Airtel

There were a couple of different names I was thinking for this post but either they would have been too long or only touching upon one of the aspects of change in airtel. So I stuck to what is this post all about.

A few months ago, when airtel changed it's logo I made a very foolish argument. My argument was - the logo lacks any creativity. It is almost like an inverse image of the Vodafone logo and this when Vodafone is airtel's biggest competitor at it's home ground - India.

This according to me was a loss of vision and differentiation and reduced focus due to it's immediate and major focus on Africa and widening the foot print.

Honestly, I knew my arguments were good fun for a water cooler discussion and did not make any real business sense to begin with.

With so many veterans and top managers at work from airtel and agencies this wasn't a school project. It was part of a Rs 300 crore marketing campaign airtel was to take on for its expansion to Africa and 3G roll out.

However, looks like the worsened logo and theme tune were signs of what was to come from airtel in future. How airtel has changed in last few months in it's network, service and marketing quality now makes me think - may be I said something right while I was giving gyan.

In the last few days some things that happened which make airtel look weaker than ever before.

- While sitting in my Bangalore office I got an SMS 'welcome to Airtel Chennai, enjoy great roaming rates'
- On requesting the Re. 1, one-time missed call alert, I got the first SMS for thanking me that we have received request and charged you, I never got the SMS with actual missed call details.
- I have had more call drops than ever before in the last so many years.
- I get 'number is invalid' response for calling numbers that I call every day and a few attempts later it starts working. It's the first time it's happening despite using airtel for over 5 years now.
- My friend requested for number porting to airtel. While the first request was rejected by VF due to billing problems, the second request did not even fetch a response from airtel.
- But since he did submit his documents in the first request, even though he does not have an active connection with airtel yet, last night he received an original hard copy of a zero rupee bill. Yes, it has his name printed and has bill amount 0 - while he is still happy and active on Voda.

Many of the above are not bad customer care or kind of bad reviews you will find on mouthshut.com, they are plain vanilla mistakes on customer focus and ensuring quality.

Not to forget their campaigns on number portability, 3G, DTH, VAS service have become more lackluster than ever before.

Being one of the ardent loyalists of airtel for ages it feels sad to see it loosing its qualities that led it to reach the heights it stands today.

No wonder as data shows, it is no longer leading the race and is managing to be at the end.

Would be interesting to see if it can do some magic again to be back in the race and lead the pack.

Till then 'Express Yourself'

Profit sharing

Why don't organizations do profit sharing with employees like they do with share holders in the form of dividends. Aren't employees share holders too of a different form?

May be organizations should take out some portion of profit to be doled out as dividend to employees. Each one would get in proportion of their salaries. Of course this would be apart from the Variable pays and bonus etc. Since that also depends on the roles of each person.

Quarterly, half yearly or yearly could be debated though. This could make people look at the organization as a whole and not just team, unit, function etc.

Yeah, top management could ask - when company makes losses? Well they do cut jobs and reduce salaries or don't give any hikes in such times. So why not, do it the same with profits too.

Imagine, 3% of profits of next quarter distributed among employees. May not be a big sum but still not bad.

Experimenting Smartphones

Smartphones are all over the place - nothing new. They have been so for years now. You may have one too or may be planning to buy one. But, did you use it for a few days before buying it?

Before you buy an iPhone or HTC Android or a Blackberry for that matter, don't you want to use it for a few days before you finally swipe your card for that big, fat sum of more than 25K. It could just make you so much more confident about your decision to buy that very smart phone which you plan to flaunt in front of your friends, family and coleagues. You may have seen your friend's phone or even used for a few hours but that would have only given you a few hours of feel and may be tried a few popular features that you have read and heard. But, what about feeling the size fitting in your pocket, experiencing the battery life, varying touch senstivity of different phones, using the app stores and much more.

So what if I offer you the phone for a few days before you buy for a small rental fee? Would you pay?

Let's assume you come over, ask me for an iPhone, I swipe your credit card and block the card for the iPhone price and give you the phone for a week. You keep it, use it and make a decision. If you do not like it and return it, I will charge you Rs. 500(hyppthetical amount). if you like it and buy, I will not charge you anything? If you do not return, anyways the credit card will be charged as soon as 7 days are completed.

