THE Great walks with the Small without fear.

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

2010-09-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Hrishi's

2009-07-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

India’s New Retailers

2009-06-30T20:29:00.000-07:00

India’s New Retailers
Microfinance institutions are going beyond financial products to sell phones, fridges and more. Everyone gains: rural consumers, rural sellers, companies and MFIs.

Shopping Cart

2009-06-24T23:57:00.001-07:00

buy now button

2009-06-24T23:49:00.000-07:00

The Evolution of Cell Phone Design Between 1983-2009

2009-05-22T22:13:00.000-07:00

22 May

The Evolution of Cell Phone Design Between 1983-2009

Categories: Cell Phones, Design, History

Cell phones have evolved immensely since 1983, both in design and function.

From the Motorola DynaTAC, that power symbol that Michael Douglas wielded so forcefully in the movie “Wall Street”, to the iPhone 3G, which can take a picture, play a video, or run one of the thousands applications available from the Apple Store.

There are thousands of models of cell phones that have hit the streets between 1983 and now.

We’ve picked a few of the more popular and unusual ones to take you through the history of this device that most of us consider a part of our everyday lives.

Self-Confidence for Leaders

2009-04-25T06:36:00.001-07:00

I was recently teaching in a seminar for MBA students at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. A young second-year student seemed anxious to talk with me. He finally asked: "I have read your book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There. In the book you talk about classic challenges faced by your clients. I noticed that you never discuss self-confidence problems. How do you deal with your client's self-confidence problems?"

This was a great question. It made me realize that I rarely encounter self-confidence problems in my work with CEOs and potential CEOs. It is almost impossible to make it to the top level in a multibillion-dollar corporation if you do not believe in yourself. On the other hand, I am frequently asked to speak at business schools (in fact five this month), and I have noticed that students in my seminars often want to talk about it.

I will share a few suggestions about how you can build your self-confidence, as it is a key quality that leaders must possess. I also hope you, my readers, will offer your own suggestions.

• Don't worry about being perfect. There are never right or wrong answers to complex business decisions. The best that you can do as a leader is to gather all of the information that you can (in a timely manner), do a cost-benefit analysis of potential options, use your best judgment—and then go for it.

• Learn to live with failure. Great salespeople are the ones who get rejected the most often. They just "ask for the order" more than the other salespeople. You are going to make mistakes. You are human. Learn from these mistakes and move on.

• After you make the final decision—commit! Don't continually second-guess yourself. Great leaders communicate with a sense of belief in what they are doing and with positive expectations toward the achievement of their vision.

• Show courage on the outside—even if you don't always feel it on the inside. Everyone is afraid sometime. If you are a leader, you direct reports will be reading your every expression. If you show a lack of courage, you will begin to damage your direct reports' self-confidence.

• Find happiness and contentment is your work. Life is short. My extensive research indicates that we are all going to die anyway. Do your best. Follow your heart. When you win, celebrate. When you lose, just start over the next day.

Readers: What suggestions might you have to help people increase self-confidence? Any of your thoughts are appreciated.

Marshall Goldsmith is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Succession: Are You Ready? as well as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller What Got You Here Won't Get You There, a Harold Longman Award winner for Business Book of the Year. He can be reached at Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com, and he provides his articles and videos online at MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com.

10 innovation lessons from The Economist magazine's Project Red Stripe

2009-03-31T23:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/EnterpriseDetails.asp?a=400

Reinventing your business model

2009-01-07T05:31:00.001-08:00

One secret to maintaining a thriving business is recognizing when it needs a fundamental change.

In 2003, Apple introduced the iPod with the iTunes store, revolutionizing portable entertainment, creating a new market, and transforming the company. In just three years, the iPod/iTunes combination became a nearly $10 billion product, accounting for almost 50% of Apple’s revenue. Apple’s market capitalization catapulted from around $1 billion in early 2003 to over $150 billion by late 2007.

This success story is well known; what’s less well known is that Apple was not the first to bring digital music players to market. A company called Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio in 1998. Another firm, Best Data, introduced the Cabo 64 in 2000. Both products worked well and were portable and stylish. So why did the iPod, rather than the Rio or Cabo, succeed?.................

Indian Harvard grads turning biz plans into success stories

2008-08-03T20:34:00.001-07:00

Back in 2005, Ashwin Damera, a student at Harvard Business School (HBS), had a bright idea. What India’s booming e-commerce industry lacked, he believed, was a comprehensive travel portal. His idea won him second place in the classroom business plan contest; the winner of which was a proposed plus size lingerie company. He doesn’t think that one came through, but a year later Travelguru did, thanks partly to generous cheques from three unexpected investors - Damera’s own classmates.

Meet Ankur Daga, one of Damera’s angel investors, and himself an entrepreneur. Fresh out of HBS he founded Angara, an online jewellery company that emerged from watching friends struggle with purchasing jewellery. Despite his family background in jewellery, Daga wasn’t expected to follow suit. “The question was always ‘You’re highly educated, shouldn’t you be working for a private equity or a consulting firm’ ?” he says. But Daga doesn’t feel deprived. “I’ve done the McKinsey stint; I wanted to start something on my own, and the earlier the better.”

Daga and Damera aren’t the only ones to go against the grain. More and more Indian graduates from HBS are rocking the boat by ditching traditionally espoused careers on wall street or in consulting for entrepreneurship , ending up with cross-border businesses and bifurcated lives. They include people like Naveen Tewari (Class of 05), a McKinsey consultant who returned to India to start mKhoj, a mobile advertising network . “When I went in to HBS all I wanted to be was a partner in McKinsey . That disappeared in exactly three months,” he says.

According to William Sahlman, Senior Associate Dean at HBS who teaches a second year course on Entrepreneurial Finance, after 10-15 years, almost 50% of graduates are involved in entrepreneurial settings. India has seen its share of successful HBS entrepreneurs from Ashish Dhawan of ChrysCapital to Avnish Bajaj and Suvir Sujan of Bazee (later gobbled by eBay). Lately, though, they are jumping into the water and getting their feet wet earlier, sometimes , while still in school.

Kapil Vishwanathan’s was a case of campus entrepreneurship. He floated Pre-Media Global, a Chennai-based leading vendor providing content services to the US publishing industry , while still at HBS, along with his sister Kami, also an HBS alum. He’s wanted to become entrepreneur as long as he can remember. “It had to be a cross-border enterprise . It was just a question of when,” he says. He even tried to support other young business leaders pursue their entrepreneurial dreams by starting the Entrepreneurship Club at HBS. “Of course, the investing and banking clubs were larger,” he jokes.

Entrepreneurship has never been more in vogue than now. Paresh Vaish, a partner with Boston Consulting group and HBS Class of ‘86, says, “The top quartile of the class got jobs in investment banking and the rest aimed for corporate jobs.” Since his time, the number of electives in entrepreneurship has gone from three to 20, and number of dedicated faculty from five to 32, the largest faculty contingent focused on entrepreneurship at any business school in the world. “In the 70s, 80s and even the 90s, HBS was all about propelling you the quickest to make partner in McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. It’s no longer the case,” says Sumeet Narang, batch of 06, who rejected an offer from Goldman to start Samara Capital, an India-focused private equity firm.

For Narang, this was his second management degree; he’s also an alumnus of IIM Lucknow. His second stab at it was largely driven by the fact that HBS offers one of the most “international and diverse candidature among business schools” . With a history in private equity and investment banking in his six-year career with Citibank, Narang says the tug to turn entrepreneur was always there, but HBS intensified it.

Like Narang’s , many of these startups were based on business plan entries in the second year business plan contest. Georgia-born , Gujarat-raised Abhi Shah, founder of Clutch — voted top Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) company from among 80 LPOs worldwide — says he and a classmate came up with 38 different business ideas during Think Week, a concept they borrowed from Bill Gates.

A part of the plan generating process was to have them be thrown out the window. Anshul Arora (MBA 04) followed neither of the two plans he submitted for the contest. Instead, with an “atypical” career at McKinsey with exposure in developmental work, Arora pursued his dream of a business with a “clear social mandate and a commercial motive” . The result was Edvance Learning, an inventive education model that spots gaps in the education and training landscape, and designs products to fill the lacuna.

For Arora the choice was between Harvard and Stanford which, he says, also has a great entrepreneurial flavour to it, along with physical proximity to Silicon Valley, the birthplace of aggressive entrepreneurship. A key Harvard advantage, he says, lay in its international leaning. “HBS with its general management perspective naturally has a strength in entrepreneurship vis-à-vis business schools like Wharton or Stanford that have strengths in finance and strategy ,” says Ashish Singh, MD Bain Consulting and HBS alum.

Another trump card for the school, according to Tewari, is its famed case study methodology. “The case study method means there is no structure and no formula. Life is like that. You’ll never get a situation that is a replica of what you learn,” he says. Every week, he recalls, the class was introduced to the case of a thriving entrepreneur, ranging from Narayana Murthy (Infosys) to Jeff Taylor (Monster) and Andrew Viterbi (Qualcomm). “I began to realise that I could be just like them and it didn’t involve rocket science,” he says.

That’s a sentiment everyone felt at some point in the course of two years , says Daga: “In a class of 900, at least 200 think seriously about entrepreneurship .” Those that do act upon it have a common starting point — the HBS alumni network — deemed one of the world’s most powerful networks with over 70,000 members. “The best part about graduating from HBS is that you can get a meeting with anyone at anytime. And as an entrepreneur that’s the hardest part,” says Daga. “We have more than a 20% share of the global venture capital business with examples like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. That kind of network is hard to replicate ,” says Sahlman.

A significant part of mKhoj’s $7 million Series A investment was landed through the HBS connection. “There is immediately a connection and the first question is, ‘Which section are you from’ ?” says Tewari. In fact, HBS has made such a success out of institutionalising its network that Vishwanathan didn’t require an investment banker when he raised $18 million for PreMedia ; he knew exactly who to call.

For Shah, on the other hand, the HBS advantage wasn’t just about fund-raising . Having built a political advocacy group for the Indian American community with 65,000 members , and a successful summer internship with Jerry Rao at Mphasis, meant his network of influence was fairly extensive and with deep pockets. “For me the choice was going the Bobby Jindal way or coming to India and making an impact as an entrepreneur ,” he jokes. Where the HBS connection did come to play was in his endeavour to recruit the best and the brightest. “It’s the credibility that comes from a school with pedigree,” he says.

Finders and seekers

2008-07-29T22:20:00.001-07:00

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the patron economist of innovation. Joseph Schumpeter was born on 8 February 1883 — and his work on innovation and the role of the entrepreneur continues to be a beacon to economists, businessmen, management consultants and venture capitalists. Economist Lawrence Summers has said that the 21st century will be the century of Schumpeter.

It is usually believed that true innovation emerges out of the tinkering of smart people in labs, garages and university dorms. Think of Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Google. But there is also the structured innovation that comes from large companies. Think of the team of engineers at Tata Motors who designed the Nano. We usually tend to underplay the importance of the corporate innovation, especially if it is part of a slow-burn process of incremental advance.

Schumpeter often wrote later in his life that large companies, too, could be hotbeds of innovation. “By the mid-20th century”, writes his biographer Thomas K. McCraw, (Schumpeter) was arguing that innovation “within the shells of existing corporations offers a much more convenient access to the entrepreneurial functions that existed in the world of owner-managed firms”. In other words, it isn’t necessary to start your own firm to satisfy your entrepreneurial urges; you can do it within the innards of a large company.

Innovation has many dimensions. One of the most fascinating research programmes that I have come across in recent years is that of David Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. In a series of papers that he has published over the past decade, Galenson has identified two types of innovators — the conceptual innovators and the experimental innovators.

Godard made his greatest films in his 30s and Clint Eastwood in his 60s. What does this tell us about innovation?

Galenson says that the conceptual innovators are the finders. They make bold leaps and challenge the existing way of looking at the world and doing things. This group mostly does its best work at an early age. The experimental innovators are seekers who gradually reach their goal, taking one step at a time. Their best work usually gets done later in life.

Galenson derives his insights by studying artistic achievement. He has recently published two new papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the US. Take the movies — and two directors born in 1930. Jean-Luc Godard changed the grammar of cinema when he was in his 30s, but declined later. Clint Eastwood did not pick up the director’s megaphone till he was past the age of 40; and his best directorial work has come in his 60s. Godard directed Breathless when he was 30 while Eastwood made Letters From Iwo Jima at the age of 76. Galenson says that Godard was a conceptual innovator while Eastwood is an experimental innovator.

Cinema is just one arena where Galenson has picked his insights. The same patterns of innovation can be seen in other arts such as architecture, poetry, painting and novel writing. So Pablo Picasso was a conceptual innovator. Paul Cezanne was an experimental innovator. Among poets, T.S. Eliot was in the first category while Robert Frost was in the second. Among novelists, Ernest Hemmingway produced his best work at an early age while William Faulkner gave us his classics later in his life. “The elegant and sophisticated poetry of Cummings, Eliot, Pound, and Wilbur grew primarily out of imagination and study of literary history, and was formulated conceptually, while Bishop, Frost, Lowell, Moore, Stevens, and Williams produced poetry rooted in real speech and experience, drawing on the observed reality of their daily lives to innovate experimentally,” wrote Galenson in a 2003 article.

