01:08:00.000-07:00

I have always been fascinated by C.K.Prahlad's theory on the bottom of the pyramid. Here's one interesting article on Red Herring titled Selling to the Poor

Here are a few excerpts

“There are five billion people in developing countries that are currently underserved, but can’t wait to join the global economy,” says Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad, a University of Michigan professor and author of best-selling business books, including The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits.

Consumers “at the bottom of the pyramid”—as Mr. Prahalad refers to the poor—can’t afford the same products as Western consumers. On average, they earn less than $2 per day. Mr. Prahalad, considered one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, believes companies can make a profit targeting this market, if they make their advanced technology affordable.

The funda:

First, price/performance ratios need to improve by a factor of 30 to 100, he says. “But contrary to popular belief, there is more to it than just taking existing technology and removing some functionality,” he says. “Products for developing countries often have to be more advanced than those for the developed world.”

How can one sell more advanced products at lower prices and still make money? “Through

innovation,” says Mr. Prahalad. The $39 you pay for a DVD player that was made in China isn’t all about low labor costs, he says. It is about doing things differently.

“In India, car manufacturers such as Tata and Hyundai sell cars for $7,000—for $9,000 you have a car with a video screen in the back seat and the quality is high,” says Mr. Prahalad. “Why do we sell cars in the U.S. and Europe for $20,000?”

Here are a few brilliant examples quoted:

Jaipur Foot, a self-sustaining company that makes artificial feet that allow amputees from rural India to continue working in their fields, is one of Mr. Prahalad’s favorite examples. With Jaipur’s advanced prosthesis, patients can squat, sit cross-legged, and walk barefoot on bumpy terrain—things that are impossible with artificial limbs made in the West. Priced at only $30, it’s more than 250 times cheaper, too.

U.S.-based Gillette is also adapting to serve emerging markets: its new razor designed for the Indian market can be cleaned without running water; millions of consumers lack access to a tapped water supply. Indian men like to use double-edge blades, Gillette researchers found, but they shave less often then men in the West, so have longer stubble. That, coupled with their use of still water, clogs twin blades. The “push clean” button on the new, cheap “Vector Plus” solves the problem.

Vision 2020 : A vision for the new millennium

2005-05-03T02:49:00.000-07:00

Having just finished reading the book with the above title, I'm left spellbound.
"The ultimate inspiration repository"
A must read for any aspiring entrepreneur in India.

I found some of Kalam's views striking and I record them here

First and foremost, is the lack of awareness and paranoia in Indians. Throughout the book, there are innumerable instances of great innovation from Indians, right from the age of Tippu Sultan. However, I concur with Kalam, when he says that Indians don't believe that they can be innovators themselves. One instance cited is when one of the persons from the Indian intelligentsia belittles Tippu Sultan's contributions to missile development, saying that Tippu's rockets were built with the help of the French, though it was completely indigenious. There are many such cases, where Indians have done the grassroot design, but have lost the edge in the field by allowing others to consolidate on our innovation(Not allowing others to take the lead implies innovating continuously to have an edge over others) Given a huge and challenging task, there are very few Indians who start off positively. Most people shun the challenge.
I quote Mr. Narayan Murthy here :
"It is very easy to set your goals low in this country. It's high time to change this trend if India has to survive".
I think this is one of the biggest problems - setting low goals. I can give an example here - When a person A goes to his teacher and says that he is intrigued by some field and wants to know more about it, the teacher scornfully replies that A has not even scratched the surface and has no scope in that 'hi-funda' field now. Is this the reply A wanted or expected? A figured out that the range of answers would be between "You can start with some basic math required" to "Thats amazing! What do you know about the field?". Agreed that the teacher may be very busy and may have prior experiences of being dissatisfied with other students, but isn't the teacher acting as an impedance in this case?
Its high time we started innovating. I can bet that you can't name 10 innovations from India that have made huge impact in a particular field. Does this mean that we don't innovate? I think that the reason is a combination of setting low goals and losing out on developments in a new field. This is to be set right immediately. When I say innovate, it doesn't constrain to the engineering aspects only. When Richard Branson came up with Virgin one, everyone realised that it was an excellent scheme and incorporated modifications in their system on the lines of Virgin one. Is it that we can't ithink of such schemes? Nope, its just that we don't try. And we effectively wait for others to innovate and then use their methods. Isn't this dependency? Is this really independence we are enjoying? OK, globalization forces you to be dependent, but the degree of dependency is an alarmingly high number in India's case. The book brings out myriad fields in which urgent innovation's required.
An excerpt from the book :
...My co-author Y S Rajan was recently in a meeting to discuss the effects of sanctions. This was before the usa had announced the details. All were Indians and working for foreign banks. One elderly gentleman emphatically said how we all have to learn to be proud of ourselves and take actions to nullify the sanctions. He narrated an episode about his visit to Japan. A leaking tap in his hotel room disturbed his sleep. He complained. Two people came, worked for half an hour and made it right. They showed the performance to him and he was satidfied. Then they apologized deeply for the inconvenience caused to him and informed him of the hotel management's decision not to charge room rent for that night. So far one can perhaps explain this as normal professionalism. But then, with a bow, the two workers showed the tap piece to him and said, 'Sir! Please see, the trouble caused to you is not by a Japanese product but an imported. We will continue to do better, Sir!' The message is that most Japanese are proud of their country's capability. They want to excel in their work. If each of us attempts to do so in our spheres of work the status of developed India will arrive sooner than we expect, because our country has many natural core strengths and competitive advantages...
The paragraph says it all.
One more thing that struck me was the fact that developed countries don't want other countries to be developed. This is much like the economic analogy of a monopoly, but this is a lot more consequential and can't be escaped attention.