Now, if you do not like it and return it and want to try HTC HD2, then I keep that Rs 500 and take the iPhone back and give you HTC and we repeat the remaining cycle. If you are too thorough in your decision making, you could even repeat this over and over again for a few more weeks.

You would end up using these phones for a few days each for Rs. 500 and be much more sure few weeks down the line, which one you want to buy. Now purchase it and see the difference it makes to your blood pressure during those few seconds when you see your card's magnetic tape passing through the iron machine charging you hundreds of rupees every few milliseconds.

Why don't you take a 3 question survey here Purchasing SmartPhones
and share your thoughts.

IPL could be the next R-Power

Newspapers were splashed with its news, everyone was talking about it, the whole nation was following up every bit of information, every event was a record in itself- listing of Reliance Power. This is happening again and this time it is IPL -Indian Premier League.

Could IPL be the next R-power? IPL is creating the same buzz before opening ceremony as Reliance power did before listing and it may also repeat the results after opening as R-power did.

Anil Ambani used to call it the great Indian story so is Lalit Modi saying about IPL. Every one wanted a pie of R-power and corporates are having of IPL. Though the ordinary man (aam admi) does not have much to do this time around as they could do in case of R-power by applying for Rs. 100,000 worth of shares. But, everything will depend on this very aam admi(they have to watch it for it to be successful). While R-power made millions dream about earning a quick buck IPL is making the rich dream of becoming richer and it has already made a few not so rich Indian cricketers richer by a few crores.

But, Why would IPL be the next R-power?

T20 world cup was a great success and so is English Premier League. So BCCI (Lalit modi) decided to mix the two and come up with a winning formula. It indeed is a good idea but every idea has a right value and I think IPL is over valued in terms of the money being thrown around for everything from tournament sponsors to TV rights to buying players.

IPL is a twenty-twenty tournament, which is all about cracking, blasting and lightning - hitting sixes and fours, scoring runs at breakneck pace. T20 world cup was successful for this very reason especially after Yuvi's (Yuraj Singh) 6 sixes in one over to Andrew Flintoff. EPL is about local clubs contesting against each other with international flavor and high standard of the sport. But, T20 world cup was also about nations competing, which IPL is not about and EPL is more about football with many more nationalities participating in the form of players which also is not the case with IPL.

Nation vs. money

IPL will have teams comprising of people from different countries with different languages and different creed. Some of these players have been through recent brawls and will not have the same spirit towards each other that a national team has on the field. This will be an important factor and will reduce the intensity of the teams to win. On the other hand there will be players with long history of playing on the same side who will stand against each other. The question here is what bounds the team together, the feeling of belonging to the same nation or being paid by the same employer? Since money is the only reason for all these players to get together in the same team, they will not be able to perform the way these very players performed in T20 world cup. For some the performance appraisal pressure will not exist either because they are already standing at the end of their career. We may see matches as we have seen before that of India XI vs. World XI etc.

Player combinations

The Indian public is much more emotional than that of many other nations. Now imagine Rahul Dravid and Misbah-ul-Haq celebrating Sachin's wicket when Bangalore Royal Challengers clash with the Mumbai Indians. This may not go very well with the crowd unless the batsmen and the bowler smile and laugh while being bowled or being hit for a six. In either case intensity of cricket will be down.

Less cricket more bollywood

The organizers have already promised a lot of music and dance, which is also very much visible in team advertisements. But, do we not have enough of music and dance on Indian television? Adding more and more masala into the same dish does not make it more tasty! This masala may just make IPL another entertainment show and not a sporting event. Leaving the viewers with a bad taste.

Fans

I am a Sachin and Rahul fan. I shifted from Bangalore to Delhi a month back. So whom shall I support? Well there are many like me who will not have one team to cheer for and hope to win so we will follow the matches just to kill time while not doing anything else.

So while I do not say that IPL will fail, I think IPL will not be a massive success or a run-away hit as expected. It will end up as just another event with respect to TV viewer ship! let us wait and watch on 18th April.

B-Schools and the ranking mania

In India, B-school rankings often get published around September as applications start rolling out at that time. So when Outlook and others came out with their rankings in September I thought of expressing my own take on the same but as usual missed like I miss on so many other occassions. Last week there was news of ISB, Hyderabad appearing at #20 in global rankings and as always blogs, newspapers like ToI, mint and portals all were flooded with this news. So I thought, why should I be left behind in writing about this frenzied B-school rankings(this is why I say I am just another mortal).