Galenson’s insights can be adapted to the world of business and innovation. Some businessmen strike like lightning at a young age. Others gradually come into their own later in their life. It is fair to say that Bill Gates was at his best in the early years of Microsoft. Sam Walton changed the retailing industry only much after he had moved into middle age. His innovations took place at a glacial pace, and were not the result of one inspired idea but gradual learning born out of experience. Steve Jobs seems to have magically transcended the divide.

Other economists too have tried to understand the interplay between drastic and incremental innovation. One group, for instance, believes that upstream firms usually produce drastic innovations while downstream firms tend to use these drastic innovations to produce their own incremental innovation.

Coming back to Galenson’s two categories of innovators, perhaps the distinction between the seekers and finders extends to national innovation systems as well. Would it be correct to say that the US is a nation of seekers while Japan is a nation of finders? And what about India? And Indian industry? Are we more finders or seekers? I invite readers to write in with their answers to these questions.

17 mistakes startups make -- the 100-word version

2008-06-24T01:02:00.000-07:00

In 1999 John Osher started Dr. John's SpinBrush to sell a $5 electric toothbrush. In 2001, he sold the company to Procter & Gamble for $475 million. Here are his "17 mistakes start-ups make" in 100 words.

Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it's viable.
Miscalculating market size. Entrepreneurs say, 'The market size is 50 million people. If I only sell to 2 percent, I'd be selling a million.' But most products sell less than 1 percent.
Making a commitment on sales projections that were wrong. Created costs that require those projections to be met. Run out of money.
Overprojecting sales prospects.
Making cost projections that are too low.
Hiring too many people and spending too much.
Lacking a contingency plans.
Bringing in unnecessary partners.
Hiring for convenience rather than skill requirements.
Spending half their time doing something that represents 5 percent of their business.
Accepting that it's "not possible" too easily.
Focusing too much on volume and company size rather than profit.
Looking for somebody to tell you you're right.
Lacking simplicity.
Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose.
Going after too many targets at once.
Lacking an exit strategy.

Eugene Kleiner Laws

2008-03-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

Make sure the dog wants to eat the dog food. No matter how ground-breaking a new technology, how large a potential market, make certain customers actually want it.
Build one business at a time. Most business plans are overly ambitious. Concentrate on being successful in one endeavor first.
Risk up front, out early.
The time to take the tarts is when they're being passed.
The problem with most companies is they don't know what business they're in.
Even turkeys can fly in a high wind. In times of strong economies, even bad companies can look good.
It's easier to get a piece of an existing market than to create a new one.
It's difficult to see the picture when you're inside the frame.
After learning some of the tricks of the trade, some people think they know the trade. This reflected some of Eugene's own humility; he recognized that many venture capitalists thought they were experts when they had just a bit of knowledge.
Venture capitalists will stop at nothing to copy success.
Invest in people, not just products.
There is a time when panic is the appropriate response

The Long Nose of Innovation

2008-01-02T18:37:00.000-08:00

innovation is not about invention. An idea may well start with an invention, but the bulk of the work and creativity is in that idea's augmentation and refinement. The newer the idea, the coarser the granularity of most analysis, and the more likely people are to say, "oh, that's just like X" or "that's been done before," without any appreciation for how much work and innovation is involved in taking an idea from concept to wide practice.

................

Rewarding the Art of Refinement

The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. The path from staking a claim to piling up gold bars is a long and arduous one. It is one few are equipped to follow, especially if they actually believe they have struck it rich when the claim is staked. Yet the true value is not realized until after the skilled goldsmith has crafted those bars into something worth much more than its weight in gold. In the meantime, our collective glorification of and fascination with so-called invention—coupled with a lack of focus on the processes of prospecting, mining, refining, and adding value to ideas—says to me that the message is simply not having an effect on how we approach things in our academies, governments, or businesses.

A Leader's Real Job Description

2007-12-26T19:53:00.000-08:00

Jack Welch has his "4E" framework for what makes for a great leader: positive energy, ability to energize others, edge to summon the courage to make tough decisions, and ability to execute. The Welch framework is just one of many in the leadership literature. Leadership gurus from Warren Bennis to Ram Charan have their own well-known and well-advanced formulas.....

Career Assessments

2007-11-20T01:02:00.000-08:00

The process of self-reflection will help start you on your way towards identifying a career path that fits your interests. The purpose of self-reflection is for you to identify your qualities and personal preferences. What are your strengths? What do you value? What are your interests? What skills and abilities do you possess? What skills and abilities do you wish to develop? The better you know yourself, the better choices you will make with regard to your major and career.

Resume and Cover Letter Tips

2007-11-20T00:55:00.000-08:00

Summary, not objective

Whereas the resume for an entry-level position typically includes a general objective describing the type of opportunity desired, the experienced candidate will be better served by summarizing three or four skills that match the employer's needs. These highlights can appear in a short paragraph or quick "bullet" format.

Lead with experience, not education

There are other differences, too. Typically resumes of recent graduates provide education information after the objective. Although you should include this information on your resume, it's better to place it toward the bottom; your actual experience is more important than your education and should lead your resume.

Accomplishments, not just responsibilities

When detailing job history, don't fall into the trap of just listing responsibilities. Think in terms of what you accomplished by completing those tasks. In other words, don't just tell employers what you did; also tell them the outcome of your actions. "Developed departmental budget" could be a duty. "Proposed and tracked annual $500,000 departmental budget. Only division to meet deadlines and operate within budget during past three years" is a statement that details the results of your problem-solving abilities and clues in the employer to specific problems you can solve.

Include relevant activities, not hobbies

Clubs, organizations, and outside interests - a staple for entry-level candidate resumes - should be approached with caution by the experienced candidate. Activities that relate directly to your self-improvement efforts, e.g. continuing education, and the position you're seeking are important to include. Hobby-type activities should not be included.

Your resume isn't limited to one page

The length of the resume may also be different for the experienced candidate. Whereas a two-page document might not be appropriate for a new graduate, it can serve a valuable purpose for the seasoned professional. Often, the candidate has enough relevant accomplishments and experiences to expand to a second page. Content is more important that length.

Cover Letter Checklist

Which cover letter are you writing? A power cover letter or a limp cover letter? Check for yourself.

I really don't know to whom I am writing this letter, but that's OK. It can be read by anyone.
All I need to say in my cover letter is that I am enclosing my resume. The employer can look at it and see if he likes what he sees, he can call me.
I have no idea what the employer does or needs at this time. Anyway, it's not necessary to talk about that in the cover letter.
I don't have to write about what I have to offer the employer. She/he can figure it out from my resume.
I'll tell the employer to give me a call to set up an interview, and I'll just wait for the phone to ring.
I want to know the specific person who will be reading my cover letter and responding to it.
I want the employer to know that I have taken the initiative to learn about his organization and to think about how I can assist him.
I will make sure the employer knows about the specific aspects of my resume that directly relate to their needs by pointing then out in my letter.
I want the employer to know how I plan to follow up on my letter. I don't want to waste time sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. I will take the next step.

Interview Preparation Tips

2007-11-20T00:53:00.000-08:00

INTERNET ADVERTISING REVENUES IN Q3 ’07 SURPASS $5.2 BILLION, SETTING NEW HIGH

2007-11-13T00:04:00.001-08:00

Industry Maintains Record-breaking Trend; 2007 Q3 Revenues Up Over 25% from 2006 Q3

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues exceeded $5.2 billion for the third quarter of 2007, representing yet another historic high for a quarter and a $1.1 billion increase, or 25.3 percent, over Q3 2006. The results, published in the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, are nearly 3 percent higher than Q2 2007, itself the last record-setting quarter. All three quarters in 2007 have set new highs—Q1 at $4.9 billion, Q2 at $5.1 billion, and now Q3 at $5.2 billon. Revenues for the first nine months of 2007 totaled $15.2 billion, up nearly 26 percent over the $12.1 billion recorded during the first nine months of 2006.

They're Making Money From Your Kids

2007-11-13T00:03:00.000-08:00

Do children need perfume or $30 haircuts? No, but smart entrepreneurs targeting affluent parents know how to make you think they do

Web spending hits new record in third quarter

2007-11-13T00:02:00.000-08:00

U.S. Internet advertising revenue rose 25 percent in the third quarter to about $5.2 billion, a new record, according to data released on Monday.

The Dream Manager

2007-11-10T21:00:00.000-08:00

What skills does a Dream Manager have?

Dream Manager is someone who has strong competitive urges. The three qualities we look for are hungry, humble, and smart. We want people to be hungry in the sense that they have some ambition. We want them to be humble in the sense that a Dream Manager is not responsible for living the dreams, and shouldn't take the credit when people do live their dreams. We want them to be smart, not necessarily in the academic sense, but more street-smart.

Why do we need a dream manager?

MK: As human beings we're driven by our dreams. I think there's a growing awareness that we have a turnover problem in corporate America. It's a big problem. Disengagement is probably the only problem larger than the turnover problem. A lot of employees quit and stay. So, they're disengaged on the inside, but they keep showing up to work and collecting a paycheck. These people are poisonous to an environment. They're absolutely toxic to a business. The most engaged employees are those who can see the connection between the work they do each day and their personal dreams. Dream Managers make that real.

What would you tell someone who has lost touch with their dreams and is reading this interview, but hasn't read the book yet? What's the first thing they should do to get back in touch with their dreams?

MK: Sit down and put together a list of 100 dreams. It will be hard work at first, but take a look at the 12 areas: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, psychological, material, professional, financial, creative, adventure, legacy, and character. Essentially, if you come up with eight dreams in each of those areas, you've got your list of 100 dreams.

Social-Network Traffic Surpasses Web-based Email’s in UK

2007-11-10T20:29:00.001-08:00

October traffic to the top 25 social networks, such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK internet visits, compared with 4.98% for the “Computers and Internet - Email Services” category, such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail, according to Hitwise (via ResearchRecap).

The End of SMART Goals? Now There’s an Easier Way Guest Post by “Justin Wolsey Riggs”

2007-11-10T01:24:00.000-08:00

The End of SMART Goals? Now There’s an EASIER Way!

When I was a kid learning how to set goals, all I ever heard was “make sure your goals are SMART… Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely.” The only problem was, setting SMART goals never seemed to help me achieve them! In fact, in my case, trying to make sure I set SMART goals usually left me tired, frustrated, and unsure of my ability to even set a goal properly, not to mention achieve it. I needed an easier way to incorporate this powerful personal development tool into my life. Lucky for me, I found one!

Years of research in the fields of human potential (and goal setting in particular) has shown that those who consistently achieve their goals follow a very specific pattern of behavior. In short, once goal-achievers intend to do something, they:

Envision what their life will look like after they have achieved their goal. Second, they assess where they stand in relation to that goal. Then, after creating an honest assessment, they begin strategizing how they are going to get from “where they are” to “where they want to be”. Next, they implement their strategy, and begin working towards the achievement of their objectives. As they progress (or regress, depending on how things are going), goal-achievers take time to evaluate their progress, and finally, they surround themselves with people they trust that they can report their findings to. When you line the process up, it looks like this.

Goal-achievers:

Envision
Assess
Strategize
Implement
Evaluate
Report

The really good news is, each of us is already an expert in using the EASIER Method to achieve those ingrained goals that we call “habits”. Think about it: when you want to get home from work at 5:30 so that you can see your beautiful wife (or handsome husband, whatever the case might be), you:

Envision what it will be like when you walk in the door into the arms of your loved one (“Man, I can’t wait to get home and hug my honey! He/She’s always so warm and cuddly!”).
Assess when you’ll need to leave, and how long you have until the moment you can leave the rat race and head for greener pastures (“It’s 4:30 now, and I can’t leave until 5 if I want to have a job in the morning. If I’m going to make it home by 5:30, I’ll need to…).

Strategize as to what the best route will be (“… avoid the highway, because at that time of day, it’s bumper-to-bumper traffic. I’ll take the back roads instead, and stop by the flower shop on my way.”).

Implement your strategy with the hope that it will help you achieve your goal (“5:00! Time to get out of here!”).

Evaluate your progress along the way (“Darn! I wasn’t planning on this construction! I’m going to have to go a bit faster once I get through this traffic if I want to make it home on time!”)

Report your progress (“Hi, honey. Boy, am I glad to see you; it was a tough day at the office! Oh, these? They’re flowers – yes, for you! I know, I know, I shouldn’t have.”)

You see? You’re an EASIER Method expert without even having tried. Just imagine what you’re going to be able to achieve now that you understand the process that leads to consistent goal achievement! Happy goal-getting, and remember: there’s an EASIER Way to do everything!

Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers

2007-11-10T01:14:00.000-08:00

Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers

by Margaret Heffernan

How do you identify the members of your team that could sink it? Get an expert's tips on the signs you should look for.

Three years ago, I joined the board of a company whose management, I soon recognized, was incompetent. I said so, but I was a new board member and the management had a lot of old friends and allies on the board. I was listened to respectfully but nothing much happened.

Three years on, the board has recognized that the management is incompetent. The consequences of leaving them alone for three years now threaten to sink the company. We’ve fired one manager and hope to stay afloat long enough to replace the other. A few generous board members, with good memories, have acknowledged that we would not be in this pickle had I been listened to in the first place. But how did I know these managers were incompetent? I’m not a seer and, trust me, I’m not gloating. But I knew they were incompetent because I’ve hired and fired so many incompetent people myself. Every experienced manager has; you probably remember yours. So what hallmarks of incompetence have I learned to identify?

