Initiation to the dreams!

I love telling stories. But my initiation into story telling has been my own state of partial awakeness (This is a word used in the Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud)

When I was three (No jokes.. three), I remember a night when we were living in a rented home in the first floor in Malleshwaram (Northern area of Bangalore). We (our family) had this practice of sitting outside our house in the nights and talk (Bangalore was much much quieter then). I would never let go of my mum when I was young (its changed a bit now). I remember I was just about to sleep when mum went in for a minute to switch off the stove on which the cooker had ‘whistled’ the required number of times.

I climbed up the fourth floor of the neighbouring building. My friends were following behind me. I was eager to reach the terrace first, hide and scare my friends. I was panting but did not give up. There was this huge adrenaline rush to reach the top. I was scared too, because it was dark. I could see my friends running up and trying to close in on me. I reached first and hid behind the water tank and waited. I am scared myself too, but am charged up to scare the shit out of my friends. I see footsteps, they are nearing and then… its silent, i don’t see them any more. Its just me on the terrace. I move to the edge of the terrace.. and take the leap.. The microseconds of fall get exaggerated and I can feel me float in the air and soon I know I am going to hit – in 3, 2, 1

I woke up and clung to my mum who had come there. My heart had skipped a beat. I lay there confused about what had just happened. This was a dream that I continued to have for quite some time after that. Every night it would be the same.

Well, that’s the first ever dream I remember witnessing. There have been hundreds more since then. All in good time.

No “More” plastic.

I have seen more “More” plastic bags on the roads of my locality than any other brand’s. Everyone around my place seems to be using these plastic bags to throw their garbage. So, I set out to find out what was happening.

Before that, I checked what my mom was upto. She goes to More – almost everyday and buys something or the other. Two reasons – proximity to our home, More has inculcated consumerism into the minds of the Indian home-makers (Though not to the extent that the Americans have been influenced by the ‘capitalistic religion’). I open the door of my refrigerator, there are More plastic bags wrapping the vegetables and fruits kept inside. I look in the dustbin – there is ‘More’ plastic bag. It does a fair job holding garbage.

With all due respect to my capable friends who have joined Aditya Birla Group, I hate the latter. The reason is two fold -
1. Being such a large business house, is it so irresponsible that it ignores its adverse impact on the environment in its yearning for growth?
2. I hate it for being a form of retail that mimics existing kirana (term for the mom and pop stores of India) shops to say the least.

Brands like ‘More’, for just the fact that it has scant respect for society, need to be boycotted. They could play a very effective role in educating its customers (housewives) to stop using plastic bags to carry items from their store. They could also provide paper bags and encourage its customers to bring their own bags.

This is a hasty post as I desperately wanted to decry More and its plastic bags!!

Which bucket are you in?

Religion, Nationality, Rich & poor were a universal categorization/ bucketing that existed from centuries, but we have successfully managed to take it to higher (actually lower) levels.

If we look at ancient India – we had the caste system (bucketing people into different [if I can call it] verticals, which stuck to a person from birth till death – An endogamous group. Each of these verticals could have been created based on the occupation/ economic & social class that a family belonged to. The ‘learned’ may decry this definition) that has split us wide open as a society. We called ourselves ‘Northies’ and ‘Southies’ (grammatically it could have been Northerlies and Southerlies, but since our average adeptness at the language is low, we have accepted it) based on which part of India we hail from.

I remember when I was a kid, there were ‘non-vegetarians’ and ‘vegetarians’ and ‘pure vegetarians (ones who don’t even feast on eggs)’. There was also the ’state-syllabus’ and ‘central syllabus’ classification of us kids who went to school. As if it was not enough, I was also a ‘Brahman kid’ – caste hit me early, but thankfully it was from the society rather than my own family.

I grew up to become a ‘comsci grad (one who is an engineer in Computer sciences)’ from ‘VTU (from colleges associated to a roughly 50000 student strong University in Karnataka).

Over time, when on campus in IIMB, we celebrated the fact that we were ‘bongs(Bengali)’, ‘Tams (Tamils), ‘Mallu (Keralites), ‘Digs (Kannadigas)’, ‘Gults (from Andhra)’, ‘Punjabi’, ‘Dig-Tam (a compromise that occurred between a Kannadiga and a Tamil), ‘Gult-Dig’, ‘Gult-Tam’ and ‘Northies (from all remaining North India captained by Delhi, UP and Bihar). This was a very new concept for me (I have been ignorant). We as a nation believe in ‘Unity in Diversity’ while ironically, we first divide ourselves. We love to mask it as ‘an evolved society who identify that there are inherent differences, yet tolerate each other’. What is true in this mask is that we are inherently different.