First of all I think B-school rankings should not be taken by their face value and instead should be used as a resource for data they provide.

Though many people have started believing that these rankings are all crap but I think they do offer some value though not in terms of the rank they assign to institutes but in terms of information they provide in the process of arriving at the rank. If, you go through the methodology of every ranking you will feel their are factors that help one institute over the other. Magazines are often blamed for being biased in setting up those parameters in order to skew the rankings. But, any ranking will have parameters and any amount of parameters will always be in favour of one or other participating members. So why exactly blame those rankings? Instead students should actually come up with their own rankings based on their own order of preference.

Here is my wish list of parameters that I expect magazines to publish and consider while compiling the rankings.

Growth in salary of alumnus over a period of 0-5-10 years of period.
Average salary, highest salary and information like that is already taken into consideration. But, today anyone with an MBA degree from any institute is walking out with a handsome package of 4-5 lacs/annum. Fairly good students are getting above 8. But, when the wheel will slow down the first to face the heat would be the bottom layer of students who managed a job today because of the surging economy. A B-school's worth in terms of real value addition to its alumni and industry preparedness would surface only in long run.

Career growth of alumnus over similar periods.
Now, if we were to measure only salary growth over the long run then those placed with huge organizations with stronger brand value or better work quality would rank lower than those placed with some of the smaller unpopular companies just because they shell out bigger sums to fill in for their other weakness. Sometime monotonous work is offered along with better pay cheque and there is no growth either. So an individual choosing a high growth career over high salary career should at least stand at par if not more than the other way.

Diversity quotient of the last 3 batches.
More and more is being written about how institutes are trying to have a mix of students in their batch in order to have a more heterogeneous pool of potential managers/leaders as this stimulates diversified thinking. But, having 1 candidate from arts, science and medical each, a few from commerce and rest engineers is not a heterogeneous batch. Only if there could be a diversity quotient to find out how much hetero a batch really is?

Average input score of last 3-5 batches.
Institutes accepting applications based on scores of various entrance tests can also list average scores of their last 3-5 selected batches. This will inform if quality of input students is improving or its the other way. There is a catch here though - with increasing number of candidates year after year, if an institutes invites same number of candidates as it invited the previous year, the percentile of the last invited application would be higher.

Average experience of the last 3 batches.
As experience is increasingly becoming important during the course of Business education and placements. It would be interesting if institutes provide data on no. of experienced candidates, average experience and average salary of experienced candidates before and after. ISB provides this data.

Average experience of the faculty in industry and as faculty.
Now getting over my obsession of the selected candidates. Having huge number of faculty is easy but the tough task lies in having sufficient number of good quality faculty. Quality is always subjective but still basic criteria - qualifications, total teaching experience, total industry experience and research papers published etc. could be a good starting point for assessing
overall faculty quality.

Entrepreneurship(E)
This is another cliche which everyone is using obsessively. But, it can still be judged more rationally. E quotient of a B-school could comprise of star-ups coming out of schools, initiatives from institute etc. E.g. what percentage of the graduating batch opted out of the placement process to start something of their own. Though this may be attributed to students and not institute but institute initiatives like IIM-A's followed by IIM-Indore's similar action contribute a lot.

There can be many more things that one can look into while opting for admissions depending upon personal priorities. Do share if you think of any.

Till now if you stuck with this post then I really admire your patience.

P.S I was missing from the writing scene for nearly 3 weeks now. But, with this post things will start rolling again.

Future of the forgotten redboxes

Indian postboxes are all set to get new and refreshing looks. Yes, the picture on the left is the future. Designed by IIT Mumbai this is how they will look like. I think it is an an ambitious project from department of post.

Now the question of-course is how important is it to change the looks of postboxes nationwide. Each postbox would cost around Rs 10,000 and approximately 3 lakh such boxes would be rolled out all over the next 3 years read more.

In my opinion it really was not so critical to change the looks but the existing postboxes were really old, dirty and if I ever had to drop a letter in the post box which, I do only when I fill some forms for entrance examinations, I always had a feeling - would this be ever picked up?