Bias against action:There are always plenty of reasons not to take a decision, reasons to wait for more information, more options, more opinions. But real leaders display a consistent bias for action. People who don’t make mistakes generally don’t make anything. Legendary ad man David Ogilvy argued that a good decision today is worth far more than a perfect decision next month. Beware prevaricators.

Secrecy: "We can’t tell the staff," is something I hear managers say repeatedly. They defend this position with the argument that staff will be distracted, confused or simply unable to comprehend what is happening in the business. If you treat employees like children, they will behave that way -- which means trouble. If you treat them like adults, they may just respond likewise. Very few matters in business must remain confidential and good managers can identify those easily. The lover of secrecy has trouble being honest and is afraid of letting peers have the information they need to challenge him. He would rather defend his position than advance the mission. Secrets make companies political, anxious and full of distrust.

Over-sensitivity: "I know she’s always late, but if I raise the subject, she’ll be hurt." An inability to be direct and honest with staff is a critical warning sign. Can your manager see a problem, address it headlong and move on? If not, problems won’t get resolved, they’ll grow. When managers say staff is too sensitive, they are usually describing themselves. Wilting violets don’t make great leaders. Weed them out. Interestingly, secrecy and over-sensitivity almost always travel together. They are a bias against honesty.

Love of procedure: Managers who cleave to the rule book, to points of order and who refer to colleagues by their titles have forgotten that rules and processes exist to expedite business, not ritualize it. Love of procedure often masks a fatal inability to prioritize -- a tendency to polish the silver while the house is burning.

Preference for weak candidates: We interviewed three job candidates for a new position. One was clearly too junior, the other rubbed everyone up the wrong way and the third stood head and shoulders above the rest. Who did our manager want to hire? The junior. She felt threatened by the super-competent manager and hadn’t the confidence to know that you must always hire people smarter than yourself.

Focus on small tasks: Another senior salesperson I hired always produced the most perfect charts, forecasts and spreadsheets. She was always on time, her data completely up-to-date. She would always volunteer for projects in which she had no core expertise -- marketing plans, financial forecasts, meetings with bank managers, the office move. It was all displacement activity to hide the fact that she could not do her real job.

Allergy to deadlines: A deadline is a commitment. The manager who cannot set, and stick to deadlines, cannot honor commitments. A failure to set and meet deadlines also means that no one can ever feel a true sense of achievement. You can’t celebrate milestones if there aren’t any.

Inability to hire former employees: I hired a head of sales once with (apparently) a luminous reputation. But, as we staffed up, he never attracted any candidates from his old company. He’d worked in sales for twenty years -- hadn’t he mentored anyone who’d want to work with him again? Every good manager has alumni, eager to join the team again; if they don’t, smell a rat.

Addiction to consultants: A common -- but expensive -- way to put off making decisions is to hire consultants who can recommend several alternatives. While they’re figuring these out, managers don’t have to do anything. And when the consultant’s choices are presented, the ensuing debates can often absorb hours, days, months. Meanwhile, your organization is poorer but it isn’t any smarter. When the consultant leaves, he takes your money and his increased expertise out the door with him.

Long hours: In my experience, bad managers work very long hours. They think this is a brand of heroism but it is probably the single biggest hallmark of incompetence. To work effectively, you must prioritize and you must pace yourself. The manager who boasts of late nights, early mornings and no time off cannot manage himself so you’d better not let him manage anyone else.

Any one of these behaviours should sound a warning bell. More than two -- sound the alarm!

Creating the Inspiration -- Part 2

2007-11-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

Motivating the Team

Lesson 1 -- Keep the scope of your vision within the appropriate bounds

Lesson 2 -- You want a lofty goal, but it should be realistic

Lesson 3 -- Your vision should be achievable within a reasonable period of time

Creating the Inspiration -- Part 1

2007-11-10T00:59:00.000-08:00

Are vision statements really necessary? Does anyone really take them seriously? If the majority of vision statements are any indication, the answer to both questions is no. But are these companies missing something?

What Makes for a Good Vision Statement?

While there are many dimensions, at its core your vision statement should clearly delineate your direction or focus, as distinct from the direction or focus of your key competitors. Consider these questions:

Does your vision statement declare what you are going to do better than your competitors? Does it identify what makes you different and how you will beat the competition?
Does it identify your target market?
Does it capitalize on your strengths and minimize the impact of your weaknesses?
Would your vision statement fit any of your competitors or is it truly distinctive to you? Of all competitors in your target market, are you the best positioned to achieve that vision (in terms of market position, strengths and weaknesses, and capabilities)?

Apple iphone's Vision Statement will look something like this:

We will offer the preeminent multi-function communications and entertainment handheld device for high-end users by providing the most intuitive user interface to access the most desired functional capabilities, while applying the latest technology and packaging options in the design of our product.

Additional Dimensions

While this discussion focuses on the core elements of a good vision statement, there are many more factors which should be taken into consideration, including:

Is your vision statement broad enough to encompass all that you want to do without allowing forays into areas in which you have no distinctive competence?
Is your vision something you wish will happen; or is it something you truly believe your company can make happen?
Is your vision stated in such a way that employees as well as others can assess progress toward your objective?

How To Stand Out from the Herd - when you can't change who you are—how do you make your application something more than just one of many?

2007-11-10T00:50:00.000-08:00

Stop Stereotyping Yourself
Mixing Up the Essay
Connect With People, Not Web Sites
More Than Grades and Scores

"...But applying to business school is like building a house. Your scores are only one pillar—if it doesn't have the other pillars it doesn't stand up properly."

...For international students like Mansukhani, being from a country where large numbers of students are also seeking a U.S. b-school education can make it more difficult for your application to stand out from the pile in the admissions office, even with top-notch test scores. And it's not just where you're from, it's also what you've done that can put you into the one-of-a-crowd category. There are plenty of applicants with backgrounds in consulting and banking, In other words, it's not that you're not right for business school. For business schools seeking diversity in their classes, you're too right.

Brands: The Power of Emotion

2007-11-10T00:46:00.000-08:00

Brands that face a high degree of competitive parity—whose ad budgets depend on what competitors spend—in categories such as soft drinks, beer, and automobiles understand the entry to effective differentiation is through the personality door. They simply don't have unique rational claims to make, so they have to win people's hearts instead of their minds. But all brands, and all products—no matter the industry—can leverage the power of personality to strengthen their appeal. It can only add to the power of a differentiated positioning, (BusinessWeek.com, 10/12/07).

Some lessons from the life and career of a visionary

2007-05-27T22:44:00.000-07:00

Narayan Murthy .....

I want to share with you, next, the life lessons these events have taught me. I will begin with the importance of learning from experience. Learning from experience be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.

A second theme concerns the power of chance events. I am struck by the incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events that is crucial. Of course, the mindset one works with is also quite critical.

As recent work by the psychologist, Carol Dweck, has shown, it matters greatly whether one believes in ability as inherent or that it can be developed. The fourth theme is a cornerstone of the Indian spiritual tradition: self-knowledge.

Indeed, the highest form of knowledge, it is said, is self-knowledge. I believe this greater awareness and knowledge of oneself is what ultimately helps develop a more grounded belief in oneself, courage, determination, and above all, humility — all qualities which enable one to wear one’s success with dignity and grace.

A final word: when, one day, you have made your mark on the world, remember that we are all temporary custodians of the wealth we generate, whether it be financial, intellectual, or emotional. The best use of wealth is to share it with the less fortunate.

I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. This is our sacred responsibility.

22 Qualities that business schools look for

2007-05-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

Business week has an excellent article listing 22 qualities that the business schools look for in a potential candidate. The qualities are:

Intellectual ability: A candidate who is smart and easily able to handle the demands of the schoolwork and, ultimately, the business world.
Quantitative orientation: A candidate who can "do" numbers.
Analytical mindset: A candidate who is able to think critically and tolerate complex, open-ended problems.
Success record: A candidate with a proven run of success.
Maturity and professionalism: A candidate who looks, talks and acts like a grown-up.
Leadership: A candidate who has created value by being at the helm in group-based activities and is comfortable in this role.
Ambition and motivation: A candidate who is aiming for big things and planning to play in the senior leagues.
Career potential: A candidate who has what it takes to go to the top.
Perseverance and mental toughness: A candidate with evidence of the gritty staying power and self-reliance needed to overcome adversity.
A strong, extrovert personality: A candidate who likes people and who is professionally (if not naturally) gregarious.
Active orientation: A candidate with a bias to action and getting things done
The killer instinct: A candidate who is not afraid of winning and seeing others lose.
Personal integrity: A candidate with good interpersonal values and morals
Community orientation: A candidate who demonstrates responsibility to community, society, and the environment, and who has an integrated, sustainable view of the role of companies in the world.
Team player: A candidate who works well with others and who operates smoothly and constructively in collaborative situations.
Diversity contribution: A candidate who brings interesting attributes, experiences, and depth of background to the group.
Intercultural experience and tolerance: A candidate who has demonstrated a tolerance for diversity in people and cultures.
Creativity and innovation: A candidate who is comfortable with change and ready to use it creatively.
Communication ability: A candidate who can write, speak and organize ideas well.
All-rounder: A candidate who is more than a suit, and who has an array of interests and passions in other things.
Recruitability
Likeability: A candidate who people enjoy having around. All else being equal, people always choose people they like as colleagues and co-workers

Effectively Influencing Up

2007-05-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

As Peter Drucker has noted, "The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data."

The guidelines that help you convert your good ideas into meaningful action.

When presenting ideas to upper management, realize that it is your responsibility to sell -- not their responsibility to buy.

Focus on contribution to the larger corporation -- not just the achievement of your HR objectives.
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Make a positive difference -- don't just try to "win" or "be right".

Focus on the future -- "let go" of the past.

Economics of CAT

2007-05-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

The rat race for Common Admission Test (CAT) is nearly two-lakh strong and growing at over 20% annually. With the number of CAT applicants likely to touch 3.5 lakh in the next five years, the institutes offering preparatory courses are aggressively expanding their presence. The coaching class industry for CAT and other entrance exams for B-schools is estimated at over Rs 500 crore.

According to industry estimates, about 60% of CAT applicants in urban and semi-urban areas opt for coaching classes. The aspirants do not mind shelling out Rs 10,000-25,000 to take coaching for cracking CAT. Apart from six IIMs, more than 80 other B-schools consider CAT score for their admission process.

The market for players like Time, Professional Tutorials (PT), IMS, Career Forum and Career Launcher is not limited only to major cities. Smaller towns are also emerging rapidly on their radar.

Interestingly, Indore-based PT is considering launching a centre in the Middle East, targeting NRI and foreign students. “We are aiming to have 100 centres under our banner by the end of the current calendar year and signing up new franchisees aggressively.

We are anticipating the CAT aspirants to grow to 3.5 lakh in the next five years. Indian society is becoming upwardly mobile and CAT is emerging as one the favourite means to achieve career goals,” said Sandeep Manudhane, CMD, PT Education and Training Services that offers training for entrance exams through its 60 centres.

In Gujarat, PT is launching its new centres in relatively smaller centres like Godhra, Junagarh, Gandhidham, Gandhinagar and Mehsana. It trained close to 35,000 students last year and is aiming to enrol some 60,000 students during the current year for CAT, GUJCAT, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT and IELTS, among others.

Career Forum, headquartered at Pune with 55 centres, is also aiming to have 100 centres under its banner. “Number of coaching classes is mushrooming with consistently increasing CAT applicants. Also, students prefer to take coaching for CAT that is considered as the toughest entrance test in the country.

Meanwhile, TIME that runs a network of 130 centres across the country would set up 20 more in the near future. “We expect to train at least 60,000 students this year for CAT alone.

More students from smaller cities and working executives across cities are increasingly taking CAT,” Manek Daruvala, managing director, Time told ET. To capitalise on the increasing footfall, coaching centres are also offering services for overseas education and coaching for exams such as TOEFL, GRE, GMAT and IELTS

The Power to Change

2007-04-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

What usually ignites someone's awareness that they need to change?

An "emotional wake-up call" is what often launches us into an awareness of the need to change, like a mild heart attack getting our attention that we need to change our diet and to start exercising. I've worked with executives, for instance, who were told by their boss that they must either change how they treated their employees or they would have to leave the organization. It sometimes takes a transformational event such as a crisis to get our attention.

A lot of people embark on efforts to change and fail to follow through. How do we sustain momentum to make the changes we're trying to make?

We've all failed to keep a New Year's resolution after only a few weeks of effort. The key to sustaining change is accountability in a supportive environment. This is one of the primary reasons that coaching is often such an effective approach in leadership development.

A coach provides the encouragement and the accountability over some period of time—a time that is critical in forming and cementing changed behaviors so that they become habits. I recommend to client organizations that a coach work with an executive for at least 12 months, if not 18, in order to get beyond just the adoption of some superficial new behaviors. Real, lasting transformation takes time.

http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/apr2007/ca20070411_924286.htm

Do M.B.A.s Make Better Entrepreneurs?

2007-03-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to learn how to crunch numbers for an investment bank, quite another to start the next Microsoft, Google or even a decent restaurant.....

In the last 10 to 15 years, business schools have massaged their curricula to attract and then train the next generation of Bill Gateses, Sergey Brins and Karan Goels. Along with core classes in accounting and marketing, students now tackle interdisciplinary exercises with macro themes like globalization and environmental sustainability. They even team with engineering schools to learn how to start and run companies, not just maneuver spreadsheets.........