After touching a slightly emotional issue of regionalism (we have different levels of fanaticism about this issue), lets move to professions. To be 1 of 180 merit seats who made it to IIMB in 2007, one had to beat .2 million (roughly) in India (Don’t we love that stat?). But, even before the famed summer placements arrived, we were bucketed as ‘IIT (an undergrad from the IITs – even if it is textile engineering)’, ‘NIT (even if it is the one where an ancient, mythical battle was once fought), ‘IT guy (if one worked in Technology before coming into B school)’, ‘fresher’, ‘fin guy’ etc. Post summer placements (which is a ridiculous process of selection as interns by companies), guys picked by a marketing firm become ‘marketing gurus’ (the selection process is actually based on trivial things like which was the last movie one watched) and those by banks – ‘bankers’ (I will resist saying what guys picked by a top management consulting firm are called).

The matter doesn’t end here – after we finish our B school education from the best schools in India, and when we join our jobs, we are again ‘typecasted’ as ‘process consultants’, ‘IT’, ‘banker’, ’strategy consultants’, ‘deck makers’, ’soap sellers’ etc. I agree expertise in a job function is a function of your past experience to an extent. There is also this concept of ‘India consultant (meaning lower price/hour for his services because he/she is specialized in India)’. Maybe this categorization is extreme in India because of the excess supply we have of individuals of average competence. Wasn’t an MBA program from a B school just meant to change the way one thinks about business problems? Where is the incentive for alternate thinking if all one is bothered about is whether you are a ‘DML (guys who make it to the Director’s Meritorious List in an IIM)’ or because you ‘did BA in psychology’ or that ‘you studied in a Dubai school’ which gives you a ‘uniqueness’ factor. It is ridiculous, but true.

So, I for one have been bucketed all my life and so will you, if you are in India. So it doesn’t matter if you are passionate about something here – you must fall into the right buckets to reach your destination.

On a lighter note – I am a ‘brahman’, ‘vegetarian born’, ’state-syllabus’, ‘Southie/ Madrasi’, ‘Dig’, ‘bank summer (lets make it a new noun)’, ‘B2B consultative sales guy’, ‘non-IIT (ooo i am such a handicap), ‘VTU’, ‘non-DML’, ‘Indian MBA’ – I am so ruined.

Now..What buckets are you in?

Positive disruption

Disruption – An interruption to the regular flow or sequence of something; A continuing act of disorder

Two quick examples.

Accenture (Anderson Consulting) and IBM did business in the US for more than 50 years, held price for their services until came the Indians. The Global Delivery Model – most work can be sourced from cheaper locations, keeping only the critical part at the client location. This resulted in lower total cost of the service being outsourced. Indian companies built up capabilities to offshore work of their clients and focussed on quality. The way business was done was disrupted permanently. Effect is common knowledge.

Airtel, the largest Telecom operator in India by market share (25%) and several others believed India is the place to be – provide connectivity, continuity and quality of service and reap the benefits of the volume market. In, comes Tata Docomo – a JV between Tata and NTT Docomo. Disrupts the price game with a pay/second tariff. Now which consumer does not want it? Airtel, after several statements that it does not affect they are currently doing business – offer the pay/second tariff to its customers. Do they have a choice?

Most of us who is in business roles in our organizations are in similar situations now. Most of our alumni have shown us corresponding paths – in which we could progress and do well in our future. But I asked my close friend recently – How does one make it big? You know. really big? It is obvious that one needs to disrupt the way we have been pursuing our careers.

The larger the disruption, the larger the return. But, what does one require to do to create a disruption? Again, its obvious that one has to think out of the box, but is it really so cryptic that there aren’t too many disruptions? Or is it that most of us are too comfortable working for a employer and making those easy bucks at the end of the month?