But if things go as planned then they would come into place on a BOT (build, operate & transfer) format. They would be used for advertising resulting into additional revenue stream and other benefits like rust free steel, common lock for all post boxes etc. would definitely reduce operational costs for India post which is a good step forward for the extincting behemoth.

But, who writes letters these days? Well many do but invisible to us living in urban areas who prefer typing over writing. But, how could the postal department revive its usage in the urban areas?

One suggestion from my side would be to insist all primary and secondary school teachers to insist their students to actually write letters to their parents, friends or teachers when they are taught letter writing in class 5th to 8th or so. Looking at the number of students in those classes in the urban areas definitely could make a good contribution to postal revenues.

Otherwise we would see kids collecting letters in addition to stamps as a hobby because they would be as rare as stamps itself and letters hung in museum with tag line "this is Indian letter".

I, We and Leadership

Since more often than not, I do not have much to do so I speak to people around me on leadership etc.

Often my argument is when leaders speak(exclusive of personal interviews) they should prefer to use 'we' over 'I' as much as possible. Because, though it is they who stand on the podium, it is they who will take big decisions, it is they who will sign the deals but to make people feel they are a part of the organisations, leaders must use 'we'.

Last sunday I was travelling from Bangalore to Guwahati. I had to change 2 flights. Would like to share an observation.

Kingfisher airlines. The inflight magazine contains an address from Mr. Vijay Mallya who is currently acting as the Chairman and Chief Executive for the airlines. In his address to the passengers he uses 'I' 4 times and 'we' 2 times.

Spicejet. The inflight magazine contains Mr. Siddhanta Sharma's Address to passengers. Mr. Sharma is the CEO for Spicejet. He uses 'we' 6 times and 'I' only once.

If you were given a choice to work in the team of one of the leaders above which one would you choose?(keeping apart the grand charisma and magnanimous reputation of Mr. Mallya).

Banker to the Poor. Book Review-V

Authors - Muhammad Yunus, Alan Jolis.

What started as an experiment in 1974 has today become one of the largest institutions in MicroCredit.

Microcredit is a concept that was not accepted easily by any banker in the 70s and the situation has improved only marginally even today, thats what yunus conveying in this book. As the title suggests Grameen is a bank which understands only one thing - Poor.
Some very good points in the book are:

-- The poor knows better how to fend for themselves than the guy sitting inside an airconditioned room in some swanky building.
-- Trust can be more powerful than mortgage.
-- Its good to have contacts in the government and use them appropriately required.

Though it is Yunus' Autobiography and one would expect personal annecdotes in between but there are a number of times when the author deviates too much from the Grameen story.

So read on if topics like poverty, development, society, upliftment etc. interest you.

Electronic Menus in restaurants-I

You enter a restaurant and take seat. On the table you have a touch screen probably double the size of a PDA(yes, smaller than the one displayed on the left). You open it and see various options available to you.
Food
Drinks
Music

Assuming you choose 'food' and you get options ranging from Chinese, Muglai to Thai and whatever you normally get to see in a restaurant. Just read the customer comments and ratings for each of the delicacies as rated by so many customers who would have tried them, loved them and hated them and you could probably choose from the best rated to weirdly commented.

How about the item you heard from your friend he said tastes good? You might want to check out how have others rated it and what do they say about it. Put it in the search option available to you on the top of your screen(powered by none other than Goggle).

You liked it! But then you like it low salt, low oil, spicy etc. You choose from the options of various degrees for each ingredient of the dish.

You choose your drinks, food and confirm your order. Pops up the screen letting you know the time you will have to wait for that chilled drink to quench your thirst or satiate your palate.

Now when you have had a nice time with your family so you don't call the waiter who could take a few minutes to come over and then do the whole money exchange thing(of course not necessary). Just look at the right side of the menu there is swipe machine integrated in your touch screen. You swipe your card enter the amount of your bill which was displayed as soon as you pressed that red "bill" tab - I know you hate it. Oh you don't use credit cards! Just press the "cash" tab next and that same waiter who served you appears in less than a minute with all the possibilities of the change that he may have to give you back. In the meanwhile you could have added your ratings and comments on what you liked and what you did not.

By the way you like music when you go out for a fine meal, don't you? You could have chosen your pick from the music library that was available to you right from your touch screen.

You just had your fine meal in restaurants that could be the future.