The number of U.S. business-school faculty teaching entrepreneurship classes has exploded, to 349 in 2006 from 12 in 1997, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business......

Of the members of Forbes' 400 Wealthiest Americans, approximately two-thirds each year are self-made. How many of those carry M.B.A.s? In 2006, just 15%, down from 17% five years earlier.

The Secret to Reinventing Yourself

2007-03-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

How do you leverage the things you’ve done in the past for what you want to do in the future?

What have you done in the past that can enhance your personal brand? Remember, you’re more than the sum of your parts. You’re an evolving person who in the act of change has an edge over the other guy who doesn’t have your background. As the adage goes, you’re not getting older, just better.

How big is your bull?

2007-03-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

Milo of Kroton was a famous Olympic wrestler in ancient Greece and was said to be the strongest man of his time. How he gained that strength is a tale worth telling and one that can teach us about ways to achieve our own goals.

When Milo was young, his family had a small farm and, on that farm, a small bull calf. Milo’s father placed the bull in Milo’s care and instructed his son to ensure that the bull grew up healthy and strong. One day, Milo’s father asked him, “How big is your bull today, Milo?” Milo ran outside, picked up the calf and carried him inside to show his father.

Each day, Milo’s father asked him “How big is your bull today, Milo?” and each day Milo ran outside, picked up the bull and carried him to his father. This went on for a number of years. As the bull grew, so did Milo’s strength.

One day, his father was competing in the games at the great Olympic Stadium. Knowing his son’s incredible strength would shock the crowd, Milo’s father asked his son the familiar question, “How big is your bull today, Milo?” Milo ran the short distance to their farm, picked up the now full-grown bull and carried him into the great stadium, placing him by his father’s side.

The crowd, seeing Milo carry a full-grown bull on his shoulders, erupted in applause. Word of his feat spread across the land and a legend was born.

In exercise physiology, this story represents the principle of progressive overload, or the need to progressively increase the degree to which we challenge ourselves when exercising in order to see continued improvements in our fitness. Fortunately or unfortunately, the human body is a great adapter and it will adjust, as necessary, to the amount of physical activity we undertake.

For example, 3.0 miles per hour might be a great speed on the treadmill when you first begin exercising but your body will soon adapt to that stimulus and will require a greater challenge if you want to keep seeing results. By gradually increasing the speed each week, you will continue to see improvements from your exercise routine.

In the story above, Milo became progressively stronger because he lifted a progressively heavier and heavier weight each day. If he had simply lifted the same size bull everyday, he would not have gotten any stronger because there would have been no need for him to get stronger. Likewise, if you are no longer seeing results from your exercise sessions, you need to ask yourself what you are doing differently today that will keep you progressively moving toward your goal.

Also, notice that Milo does not begin by trying to lift a full-grown bull. Instead, he begins when the bull is young and small and lifts him each day. It often takes great perseverance and patience to achieve a goal. Had Milo first attempted to lift the full-grown bull, he would have quickly become frustrated (and possibly injured) and given up, never realizing his true potential.

With exercise, begin easy and gradually work your way up to increasingly more challenging workouts. Make small adjustments to the intensity of your aerobic workouts and small increases in the weights you use when strength training. The objective is to establish a reasonable goal and then keep progressing toward it at a pace you can handle.

Lastly, the story demonstrates the need for consistency in your exercise program. If Milo had skipped a week or two every now and then, there is a good chance that bull would have outgrown him and he may never have caught up again. By sticking with it, day after day, Milo shows how important it is to maintain a consistent routine when trying to reach our goals. Each day is one small step towards your goal; don’t be afraid to take a bigger step today than you did yesterday.

Progressive increases in intensity, realistic goals, and consistent workouts will go a long way toward keeping you on the path to your own fitness goals. When you’re feeling impatient due to a lack of results from your exercise or diet plan, remember the words of Milo’s father - “How big is your bull?”. What are you doing today that has you progressing toward your goals for tomorrow?

Good luck and keep moving!

By Dan Strayton

http://209.15.46.229/fitnesspro/news/77.shtml

RISK-TAKING

2007-03-07T22:43:00.000-08:00

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.

Quotes from Brian Tracy

2007-03-07T22:16:00.000-08:00

Quotes from Brian Tracy.

Brian Tracy

“One of the things, which I teach over and over again that is so important, is that nobody’s better than you and nobody’s smarter than you. People who are doing well have learned the rules!” -Brian Tracy

“Therefore, if you want to be successful at anything, the rule that’s number one is that all the answers have been found already. You don’t have to find a new answer. Somebody’s already paid dearly to find the answer. And if you find the answer and do what the other people did, you get the same result, and it’s as simple as that.” -Brian Tracy

“ I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often. ” -Brian Tracy

“ You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile. ” -Brian Tracy

“ Perhaps the very best question that you can memorize and repeat, over and over, is, “what is the most valuable use of my time right now?” ” -Brian Tracy

“ A major stimulant to creative thinking is focused questions. There is something about a well-worded question that often penetrates to the heart of the matter and triggers new ideas and insights. ” - Brian Tracy

“ Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed. ” -Brian Tracy

“ A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power. ” -Brian Tracy

“ People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine. ” -Brian Tracy

“ If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals. ”

-Brian Tracy

“ The Unsuccessful Salesperson says, the other guy has the best territory.
The Successful Salesperson says, every territory is the best one.
The Unsuccessful Salesperson says, that company will never buy.
The Successful Salesperson says, I can make that company buy ” -Brian Tracy

“ I believe through learning and application of what you learn, you can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal that you can set for yourself. ” -Brian Tracy

“ The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services. ” -Brian Tracy

“ One quality of leaders and high achievers in every area seems to be a commitment to ongoing personal and professional development. ” -Brian Tracy

Myth Busters : Leadership & Management

2007-03-07T22:09:00.000-08:00

Entrepreneurs & Leaders : It's simply a myth that entrepreneurs can't evolve into company builders. He says research shows quite the opposite: In great companies the entrepreneurs generally grow as the company grows. Here is a short list of those who evolved into company builders: Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Hewlett and Packard, J.W. Marriott, Sony's Akio Morita, Walt Disney, Intel's Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher, and of course Gates and Phil Knight. They made the shift from time telling to clock building - to seeing their primary creation as the company itself: what it stands for, its culture and how it operates.

Success & Pride : He finds willful humility in the best CEO’s who display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. They ascribe much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/02/19/8400260/index.htm

A peek inside Google's war chest

2007-03-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

Google has filed its Form 10-K for the fiscal year ending 2006, and there are some interesting tidbits in there. First off, the company's good financial performance over the past several years—going from revenues of $439.5 million in 2002 to $10.6 billion in 2006—has resulted in a massive war chest. Google's cash and short-term investments amounted to over $11.2 billion at the end of 2006. That's a 433 percent increase from 2004's $2.1 billion, and there is little to indicate that the growth party will end any time soon.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070302-8966.html

Quotes of the Week

2006-12-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

Pursuing a mission without achieving results is dispiriting; achieving results without a mission is meaningless.— Frances Hesselbein

A vision without a task is but a dream,a task without a vision is drudgery,a vision and a task is the hope of the world.— 18th-century inscription from a church in Sussex, England

The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths -- the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance. - Peter Drucker.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged,and increased constantly, or it vanishes.- Peter Drucker.

The most serious mistakes arenot being made as a result of wrong answers.The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question..- Peter Drucker.

An overburdened, overstretched executive isthe best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the timeto meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.* Jack Welch

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!Live the life you’ve imagined!As you simplify your life, the laws of the Universe will be simpler,solitude will not be solitude,poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.* Henry David Thorea

The only real security that a man can have in this world isa reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.* Henry Ford

Life is divided into three terms -that which was, which is, and which will be.Let us learn from the past to profit by the present,and from the present to live better in the future.* William Wordsworth

One of the main barriers to turning knowledgeinto action is the tendency to treat talking aboutsomething as equivalent to doing something about it.* Jeffery Pfeffer, Robert Sutton

You become a star not because of your title; you becomea star because you are adding star value to the company.* N. R. Narayana Murthy

There is only one success -to be able to spend your life in your own way,and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.* Christopher Morley

Follow effective action with quiet reflection.From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.* Peter Ferdinand Drucker

The elephant passing through the market-place is always beset by curs,but he cares not. He goes straight on his own way. So it is always,when a great soul appears there will be numbers to bark after him.* Tulasidas

We learn…10%… of what we read20%… of what we hear30%… of what we see50%… of what we see and hear70%… of what we discuss with others80%… of what we experience personally95%… of what we teach others* William Glasser

We become like those with whom we associate:“A mirror reflects a man’s face, but what he isreally like is shown by the kind of friends he chooses.”* The Holy Bible

Love your job, but never fall in love with your companybecause you never know when the company stops loving you.* N. R. Narayana Murthy

I long to accomplish a great and noble task,but it is my chief duty to accomplishsmall tasks as if they were great and noble.* Helen Keller

Luck is a losers excuse for a winners success* Mike Lewis

When it comes to the future,there are three kinds of people:those who let it happen,those who make it happen,and those who wonder what happened.* John M. Richardson, Jr.

Half the world is composed of those who have something to say but can’t;the other half is of those who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.* Muriel Strode

Where you end up isn’t the most important thing.It’s the road you take to get there.The road you take is what you’ll lookback on and call your life.* Tim Wiley

Life is not a problem to be solvedBut a reality to be experienced.* Soren Kierkegaard

People love others not for who they are,but for how they make them feel* Irwin Federman

There are times when a man should be contentwith what he has, but never with what he is.* William George Jordan

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to buildand nobody wants to do maintenance.* Kurt Vonnegut

If your actions inspire others to dream more,learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.* John Adams

Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them.* Andrew Mason

You should be ambitious and achieve them.You should never start with a small aim.Your aim determines the nature of your accomplishments.If you are not ambitious enough, you shall not get enough to eat.* Subhashita

Good, better, bestNever rest till good be betterAnd better be best!* Harvey Mackay

Grief drives men to serious reflection, sharpens the understandingand softens the heart.* John Adams

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.* Percy Bysshe Shelley

To laugh often and much;to win the respect of intelligent peopleand the affection of children…to leave the world a better place…to know even one life has breathed easier becauseyou have lived. This is to have succeeded.* Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is:What are you doing for others?* Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you know something, it is in your head.When you believe something, it is in your heart.* Gabriel A. Bankes

It is not the strongest of the species that survives,nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.* Charles Darwin

Positive attitude is like a fire:unless you continue to add fuel, it goes out.* Alexander Lockheart

If you want to conquer fear,don’t sit home and think about it.Go out and get busy.* Dale Carnegie

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.Boldness has genius, magic and power in it.Begin it now.* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.* Albert Einstein

He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for.* Moroccan Proverb

People who want the most approval get the least and people who needapproval the least get the most.* Wayne Dyer

Please all, and you will please none.* Aesop

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need butthe creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphonyuntil he created it. Now we could not live without it.* Louis I. Kahn

A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of theblame and a little less than his share of the credit.* John C. Maxwell

Study as if you were going to live forever;live as if you were going to die tomorrow.* Maria Mitchell

Whatever you’re ready for is ready for you.* Mark Victor Hansen

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.* Henry Ford

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.* Rumi

True wealth can not be found in your bank account.It can only be found in those you call friends.Those with whom you share your deepest feelings.And those who accept you for who you really are.* Mary Vandergrift

To live is the rarest thing in the world.Most people exist, that is all.* Oscar Wilde

Besides the noble art of getting things done,there is the noble art of leaving things undone.The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.* Lin Yutang

You may not have perfect teeth,or a nose to ever match,but if you’re smiling through your heart,that smile will be nothing less than beautiful.* Jackie Riedel

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.* Vidal Sassoon

Be nice and smile to everyone you meet.You don’t know what they are going through,and they may need that smile. And treasure it.* Christine Huppert

Be not afraid of growing slowly,be afraid only of standing still.* Chinese Proverb

Happiness cannot come from without.It must come from within.* Helen Keller

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.* The Dalai Lama

Courage is not the absence of fear,but rather the judgment that something elseis more important than fear.* Ambrose Redmoon

I had no shoes and complained,until I met a man who had no feet.* Indian Proverb

The purpose of an education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.* Malcolm S. Forbes

Opportunity is missed by most people becauseit is dressed in overalls and looks like work.* Thomas Alva Edison

There’s one sad truth in life I’ve foundWhile journeying east and west -The only folks we really woundAre those we love the best.We flatter those we scarcely know,We please the fleeting guest,And deal full many a thoughtless blowTo those who love us best.* Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Take a second look …it costs you nothing.* Chinese Proverb

You can easily judge the character of a man byhow he treats those who can do nothing for him.* James D. Miles

The adventure of life is to learn.The purpose of life is to grow.The nature of life is to change.The challenge of life is to overcome.The essence of life is to care.The opportunity of life is to serve.The secret of life is to dare.The spice of life is to befriend.The beauty of life is to give.The joy of life is to love.* William Arthur Ward

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.Small people always do that, but the really greatmake you feel that you, too, can be really great.* Mark Twain

Classified calamity

2005-11-21T05:03:00.000-08:00

Small ads are flooding away from newspapers and onto the internet

Search advertisingthe small text-ads that appear alongside Google and Yahoo! searchesaccount for 40% of the online ad market. Another 20% goes to display ads and 18% to classified advertising. But search advertising can also work like a small ad and will increasingly challenge print classifieds as websites develop localised and more elaborate services for online users.