Analyzers and Happy-go-luckies

People I have come across fall between two extremes – Extreme analyzers and Extreme Happy-go-luckies (HGL s– for the lack of knowledge of a better word). On the one end, I know of a person who never does anything other than analyzing the repercussions of what would happen if she/he does something. On the other, I know of a person who would never think (not because he/she cannot think, but because of a habitual dismissal of thought before action).
I will stop short of saying listing to which side is better (an indication that I tilt to the analyzers sometimes). But, what is more important is to observe that by understanding which side one tilts towards, one realizes more about the reason for what he/she does.
It all spawned off when I observed the way in which my friends chose careers during our placements at IIM Bangalore. There are some who choose the job for the money, some for the lifestyle, some for the status and specifically to my batch; some opted jobs because of lack of options (lack of options unequivocally because of the worst possible economic scenario). But beyond all this, there are a people with a propensity to do the thinking jobs (Analytics, strategy, marketing, analyst positions in banks, consultants) and there is another lot which loves to “do” (FMCG sales, B2B sales, trading, Partners). Though it is wrong to deduce without data, intuitively, one can see that the thinking jobs are dependent on the doing jobs to stay in business. Though, the doing jobs do require the thinking jobs to feed them with information (thoughts).
Now, we wonder – should the MBA graduate think or waste his time doing (which apparently can be done by a more trivial human)? There are valid arguments for both sides – An MBA graduate can be the guy who crunches numbers and lays out strategy while a glib talker can sell all of it that the former does or the MBA graduate can go and get business while he leaves the leftovers of the fun to the mere mortals. When one goes this way, there is enough data that proves that the MBA graduates have done equally well on both these paths. This leads me to conclude (though not very scientifically) that MBA graduates do well because they have other innate characteristics that drive them to reasonable success, rather than just the degree itself.
The doer jobs are mostly leaning towards the extreme HGLs and the thinking jobs are tilting towards the Extreme analyzers. The doer jobs will involve travelling, living on the edge, loads of money, mostly being out of office and hence exciting. The thinking jobs will be more deck making (reality), channelizing thoughts into frameworks and making your boss happy.
As I begin to understand what has unfurled here on this page, I realize that it is an ugly way to draw a correlation between the kind of person one is to the kind of job he chooses, but why should a blog be completely scientific?

If I get swine flu while in Bangalore

The swine flu has spread in India and supposedly the “virus is in the air” (Source:Times Now – An Indian News channel). The channels are sensationalizing the deaths due to the deadly virus, like announcing a fall of a wicket in a cricket match – “There goes another one” (Source: My mom). We have reporters wearing masks and getting us first hand news from the Government Hospitals of India. These hospitals are abundant with doctors who became one by either the Indian Quota system (based on caste and where merit is compromised) or by the super rich (who get more dowry due to enhanced ‘market value’, by prefixing their names by ‘Dr.’ ).

Our Union Health Minister – a respected man in Kashmir (I have visited his tulip gardens) flashes his characteristic smile and says – “There is nothing to panic”. But, its really not helped anyone. People have covered themselves with all kinds of make-shift masks hoping to rebound any H1N1 virus that is trying to fly into their mouths and noses – Kerchieves, surgical masks, N95 masks (whose market rate is INR 500 when it had to be INR 45) and sometimes cupped palms too.

There are some who are so paranoid, that they visit doctors, get tests done unnecessarily, gulp down several paracetamols, lock themselves up at homes etc. My friend today runs out of his office because his neighbours were coughing around him. There are us who say, it doesn’t matter if we get quarantined, the “market may be better when we come out”.

I also found more people washing their hands post the inevitable pee sessions at work. I don’t think we Indians, ever in history, washed our hands as regularly as we are nowadays. But, there is also a large number of people who believe its better to stay locked up at home for a week to stay out of trouble. Little do they know that the flu is expected to infect 2 Billion people around the World by 2012 (Source:WHO).

So yesterday, when the lady died in Bangalore – the first swine flu death in the city, I was wondering what I would do if I get to know I have the flu. Its mostly the Government hospitals which are equipped to treat me. Well, the lady (God bless her soul) went to Philomena Hospital – as far as I know, the hospital can kill people while injecting an antibiotic. So, if I am going there, I should know that the probability of me coming out of that place, alive, in the next week is almost close to zero. Knowing that, I did do a lot of things before I get into the hospital. Wear a genuine N 95 mask and a head-to-toe body suit, hug all my friends and family, eat all that I want, do a bungee and laugh my heart out watching the best movies I have seen. The moment I cross the gate of the hospital, my time will tick faster.

Venture Gyan – 1

I have heard of many friends wanting to start off a venture or two of their own. I have recently failed in one of my own. It is only natural that ventures die prematurely and there is no shame in it. After all, all the successes one sees are only anecdotal in nature.