Suggesting or insisting

On the FC Blogs, after reading Innovation: Lessons From a Car Shopping Experience, I had made a long comment. Longer than some of my own blog posts, so I thought of posting the same comment here too.

My comment was "Pushing a customer to alternatives of the product which the customer is looking for is definitely not going to help. In fact it will have a negative impact even if the dealer is suggesting a superior product at whatever price.

But, I think there is a finer line between insisting and suggesting. Suggesting is not a bad thing if properly dealt with.

In today's world with internet though most of the customers come with as much knowledge of the car as the sales representative at the dealer, still there are customer's who are not exactly sure what they are looking for. They have plain aspirations and that is where suggestive approach can help.
Again there has to be a strong restrain from making that suggestive approach into an insistence.

In this case you as a customer had very clear priorities and understanding, where the best a dealer could have done was answer all your questions and be obliged to meet your requests.

But, an attitude of suggesting superior product, lower prices, alternatives should have been the approach only after understanding what the customer is looking for i.e. after getting to understand a little more about the customer."

Now EnergyPods

No, they are not any new product from Apple which on plugging into ears will energize you.

Read here EnergyPod .

I am impressed by the looks, otherwise I do not need this big an instrument like a spaceship to take a 15 minute break.

Indian hockey - chak diya!

No, I am neither going to write a review for chak de! nor I would be writing a news item for Indian hockey team's victory over Korea in Asia Cup(7-1 victory is commendable).

I watched the final of Asia cup final on Sunday evening and yes it was a shocking victory (yes not a shocking defeat, but a shocking victory). Indian beat Korea 7-1 in an already flooded tournament - flooded with goals by Indian hockey team, who scored a mammoth 57 goals in the tournament. Then I coincidentally watched chak de, 2 hours later. I think this would probably be the reverse of what others would have recently done - I am assuming some of the so many people who liked chak de! might have watched the match.

This could well be a great opportunity for the celebrity hungry brand managers and media agents. For example even the news channels in my opinion have a good chance to spread their wings over some other sports and may be have dedicated shows for hockey.

Companies picking some of the good hockey players as of now could be spotting a good opportunity for much lesser a price than they might have to shell out in case they win another tournament and then all the companies jumping to cash them resulting in much higher prices for the new ambassadors.

It may look as if I am blowing Indian team's victory in the Asia Cup way out of proportion. But, as far as I can see hockey is one of the few games which can easily gain mass appeal in a country like India. I say so because,
(i) It does not require costly equipment to start with.
(ii) It does not need special courts or tracks for common man to play.
(iii) It is not a very complex game when it comes to scoring.
(iv) It's a good entertainer.

And then once upon a time... India was the best in this very sport and even though I doubt kids below 10 would know this, but it is India's national game.

I don’t think chak de was the motivation for Indian hockey players but it could be with these results coming in more frequently. Great hopes for hockey to gain its lost glory.

Does the menu matter ?

Have a look at some of the pictures I took while having dinner at Pizzahut on Sunday evening.





The pictures make everything worth eating and drinking. Drinks for example - under normal circumstance if everything is only written without any pictures then very few would really want to wander out of the normal Coke and Pepsi. But, when you open the menu and find a 15*10 cm picture of a refreshingly green "apple coolers.." it becomes tempting enough to try at least once.

Now lets look at what this could to the business. We as a group could have ordered a pitcher of Pepsi, which would have cost us Rs 90. But highly tempted by the pictures 2 of us ordered apple coolers and 3 ordered "masala lime" each costing 45 resulting into a total splash of Rs 225 only on drinks. That is 2.5 times what otherwise would have been.
Assuming that 1 of every 2 tables order drinks and 1 out of 5 such drink ordering tables is impressed by the pictures and makes an experiment, that would mean an increase of revenue from Rs 900 to 1035(vague approximation of all tables ordering same). This is 15% more!!!

The same goes for pizzas that we ordered.

15% more revenues for designing and redoing the menu once in every 6 months and including new and fresh pictures. I think the menu does matter!!

The bottom line for a restaurant is, pictures in the menu can definitely add value. But, remember it raises expectations at the same time and so living up to expectations is more important and difficult than creating those very expectations.

This is a practice seldom followed in Indian eateries, which I think is worth
spending some time and money in order to reap benefits from the visual impact.

