Mittal wins

As I rightly predicted, Mittal has won. From his words, 'If this deal does not go through, Globalization has no meaning'. I think so too.

Mittal vs Arcelor

Its an interesting game is not it? But its not new to Mittal. Infact its been his most favourite game. The game he played since he has been an entrepreneur. The game he mastered for years. For me personally, I felt Arcelor made a hasty decision when it could not shape up the deal right with Severstal (the russian steel maker). Infact I read one of the reportes wrote a sentence that sounded like this entire take over bid of Mittal is a conspiracy planned with the help of Indian government. It might sound absurd... but then how else could one convince the investor community in European countries?

Now Mittal has got the nice business plan presented to the investors and I have a strong feeling that he is going to win this match too.

Social Networking

These days I see lot of people using Orkut. Then I started wondering how successful this webcommunity is. Coincidentally, I found an article on Social Networking from K@W Newsletter. (Connecting the corporate dots). Its an interesting article, afterall some big heads from Wharton have written it. Well... the amazing thing is, the concepts have been there for quite sometime - except that the new age computing has made them as a bigger commodity. Easy to use, whenver, wherever, more accessible, more interesting.... all in all it has become a fun activity that users would love to do.

I would now like to take another view point on these web communities. Just login to Orkut or MySpace or Friendster. Did you find any ads? Or adsense atleast? (ubiquitous google)
How do they make money? Atleast they are not in charity. This certainly is a food for thought.

Atleast one blog a week

I set a goal for myself to write atleast one sensible blog in a week. I myself did not like the making of telugu movie blog. I shall delete it.

A small story....

Once upon a time in a village a man appeared who announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs. 10. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys went out in the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at 10 and as supply started to diminish and villagers started to stop their effort he announced that now he would buy at 20 rupees. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching moneys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to 25 and the supply of monkeys became so that it was an effort to even see a monkey let alone catch it. The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at 50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business his assistant would now buy on behalf of the man. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at 35 and when the man comes back you can sell it to him for 50. The villagers queued up with all their saving to buy the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!

What is the similarity between Indian Cricket & Indian Stock Market

These days its like Indian cricket team. I seriously doubt the current windies series. What would you do incase the popularity for cricket is going down especially when windies is hosting the next year's cricket world cup!! One must revive the interest and which is the best way to do it? Get a strong cricket team and make it lose. Thats it. I feel this series would have been mutually agreed at high levels.

Big deal. What the heck this has to do with Indian stock market? Pretty simple huh... how do you attract lot of money? Make it popular... from 6000 to 12000 in just one year, hype it, talk about it, let media take care of advertising for it, create an impression as if its going to cross 20000 points... let the retail investor's hard earned money be pumped in. Now pull your (FII) money back...

Drawing similarities between these two.... look at mass behaviour of people. Its pure flocking nature. And others make money out of it.

**Disclaimer: All my posts are purely of personal opinions. You are most welcome to comment on my posts.

Stock market blues... cont...

Found some interesting statistics...
Today's market correction is the biggest single day fall in absolute terms (Sensex).

Single Day market falls
18-May-2006 = 862 Points ?? Global fall + Commodities fall + Fed Hike + Taxation of FIIs
28-Apr-1992 = 570 Points ?? Harshad Mehta Scam
17-May-2004 = 564 Points ?? NDA losses + Left joins Govt
15-May-2006 = 462 Points ?? Global Fall starts...

In percentage terms...
Oct 8,1990 = 15
Apr 28, 1992 = 12.7
May 17,2004 = 11.1
May 12, 1992 = 9.7
May 18, 2006 = 7
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Munich

Watched the movie Munich last weekend. Liked it. The way Speilberg makes movies !! Truely amazing. He shot the movie as it it was taken during early seventies.

The way Golda Meir potrayed is brilliant. Very inspiring character.

Indian stock market

Tell any stock market savvy person that lefts have joined the government or serial blasts in Bombay or war situation in middle east or new RBI credit policy, immediately he would ask how many points Sensex moved?