These were some of the points that are to figure out in every person's checklist...
Read the book for more...
One thing that flabbergasted me was the amount of information collected by the authors on every field. Its amazing, and shows that this is the time to blossom, when the right person's on the throne.

Doors of Perception, in Delhi

2005-05-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Faludi writes on World Changing:

Doors of Perception is a biannual conference put on by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science; it is a collection of designers, technologists, and other creative people from diverse fields. This year it is held in Delhi, and the theme is “Infra”, meaning infrastructure, but it’s about a range of ways in which technology and innovative design or ideas can help international development and general worldchanging. The first day’s most interesting presentation was by Solomon Benjamin, a researcher/consultant from Bangalore...

Benjamin described how the most innovative places in India, the places where new technology and manufacturing starts, are slums. There is almost no infrastructure, and certainly no help from government; in fact, most activity is underground in order to avoid taxes and general governmental disapproval of things that weren’t part of their plan. These entrepreneurs have no capital, evolving their own methods of financing; they also have no IP law. And yet whole clusters of interdependent companies sprout up making things that are found nowhere else in the country (computer cable mfr.s were his main example).

And it turns out this phenomenon is not unique to India. He pointed out an example in New York, and I would say the same is true in reverse of Silicon Valley--its explosion of innovative companies created an unplanned, unregulated city-sprawl. It’s not a slum, but it does have the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the country. This brings home the point that innovation causes social problems as well as benefits.

Benjamin’s talk reminded me of a characteristic of many non-industrialized nations that I think will push India ahead in the future: everything here is patched, hacked, and customized. You have to do that, because there’s insufficient infrastructure to support the products you use, and because people’s needs are always far beyond what they can buy. As a result, everyone here is a hacker, meaning everyone is an innovator. Normal westerners don’t have the hacker mindset, because products already exist for their needs, and any need can be solved by a purchase; the people who push the envelope only do so because they enjoy it. (This is also why normal people in the industrialized world depend on branding to express themselves, rather than making their possessions into personal folk art like people in the third world do.) Having everyone in your country start with a hacker mindset will help you leapfrog from cheap-labor-source to vital-technology-hub.

The barrier to such leapfrogging is infrastructure, and as technology become more self-contained, more mobile, more peer-to-peer, infrastructure becomes less and less necessary. Ironically, the playing field gets more level the more advanced technology gets. (Not linearly, and not universally, but enough to be hopeful.) As another speaker, Ezio Manzini, phrased it, we’re starting to see the existence of “poor-to-poor” networks, and we should do as much as we can to facilitate them.

Bottom-up-innovation is an absolute necessity these days in India. And its prime time young entrepreneurs to shine in such innovation.