Member Details

This morning I got a mail(in my bulk/spam folder) with subject line 'member details'.
I think this trick can definitely add traffic to the website at least initially.

The trick is, some website guys will send you thanks for registering on their xyz site with your username and password.

If you encounter a salesman approaching you with some product or file in his hand more often than not you look at him and say no, before even listening to what is he saying(in fact you don't even know if he is selling or buying). If you were a bit polite at the most you would listen to him and then say thanks, make some excuse for why you do not want to listen to him further. But now if he says "do you remember you bought that thing from us" or "do you remember we met" or may be something like "thanks for buying so and so" which you might have never bought, would you not be provoked to listen to him/her for a few more seconds and ask him/her back what is it that he/she is talking about.

Well the spam mails I am getting in my mailbox stating "thanks for registering at our website, your login details are following and please visit our website" is following the same trick(in my opinion). I think it does makes some new or gullible internet users to visit the website. In case you get an e-mail mentioning the website features, the possibility is that even the new internet users might not visit the site. This could be because they did not like the features or just that they are not involved with it. In case-I, it provokes them to think how could they be registered with this site so they visit the site to check it out.

I think the trick makes sense to introduce products to customers who are not willing to have even a single look at it.

Being brutal

At my age I have read many a books on business which talk about performance and non-performance. All those authors often write about getting rid of non-performance and encouraging performance. I always thought it would be easy to encourage performance. At the same time when I read about the bell curve Jack Welch created I was shocked to hear that a team lead would be required to fire the bottom 5% performers of his team every year.

Jack himself said that he found team leads signing-off at the end of 3 years because there was no way they could fire someone they had been working with for 3 years and now he performed fine but was still at the bottom of his team.

I thought it was crazy but still always used to quote this example in any discussion that involved a point about performance. I did agree that it was an outrageous thing to do something like this but at the same time believed that if a standard of this sort could be established then others could try to establish standards equivalent to 80% of that by may be softening some of the rules.

I am standing at a position where my stance about someone's performance might result into a decision like that. Unfortunately the person in question is a good friend of mine. And more unfortunately an honest statement from my side might not result into happy state of affairs.

I do have sometime to decide on my position on the whole matter and I hope whatever I do is a rational and justified decision.

Blue Ocean Strategy. Book review - III

Authors - W. Chan Kim. Renee Mauborgne.
Publisher - Harvard Business School press

A typical management book it talks about creating a market for your business where you no longer compete with your existing competition. Though it is a bestseller. I did not like it too much for a few reasons like (i) It really does not gives any practical solutions instead it is giving too much of theoretical solutions (ii)It really does not tells anything new.

The book is written by management professors at INSEAD and hence is more like a consultant suggesting something instead of an executioner with task at hand.

The examples cited as reference to the strategy of creating a new market all make sense in hindsight because they succeeded but there would have been so many unique attempts that would have failed as well. Though the book does touches upon how to execute such strategies, convince people to allow changes and move things forward but again it is too much theory. Well I would say my understanding might not have been good enough but if you think you like business then do read the book to realize it is not fun to do business in fact to do business is a serious business and it is very important to do monotonous and not so interesting tasks in business.

The only blue ocean strategy I could learn from the book was how the authors made this book look technical with a complex name and still write not so very complex content (though the authors might have worked very hard to generate this) and make the book a bestseller. One good thing is the book is not very thick like other management books and hence can become a short read on some journey.

It happened in India - Book Review

Book - It happened in India (Autobiography, Kishore Biyani).
Author - Kishore Biyani with Dipayan Baishya
Publisher – Rupa

Kishore Biyani is not a very popular man and neither old enough or idolized enough to have written an autobiography. But, I bought the book for a number of reasons. I had read the name Kishore Biyani some 5 years back in Business World when organized retain was starting to emerge as a massive industry of future. I have been interested in organized retain because of my personal interest in mass customer business i.e. B2C over B2B. The book has a glitzy cover and pulled my attention quickly plus only for Rs 99 (original from Landmark, Bangalore).

Now coming to the contents of the book. It is a good, simply written book with no big words or teachings. One unusual approach in this book is so may reviews about "Kishoreji" from various people who have been with him during his ascent. This includes family members, friends, colleagues and business partners. In an autobiography this is unusual because an autobiography is supposed to be the story of the person from the person. But disappointingly rather I must say ‘as expected’ all the people who reviewed (20% of the book is only made up of other people writing about him), none has mentioned any weakness or shortcomings. This makes the book so very usual since it is only human to have shortcomings and weakness and then he too is a human.