Situations like changing governments that do not suppoert liberalization, could be a big thing. Stock market crashed more than 200 points. Trading was stopped for a while.

Well, times have changed my friend. Two years is a considerable time. I agree, looking at the percentages, you might say it is just 7% down. But, when its big, a small percentage of change also effects.

Look at small investors who entered the markets at 12000 levels, hoping for 13000 or worse (rather best) 16000 levels. And if the market goes down 850 points in a single day who is protecting them?

MindTree was born

I could not resist myself from writing this after reading 'The making of MindTree by Subroto Bagchi'. The transcript is available in MindTree Consulting's site. Do you know that the logo of MindTree was painted by K.S.Chetan a 17 year boy who has a form of Celebral palsy that denies him co-ordinated limb movement and affects his speech!

I strongly suggest the budding entrepreneures to read both the documents available on MindTree about Making of The MindTree.

Web Services

I just want to share few new terms I have been hearing oflate related to WebServices.

1. BPEL - Business Process Execution Language Wiki link

2. CDL - Choreography Description Language
The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is an XML-based language that describes peer-to-peer collaborations of parties by defining, from a global viewpoint, their common and complementary observable behavior; where ordered message exchanges result in accomplishing a common business goal.

The Web Services Choreography specification is targeted for composing interoperable, peer-to-peer collaborations between any type of party regardless of the supporting platform or programming model used by the implementation of the hosting environment.

The main difference between 1 and 2 is that CDL ensures ORDERED MESSAGE XCHANGE. And BPEL requires central co-ordination whereas CDL does not (atleast thats the idea).

Well the main advantages with the above BPM techniques are, an Enterprise can service enable its systems and wire them together in a network of SOA systems. Once service enabled, any third party or new internal service integration is a cake walk. No need of middleware integration programmers. You can ask them to develop business logic.

Entrepreneurship again.

Many places you hear about individuals talking about 'Entrepreneurship'. You hear this word from those who are successful, those who are not and also those who are in the process of falling into one of the first two categories.

After reading the stories from Subrato Bagchi on 'Making of Mindtree', it inspired in me and my dear friends on the specifics of 'Entrepreneurship', from 'What' to 'How'. Let me share some information from the discussion.

Every entrepreneur has to first answer these two questions.
1. Why do I want to open an Enterprise?
2. Why would my Enterprise be a success? What are the strengths I have to make it a success?

Now, how to answer these questions?

Are you doing business because you have 10 crores of money to spend? Or is it a unique business idea you have which you would like to see taking shape? If you are not passionate about your business, not committed, can not give your 100% effort and time, lets not talk about this any more. If you are into a startup you have to give up two things. All of your time and all of your money. Only then I feel its possible to shape an individual's imaginations.

More in my next post...

Leadership

Leadership can not be taught in business schools. It is more practiced and learned in organizations. How much of it practically happens? How many leaders are actually grooming their people to become next generation leaders? Look at the growing number of head hunters to find those exceptionally well business leaders and are always behing these highly skilled executives. Look around you, the MNCs are now filled with foreign CEOs who are filling the vaccum of good business leaders.

How many managers in Indian companies are able to groom nexgen biz leaders is a big question for me. Leadership skills can not just be transferred in a 10 session classroom. The leader has to take his team through a consistent set of values he/she believes in and stick to them during all times. Honesty, belief and trust create the right environment for leaders to grow. A leader must dream of the impossible and make it happen with his team. Always keep the team inspiring and let the team dream of high aspirations. I really really wonder how many leaders or people managers actually practice this !!

Outsourcing & Europe

When business outsourcing started in early nineties in USA, Europe was not largely interested in it. Then came the dot com burst, economic recession and those who are still in business wanted to test the outsourcing waters and they wanted to do it real hard.

