1. Bloomberg UTV on TV referred to Schneider Electric as “Schneider Electronics”, at least once when I heard
2. Bloomberg UTV on its website referred to Schneider Electric as “Schneider Electric India is part of Luxembourg-based Schneider Group”! This seems to have been corrected later but google can find the error
3. Times of India newspaper referred to Schneider Electric as Germany based!

These are just 3 instances I came across. There could more. I wonder if these are errors by the media or Schneider’s insufficient public relations act. By the way, Schneider Electric is based in Paris.

(Disclosure: I work for Schneider Electric, Bangalore office.)

Everyday, we respond to emails, finish day to day activities, participate in meetings and so on. Besides, we consciously or subconsciously:

• Assess or at the very least, observe the progress of project/program/organization.
• Build opinions on various things - process, tools, vendors, decisions, teams

Do we share them beyond the coffee table discussions? We do in meetings or discussions, when asked for or even proactively. It may be good idea to take a step further and share these opinions in a well thought, clear email on relevant areas addressed to the management.

Of course, it is important to pick the right time, appropriate subject, use subtle language, modest tone, and imbibe character & attitude in the communication and many such “get it right” factors.

What is your opinion? What does your experience say?

I happened to look at few of the budget archives and here are some interesting opening lines-

“I rise to present the first Budget of a free and independent India.”
- R.K. SHANMUKHAM CHETTY, 1947 - 1948

“….The massive mandate that the people of India gave the Janata Party in March this year was not just a vote against authoritarianism. It was also a manifestation of our people’s desire for a reorientation and a reshaping of our economic policies so as to bring about speedy elimination of poverty and destitution. In the last few weeks, our Government has taken several steps to dismantle the authoritarian and repressive structure erected during the dark days of Emergency.”
- H.M.PATEL MINISTER, 1977-78 - First budget after the controversial state of emergency by Indira Gandhi from June 1975 to March 1977.

“…The new Government, which assumed office in mid-November 1990, inherited an economic situation of crisis proportions. The budget deficit of the Central Government reached a level of Rs. 13,000 crores, on 30th November 1990, as a consequence of revenue shortfalls and expenditure overruns. The Wholesale Price Index registered an increase of 8.5 per cent, while the Consumer Price Index rose by 11.9 per cent, during the first eight months of the current financial year. The sharp deterioration in the balance of payments situation led to a rapid depletion of foreign exchange reserves, which dropped to Rs. 3142 crores at the end of November 1990 and this sum was not even sufficient to finance imports for one month.”
- Yashwant Sinha, 1991-92 (Interim)

“I rise to present the budget for 1991-92. As I rise, I am overpowered by a strange feeling of loneliness. I miss a handsome, smiling, face listening intently to the Budget Speech. Shri Rajiv Gandhi is no more. But his dream lives on; his dream of ushering India into the twenty-first century; his dream of a strong, united, technologically sophisticated but humane India.I dedicate this budget to his inspiring memory.”
- Manmohan Singh, 1991-92

“… Honourable Members would recall that when the new Government assumed office eight months ago, we inherited an economy on the verge of collapse. Inflation was accelerating rapidly. The balance of payments was in serious trouble. The foreign exchange reserves were barely enough for two weeks of imports. Foreign commercial banks had stopped lending to India. Non-Resident Indians were withdrawing their deposits. Shortages of foreign exchange had forced a massive import squeeze, which had halted the rapid industrial growth of earlier years and had produced negative growth rates from May 1991 onwards.”
- Manmohan Singh, 1992-93

Same logic applies in the upbringing of a new born. Seek out for modern and latest products & services to tilt the balance towards the pleasure side of things.

Full credits to Ashu on this front to have explored many avenues and discovered some interesting & uncommon products in the market (My contribution is limited to toughest of all - opening the wallet!). These products serve one or more of the following -

• Ease out on energy-draining tasks
• Improve the comfort for the tiny tot
• Reduce the need for a helping hand (read “be independent”)

Here goes the list.

