Abhisek Bhowmik

Help Me from Reply All

2012-02-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

We spend considerable time drafting and reading emails. While sending the email we are not always sure who all should be the recipient and hence sometimes we add more people than required(organizations have created tools like Distribution lists etc. to facilitate the collaboration process). This way we waste many people's valuable time who need to at least take a glance at the email and delete/file it. Similar way others waste our valuable time sending emails which are not related to our interest. Worse - people use Reply All button and thus a series of conversation starts. This is a huge waste of human energy.

That's why I suggested Pmail - a vision to change the way we make email communication. Today I am suggesting something more easy to implement but still having huge impact - 'Block Reply All' button and 'View the Conversation' button. Here is how it should work.

You receive an email which was sent to multiple people. You find that the subject does not interest you. You click 'Block Reply All' button for that email and no further Reply All will be sent to you - but the same time sender will not receive any failure message(to to keep things straight from legal perspective in the sent emails the recipient list will be updated only to the people to whom it was sent).

There may be a need in the future that you want to reference that email or you want to see what was the latest decision made on that conversation. You can then click on the 'View the Conversation' button in the original email and voila - you see all the history!

Tough Job...really tough Job!

2012-01-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

I was watching a hindi movie 'Fashion' - it is a story of two Supermodels..their reaching to the top of the stardom, their various compromises and then sudden fall to nowhere. One of them was able to ultimately manage it, but other couldn't.

It is difficult to reach the top...but it is more difficult to stay there for long. It is so painful and lonely! Most of the world will envy you; try to bring down you. You will be encouraged to show-off. The noise of popularity will be enough to derail your focus. You will live in world of fear - a single mistake and you are out!

So hat's off to legends like Sachin Tendulkar and Bill Gates...they not only reached to the top but kept their cool & focus. The excelled in their profession but more importantly they were able to manage their focus, their own personality, their own life. It is tough...really really tough!

Patents help Law Professionals - and not Innovators

2012-01-07T11:44:00.003-07:00

Huge waste of human energy...What do you think?

Source: http://frugaldad.com

commoditized

2011-12-26T21:29:00.001-07:00

All Products and Services can be categorized into two types - Premium and commoditized.

As a buyer try to convince the seller that his/her Product/Solution is commoditized.

As a seller try to convince the buyer that he is getting a premium service and he need to pay appropriate price for it.

Keep in mind, convincing is not easy if the claim is grossly wrong. So you need to position your play appropriately.

What HR heads can learn from Cruise and Airlines industry

2011-10-31T00:00:00.001-07:00

Short answer...Loyalty Programs to reduce Total Cost of Ownership. Continue reading for the long answer.

Let me be very clear..this advice will not help all the HR Professionals. Many HR Professionals (Headhunters/Job Portal companies etc.) will actually hate the plan because if implemented properly most of them have to close down.

Who will love the plan..I think everyone except those HR Professionals. Customers, Co-workers and Managers - nobody loves to work with a person who is new in that role and who do not have complete information. Nobody wants to train a person from scratch and then loose that talent one day and start the process again. Attrition is costly - and the cost is generally underrated. Depending on the industry and the role that cost varies - but I think most don't appreciate all the cost implications of attrition. We generally consider the substitution cost (extra salary/compensation (which sometimes are as high as 100% or more) which needs to be paid to attract similar talent to fill that position) but don't account for the loss in customer confidence, extra hours lost by co-workers in knowledge transfer process and loss in intellectual insight when a person leaves the organization. From an employee perspective as well it may be beneficial - considering the pain of relocation, adjusting to the new office work-culture and extra work needed to create a good brand image. So it is a win-win.

Problems understood, what's the solution? My view: Organizations need to implement the best practices from the Best-run Loyalty Programs in the industry - airlines and cruise industry. Airlines have one of the most liberal rewards (loyalty) program in the world which actually creates a lot of stickiness. Cruise lines offer something unique - they provide repeat guests VIP treatment by inviting them to special parties, bon-voyage gifts or Champagne, priority embarkation, great rates for the next cruise etc. Result - cruise industry enjoys a very high-level of repeat clientele.

Organizations need to understand there are two pieces for employee loyalty - monetary (tangible) and emotional (intangible). Monetary parameters are important - nobody likes to stick to the same company if he sees that even the best performance for next 10 years cannot match the salary he can gain by a single switch. Companies need to understand the market forces and go for more personalized, more real-time approach towards compensation(why not increase someone's salary 15% when you need to pay at least 30% more for a substitute talent) .