Globalization and outsourcing has largely affected the lives of many in US and Europe, especially those whose jobs have moved to many miles away. But, large corporations could not do anything else to survive the competetion. They had no other choice than to move those jobs that could be done remotely. Though Europe has joined this model after US, Europe has a different challenge to face. As more and more Eastern Europe countries with struggling economy have joined EU in 2004, the low skilled jobs from France, Germany and Italy were grabbed by citizens of these countries. There is a large difference in the wages among the big brothers of EU and those who joined in 2004. This has caused a real concern on job security for those living in developed nations of EU. The recent political turnout gives clear mandate of this change in people perception. Angela Merkel who has been supporting free market is believed to win the German election has to settle with 'grand coalation' with limited capacity to carry out any economic reforms. Its hard for the politicians to predict or know what exactly people want. Its the basic nature of democracy. Things take time, and the transition period is the most horrible experience for the people. Things are not bound to time and confusion prevails in both the people and leaders.

This is the biggest challenge that EU has to manage now. The people of US and the leaders could successfully manage the transition phase or currently managing it effectively. Bush won again despite of outsourcing topic being used as one of the campain topics. Its a matter of time and consensus between people and leadership that must bring stability in socio economic situation in EU.

Google does it again!!

Google creates online database of mail order catalogues. The vendor can submit the content to google or can potentially make his content retrieved by google. This means the vendor does not need to have an ecommerce site, can continue to do brick and mortar business but in a different way with increased order flow perhaps.

Are you slowly getting to the point??????? Do you mean, Google is getting slowly into eBay's space?? Or to that matter any other ecommerce site? I think yes. Look at it... Google is finding out the best things that can happen to Internet and combining them in one site i.e. www.google.com.

One of the leadership qualities - Strong belief in winning idea

the scene... employee staff meeting of a software company
the speaker just finished his speech and is open for questions. The speaker holds second highest position in the company.

the question came from one of the employee and related to a new project that is so much talked about in the company. The question was what if the new project fails !, do you have an alternate plan.

And the answer has come in notime. You cant win the war if you are losing it. Obvious !! But the essense is the belief. Belief in the team, in the idea, in the market, in the success rather in making the idea a success. First of all this project would not have been selected if its not a winning idea. And even if its slowly slipping the leader has great ability to bring it back on to the foot and make it a winning.

I salute the leader.

Google !! The ubiquitous name in the byte world.

I dont know how and where to start this. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is making news all over. Every morning I click on Google News button on Google toolbar, I see some news on some innovation that Google does. Though to many net visitors google is just a search engine there are many more applications that this tiny giant is into. Just did a search for Google in Google Search Engine and it fetched 728,000,000 results (in 0.12 seconds). Microsoft scores 733,000,000 and Yahoo scores 413,000,000. That explains the spread of Google.

And look at the diversity of Google's projects. Search Google NASA, Google SUN, Google Microsoft, Google Satellite, Google Outsourcing, Google Productivity, Google Scholar, Google Pictures ... the list continues. Do you think Google is offering various tools and services on its web page that come packaged in a GUI Based operating system (read that as Windows or Mac OS X or ...). You have everything available on the internet. Including 2GB of space today. May be more tomorrow. Why would I buy a demanding piece of hardware and install more demanding piece of software? I would rather buy a thin client with Internet connection (probably a bare minimum laptop with wireless connection) and everything else computed over the web. Do we see some radical changes in near future?

Send in your comments

Making elephants dance - Business Innovation

Following write up talks about innovation that large companies are adapting to succeed in future. This information is taken from BusinessWeek online.

The Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new -- call it the Creativity Economy. Even as policymakers and pundits wring their hands over the outsourcing of engineering, software writing, accounting, and myriad other high-tech, high-end service jobs -- not to mention the move of manufacturing to Asia -- U.S. companies are evolving to the next level of economic activity.

What is unfolding is the commoditization of knowledge. We have seen global forces undermine autos, electronics, and other manufacturing, but the Knowledge Economy was expected to last forever and play to America's strengths: great universities, terrific labs, smart immigrants, an entrepreneurial business culture.