Perhaps the most significant development came on November 16th, when Google started up a prototype service called Google Base. It offers a searchable database of free listings, including small ads which can be narrowed down to postal regions. Among its first offerings were used cars. In time, Google could challenge eBay, whose own auction listings now work much like a giant classified websiteespecially with its buy-it-now options. But eBay charges sellers. Even so, it sold more than 450m items in the three months to September 30th, for almost $11 billion.

22 Qualities that business schools look for..

2005-11-21T04:59:00.000-08:00

Business week has an excellent article listing 22 qualities that the business schools look for in a potential candidate. The qualities are:

1. Intellectual ability: A candidate who is smart and easily able to handle the demands of the schoolwork and, ultimately, the business world.
2. Quantitative orientation: A candidate who can "do" numbers.
Analytical mindset: A candidate who is able to think critically and tolerate complex, open-ended problems.
3. Success record: A candidate with a proven run of success.
4. Maturity and professionalism: A candidate who looks, talks and acts like a grown-up.
5. Leadership: A candidate who has created value by being at the helm in group-based activities and is comfortable in this role.
6. Ambition and motivation: A candidate who is aiming for big things and planning to play in the senior leagues.
7. Career potential: A candidate who has what it takes to go to the top.
8. Perseverance and mental toughness: A candidate with evidence of the gritty staying power and self-reliance needed to overcome adversity.
9. A strong, extrovert personality: A candidate who likes people and who is professionally (if not naturally) gregarious.
10. Active orientation: A candidate with a bias to action and getting things done
11. The killer instinct: A candidate who is not afraid of winning and seeing others lose.
12. Personal integrity: A candidate with good interpersonal values and morals
13. Community orientation: A candidate who demonstrates responsibility to community, society, and the environment, and who has an integrated, sustainable view of the role of companies in the world.
14. Team player: A candidate who works well with others and who operates smoothly and constructively in collaborative situations.
15. Diversity contribution: A candidate who brings interesting attributes, experiences, and depth of background to the group.
16. Intercultural experience and tolerance: A candidate who has demonstrated a tolerance for diversity in people and cultures.
17. Creativity and innovation: A candidate who is comfortable with change and ready to use it creatively.
18. Communication ability: A candidate who can write, speak and organize ideas well.
19. All-rounder: A candidate who is more than a suit, and who has an array of interests and passions in other things.
20. Recruitability
21. Likeability: A candidate who people enjoy having around. All else being equal, people always choose people they like as colleagues and co-workers

Three phases in the Indian ITES industry.

2005-10-02T22:19:00.000-07:00

There are three distinct phases in the Indian ITES industry.

The first phase had those players that started captive units, such as GE and Citigroup in the mid-1990s. This phase lasted for three-four years when the idea of third party was born and we saw the advent of the Spectramind, CustomerAssets and Msources of the world. We also saw VC-funded companies and niche companies entering the BPO space and, of course, there were the big daddies of IT such as TCS, Infosys and Satyam, who started Intelenet, Progeon and Nipuna, respectively, around the same time.

In the third phase, we are seeing these third-party players moving back to a captive set-up ... look at Eserve, Intelenet. We also are seeing global banks, automobile majors and insurance companies setting up their captive shops here in India, such as ABN AMRO, HSBC, General Motors, Aviva, etc.

The BPO industry has evolved though these various stages but now as these BPO players move up the value chain and execute more specialised functions, we will see the transformation from BPO to KPO (business process outsourcing to knowledge process outsourcing).

Both the industries are complementary to each other. In fact, many BPOs are repositioning themselves as KPO units. Only time will tell how much the media projects KPO as the next big thing.

Break through..

2005-09-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

Derek Jones writes about the difference between successful person and an unsuccessful person ...

Have you noticed that the line between a successful person and an unsuccessful person is often just wafer thin. People who are unsuccessful are not necessarily irresponsible, lazy or lacking in character. Many are enthusiastic, hardworking and sincere and they appear to be very much like those who achieve remarkable things. So what's going on?..............

Quotes Worth Reflecting - Bertrand Russell

2005-09-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge"
.What I believe

"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness"

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. "
.A History of Western Philosophy

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. "
.Autobiography

"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. "
The Prospects of Industrial Civilization

"As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. "
.An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. "
.Unpopular Essays, Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

I like the way you are thinking...

2005-09-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

Little Johnny was sitting in class doing math problems when his teacherpicked him to answer a question.
"Johnny, if there were five birds sitting on a fence and you shot one withyour gun, how many would be left?"
"None.", replied Johnny. "'cause the rest would fly away.""Well, the answer is four," said the teacher.
"But I like the way you arethinking."
Little Johnny said, "I have a question for you now. If there were three women eating ice cream cones in a shop, one licking her cone, the secondbiting her cone, and the third one sucking her cone, which one is married?
Well," said the teacher nervously, "I guess the one sucking the cone?"
"No," said Little Johnny, "the one with the wedding ring on her finger.But I like the way you are thinking.

The Teacher Fainted...

Style over Talent...

2005-09-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

Player Discrimination is getting rampant in india,it will hinder the growth of talented and quality players.

Sania mania rules over grandmaster Koneru Humpy,excelling in a non-spectator sport, world no.6, and our very own Bengali lad, 25-year-old Ritwik Bhattacharya who is world number 62 in a similar game and that's squash and also Rohini Rau , clinched her maiden national sailing women’s title recently at Hyderabad .

Raging Bullishness

2005-09-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

Indian Express has an article regarding the Raging Bullishness in BSE

Now that the Sensex had crossed 8,000, the perennially optimistic are eyeing 10,000. But if the Sensex were to comprise of 300 penny stocks instead of 30 blue chips, it would probably have soared well beyond the 16,000 that was recently predicted by a regulator........

Circular trading

A group of Delhi-based investors have written several letters to the Sebi chairman pointing to four specific stocks that are being manipulated by generating huge volumes. This is done by simultaneously buying and selling large quantities of shares from different terminals to create the impression of huge investor interest and enormous liquidity. Market sources say that manipulators usually ensure that the terminals are often located at different cities to create the impression of wide-spread investor interest. ..

Kitabkhana

2005-09-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

Kitabkhana

Rare Images..

2005-09-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

Exemplary Leaders

2005-08-30T13:36:00.000-07:00

Tim Berners Lee -- Founder of the World Wide Web

Picture taken when Microsoft was started

Steve Woznaik(sitting) and Steve Jobs of APPLE Computers.He was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn't get any better name for his new company.So one day he told to the staff: "If I'll not get better name by 5 o'clcok today, our company's name will be anything he likes..."so at 5 o'clcok nobody comeup with better name, and he was eating APPLE that time...so he keep the name of the company 'Apple Computers'

Bill Hewlett(L) and Dave Packard(R) of HP. Behind them in the picture is the famous HP Garage. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.And the winner was NOT Bill... the winner was Dave.

Ken Thompson (L)and Dennis Ritchie(R) ,creators of UNIX.Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'.B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie)He later called it C.

Larry Page(L) and Sergey Brin(R), founders of Google.Google was originally named 'Googol'.After founders (Stanford graduates) Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor...they received a cheque made out to 'Google' !... So they kept name as GOOGLE

Gordon Moore(L) and Bob Noyce(R) ,founders of Intel.Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce'.But that was already trademarked by a hotel chain...So they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics... INTEL

Andreas Bechtolsheim , Bill Joy, Scott Mc Nealy and Vinod Khosla of SUN(StanfordUniversity Network) MicroSystems.Founded by four StanfordUniversity buddies.Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him;Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it;and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer...SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.

Linus Torvalds of Linux Operating System Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced by his OS.Hence the working name was Linux (Linus' Minix).He thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to name it Freax (free + freak + x). His friend Ari Lemmk encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded.Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax. Linus like that directory name and he kept the name of his new OS to LINUX...

Picture taken when INFY was started. This picture was found in the album of the clerk who took this picture...

Chinese, Americans Truly See Differently

2005-08-29T02:09:00.000-07:00

Chinese, Americans Truly See Differently, Study Says

Chinese and Americans literally view the world differently, according to a new study, which found that the two groups tend to move their eyes in distinctly different patterns when looking at pictures.

National Geographic News, has an interesting article about the study,

"Westerners tend to be analytical and pay more attention to the key, or focal, objects in a scene—for example, concentrating on the woman in the "Mona Lisa," as opposed to the rocks and sky behind her.

East Asians, by contrast, tend to look at the whole picture and rely on contextual information when making decisions and judgments about what they see, said Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.."

[.....]

"Americans are looking at the focal object more quickly and spend more time looking at it," he said. "The Chinese have more saccades [jerky eye movements]. They move their eyes more, especially back and forth between the object and the [background] field."

[....]

Nisbett and his colleagues believe that this distinctive pattern has developed because of the philosophies of these two cultures. "Harmony is a central idea in East Asian philosophy, and so there is more emphasis on how things relate to the whole," says Nisbett. "In the West, by contrast, life is about achieving goals."

[....]

"Westerners are taught to pay attention to objects that are important to them, to have goals that they can follow," he said. "East Asians are more likely to pay attention to the social field. ..."

[.....]

Nisbett traces the origins of the variation to at least 2,500 years ago. At that time collaborative, large-scale agriculture was the primary driver of the East Asian economy. For most workers, economic survival required paying attention to the person in charge as well as co-workers in the fields. Context was important.

By contrast, ancient Greek society—the prototypical Western society—was characterized by individualistic activities, such as hunting, fishing, and small-scale farming.

Google, the ultimate deflator..

2005-08-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

Post by Robert Young

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. At this stage, I think it should be more along the lines of Honda’s original mission statement, which was, “five Honda’s in every garage” (e.g. car, motorcycle, lawnmower, etc.). I say that because it certainly seems, with every new Google service that comes to market, my garage… er, desktop, is filling up with their stuff! So, what is Google’s master plan? These days, that’s the big question everyone seems to be asking (it used to be: “What’s the next killer app?”). Just to add more fuel to the fire, I’ll speculate alongside the rest of you. But before I provide my answer to the big question, allow me to digress a little to provide some background and perspective.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that Google’s success has largely been based on their ability to be highly counterintuitive. For instance, they started a search engine when everyone thought that game was over. They started to place ads in search results when everyone thought it was highly controversial. They introduced simple text ads when everyone was developing rich media ads. They designed an ad engine to rank the placement of ads by their effectiveness (click-through-rate) when everyone else was placing ads based on the CPM rates they were able to sell. Their performance-based ad model enabled them to initially build their business on “mom-n-pop” small business advertisers (generating billions of dollars in revenues from the long tail) when everyone else was chasing after Fortune 1000 brand advertisers.

More recently, Google has introduced services that clearly indicate their desire to build a comprehensive “platform,” one that challenges Microsoft’s dominance in this area head on (Gmail, Desktop Search, now GD2, and Google Talk). So what is Google’s master plan? I believe they are once again going counterintuitive, but in a manner that hits Microsoft where it hurts most. Google will make Microsoft’s entire strategic plan and mission, which revolves around the continued proliferation and dominance of the desktop PC operating system, obsolete by making Google itself the operating system. The model they are pursuing is very similar to Sun Microsystems’ (Jonathan Schwartz’s) vision of turning computing into a utility, like electricity. The only difference is that Google is already almost there.

To some extent, Google is bringing back the architecture of the mainframe to render Microsoft obsolete. In the future, all computing devices, whether it be the PC, mobile phone, TV, etc., will simply be terminals that “plug-in” to Google’s massive server grid and application services. With the increasing price/performance of CPUs, memory, bandwidth, and storage, Google’s strategic edge will be based on their advantageous cost of processing bits. And as long as users are comfortable sharing their private data and behavior with Google, all services will remain free (and supported by advertising).

It’s not too difficult for me to imagine a day, very soon, when I rely on Google for almost all my computing needs and I buy hardware devices based on such criteria. That’s the day Google will have become my operating system. We all know that the internet has a deflationary effect on the assets of every industry it touches, whether it be printing & publishing, media & entertainment, telephony, etc. If what I pose above is indeed true, Google is using the internet to systematically devalue Microsoft’s assets. Perhaps there will be a day on Wall Street sometime in the future that’ll be known as “Microsoft’s Black Monday.”
In Random

Technology Levels the Business Playing Field

2005-08-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

Hal R. Varian writes,

"When we think about the economic impact of information technology, the first companies to spring to mind are the industry giants like Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo. But the biggest impact on the economy may well show up in small and medium-size enterprises."

[.....]

"Even the success of the big Internet companies rests, in large part, on the fact that they provide advertising and sales platforms for small enterprises. EBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo all make it possible for small businesses to reach national, and even global, markets, that were previously inaccessible."

[.....]

"The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus for the American economy. It allows the small players to have access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a few years ago."

Another TITANIC is Ready( World's Largest ship !!!)

2005-08-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

Queen Mary 2, the world's largest, longest, tallest and widest passenger ship ever conceived is ready to sail.
QM2 was built in the Alstom Chantiers de L'Atlantique shipyard in Sainte-Nazaire, France at a total estimated cost of $780 million USD.

So, she is the most expensive ship ever built.