On the tombstone

2005-05-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a snippet from a conversation that Tuck graduate students had with The Sage of the Omaha - Warren Buffet

Q: After all your accomplishments, what legacy do you want to leave behind?

A: I think an example is the best thing you can leave behind. Obviously, you want to leave the right example. I mean, Wilt Chamberlain's tombstone may say, "At last, I sleep alone," and that's probably not the example you want to leave. If what I've done with Berkshire Hathaway - running a unique and independent company in true pursuit of shareholder value - persists and people learn from it to improve the way they invest and run their companies, that would be a fine legacy to leave.

Yes, let us leave an example behind ourselves........a good one.

On the tombstone

2005-05-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

Here is a snippet from a conversation that Tuck graduate students had with The Sage of the Omaha - Warren Buffet

Q: After all your accomplishments, what legacy do you want to leave behind?

A: I think an example is the best thing you can leave behind. Obviously, you want to leave the right example. I mean, Wilt Chamberlain's tombstone may say, "At last, I sleep alone," and that's probably not the example you want to leave. If what I've done with Berkshire Hathaway - running a unique and independent company in true pursuit of shareholder value - persists and people learn from it to improve the way they invest and run their companies, that would be a fine legacy to leave.

Yes, let us leave an example behind ourselves........a good one.

Losers eh?

2005-04-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

I second Abhi's thoughts in his post "....and we are called losers".
This was the 'advice' I got from one of my 'Well wishers':
But, first the prelude :
I've just completed my PUC, more commonly known as 12th Standard. I've cracked most exams (I wish I'm able to do that now!). I've pocketed a great percentage in my board exams (which I least heeded, except for the entrance to BITS. Hey, I almost forgot, I actually didn't do well enough to get a good percentage initially... I had to go through a trying period waiting for my revalued marks!) and a good rank in Karnataka CET, and an unanticipated great rank in IIT-JEE. This gentleman is at my home, wanting tips for his son. It was really good that he wanted his son to do well etc. but this is what he had in store for me:

"Son, Congrats on your great performance! You've done us all proud...
Do well in your future at IIT. Don't stay here. This system won't allow bright people to come up. Go for further studies in some good US university and get settled there. Get married, have children and return to India only when your children come to school-going age. But, make sure you come back before they start going to school, because their culture isn't clean...."

Though the advice is typically Indian, I had no answer to this at that time. I had a hunch that it wasn't right, but I stopped myself from questioning him because my thoughts were premature then...
However, I now see that it would be narcissistic on my part to shun the Indian society because of its blemishes. I'd rather challenge the discrepencies in my own way and try to set things right.
But again, the questions posed by Abhi about the Indian society prop up, paining us incessantly...

How it all began...

2005-04-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

The birth of this blog is kind of rare, a post giving birth to a blog!
This is how it happened -

Abhi blogs:
"Where you are, it doesnt matter. All that matters is whether, you are contributing either directly or indirectly to the growth of India to the maximum possible extent. Here I would vehemently avow that it is not a sin on one's part to cross the seas and settle there. It becomes
a cardinal sin, if one forgets to even contemplate over one's home country's state."

I comment:
"I disagree... This is wat i construed the movie as : I'll start with an analogy. Consider your family, your mom, dad and bro. What would they best like from you? Is it the money you earn, the comforts you can buy? Or is it your contribution to the family staying elsewhere in whatever way it is? I think its none of these... its your presence that matters most, ... The time you spend with them (There may be things like getting yourself a good name etc, which can be achieved anywhere). I don't say you have to stay back while studying.. No, in this time, anyone's aim must be to get the best education possible. So, you may have to stay away from your family. But, I think when it comes 2 staying away when not studying and contributing to your family, there's a big void you've left... The same applies to your motherland. I think you can do more by staying here and doing your part than doing your best from elsewhere... It doesn't work out..."