There are several things that come to mind when one thinks about ventures – opportunity costs, independent thinking etc. I will cover the financial aspects in this blog in layman terms.

a. The opportunity cost of leaving a job needs to be factored. You lose your salary and may have to go without one while you are slogging at your new venture.
b. The starting Capital (investment) is to be estimated and raised in the cheapest form. If you borrow money from a financial institution, mind what you are pledging for it, mind which bank you borrow from. An ICICI bank may give you money, but may screw your happiness if you don’t pay the interest on time. Also, remember to make interest payment regularly. A failure at doing so will affect your credit history and hence your ability to borrow in future at a lower cost.
c. The cash flows associated with the business needs to be estimated. This is needed for you to sustain yourself and to plough back money into your business.
d. The Return on Investment (ROI) should be measured and must be more than at least the best deposit scheme interest rates in the market/ or the lowest return in the mutual funds market. This may not be the case initially, but it must be the case in a short-medium term at the least.
e. If the venture involves a service, ensuring that there is a legal cover for default of payment is important.
f. Maintaining financial statements for the venture helps making the operations more efficient.
g. Sluggishness in handling money results in loses that could damage your financial progress.
h. Most importantly, learn how petty, mid-size and large entrepreneurs raise capital. Each of these categories have multiple modes of financing their ventures. Loads to learn from guys already in the market.

Financials of a venture is as important as the concept behind the venture. Hence, financial discipline increases the probability of success for one’s venture.

Men are in a hurry

When I completed school and before I could completely idle out during my vacation, I remember having been shocked at some four of my classmates, girls, had got married. By the time I finished 12th grade one of them had twins, four others had some babies dangling around their waists. It was just a matter of time, I thought, that their kids would join my own school. And that happened too!

Well, it was always the case in India. I studied in a school that was inhabited by the middle income society and this was common. Girls would get married and their babies would join my school soon.

A few years later – 9 to be precise I got into B school. It is different here. By the time I graduated, there were a dozen guys who had got married. Yes. Guys. Then in my vacation, there were a dozen more. This time most of them were my Mallu friends – again they seem to do everything together. A close friend from my earlier company got engaged recently. Today it was the turn of my very good friend from Lucent. Bang! out of no where he sends a mail – Dude, come to my wedding. Its this Monday! We spent years when we were 21, 22, 23 odd laughing at other men getting married and flaunting their pregnant stomachs before their wives had one. And today, this friend of mine, though slim, was beaming with his newly wedded wife. God bless them though.

Well, I am still wondering, what the reason for such behaviour is? I am trying to correlate it to something. If it is a recessionary environment, traditionally, I did expect the men to be single. Well, this is the worst recession I hopefully will see in my life and I see so many of my male friends get married and importantly, while my lady friends don’t care about it. I wonder if the ladies have found some P&G product that’s going to preserve their age. Why this aberration, I wonder! I am sure we got to blame the emissions.

how Indian market kills

A typical life cycle of a product is that graph which is takes off exponentially in the beginning and tapers off as it reaches ‘maturity’ and then finally starts deteriorating at some point. Oh, the typical management consultants may make some minor adjustments to it and claim some intellectual superiority over it. An example could be introduction of CDMA technology in the US. In a simplistic sense, a telecommunication operator (telco) would have made an executive decision to ‘go the CDMA way’, bid for spectrum licenses (unlike family business’ bribing ceremonies in India), hire a Network equipment maker to supply it the hardware and the firmware and finally go on to introduce the services to his/her end consumers (people).

What was good for the entire ecosystem then was that the telco reaps good profit in a few years and consolidates on its position – all this for having taken the pains of investing heavily initially on infrastructure. The equipment makers would enjoy sustained cash flows through maintenance of such deployed networks. The handset makers would grow the new market wanting the new technology. All this because the US consumer would enjoy the benefits of the new technology.

When it comes to India, all industries are on a fast forward motion. The telecommunication sector for example moves from 2G to 2.5 G to 2.75 G to 3G and in future 4G in no time. No one has the time to consolidate in the Indian market. Because everyone needs to continuously fight for survival. China is worse – after China Telecom just finished upgrading its networks to 3G, the Chinese industry and market is looking to move to 4G. What business sense did it make to China Telecom to invest heavily in 3G when in no time the focus is on 4G.

In the IT industry, IBM and Accenture (Arthur Anderson) held price for software services at a price point for a 100 years. Indian players pioneered the Global Delivery Model and upset the way the industry operates and offered the same services at a lower cost – brilliant stuff. But, from then on, the Indian players have cut price so fiercely that today, IT services is looked upon as a commodity by everyone. By cutting price, the service providers have lost their bargaining power and are now pressured by their clients to cut price even further. The industry has a threat of pre-mature death because of such action, when Accenture and IBM had held price for a 100 years.