On January 31, 2004, its maiden 14-Day Voyage started from Southampton and will reach Fort Lauderdale via Funchal, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas, Bridgetown and Charlotte Amalie.

Length: 345 meters / 1132 feet

Gross Registered Tonnage: Approximately 150,000 gross tons

Passengers: 2620

Crew: 1253

Top Speed: Approximately 30 knots (34.5 mph)

Power: 157,000 horsepower, Environmentally friendly, gas turbine/diesel electric plant

Strength: Extra thick steel hull for strength and stability for Transatlantic Crossings.

Cost to built: $800 million dollars approximately

Charge details:

- 12 Nights Cruises from $2,449
- 10 Nights Cruises from $1,689

Some comparisons:

QM2 is 147 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower ( 984 ft.)

QM2 is more than 3 ½ times as long as Westminster Tower (Big Ben) (310 ft.)

QM2 is only 117 feet shorter than the Empire State Building (1248 ft.)

QM2 is more than three times as long as St. Paul 's Cathedral (366 ft.)

QM2 is as long as 36 double-decker London buses (31 ½ ft. each)

QM2's whistle will be audible for 10 miles.

A magnificent Spa will include one of the ship's five swimming pools, and together with the adjacent Winter Garden, will provide a health, fitness and relaxation area of over 25,000 square feet.

Numerous smaller lounges, alternative dining venues and specialized rooms will also welcome travelers during the crossings.

Amazing Liger..

2005-08-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

The 10ft Liger who's still growing...

He looks like something from a prehistoric age or a fantastic creation from Hollywood.

But Hercules is very much living flesh and blood - as he proves every time he opens his gigantic mouth to roar.

Part lion, part tiger, he is not just a big cat but a huge one, standing 10ft tall on his back legs.

Called a liger, in reference to his crossbreed parentage, he is the largest of all the cat species.

On a typical day he will devour 20lb of meat, usually beef or chicken, and is capable of eating 100lb at a single setting.

At just three years old, Hercules already weighs half a ton

He is the accidental result of two enormous big cats living close together at the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species, in Miami, Florida, and already dwarfs both his parents.

"Ligers are not something we planned on having," said institute owner Dr Bhagavan Antle.

"We have lions and tigers living together in large enclosures and at first we had no idea how well one of the lion boys was getting along with a tiger girl, then loo and behold we had a liger."

50mph runner... Not only that, but he likes to swim, a feat unheard of among water-fearing lions.

In the wild it is virtually impossible for lions and tigers to mate.

Not only are they enemies likely to kill one another, but most lions are in Africa and most tigers in Asia.

But incredible though he is, Hercules is not unique.

Ligers have been bred in captivity, deliberately and accidentally, since shortly before World War II.

Today there are believed to be a handful of ligers around the world and a similar number of tigons, the product of a tiger father and lion mother.

Tigons are smaller than ligers and take on more physical characteristics of the tiger.

Look at the size of the head on this thing..

10 yrs of yakking, SMSing, MMSing

2005-08-22T16:48:00.000-07:00

Mobile service in the country just turned 10 on Monday — and the child is healthier than ever.

[....]

In those days mobile handsets, with a limited choice, cost at least Rs 45,000 and a minute of talking left you poorer by Rs 16.80. Rentals ranged between Rs 400 and Rs 600 per month.,,,,
[....]

The mobile story saw two turning points: introduction of revenue sharing between operators and the government in August 1999 and the advent of free incoming (calling party pays) in July 2003

India Enters the Top 10..

2005-08-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

An article from indianeconomy.org

The World Bank has recently updated its development indicators. Among the indicators updated are the GDP figures and the per-capita figures. According to the updated numbers, India’s $691 billion economy has just overtaken South Korea to become the 10th largest economy in the world (and the 3rd largest in Asia). China has moved into 7th place now with its $1.6 trillion economy. India’s share of the world economy has gone up to about 1.7%, while China’s has gone up to about 4%. The U.S. still dominates the world economy with a 29% share. A look at the top 10 also reveals why the G8 is an anachronism. Russia is not in there. China will probably overtake Italy in the next couple of months. Spain has a larger economy than Canada. And India ought to enter the top 8 in the next couple of years. Among developing countries, Mexico, Russia, Brazil and Turkey also feature in the top 20.

Best SMS of the Year:

2005-08-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

How amazing!! - A mother makes her son "INTELLIGENT" in 20 years, but a
girl makes him "STUPID" in 2 mins.

Second Best:

Arguing with a girl is like wrestling with a pig in the mud. After some
time, u realize that u r getting dirty, but the pig is actually
enjoying.

Third Best SMS:

Boys go to college to develop the mind; girls go to college to catch
them before this happens.

‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ syndrome

2005-08-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

R Ramaraj, CEO of Sify has written an excellent article in today’s Financial Express.

"Do you jump out of bed with great enthusiasm on a Monday morning? Monday morning! Must be kidding, right? Why is it almost a given thing that work is the last thing someone wants to do? We hear words like repetition, boredom and stress as an inherent part of working, instead of challenged, invigorated and productive."

"In the past, people took up a profession according to their aptitudes. One became a baker, carpenter, trader or ironsmith, based on aptitude, training and skill. Today, we tend to ignore our aptitudes and, instead, focus on academic qualifications. I believe that this has led to stress, unhappiness and the ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ syndrome."

"But the truth is, you must enjoy what you do to look forward to going to work. For that to happen, choose something that enables you to use your natural talents and aptitudes, in addition to academic qualifications. Only then will there be a passion in you for what you do."

Wanning Galaxy of Author's in India

2005-08-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

The Guardian presents an excellent article about the gradual decrease of indian writers...

" Seven years ago, publishers descended on Delhi in search of the next Arundhati Roy. But, writes William Dalrymple, the future Anglophone Indian bestsellers are more likely to come from the west ..."
"Arundhati Roy could not have happened without VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth: in particular Rushdie's 1981 masterpiece Midnight's Children liberated Indian writing in English from its colonial straitjacket. It also gave birth to a new voice, one that was exuberantly magical, cosmopolitan and multicultural, full of unexpected cadences, as well as forms that were new to the English novel but deeply rooted in Indian traditions of storytelling. It won the Booker, as did Nai-paul's Bend in the River. Then, in 1993, Seth produced his massive - and magnificent - A Suitable Boy. Rushdie's prediction that "Indians were in a position to conquer English literature" seemed about to be vindicated."
[....]
Roy fingered what is without doubt the strangest aspect of the renaissance of Indian writing in English: the extraordinary degree to which, at least at its highest levels, it is now almost entirely written by the diaspora. As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction. It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog.
[....]
Nevertheless, the sheer scale of this diaspora of India does remain an odd phenomenon. From the 1890s through to the 1930s, most English-speaking readers received their notions of India through the mediation of British-based writers such as Rudyard Kipling or EM Forster. That briefly changed between the 1940s and 1970s with the rise of Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali and RK Narayan, deeply rooted writers who really lived and breathed the air of the India they wrote about. But by the 1980s, London again became the place of mediation with the rise of Rushdie and his ilk - except that New York (the residence of Ghosh, Gita Mehta and Lahiri), Toronto (Mistry and Michael Ondaatje) and even rural Wiltshire (home to Naipaul and Seth) now had to be added to the major centres of Indian writing in English.
[....]
As for the future, there is at least a lot of writing going on. The Indian superstars of the 80s and 90s - the Rushdies, the Ghoshs, the Seths and Chandras, the Mistrys - are still in their 40s or 50s and presumably have at least another 20 years of great books in them. Most are still at the height of their powers, and developing in a fascinating way: look at the spectacular way Ghosh's work has grown and matured since The Circle of Reason. Most still visit India very frequently, still think of themselves as Indian (or at least as hyphenated Indians: Indian-Americans, British-Indians and so on), and some may even move back here when they come to give up their day jobs - in contrast to previous generations of emigrants who usually left India for good.

Same scene different seasons

2005-08-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

Picture speaks a thousand words...

2005-08-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

Evolution of the tricolour

2005-08-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

Everything our flag stands for was written by their lives. Our flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. The inseparable nature of national unity and freedom was best expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru who became the youngest President of the Indian National Congress at its annual session in Lahore on 29 December 1929. At that session, the Indian National Congress adopted the attainment of Poorna Swaraj as the immediate objective of India. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as the newly elected president spoke the following inspiring words:

'l have just unfurled the National Flag of Hindustan. What is the meaning of this flag? It is symbol of India's unity. The flag under which you stand today and which you have just saluted does not belong to any particular section of society or community. It is a the flag of the country. All those who stand today under this flag are Indians, not Hindus, not Muslims, but Indians. Remember once again, now that this flag is unfurled, it must not be lowered so long as a single Indian, man, woman, or child lives in India?. India became independent on 15 August 1947. The tricoloured Indian National Flag with Ashok Chakra in the centre was presented to the Constituent Assembly by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on 22 July 1947.

The story relating to the different stages and landmarks in the evolution of our national flag is indeed inspiring:

The historic dates and landmarks:

1906: Three colours: Saffron with eight stars across, white with Vande Mataram and green with moon to right and sun to left. This flag was proposed by some Indians in England and France who thought of an 'Indian National Flag'. Not recognised in India.

1916: Two colours: Red and green, with five red and four green stripes. Emblem of Great Bear. Union Jack at top left. In vogue during 'Home rule days'.

1921: Three colours: White, green and red, with Charkha across all colours. Sponsored by Mahatma Gandhi at the Bezwada Session of the Indian National Congress (this flag was informally used at all sessions of the Congress till 1931, though not officially accepted/adopted by the Congress). March, 1931: One colour: Saffron with Charkha at top left. This flag was proposed by a committee appointed by Working Committee after Karachi Congress. This flag was not approved by Working Committee.

August, 1931:Three colours: Saffron, white and green, Charkha in blue colour in middle across white strip. Length and breadth in proportion of 3:2. Proposed by Congress Working Committee. Form of Flag suggested by Mahatma Gandhi retained with slight changes in order of colours and position of Chakra. Accepted by AICC officially in Bombay in August 1931.

August 15, 1947: The present tricolour National Flag was adopted.

Empower by the Brian Power.

2005-08-15T02:51:00.000-07:00

DR. MANMOHAN SINGH says
A nation is empowered by its people. A people are empowered by their capabilities. People’s capabilities are created by investments in their education, well-being and skills and providing them with opportunities for gainful productive employment.........
[......]

Some people think nations are empowered merely by their military prowess. They pursue mindless militarisation. Some think nations are empowered by their command over resources. They pursue greedy aggrandizement. Neither military prowess nor economic resources can by themselves ever empower a nation for any length of time. A nation is truly empowered only by the brain power of its people.

The creation, the dissemination and the utilisation of knowledge is what really empowers both people and nations.
[......]
The battle against poverty, ignorance and disease is, above all, a fight for the empowerment of our people.

58 things we want freedom from

2005-08-15T02:00:00.000-07:00

1. Police harassment
2. Using religion for politics
3. Blindly supporting capitalism
4. Intolerance towards minority groups
5. Potholes
[....]
8. Extravagant weddings that put unnecessary pressure on parents
9. Undue pressure on schoolchildren
[...]
13. The Babri Masjid-Ram Janm Bhoomi tussle
14. Terrorism in Kashmir
[...]
20.Terms like “eve-teasing” or “roadside romeos”. It’s sexual harassment and those who do it are harassers.
[...]
24. Obsession with America
25.The informal joint military alliance with the US (joint military exercises and the offer to permit Indian soil to be used for refuelling facilities for American military airplanes)
[...]
27. Media space provided to Page 3 types
[...]

31. Yellow journalism
32. Mindless dribble that 24-hour news channels broadcast as fillers
[...]
42. Remix videos and the objectification of women
43. The casting couch
[...]
46. Bollywood ‘formula’ films
47. Item girls
48. Media coverage of item girls
[...]
53. Obsessing over Aishwarya Rai’s clothes
54. Double standards about saas-bahu serials

Success Defined.

2005-08-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

Guess which Actor's daugther is She ????

2005-08-10T12:35:00.000-07:00

Can anyone beat this resume ?

2005-08-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

One can hardly find very few world leaders can compete with resume.

RESUME

EDUCATION /Qualification:

Stood first in BA (Hons), Economics, Panjab University, Chandigarh,1952.

Stood first in MA (Economics), Panjab University, Chandigarh,1954.

Wright's Prize for distinguished performance at St John's College,Cambridge, 1955 and 1957.

Wrenbury scholar, University of Cambridge,1957.

DPhil (Oxford), DLitt (Honoris Causa); PhD thesis on India'sexport competitiveness.

OCCUPATION /Teaching Experience:

Professor (Senior lecturer, Economics, 1957-59.

Reader, Economics, 1959-63.

Professor, Economics, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 1963-65.

Professor, International Trade, Delhi School of Economics,University of Delhi, 1969-71.

Honorary professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University,New Delhi,1976 and Delhi School of

Economics, University of Delhi,1996 and CivilServant.

Working Experience/ POSITIONS:.

1971-72: Economic advisor, ministry of foreign trade.

1972-76: Chief economic advisor, ministry of finance.

1976-80: Director, Reserve Bank of India.

Director, Industrial Development Bank of India.

Alternate governor for India, Board of governors, Asian Development Bank.

Alternate governor for India, Board of governors, IBRD.