What I liked about the book/kishoreji is the extreme focus on learning, un-learning and re-learning. Though Biyani is also writing about customer as his only focus but I think that is something most of the people say. I offcourse do not intend to say that it might not be the case with him but for me an autobiography is not proof enough. Though I would still agree with him as I myself have been a keen observer of the Big bazaars and Centrals and I had noticed a lot of things that he is mentioning specifically.

An autobiography normally (in fact very often) contains 98% past(history) and 2% future. This one contains almost 60-40. Instead at times Kishoreji is laying so much focus on his projected plans and future strategies that it starts to seem like an investor meet where the idea is to impress about the company and then ask them to invest in it.

It is a good read for those who are part of the retail industry or aspiring to be part of it. I also liked it because it is very much Indian with usage of Hindi words at a number of places, which makes it so very easy to relate to things.

3.75/5

Decision-making

Decision-making is something I have always suffered with. But despite that I plan to put up some of my thoughts on decision-making that have been popping up in my head for months.

I personally believe one of the important things for anybody to remain happy in life is to make decisions the way he/she thinks. There is a lot that can go into making of a decision.

A few factors that would result in a good or bad decision could be:

1. Strong will of decision maker.
2. Good understanding of the current situation.
3. Proper view of the future and visualization of the outcome/consequences.
4. Being ready to face opposition.
5. Knowing the art of saying no (saying yes is the easiest thing).
6. Uncompromising.
7. Complete information in hand.
8. Willingness to sacrifice one thing for the other (to have everything is being lucky).
9. Being ruthless at times.
10. Being prepared for failure.

Some of the above mentioned factors might have been very specific based on a few past incidents that have been going on around me. But, I still think a lot of these factors are generic.

Decisions can make or break the course of action that might follow ahead. So it is better to take tough and hard decisions even if it results into misery/grief for some time instead of making a soft decision for the meanwhile and then suffering in the longer run.

Orkut turns more Indian

I am not saying, "Orkut turns Indian" because there are lot of Indians using orkut. But, it is interesting to see that till yesterday on the home page of orkut there was not even a single picture of an Indian among the 8 pictures of some smiling people.



Today I check the same page and see that 4 of those 10 smiling people are Indians.



This number is quite high as compared to the actual number of Indian on Orkut, which is around 14% of the total Orkut users as on 28 Feb 2007(Orkut on wikipedia).

This is interesting to see that orkut is turning so much of attention to India leaving China. Reason I would attribute to this the fact that it is not just that Google (orkut belongs to google) believes lot more Indians are interested in orkut social networking than Chinese are but it is more because orkut is facing much less competition with other networking sites in India. In India new friends/social networking portals popped up only after a huge success of Orkut where as such things started simultaneously in China, which has made the penetration of google (orkut, youtube, blogspot) a much difficult task than it has in India. Services like these started by Chinese service providers have existed in India for quite sometime before they caught fire in India.

I think there are two important aspects to this:
1. Indians are more visible in global activities these days.
2. But, we need to have more indigenous products (I am not being chauvinistic).

More on that some other time.

Good for Indian sports

It’s been a old matter that India exit from the cricket WC in round-I and people seem to have forgotten this as well. Though i am not happy to see my own country and its players loosing so badly. Not because it lost but because it lost without even giving any fight to the teams it lost to.

But, i think it is a good opportunity for the other Indian sports. I personally believe a sport in today’s world is driven by business. With Indian cricket team's all time low rankings and worst performances, Indian sports is lacking national idols and now is the time for any of the new individuals to show some great performance. Business will grab them for their brand endorsements and that would give a good push to the respective sport.

I think its important for business to look outside cricket. Only cricket and bollywood being the options available with ad makers the options are too less and thus the brand value of even not so popular and new celebrities is quite high.

Now is the time when these new sportspersons could click and get their share of fame and glory, which has been overshadowed for long by cricket.

So may be Indian cricket might recover from the slump soon for some reason but here is a chance for Indian sports to redefine itself from sports=cricket to sports=sports.