There is this clear immaturity in the business executives in Indian industries, when they fail to understand that their companies ought to serve a longer period of time than fizzle out in no time. One may argue “why should a company live for a 100 years?” I did say a societal obligation? We don’t have to kill industries by cutting price for achieving short-term successes against their rivals, by introducing every available technology all at once, inspiring the consumers to also ask for so much more every other day, and by falling prey to ‘creative destruction’ to such an extent that we reach a stage when it becomes unsustainable. The stock market behaves similarly too – expects heavy growth & profitability from companies on a consistent basis and if they fail marginally, the market pulls the stocks of these companies heavily downwards. I am surprised why, not too many Indian companies de-listed when their stock prices were so badly battered six months ago. In no book, did the stock prices justify itself.

No wonder a Ford, a Haier and so many successful brands struggle in India. The Indian market slaughters the companies that target it – it has to either be price competitive, or innovate continuously, or keep sending new messages/ position its brands differently so as to remain contemporary, or introduce new products/ services, reduce TCO or hire new brand ambassadors (we have 11 cricket players only) every Sunday. The Indian market could be a great potential to do business, but businesses have to be cut out to meet its expectations.

And the Indian Executives, though tremendously talented, must learn ‘to play the Western game’ so that organizations create wealth and sustain themselves longer than they already are.

when strangely, losing did not matter!

If there was one thing that my modest school did not teach me was that it was – one must not lose (There is a school of thought that says its okay if you don’t win, but I believe it is equally not okay to lose). Though I attribute most of what I am to the school and its teachers, this was something that I missed to pick up from there. It did be opportunities or something that I owned, I lost them and it never mattered.

So in my school, it was awesome to clear 10th grade – not top it. Then came 11th and 12th in NCJ. There were a number of guys who aspired to be IITians there. Dad put me to IIT coaching in a week after 10th exams. I went and cleared some entrance tests and got an ‘admit to the coaching class’. I remember that evening, one of my close friends from school came and said something like “dude, we just finished school, you want to start off studying tomorrow? Its not even been a week. We are playing cricket tomorrow. See if you can join.” It took me 10 minutes to decide that all I wanted to do was to play cricket and not start studying again. Dad was furious and asked me to go and get back the fee we had already paid if I can. I had been doing theatre for 8 years then, fibbed to the director of the coaching institute and got back the money. I was so proud of myself.

If these were lost opportunities, there are many lost assets during these times – money, phones, wallets, keys and so on. The most recent was the wallet I lost in the Golden temple in Amritsar – along with it went my credit cards, debit card, IIMB identity cards and cash. Now, who could possibly lose a wallet inside there. I did! Remarkably I seem to have lost it during the Langar. In the same trip I lost my Adidas sipper in Delhi – I guess it was the metro station. Surprisingly, I lost a pair of formal trousers at IIMB. I suspect it was the crows. In the first term, I went to the library in search of Rudyard Kipling’s book of poems – Lost a new moto ming there. I lost some jerkins in some hotels! Almost lost my passport once again on campus. Prior to that, during undergrad I lost my bike keys so many times that after a few times, I had to just send someone to collect my bike keys from him. I have lost an adidas cap on campus, a penn state cap in Indigo airways and a nike in a cab. Yeah, I lost my slippers many times when I was young. The one thing that I used to lose the most in school was pencil boxes – about a dozen and lunch bags – about half a dozen. Losing notes is not too uncommon too.

Now, the number of times I got lost is decently high too. Once in Kanyakumari – dad and bro had run off to get the best snap of the sunset and I was with my own fictitious dad for about 30 minutes. Was in Kukke Subramanya (in the western ghats) with relatives – sat in the wrong car and stayed there while they searched frantically. And all my old friends can vouch the number of times I can get lost in Bangalore roads – invariably I spend good time seeing newer parts of the city.

But what has changed is that I have been trying to mitigate these losses. Like I have stopped losing opportunities that come my way to a large extent from the last quarter of 2008. I have stopped losing things from May 2009. I have stopped getting lost too – thanks to the mobile phone!

I know I have spoken about disparate things here – losing out on opportunities, losing things, losing oneself – lack of focus. But, I think the binding thing among these is the fact that one is lack of awareness – awareness of opportunities, awareness of oneself. I dont want to preach anymore.. Yuck!