At the same time companies need to understand a very important piece of the puzzle which is seldom appreciated. How you treat people, how you give them more opportunities, how you empower them, how you respect them (here is great book on this), how you make their life more easy is as important as how much you pay them. Learn from cruise industry - create special benefits for the people who have shown loyalty - it may be extra leaves, special bonus rates, invitation-only parties - there are no limits on innovation in this space.

Caveat: Loyalty programs are not for everyone. Companies do not like loss-making customers or

Bad-performing employees and do everything needed to get rid of them - and that is perfectly acceptable (I love Jack Welch theory of eliminating bottom 10% every year). What is not acceptable is treating good talent without special recognition.

Rent a Toy!

2011-10-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

Kids have interest for new toys only for few days if not for few hours.

Don't you think Toy renting is a wonderful business case?

But probably just want the parents to buy a new one for them..they probably don't care about economics.

Yearly Driving Training can create Huge impact

2011-10-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Practical Tips - choose the class as you need. You can't do Parallel Parking - take a session. You do not know how to change lanes - take a class. If you want to take all the training - you can do it all.

I think this will drastically improve the driving skills of americans and drastically reduce the number of accidents. Other benefits include lower insurance premium, less carbon footprint and more importantly lot of saved lives!

Insurance companies/governments should sponsor such training programs as that will lower much of their cost.

All you can eat - Is it a good deal?

2011-10-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

It's a bad deal for both Consumer and Solution Provider...

Consumer pays more because generally the Package is charged at a higher rate by the Solution Provider(who wants to minimize the risk of cost overrun).

Consumer wastes resources, instead of mindful quality consumption consumer focuses more on quantity of consumption - only because he has already paid the price.

Why it is generally a bad deal for Service Provider?

(S)he needs to take the risk of cost overrun and estimation errors. There is also a risk of bad press due to bad quality - if you have tried a-la-carte and buffet in the same restaurant, you know the difference in quality. The restaurant owner cannot just afford to provide the best quality food in a buffet.

Life is boring...except these magicians

2011-09-18T09:01:00.001-07:00

Business as usual life is very boring...think about it...anything predictable is boring.

So what makes life worth living...discovering unknown unknowns..miracles and magic.

If you want to get fun out of your life, fill your life with magicians!

You can find magicians everywhere(a great manager is a magician, a great cook as well)...make them your friend..learn from them and try to become one of them.

Can the fear of 2012 Apocalypse stop the imminent recession?

2011-09-13T20:46:00.004-07:00

If the world is going to end next year we will live like there is no tomorrow. We will spend like anything - try to fulfill our wildest dreams. We will travel the world, splurge in the best hotels and restaurants, buy our dream Louis Vuitton leather accessories and what not.

I am probably giving examples of Rich world, but the case stands true for everyone. A poor farmer in Bangladesh probably dreams of a vacation in Goa or a Financial Analyst in Mumbai wants to see Wall Street. You get the point right?

Can you think of any better stimulus if the whole world starts living a desperate life?

Are the world leaders listening? Forget economic stimulus...push the Adrenalin flow. There is no better stimulus than Fear of Death!

Josette Sheeran: Ending hunger now

2011-09-11T09:56:00.001-07:00

Great TED talk on solving hunger problem - it has one of the best Return on Investment(ROI) considering the improved productivity and reduction in healthcare cost. I especially love the strategy proposals - starting mid-day meals in schools instead of food subsidies etc.

Jeremy Gilley: One day of peace - Spread the thought

2011-09-09T08:45:00.001-07:00

Like the idea..but more than that I like the speaker and his passion..check this TED talk.

Let’s Cancel 9/11 - Love this article

2011-09-09T08:40:00.001-07:00

'The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 -- who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used -- as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands..'

Read the full story here

One of the best article I read in recent past

2011-09-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

Here is the CNN link and if you want to know more about the author and read related comments check his blog.

We have to move to Independent Collaborative Value-addition model as the big corporation mode will be obsolete.

There is no way with Technological Progress and Automation we can continue to add(or even keep) jobs.

We need to reimagine,rework and rediscover work.

Hopeless RBI

2011-09-01T21:50:00.000-07:00

Reserve Bank of India(RBI) governor thinks he can control Food Inflation by increasing Interest rate. High Food Inflation has nothing to do with the Interest rate. It can be controlled only by increasing efficiency and reducing leakage in the Farm and Food distribution system. Government's approach is risking growth, creating more pain for middle/lower middle class on top of high Food inflation.

I am ok to compromise with growth if Inflation can be controlled, but till now RBI has not been successful. Policymakers - please keep in mind India had huge food inflation even during Nehru-growth days. So growth is not the culprit - at least for food inflation.