Abhi:
"First of all great to listen to a new perspective. Makes a lot of sense to me. But I am in partial agreement with it. I am in total agreement with your analogy. But, I am of the opinion that it would be hegemony on our part to tell the youth "Dont you ever go to any other country and work......work in India" and in a sense it is illogical too. What if I have a startup based in B'lore and I plan to expand to California where I can beat the bigwigs at their own game. Then I go to Cal to run my biz. Is that bad? What if I am a big gun in the American/European Biz market....big enough to influence political decisions and I use my ccontacts for the betterment of India? What if I go to Canada, setup a chain of Indian restaraunts with Indian ambience and change the perception of Canadians about India, thus increasing no. of Canadian tourists to India? Am I not helping in the progress of India? Some might say that I would be better off starting a meal service for destitute Indians....but then it is one's way of life. Each one of us have to be true to our own selves and work in our own ways for the betterment of India. Some might stay here and work towards it, some might not. But what is important is to do it. I may sound like I am catching the next flight to NY, no way!!!!!! I was just trying to justify my statement..."

Me:
"OK, I misinterpreted you in a way/ you misinterpreted me... Let me explain. First of all, when I said you must stay here, I had none of the start-ups you are talking in mind - Since it was Swades I had in mind, I thought you are saying that there's no problem if someone goes abroad and works there for some company unrelated to India (like SRK @ nasa in Swades). If this is the case, I'm sure he/she won't be able to do any big thing for India. But, if you say 'An ocean arises from droplets of water', I'll say, "I know YOU don't want to contribute just 1 drop of water!" If you are talking about starting up here and branching out, I back it. That's great! But, at the same time, I would persuade people to startup here and expand later, i.e. a Narayan Murthy is better than a Vinod Khosla/Gururaj Deshpande coz. your investment and employment generation is more important here and now's the time for it. You can always expand... I'm kind of against starting up abroad and expandin into India at a later stage. (But again, that depends on your biz... ) OK, I also would persuade one to stay here even if his/her biz has expanded abroad. You can stay there for some time, but make sure you are always an Indian citizen. I believe that its only if you stay here, that you'll be able to identify the problems in the society and help in a big way. Again, this is coz. I believe that an entrepreneur now has a bigger role than just being one who ensures smooth running of his biz... He must better the society... I'll cite an obvious eg to justify my stand: Infy : Narayan Murthy's biz is definitely better than Vinod Khosla's biz from India's perspective. I don't know about the present contribution to GDP, but it was Infy which catapulted India as an IT giant and not Sun (I agree that it was a collective effort, but, Infy led the way in India). Again, Infy (through Infy fiundation -http://www.infosys.com/infosys_foundation/about.html) has played a better role than Sun in view of betterment of society. I think this was primarily coz. Sudha Murty stayed here. She could identify the problems. I feel it wouldn't be as effective as it is if she was doing the same from abroad..."

Abhi :
"Ialso agree with you, that an entrepreneur should startup in India and then expand abroad, coz it makes much more sense this way to put in some value-addition to the society. Man, after being part of a soceity I feel, it is a moral obligation on everyone to give back something concrete and worthwile back to it. That's what we've got to tell people. To rise above the ordinary. And Infy has done much more good than Sun etc coz it has given India what it needed desperately in that time - thoda sa lift. Hey! Have got this great idea !! How about both of us co-authoring a blog on "Entrepreneurs & India". It would be cool ! What say ?"

Me:
So, we agree about everything! great! I got pissed off when a senior in my hostel said that he's not going to return to India... Man, he's a real ****** *******!
Yup! Blogs a great idea!

Abhi :
Cool! Let's start a Blog.... Suggest a title

And so began this blog...
We met on Yahoo a couple of days after this discussion and decided on the title...

....and we are called losers

2005-04-08T04:01:00.000-07:00

I remember blogging last month in my blog about the paradox of being Indian . As the dust-laden loo (hold it! i meant the summer winds which are also called 'loo') of Pilani blows through the narrow creak in my door, I reponder about the same thought. How conducive is the Indian society for people who want to take the untreaded path? Maybe mavericks like us might not give a damn to what the society says, but then we have a family to answer to, we have a society to which my family in answerable to.

Let me put things on a clearer plane. First off, lets assume that I am just done with college. I have undergone 4 years of totally useless technical education, because I am as clueless as I was 4 years ago. But now, I feel an urge to give back to my country, my society that has made me the man that I am now. But, what had my family expected of me? Simple.

