holdyourthoughts

Everywhere around I look, I see a crisis of leadership. In Bengal, India, in the world, everywhere. There are simply on one who can be a role model for the future generations. In Bengal, the state is plagued by myriad problems. Primary among them is an acute shortage of cash to pay salaries and pensions to the state government employees. Yet, there is a leadership vacuum to bite the silver bullet and raise taxes and reduce government expenditure. The government and its ministers are busy promising developmental programs for which there is no money! The only way to garner tax resources in the long term is to encourage business prosperity. It is going to be difficult to do this as the government has a stated policy of non-interference into land acquisition. You cannot have big factories without large tracts of contiguous land which the government is unwilling to deliver. So, no one wants to be unpopular in the short term to do things which are important for the long term. In India, we ha...

I was to travel to US on Friday night (early Saturday morning, Aug 13, 2011) for New York. From Friday morning, I was not feeling well. Had a slight fever, headache and a queasy feeling. Overall, a bad day to start travel on a 21 hour flight away from home. I got to the airport and it was raining really heavily. Then as lady luck would have it I got upgraded to Business Class! My first trip on business class. So, the flight experience was good. After a while, the effect of the medicines that I had taken took effect and I started feeling a better. Slept nearly all the way to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt, I had to go from one end of Terminal 1 to the other end. A good 1-1.5 km walk in the morning. Then for the New York flight was announced and it was a A380. Had heard so much about it when it was launched. From the outside it looks imposing, nearly 1.5 larger than the regular size. But the inside, atleast for this particular flight, was the same old one. Here again, I got a good seat, alth...

I just completed listening to a brilliant audio book today from the Franklin Covey foundation on "Execution". Here is what I learnt. Execution is the most important aspect of strategy. Nothing works if you can't execute it. It is dependent on a few factors:- Goals - Have focused goals. Max of 3. More goals dilute the focus. Find out the measurable factors for your goals - the lag (the dependent variable y) and lead indicators (the independent variables x1,x2 etc) Create a dashboard to monitor if you are winning the execution game. It should contain both lag and lead indicators. Monitor the dashboard results daily/weekly ONLY for the identified goals.

I read this book sometime back as part of my journey of understanding food and how it affects the body and mind. In the last two years I have managed to lose about 10kgs of weight and in the process have learnt a fair deal about food, although not enough to talk authoritatively with a nutritionist. Roger Wilson's book deals mainly about how the author lost a significant amount of weight himself after trying his own diet plan. The diet he followed was eating fruits and proteins. His lack of fundamental knowledge of nutrition makes his commentary a suspect from the very beginning. This book is more a chronicle of the authors weight loss journey than a guide to healthy eating. Conclusion: Better to avoid.

Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister and an ex-IIT graduate has rekindled the debate of the effectiveness of the quality of research and faculty at the IITs and IIMs in India. As expected, people have taken a position based on their allegiances. IIT/IIM alumni and faculty have come out vociferously to defend their alma mater. People are amazed that an ex-student whose father was also the head of Civil Engineering department at one of the IITs can break rank and speak out against them! Various reasons are being put forward for the lack of quality research, primary among them is the lack or delay of funds from the government. Interestingly, what is getting sidetracked in all this noise is that fact that Jairam Ramesh is actually right. It is a fact that the quality of students going into these institutes is far better than what other esteemed colleges abroad (MIT, Caltech, HBS etc). I would really like to see one experiment that would prove the mettle of the faculty. Let them swap on...

The future of Bengal took a turn (for better or worse – the debate continues) when the votes were counted on May 13 th , 2011. Trinamool Congress, Mamata Banerji’s thirteen year old party along with its one time parent party, the Congress, swept the Bengal assembly polls. The combine won 227 of the 294 seats and with it ended the 34 year rule of the Left Front – the longest by an elected communist government anywhere in the world. There are two prevalent reactions that I have seen after the elections. Some are saying that Bengal has jumped from the frying pan to the fire. Others are saying that let us give these guys a chance. If they don’t perform, we can always vote them out. I am more inclined towards the second line of thought. My argument is that today Bengal is at the bottom of a “bear-market” (if I may borrow a term from the stock markets). It can’t really get much worse. The fact is that for a lot of people in our generation have never seen a non-Left government in the stat...

First a d isclosure: I work in an IT company and this post reflects my personal opinion and not that of my company. Infosys made the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated event in Indian corporate calendar (nearly as eagerly awaited as the succession-planning event currently on at Tata Sons). The stake here was very high. Infosys is a highly regarded Indian IT giant. It, alongwith a few others, created the IT outsourcing phenomenon that has become part of the standard business model today. The question was can Infosys move to the next generation of leadership. It had been guided all along by NR Narayan Murthy (NRN) and later by the more charismatic Nandan Nilekani. With NRN’s retirement from the Chairman’s position, the top position was open for the first time. Infosys announced that K.V. Kamath would step in as Chairman and S.D. Shibulal would be the new CEO and S. Gopalakrishnan (the current CEO, better known as Kris) would be the Executive Co-Chairman. To me, this announcement...