November 1976 - April 1980: Secretary, ministry of finance (Departmentof economic affairs);

Member, finance, Atomic Energy Commission; Member, finance, Space Commission.

April 1980 - September 15, 1982: Member-secretary, Planning Commission

1980-83: Chairman, India Committee of the Indo-Japan joint studycommittee September 16,

1982 - January 14, 1985: Governor, Reserve Bankof India.

1982-85: Alternate Governor for India, Board of governors,International Monetary Fund.

1983-84: Member, economic advisory council to the Prime Minister.

1985: President, Indian Economic Association.

January 15, 1985 - July 31, 1987: Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission.

August 1, 1987 - November 10, 1990: Secretary-general and commissioner, south commission,
Geneva.

December 10, 1990 - March 14, 1991: Advisor to the Prime Minister oneconomic affairs.

March 15, 1991 - June 20, 1991: Chairman, UGC.

June 21, 1991 - May 15, 1996: Union finance minister.

October 1991: Elected to Rajya Sabha from Assam on Congress ticket.

June 1995: Re-elected to Rajya Sabha.

1996 onwards: Member, Consultative Committee for the ministry of finance.

August 1, 1996 - December 4, 1997: Chairman, Parliamentary standingcommittee on commerce.

March 21, 1998 : Leader of the Opposition, Rajya Sabha.

June 5, 1998 : Member, committee on finance.

August 13, 1998 : Member, committee on rules.

Aug 1998-2001: Member, committee of privileges 2000 onwards: Member,executive
committee, Indian parliamentary group.

June 2001: Re-elected to Rajya Sabha.

Aug 2001 : Member, general purposes committee.

May 22, 2004 onwards: Prime Minister of India.

BOOKS:

India's Export Trends and Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth -ClarendonPress, Oxford University, 1964; also published a large number ofarticles in various economic journals.

OTHER ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

Adam Smith Prize, University of Cambridge, 1956

Padma Vibhushan, 1987

Euro money Award, Finance Minister of the Year, 1993;

Asia money Award, Finance Minister of the Year for Asia, 1993 and 1994

INTERNATIONAL ASSIGNMENTS:

1966: Economic Affairs Officer

1966-69: Chief, financing for trade section, UNCTAD

1972-74: Deputy for India in IMF Committee of Twenty on InternationalMonetary Reform

1977-79: Indian delegation to Aid-India Consortium Meetings

1980-82: Indo-Soviet joint planning group meeting

1982: Indo-Soviet moni toring group meeting

1993: Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting Cyprus 1993: HumanRights World Conference, Vienna

RECREATION:

Gymkhana Club, New Delhi; Life Member, India International Centre, NewDelhi

Name: Dr Manmohan Singh

DOB: September 26, 1932

Place of Birth: Gah (West Punjab)

Father: S. Gurmukh Singh

Mother: Mrs Amrit Kaur

Married on: September 14, 1958

Wife: Mrs Gursharan Kaur

Children: Three daughters

Our Prime Minister seems to be the most qualified PM all over the world.

Forthcoming Hollywood Movies

2005-08-05T13:09:00.000-07:00

Beauty Of Kerala

2005-08-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Mumbai Marooned...

2005-07-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

Poem of the Day

2005-07-28T03:05:00.001-07:00

The Brain is wider than the Sky - Emily Dickinson

The Brain is wider than the Sky
For put them side by side
The one the other will contain
With ease and You beside

The Brain is deeper than the sea
For hold them Blue to Blue
The one the other will absorb
As Sponges Buckets do

The Brain is deeper than the sea
For hold them Blue to Blue
The one the other will absorb
As Sponges Buckets do

I believe that Emily Dickinson was saying that there are no boundaries for the capabilities of the mind. In essence like a sponge, the brain can take in so much that it is difficult to imagine how much "absorption" takes place.

Who Created Modern India?

2005-07-28T02:11:00.000-07:00

A part of credit goes to British Raj for making the Modern India.. says B P R VITHAL ,,

"the British did not come here to provide good government. They came to do business as the East India Company and later for the benefit of Great Britain. If, even so, they appeared sometimes to be better than native rulers, it gives us an idea of how our rulers of those days were. .."

"The British did better in education and health compared to the Indian princes. Our grievance arises only when we compare them to what free India could do in the 20th century. Yes, there were famines during the British rule, causing great distress."

"The British did not divide a united India. They united a divided India and that unity could not outlast their empire. The question is not whether the British came to help us. They came for profit. But we created the tragic situation in which a colonial power stepped in. We had an unpleasant choice, between the British, the French and the Dutch. Among them the British proved to be the best..."

Meanwhile , it was British Raj that made Sati as an Criminal Offence , says VK Ananth,,

KHUSHWANT SINGH, says,

"Despite their racial arrogance e.g. 'Whites Only Clubs' and crimes like the massacre of innocents in Jallianwala Bagh, they did a lot of good work as well. All our four metropolitan cities - Madras, Bombay, Calcutta and New Delhi - were built by them. So were our rails, roads, canals and the telegraph system. They introduced democratic norms in our municipalities, State and Central legislatures. Our constitution is patterned on theirs. Our law courts and system of Justice are also based on theirs. They gave us their language to make it ours to communicate with each other and the rest of the world. There was much less corruption in their time than it is today..."

Look out, world: Here comes booming India

2005-07-23T07:31:00.000-07:00

Dick Morris writes,

India, not China, is the coming giant of the 21st century. And India, unlike China, has no history of imperialism or inclination to global domination.

The key to China’s coming failure and India’s growing success is Bejing’s dependence on manufacturing exports for its wealth and New Delhi’s focus on its service sector.

India’s economy is firmly rooted in the service sector. Almost half of its GDP comes from services, spurred by almost $4 billion of investment by American companies. Because of its English fluency, India is in a position to tap into the growth of the U.S. and U.K. economies and to provide low-cost, high-quality services, particularly to the high-tech market.

Merit,Reservation made it for NRI's..

2005-07-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

In a characteristically sharp piece of analysis, Chetan Dhruve writes,

How did we Indians achieve such astonishing success abroad, especially in the
US? How did the likes of Infosys and Wipro make it so big? The M-word, merit, is
only a half-answer. Behind this success is the much-hated and unacknowledged
R-word. Reservations, that is, the American version of it. ..

Red light for traffic cops

2005-07-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

Amit Varma writes,

Remember when Georgia abolished its traffic police because they were too corrupt? If you missed the story, in 2004, the President of Georgia dismissed all its traffic police officers. There was absolutely no impact on the accident rate, (naturally, because the police were not doing the job at all.) Then he replaced them all with freshly recruited officers. The situation has apparently improved a lot there.

Now Ukraine is doing the same. [Link in the original.]

Here's an International Herald Tribune story on the reforms in Georgia, and another one by the New York Times. The second link is via a post by Reuben Abraham on the subject a few months ago.

Imagine if this happened in India, and all traffic cops got sacked. You could have this scene at a signal:

(Pot-bellied policeman stops car)
Driver: What happened, why have you stopped me? Here, see my license. (Tries to hand over license with 100 rupee note in it.)
Cop: No, I don't need to see your license. (Starts sniffling.)
Driver: Hey, what happened, why're you crying?
Cop: I got fired. All the traffic policemen got sacked today. The chief minister says that he doesn't want Mumbai to be like Shanghai any more, but like Gurjaani. (Starts sobbing.)
Driver: What? Gujarat?Cop: No, Gurjaani. It's a city in some place called Georgia. Now I'm out of a job, and I have three wives and one... I mean, one wife and three children to feed. (Starts wailing.)
Driver: Oh my goodness. So what will you do now? Why are you still at this traffic signal?
Cop: Well, I have to think of an alternative profession now, and a traffic signal is the only habitat I know. Do you have any old saris? (Starts clapping and saying, "De na Raju, main tere shaadi pe naachegi" in a hoarse voice.)

Yeah, wouldn't I love to see that day?

"Facts Do Not Speak"

2005-07-22T05:19:00.000-07:00

Salman Rushdie on truth, which, he says, is "the first casualty in the 'war on terror'":

What is a “fact”? In an age beset by bitter disputes about reality, the word itself, and its close relative “truth”, become embattled. “Let the facts speak for themselves,” historians, politicians and columnists like to say, but facts do not speak — they must be interpreted and spoken for. And then, according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, what is observed is altered by the observer’s presence. Facts shift, depending on who is interpreting them.

In war, as Aeschylus said 3,000 years ago, truth is the first casualty. Solid, reliable facts and objective truths, always hard to define, become more elusive in times of heightened conflict. The “war on terror” is a new sort of conflict, but truth is certainly embattled and the facts themselves are under heavy fire from all sides, and are daily receiving near-fatal wounds....

Getting naked ........

2005-07-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

Be that as it may, viewed dispassionately and without getting too much into the vortex of morality (since indecency, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder), I, for one, cannot escape the conclusion that the sight of disgustingly ugly naked bodies, with misplaced pretensions to attractiveness, is positively repugnant, even to a philistinee judge of works of art — or of the human anatomy, for that matter — like yours truly.

writes,Khalid Ansari....

Many Faces of Internet..Good,Bad,Ugly..

2005-07-18T04:48:00.000-07:00

The Sunday edition of New Indian Express has a cover story on the impact of internet,

"The Internet by being the most powerful tool invented, so far, for better knowledge sharing and collaborative working allows the human brain to work as a collective whole. And that is the greatest technological invention of Internet times: the collective human brain working from different parts of the world, in unison."

Thanks to the Internet, we have BPO's...

"...if there was no Internet, there would be no BPO Revolution. And without the BPO's, there would be less disposable income in the hands of the people from the developing world. It's the Internet that makes it possible for companies to get work done from a labour force spread across all corners of the world. Thanks to the Internet, we have BPO's. Thanks to the BPO's, more people have money. More money, means more economic activity for more people. And more of the trickle-down effect of economic development. "

The Internet as a social engineer,,

"..The Internet is media. And while we may like to think we make the media, it's often the reverse that happens. We form our impressions of Michael Jackson based on what we're fed by the media. The media social engineers us into believing what we believe about Michael Jackson. The media is now more fragmented than ever. We have more places than ever before from which to get our news. We can choose whom we want to help us make up our minds. The Internet is, today, the most powerful tool in this process of making up our minds. Every society is socially engineered by it's media. "

The Internet as an Industrial revolution ,,

"The Industrial Revolution allowed us to do less by helping us do more, through machines. The Internet allows us to do much, much more by bringing even more things to our desktops. If a machine made spinning yarn easier, the Internet makes buying yarn, even easier. Whereas the Industrial Revolution introduced us to the concept of boredom, for the first time, the Internet allows us no time to, even, be bored. Think about it, hasn't time become the biggest casualty of our age? So much so, you don't even have time to think about it! "

Lastly, The Internet as a nuisance,,

" The Internet is to our lives what the TV is/was to living room conversations. Why is it to our lives what TV is/was to living conversations? If you don't have the Internet, you're probably a lot more socially adept. It's the constant connectivity enabled by the Internet that makes the Internet such a nuisance. That makes weak humans want to keep checking for email, keep wondering whether they're wanted somewhere, and keep getting distracted from what they're doing by the thought of what they're missing. Without the Internet, the pressure to be connected wouldn't be the irresistible nuisance it is. It's always there, in front of you, enticing you, tempting you with the forbidden in the land where nothing is forbidden, and most things free. "

Magic in the Marketplace

2005-07-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

In an Excellent post ,Micheal Higgins writes:

Here is a link to the Forbes top 400 Americans.

Now looking at the list and seeing the many Waltons, Coxes, and Mars, it is clear that choosing your parents wisely is still the easiest way to become super-wealthy. Consider the Walton Family. Collectively they are worth nearly $100 billion – twice as wealthy as the Gates Family or the Buffet Family. Their wealth comes from Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is a perfect example of what I call business magic: somehow they take the same workers and buy from the same wholesalers as other retailers, but their prices are lower. Like a magician’s trick, you see it happen but you can’t figure out how they did it.

The key to wealth is having a magic technology. Technology, in the sense that I’m using the word, is any means that you might use to take inputs (labor, capital) and turn it into a finished product or service that customers will buy. McDonald’s might be considered low-tech, but in reality that have sophisticated technology since it isn’t so easy to take high-school students and transform them into a force that produces a consistent quality product. Likewise, Wal-Mart is a very sophisticated technology. There are lots of people who would like to know how they do it.

Technology comes in two types: clone-able and magic. Clone-able technology can be duplicated by anyone simply be observing the end product. A chocolate-dipped frozen banana is clone-able. A really big paper clip is a clone-able. You don’t make any money from going into business by trying to create a new market with a clone-able technology. If you want to make money, you must have a magic technology – a technology that no one can figure out how you are doing it.

Looking at the list of wealthy Americans again, it is interesting to note who made the big money making computers: Michael Dell of Dell Computer. In the early 1980’s, you would have thought that IBM and Apple would make the big money. Well, they did okay for a while, but Dell, which wasn’t even around in the early 1980’s, took over in the late 1990s. I remember seeing one of the first Dell computers displayed in the late 1980’s in Austin Texas and thinking this computer is a piece of junk and the company will go under soon. I wish I had thought, “This guy is brilliant, I’ve got to buy Dell stock!”

What makes Dell special is nothing you can observe by looking at their product. Their “magic” is the ability to take your order, manufacture the computer to your specifications, and deliver it to your door in a week. That’s magic. It isn’t easy to clone that.