Slog and make into the best engg./medical college
Once, I make it there, burn the midnight oil again for good grades
Make it to the best paid S/W job in some company, preferably the ones like Infy or Wipro, so that the neighbors are envious.
Work there for a couple of years, and then marry the chosen girl.
Keep working (day) and (nite as well ;) ) sire a couple of children
And live a life happily ever after.

I am so elated that my family doesnt even come close to this. But then, this is how the Indian family system is. If I follow the above regime, I would end up being just another guy in the billion that already exist in this country. NO. This is not how I want to be. This is not how I want anybody to be.

Making it to the best engg./medical college equips one to a certain extent, but if one doesnt make it, that isn't the end of the world.
Good grades.....For Heaven's sake, give me a break! Now, I know the importance (or should I say mundane worthlessness) of grades.
Just making a job in yet another company. Probably the first step in becoming a ciphers among a billion ciphers.
Marrying the chosen girl, raising a family and living happily ever after. This is fine as long as this happens while one is doing something bigger in life. Something that is worth pointing out and commenting - "Look, thats what I call an effort", "Man! That guy is a 'man' ".

The Indian family system rarely gives children the liberty to go against the tide, to become mavericks, to become the chhange that they want to see in the world. Most parents are happy as long as their kids follow the first regime as they grow up. The eternal complacency of Indians, the inability to call a spade 'a spade', the viewpoint that those who dont make it into Infy are losers - a heady concoction to disaster.

Say, if I go ahead and startup right after college not giving a year to what the family says, what the society says and I am somehow mending ways to make a living for a couplle of years building my company. And then Murphy's Law come into play, and my company sinks, it is liquidated. I am bankrupt. The society turns at me and mockingly laughs - "Son, I told you. You should have just made it into Infy and led a happy and easy life". And I am called a loser. When I have the experience of being in a company that died, I know what went wrong. I have the recipe for the antidote to any such imminent disaster in any other company. My antidote is in reality priceless. But here my experience is considered worthless. All they know is that I flunked my studies, didnt make into a job, and hence tried making some small money by starting a company of my own which ended in cold water. Irony! When all I tried was to make this society a better place to live in.

So, the questions raised here are -

Does the Indian system curb freedom and hence the thought process?
Why are failures seen as outcasts in the society
Why is entrepreneurship seen as a means of making small money to sustain lib\ving and not as an avenue for value-addition to the society?

As the sands of time blow across, I pray that these do change and I pray that I am alive to see that India I have always dreamt of.

Dawn of a long day...

2005-04-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

I was rather late to notice the parallelisms between Abhilash and myself. Though we were classmates for 5 long years, I realised that our brains resonated perfectly in unison only after coming here, to Chennai. It was probably because of the infinite number of new faces I came across, and the absence of people who think alike. Though I have many friends now, who share some of my views, no one has come close to matching the degree of chirality between Abhi and me.
It was one incident that influnced me in a drastic way, so as to change my long term vision - a lecture by N R Narayana Murhty, on "How to be a good citizen?", which was aimed at sowing a seed of entrepreneurship in the minds of the youth, and it hit the nail on the head. I decided that Entrepreneurship was for me to embrace. The same night, I concluded that if I talked to someone on this, it had to be Abhi. I was so indulged in thinking about all these things that I could hardly sleep, and ended up going 15 minutes late to the test I had the next day!
So, what followed in december, as Abhi has elaborated, was on top priority in the list of Do's for the winter vacation.
However, this blog is a new concept, not actually planned. Born out of a discussion on "Takeaways from Swades", blogged by Abhi, which both of us enjoyed.
We believe we can achieve the goal set by Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam by 2020. We hope to bring out various issues related to Entrepreneurship and be cogent enough to convince people to join us in the path less travelled...

On the banks of the Karanji

2005-04-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

To cut a long story short, me and Aravind were classmates for 5 years. Treasured moments for both of us. Now, we live in two extremes of India - me in Pilani and he in Chennai. But then the inspiration behind this blog was a long chat we had this winter while walking on the banks of the Karanji lake in Mysore, our hoometown. A lot of common threads pass through us - be it Technology, Entrepreneurship, an unflinching passion to do something for India, F1, blogging ...the list goes on. This blog is just another vent for mavericks like us dying to change the way the world is. At the end of the day, we will take the path less taken, and exhort you to take the same.