The U.S. has a lead in this unfolding Creativity Economy -- for the moment. The new forms of innovation driving it forward are based on an intimate understanding of consumer culture -- the ability to determine what people want even before they can articulate it. Working in what is still the largest consumer market in the world gives U.S. companies a huge edge. So does being able to think outside the box -- something Americans still do better than most.

A New DanceFor managers, the biggest challenge may be making the leap from their Six Sigma process skills to new ways of thinking. For corporations, transforming themselves will require new sets of values and organizational principles. Have you heard of design strategy? It's probably the Next Big Thing after Six Sigma. How about consumer-centric innovation? It may be the most powerful way to raise a company's innovation success rate. Do you know what innovation metrics your company needs? Have you heard of CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize, and realize)? It's the post-Six Sigma dogma GE is spreading far and wide among its managers. Are B-schools on top of all this change? Not really, but Stanford University is starting a "D-school" -- a design school where managers can learn the dynamics of innovation. Teaching elephants to dance is never easy, but that's the task ahead if you want your company -- and your career -- to prosper.

There is, in fact, a whole new generation of innovation gurus. They are not the superstars of the '90s, such as Clayton Christensen, who focused on what might be called macro-innovation -- the impact of big, unexpected new technologies on companies. The new gurus focus more on micro-innovation -- teaching companies how to connect with their customers' emotions, linking research and development labs to consumer needs, recalibrating employee incentives to emphasize creativity, constructing maps showing opportunities for innovation.

When creative mojo gets going, it can explode into innovation. An example: the mundane mop. Cleaning used to be done with mops and water. Design Continuum Inc. in West Newton, Mass., researched cleaning for P&G and observed that water tends to slop dirt around, while dry rags pick it up (thanks to electrostatic attraction). Ergo, the Swiffer. In the design-speak of the Creativity Economy, this is paradigm shifting. Design Continuum helped P&G shift the cleaning paradigm. Now the Swiffer may become P&G's newest $1 billion brand.Think out-of-the-box consumer experiences, and you get the idea of paradigm shifting. Old paradigm: corner coffee shops. New paradigm: Starbucks (SBUX ). Old: radio. New: satellite radio. Old: crowded electronics stores. New: Apple Computer (AAPL ) stores. Old: grungy, smelly circuses. New: Cirque du Soleil. Old: any airline. New: JetBlue Airways (JBLU ). Old: Macy's (FD ). New: Target (TGT ). Old: Earth-toned Birkenstock sandals. New: colorful beach "Birkis."

The evolution of the economy toward creativity has been underway for some time. Steve Jobs, of course, has turned Apple into the paragon of the creative corporation. Companies throughout the world are deconstructing Apple's success in design and innovation, and learning the lessons.

Storytelling is very important. Designers have found that placing a potential new product within an emotional story that connects with consumers raises the chances of success. The design of the new line of MINI_motion watches and driving shoes, for example, captures the story of the Mini Cooper's cool urban driving experience. It's about the driver, not the car.

Whats Hot? Is CNOOC's Bid for Unocal a Threat to America? - Knowledge@Wharton

On June 23, CNOOC, the third-largest oil company in China, made an unsolicited $18.5 billon bid for U.S.-based Unocal. The bid has caused concern in the U.S. Congress because CNOOC is a government-owned company attempting to buy a natural resource that is important to national security. But ultimately, some say, there appears to be no sound reason why the U.S. government should move to block the deal, if Unocal shareholders decide it is in their best interests. At the same time, observers note the unresolved ambiguity that exists in the minds of both ordinary Americans and government officials responsible for U.S. foreign policy. Should China be viewed, as it was during the height of the Cold War, as a foe of American interests? Or should it be seen as a trading partner that is embracing free-market principles?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1240.cfm

Those High-flying Angel Investors: VC Panel Talks Up Creative Financing for Start-ups - Knowledge@Wharton

Those High-flying Angel Investors: VC Panel Talks Up Creative Financing for Start-ups - Knowledge@Wharton