The IBM computer was the ultimate example the problem of having clone-able technology. Once the clones came in the market, it was all over for IBM. They thought their magic was their name, their network of service technicians, and a patent. Well, computers become obsolete before the break down, and as is often the case, the patent only proved to be a temporary obstacle. As for the name: “IBM compatible” worked wonders for Compaq and Dell.

The biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make is to try to open a new market with a technology that is clone-able. You do all the hard work (and use up a lot of money) doing market research for somebody else. You need to wonder, “Why did no one think of doing this before?” Maybe someone did, but they did not think there was a good market for the product, or if there were, then 10 other competitors would jump in a steal the market away. Think of the Sunshine Biscuit Company that invented the classic cream-filled cookie we call the “Oreo” cookie. You guessed it: Nabisco stole its cookie recipe and made a fortune off of someone else’s hard earned market research.

I read about a lady who lost a lot of money trying to market an oversized paperclip that had several patents on it. It was made of special steel so it wouldn’t deform. But it was too easy to clone. The patent didn’t help because the clone was made out of ordinary steel and did deform, but was made in China for one-twentieth the cost.

I saw on television once about a man who tried to market chocolate-covered frozen banana pieces. He did a lot of work trying to market his product. Then he tried to sell his company to a major company. He showed them all of the nice data he had collected showing how there was a profitable market for his product. In the category of “You need to have a good lawyer when you negotiate with a big company,” the company did not buy his company but just put it out of business by cloning his product.

There are some products that look extremely clone-able but haven’t been (yet). One example is Turbo-Tax. How can Intuit sell that for $50 apiece when all it does is calculate taxes? They cannot have a patent on that. Couldn’t any software company produce a clone for one or two million dollars and sell millions of copies for $2 apiece?

On the other hand, there are several products that haven’t been developed that many people want but manufactures are not brave enough to try to market. A good example is the self-cleaning toilet. There is definitely a market for it. Definitely, many companies could produce a workable prototype of a self-cleaning toilet. But if there is no magic associated with the technology, everyone will sit back, wait for the first entrant to do the hard marketing work of creating a market, and then a dozen clones will swoop in to take over the market.

Is there a market failure here? I am somewhat conflicted about this. It is clear the market prefers firms to cut costs than to create new products because cost savings go directly to the owners of the firm but new product releases create benefits to competitors who learn about the new market for free. On the other hand, if the entrepreneur is clever, he can often tie a clone-able technology with a magic technology and avoid being destroyed by the clones. For example, everyone thought Barnes and Noble would destroy Amazon when the on-line bookseller business took off. Selling books on-line looked very clone-able. But Amazon invented the best technology for processing credit card purchases. And they were able to develop software that magically knows what books you might like to buy from seeing your previous purchases. The moral of the story is that is can be really good to be the first to the market if able to spot opportunities to create some magic.

Nevertheless, I don’t think anyone will come out with a self-cleaning toilet in the next 10 years. A patent won’t protect anybody and there is little magic to be found in a toilet. Here’s one way to create the magic: we hold a contest for the best design for a self-cleaning toilet. The winner gets exclusive right to market self-cleaning toilets of any kind in the U.S. for 17 years. It probably won’t be the best technology after 17 years but, as it stands now, the only technology we will otherwise have is the do-it-yourself variety.

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish"

2005-07-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

Last June 14, Steven Paul Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios , a leading figure in the computer industry. More popularly known as Steve Jobs,delivered a very thought-provoking commencement address at the Stanford University.

It gave some eye-opener to those who have just graduated from college--or even to those who are already working.

" Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice…Remembering you are going to die is the best way to avoid the fear that you have something to lose. "

He talks about the journey of his life, which "started before I was born".He calls this "joining the dots".

" 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, "

text of the Commencement address ...

Quotes Worth Recoding - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2005-07-15T22:51:00.000-07:00

---------------------------------------
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
---------------------------------------

Fk Aamir, fk Aamir, f**k Aamir....

2005-07-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

Furious Salman accused Ash of sleeping with all her co-stars and bragged about affairs with Preity, Dia....

Courtesy Mid-Day..

How Some Companies got their names ..

2005-07-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

This article has been posted by Gangadhar Ambati ,

We all have a childlike love of playing with words, adding bits, Lego-style, to create new ones.And we often wonder where words come from and how they are formed.The answers can be found in a good dictionary or in any other related one.But some times I wonder how some companies got their names. Do you ever think about it? Then here you can find some info....

Apple Computers - Favourite Fruit Of Founder Steve Jobs. He Was Three Months Late In Filing A Name For The Business, And He Threatened To Call His Company Apple Computers If The Other Colleagues Didn't Suggest A Better Name By 5 O'clock.

C - Dennis Ritchie Improved On The B Programming Language And Called It 'New B'. He Later Called It C. Earlier B Was Created By Ken Thompson As A Revision Of The Bon Programming Language (Named After His Wife Bonnie).

CISCO - Its Not An Acronymn But The Short For San Francisco.

Compaq - Using Comp, For Computer, And PAQ To Denote A Small Integral Object.

Google - The Name Started As A Jokey Boast About The Amount Of Information The Search-Engine Would Be Able To Search. It Was Originally Named 'Googol', A Word For The Number Represented By 1 Followed By 100 Zeros. After Founders - Stanford Grad Students Sergey Brin And Larry Page Presented Their Project To An Angel Investor, They Received A Cheque Made Out To 'Google'!

Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith Got The Idea Of Accessing E-Mail Via The Web From A Computer Anywhere In The World. When Sabeer Bhatia Came Up With The Business Plan For The Mail Service, He Tried All Kinds Of Names Ending In Mail' And Finally Settled For Hotmail As It Included The Letters "Html" - The Programming Language Used To Write Web Pages. It Was Initially Referred To As Hotmail With Selective Upper Casing.

HP - Bill Hewlett And Dave Packard Tossed A Coin To Decide Whether The Company They Founded Would Be Called Hewlett-Packard Or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel - Bob Noyce And Gordon Moore Wanted To Name Their New Company 'Moore Noyce' But That Was Already Trademarked By A Hotel Chain, So They Had To Settle For An Acronym Of Integrated Electronics.

Java - Originally Called Oak By Creator James Gosling, From The Tree That Stood Outside His Window, The Programming Team Had To Look For A Substitute As There Was Another Language With The Same Name. Java Was Selected From A List Of Suggestions. It Came From The Name Of The Coffee That The Programmers Drank.

Linux - Linus Torvalds Originally Used The Minix OS On His System Which He Replaced By His OS. Hence The Working Name Was Linux (Linus' Minix). He Thought The Name To Be Too Egotistical And Planned To Name It Freax(Free + Freak + X). His Friend Ari Lemmke Encouraged Linus To Upload It To A Network So It Could Be Easily Downloaded. Ari Gave Linus A Directory Called Linux On His FTP Server, As He Did Not Like The Name Freax. (Linus' Parents Named Him After Two-Time Nobel Prize Winner Linus Pauling)

Microsoft - Devoted To Microcomputer Software. Originally Christened Micro-Soft, The '-' Was Removed Later On.

Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin Came Up With This Name When His Company Started Manufacturing Radios For Cars. The Popular Radio Company At The Time Was Called Victrola.

ORACLE - Larry Ellison And Bob Oats Were Working On A Consulting Project For The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The Code Name For The Project Was Called Oracle(The CIA Saw This As The System To Give Answers To All Questions Or Something Such). The Project Was Designed To Help Use The Newly Written SQL Code By IBM. The Project Eventually Was Terminated But Larry And Bob Decided To Finish What They Started And Bring It To The World. They Kept The Name Oracle And Created The RDBMS Engine. Later They Kept The Same Name For The Company.

Sony - From The Latin Word 'Sonus' Meaning Sound, And 'Sonny' A Slang Used By Americans To Refer To A Bright Youngster.

SUN - Founded By 4 Stanford University Buddies, SUN Is The Acronym For Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim Built A Microcomputer; Vinod Khosla Recruited Him And Scott Mcnealy To Manufacture Computers Based On It, And Bill Joy To Develop A UNIX-Based OS For The Computer.

Xerox - The Inventor, Chestor Carlson, Named His Product Trying To Say Dry' (As It Was Dry Copying, Markedly Different From The Then Prevailing Wet Copying). The Greek Root `Xer' Means Dry.

Yahoo! - The Word Was Invented By Jonathan Swift And Used In His Book Gulliver's Travels'. It Represents A Person Who Is Repulsive In Appearance And Action And Is Barely Human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang And David Filo Selected The Name Because They Considered Themselves Yahoos.

3M - Minnesota Mining And Manufacturing Company Started Off By Mining The Material Corundum Used To Make Sandpaper.

Lage Raho India ,lage raho.....

2005-07-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

Suketu Mehta , has written a thoughtful Editorial "A Passage to India " in The New York Times....

Indian's Abroad are becoming a huge source for American Markets ,they are getting ready to
"Chase the Desi Dollars"

Oomph goddess Mallika Sherawat,doesn’t need porn for publicity

2005-07-12T06:28:00.000-07:00

Bollywood circles are abuzz with speculation if it is Mallika or her look-alike,,whatever it is she doesn't need pron for publicity,,,

Bachke Rehna Re Baba, 'Kis Kis ki kismat' kisney jana...

Ram Gopal Varma : The Story you haven't heard..

2005-07-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

In an Excellent interview with Bhawana Somaaya Rgv shares his part of life which he never shared before..

I’VE never been a good son. Not as a child and not now. Well, at least not in the traditional sense.....

I wasn’t a good student. I failed twice (in class X and later during my entrance exams for engineering). Both times, there was no remorse. Today, I wonder why I didn’t feel the slightest concern for my poor parents who had put together their life’s savings to afford my college fees....

Success to me is not recognition from other people but the power to do what I want. True confidence is about conquering fears...

Quotes worth recording - Walter Savage Landor

2005-07-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

This little quote reminds us that our thoughts are under our control. Many times we tend to forget this simple truth and get carried away with negative and unproductive thoughts.

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"My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them" - Walter Savage Landor
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(link via Rajesh)

India "Can produce,Can't Organise"

2005-07-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

P. V. Indiresan writes,, in the The Business Line:

"....we can say that we have the ability to provide world-class
undergraduate education, and that we have begun to train world-class managers and designers. However, we cannot claim to have the ability to organise world-class research; in innovation and invention we still lag behind..."

Yes, India succeeds in doing a mother's work,,,but is failing to do father's job.....

THE Great walks with the Small without fear.

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Hrishi's

India’s New Retailers

Shopping Cart

buy now button

The Evolution of Cell Phone Design Between 1983-2009

The Evolution of Cell Phone Design Between 1983-2009

Categories: Cell Phones, Design, History

Self-Confidence for Leaders

Self-Confidence for Leaders

You won't get to the top without it. To build your self-confidence, believe in yourself, don't worry about being perfect, and put up a brave front

10 innovation lessons from The Economist magazine's Project Red Stripe

Reinventing your business model

Indian Harvard grads turning biz plans into success stories

Finders and seekers

17 mistakes startups make -- the 100-word version

Eugene Kleiner Laws

The Long Nose of Innovation

Rewarding the Art of Refinement

A Leader's Real Job Description

Career Assessments

Resume and Cover Letter Tips

Summary, not objective

Lead with experience, not education

Accomplishments, not just responsibilities

Include relevant activities, not hobbies

Your resume isn't limited to one page

Cover Letter Checklist

Interview Preparation Tips

INTERNET ADVERTISING REVENUES IN Q3 ’07 SURPASS $5.2 BILLION, SETTING NEW HIGH

They're Making Money From Your Kids

Do children need perfume or $30 haircuts? No, but smart entrepreneurs targeting affluent parents know how to make you think they do

Web spending hits new record in third quarter

The Dream Manager

Social-Network Traffic Surpasses Web-based Email’s in UK

The End of SMART Goals? Now There’s an Easier Way Guest Post by “Justin Wolsey Riggs”

Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers

Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers

Creating the Inspiration -- Part 2

Motivating the Team

Creating the Inspiration -- Part 1

Additional Dimensions

How To Stand Out from the Herd - when you can't change who you are—how do you make your application something more than just one of many?

Stop Stereotyping Yourself

Mixing Up the Essay

Connect With People, Not Web Sites

More Than Grades and Scores

Brands: The Power of Emotion

Some lessons from the life and career of a visionary

22 Qualities that business schools look for

Effectively Influencing Up

Economics of CAT

The Power to Change

Do M.B.A.s Make Better Entrepreneurs?

The Secret to Reinventing Yourself

How big is your bull?

RISK-TAKING

Quotes from Brian Tracy

Quotes from Brian Tracy.

Myth Busters : Leadership & Management

A peek inside Google's war chest

Quotes of the Week

Classified calamity

22 Qualities that business schools look for..

Three phases in the Indian ITES industry.

Break through..

Quotes Worth Reflecting - Bertrand Russell

I like the way you are thinking...

Style over Talent...

Raging Bullishness

Kitabkhana

Rare Images..

Exemplary Leaders

Chinese, Americans Truly See Differently

Google, the ultimate deflator..

Technology Levels the Business Playing Field

Another TITANIC is Ready( World's Largest ship !!!)

Amazing Liger..

10 yrs of yakking, SMSing, MMSing

Fk Aamir, fk Aamir, f**k Aamir....