Food & Feed

• Feeding Pillow (also called Nursing Pillow)
• Feeding Cover
• Food Injector

Sleep

• Baby Monitor - A simple radio device to remotely listen to sounds made by the baby with a transmitter near the baby & receiver near you. Lets the baby have a good sleep as you can continue with your activities
• Hanging spring-powered cradle

Wellness

• Concoction of almond oil, olive oil, coconut oil & butter (homemade bath oil)
• Corn starch powder - Apply on baby’s bum to remove the dark patches caused by daipers
• Bathing Chair - You do not need a experienced aunt or relative to put the baby along the legs (tradition Indian way) for bath. Its foldable and easy to carry during travel.
• Baby Gym

Baby Clothes

• Thermal inners
• Full body length suits
• Full/overall bib - The normal bibs are fine at home. Overall bibs cover full and saves soiling the favourite outside wears of the baby

Leisure & Entertainment

• Portable DVD player
• Wireless headset for TV
• Bluetooth headset for mobile

Miscellaneous

• Ear Thermometer - Checking temperature cannot be easier than a simple touch of the device in the ears.
• Camera Tripod - Do not expect your baby to pose for the camera or perform a retake. Set up a tripod in the room to capture those moments with the press of a few buttons.
• Disposable breast pads
• Nipple cream, puller, shield

Not listed are some more common and popular products such as bathing tub, microwave sterlising box, anti-diaper rash cream.

Beyond products, a few services help too.

• Consult a lactation consultant - Besides gynecologist/obstetrician/neonatologist/pediatrician, pay one visit to a lactation consultant even if all is well. Just helps reduce the doubt bank! We consulted Dr Asha Benakkappa.

• Subscribe to dvd rental service - If you plan to be good father and husband, you can forget the laptop & newspapers (don’t you get it - they make sound when you turn pages!). Good time to catch up on all the movies one wanted to. Of course, in mute & reading subtitles! For mothers, this will go well with a portable dvd player.

• Subscribe to the weekly newsletter of babycenter.com - One thing that comes to mind in the early days of parenthood are plenty of questions! The newsletter helps discover these questions sooner. The fact that “we are not only people in the world with these questions” eases things out.

• Subscribe to few months of any baby magazine - In the initial months, mothers like to be exposed to ideas to a better life for oneself and the baby. It is immaterial if the ideas are implemented or useful but it just helps to have a magazine-relevant-for-the-new-state-of-affairs-at-home lying around.

• Subscribe to lifestyle/travel magazines - One can forget long hours shopping or planning getaways. These magazines are a desperate man’s poor replacements.

We hope some of these help you. Feel free to leave a public comment or drop a line to ashwini.s at gmail dotcom for a personal conversation.

A friend shared this experience with me a few days back. He works for a large software & IT services organization.

In another situation: During a presentation to a potential new customer, the sales person was baffled when the customer told him about the engagement the customer had with the company only a few months back. The sales person, in spite of his best efforts during preparation for the presentation, had failed to gather the information about the past engagement of his company with the customer. If only he had known, he could have approached the meeting differently with a much better understanding of the customer.

As companies grow in size, expand across geographies and serve multiple customers, they are structured for better focus, efficient management and enhanced organizational effectiveness. The basis for an organizational structure could be geography, domain, industry, customer, technology, partner or combination of these. Irrespective of the model a management adopts, a broad and deep structure by nature increases distances and draws boundaries. This leads to significant challenges and demands frameworks to maintain communication and coordination among the various units to leverage one another’s skills, information & knowledge. Companies adopt various tools & techniques to address these bottlenecks. The challenge of leveraging the intangible assets like knowledge and information is far more complex than that of tangible ones such as people and machinery. Knowledge management & information sharing applications such as portals, forums, documents and tool repositories are common in most organisations. They have helped address the knowledge and information “generation & storage” side of the equation. However, instances eluded above are common indicating ample room for further innovation in the “discovery and assimilation” side of the equation which is a true measure of the effectiveness of the intent.

Inspiration can be derived from the concept of “social activity streams”, popular with the online social networking revolution. An activity stream is merely a list of content items, typically in reverse chronological order. For best examples of activity streams in action, login to Orkut or Facebook. You will be presented with a list of updates from your network for friends. These updates represent “an act” in short and further lead to an appropriate photo album or profile for further information.

This concept of social activity streams, within an organization, could help towards bridging gaps in collaboration. This is “Enterprise Activity Stream”- an organization-level structured list of relevant activities performed by different groups, teams or people.

Below dwelling further, here is sample Enterprise Activity Stream of SmartWebWorks Inc, followed by use case.

This Enterprise Activity Stream is published in the intranet of SmartWebWorks Inc accessible to all mid-level professionals in delivery, pre-sales, sales, marketing & research teams. It helps in looking for leads to achieve a certain objective. For instance, Hiro Nakamura, a sales person preparing for a customer meeting in Japan, realises the need for localising applications in Japanese for his customer. The activity stream provides him a lead to a relevant proposal submitted by Jack. Hiro can refer the proposal document or get in touch with Jack. The activity stream has helped Hiro, without wasting time in telephone calls and emails to peers seeking out for information. The traditional approach is also accompanied with the risk of hitting a dead end with loss of time and no relevant information.

In a real-life scenario, even in mid-sized organization, the number of activities in the stream could potentially grow to thousands in a few weeks, if not days. Hence it is important to design and manage the stream to make it compelling and sustain the usability for information consumers to reap the benefits over the long term. As part of design, well-defined structure is fundamental aspect for every activity. The structure of each activity governs the overall discipline of the stream. Lack of discipline will result in an overload of miscellaneous activities and fail the cause. As a basic structure, every activity must consist of:

• Text: Concise description about the activity
• Poster: Contact person or team
• Date: Date of occurrence of the activity.
• Tags: Keywords to improve tracking and search
• Links: Supporting elaboration- case study, blog, proposal document, project report depending on the nature and need.

Besides the structure, the type of activities worthy of inclusion in the stream needs a thorough thought. In the case of SmartWebWorks quoted above, some the options would be: Proposal submissions, Proposal wins/losses, Project milestones, Research projects, Marketing events, New customer acquisitions. Based on feedback on the effectiveness and value of the information to its consumers, the nature of activities will deserve an evaluation periodically.

The next key design question is: How to source the most useful activities into the stream? The idea of manual entry of activities is impractical & error-prone and adds the additional burden of moderating the authenticity and integrity of data. The solution is to source activities from the business enabler applications such as project tracking system, opportunity management system, order management system, CRM system, KM systems and others. Pull or push methods could be used to fuel the activity stream at appropriate stages of workflow in these systems. Here are few scenarios: CRM system introduces activities when a new customer is added; project tracking system creates activities when a project milestone is met; opportunity management system posts activities when a proposal is submitted, won or lost. Such an approach will be trustworthy & consistent. The data integrity in the underlying system percolates to the stream without any additional effort.

On the usability front, the stream must be easily accessible. Features such as sort, filter & search will help consumers find relevant information faster. Subscription to the stream based on tags or activity text or poster would benefit frequent users of the streams.

Kahlil Gibran, a 20th century Lebanese-American poet & philosopher once said, “A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle“. Enterprise Activity Stream attempts to enhance the worth of knowledge and information by generating leads to the asset distributed across systems and people.

Oh ya, she helps me & exercises her mom too…

Picked-Billed-Paid-Returned home. Those days we had just learnt to be out with Aashira but not for too long. So, returned home asap. That night I checked - The kettle was fine but the bill wasn’t! It was billed Rs 1199! How can bloody organised retail backed with technology, process, Tata charge me Rs 200 more??? I swore to confront them & kept the bill safe.

I managed to get back to the same branch of Croma and gave the flashback to the guy at the billing counter. He promptly turned his monitor and showed me his pricing software. It clearly said that the day I purchased the price was indeed Rs 1299. It was 999 a few days before my purchase date. Nevertheless, the fact remained that the price display read 999 but what did I have to prove. Security camera records! I wasn’t so tough as it turned out later. I simply had to check the price display again! It read 1299 (in font 72)  while the billing system read 999! Their stood the proof! The guys simply messed up the merchandising process. While the IT team had implemented a new technology (read expensive) software that connected all stores allowing the company to adopt modern retail pricing strategies (one such is psychological pricing that leads to the fight for Re 1), the guys on the ground simply forgot to change the price display effectively negating all the benefits that are expected to be derived by technology, process & smart minds back in the corporate office. This was the trauma @ Croma.

Yes, I managed to get the 200 bucks back :)

This time I was lucky to witness the last day of the 2500km 3 week race at the Champs-Elysees in Paris. It was a pleasant Sunday and it was fun to catch a glimpse of the last stages of the race amidst the festiv environment. It is not every day that you see people climbing up signal posts and buildings in the heart of Paris!

Photos here

A week down the lane, the delivery is still expected tomorrow! Somebody from the website is nice to respond to the daily emails promptly. He or she also seems to be in touch with DTDC on the delivery. However, the curry the book is still awaited. I paid a delivery charge too for this lousy service. I am foolish, s0 I remain hungry?

Update: The book made its way after a more than a week. The DTDC parcel tracker never showed the real date of delivery!!!