Stop playing with RBI rates( reduce it) and better concentrate in reducing the wastage in Food Corporation of India warehouses.

Code Wars - See if all Traffic signal stop working

2011-08-27T10:09:00.000-07:00

Can US Solve these issues?

2011-08-26T08:38:00.003-07:00

Barry Ritholtz posted a fantastic piece in his blog The Big picture. As I mentioned in my previous post innovation is highly overrated and just being optimistic(hope and pray) will not be enough. We need to be realistic, accept that we don't have an answer yet and try to solve the big problems.

Quickly!

Additional Note: There is a chance that I am overreacing to the problems(some notes here). But as they say,"Only the Paranoid Survive".

Solving Big Problems

2011-08-23T23:40:00.002-07:00

It seems that we know the solution for most of the problems. We know big government is bad, huge national debt is worse. We know banker-politician nexus is ruining the economy - they are privatizing profits and socializing losses. We know we waste a lot of resource when the world is starving. We know we all can use public transport and significantly reduce our carbon footprint. We know we have limited fossil fuels, our alternate energy solutions are nowhere near sustainable model and we should invest significant effort, money and talent in discovering new energy technologies.

But still nothing changes...we continue to print money, waste huge amount of stuff(including food), drive gas-guzzlers, package debts in more complex CDOs and get excited about next about generation iPads (and think that our innovation can solve any problems). Why?

I think we have not really understood the root causes and/or have been able to solve those.

Let me give some examples to clarify this. Let's start with Game-theory issues. Most of the Americans know that they are one of the biggest per capita greenhouse gas producers. Still most of them are really not interested in improving on this(I am talking about significant efforts(not using hybrids but using Public transports) and only motivated by the thought of 'good karma'(and not for controlling cost in the days rising fuel prices)). Are they bad people who are destroying our world for material comfort. Not really. It's a game theory problem. They are not sure even if they reduce the greenhouse emission their life(or for that matter everyone's life) will be any better. They don't have a guarantee that even if they compromise with their lifestyle billions of people in China and India will also do so. It's a case of prisoner's dilemma. Nobody wants to compromise because they are not sure about the other parties.

Another case - Politician and Business lobby nexus - again a story of short term gain('in the long term we will all die'). Do you think Obama has no idea how to fix the economy or for that matter Ben Bernanke. There may be some amount of analysis-paralysis but know for sure that they have the most informed and knowledgeable advisers available in the world. Above all they have enough amount of intelligence to understand the situation. Then why they cannot take bold action? Why can't they solve the 'Too big to fail' problem? Why can't they solve conflicts of interest problem between business and rating agencies? Because politicians need financial supports from banks and businesses. A too big to fail bank can provide huge campaign support which an average Joe cannnot.

Last case(most won't agree) - our technological or business process innovation is highly overrated and we have misinvested our talent in low priority problems. We see a lot of changes. But I have a feel that most of our changes are cosmetic and there has been very few epoch-making improvements in recent past(except Internet or few other stuff). Think about it - most of us still drive to office everyday, do 8-5 job, comeback home, see TV/movies and sleep. We still have very low level of control over many diseases(AIDS, Cancer etc.). We still can not control natural forces(flood) or even predict them(earthquake). We still have billions of people in the world who are dying for basic needs - food, drinking water and safety. Millions are people fight against each other and die. If you think Apple will can save the world - think again! Companies concentrate on opportunities which can be monetized quickly(low hanging fruits). Solving big problems such as energy is a high risk high gain play. Most investors do not have capacity or attitude to take that risk. Governments should pitch in but again government is never good in execution(different parties have different views, less focus etc.).All in all no progress.

Bottomline: We need to solve big problems. Our Innovation need to tackle these root causes(game-theory, Information Asymmetry, conflict of interest, pricing etc.) and should not be busy in walkman-> ipod kind of progression. I don't have a answer on how to do it but I have a sample solution how it should look like.You must have heard of 'invisible hand of the market'.

Healthy body No Diet

2011-08-21T10:53:00.003-07:00

I love to eat..and eat a lot. Unfortunately all my favorite foods are the worst things to eat for keeping a healthy body - Cold drinks, Cheaps, Frys, Ice Creat, Goat Meat, Salad Dressings etc.(probably foodies can appreciate the fact that most healthy foods taste crap..not sure if we can create genetically modified food which taste great and still have less calorie, sodium or salt). So it's a bad compromise...(healthy slim body+Eat less food(which generally taste bad)) or (Become obese with all related problems+ Eat yummy food as much as you like)...I hate it.

Can we have a TRIZ like solution - have the best of both worlds? Will eat whatever we like but still have BMI within our control? I don't know if it is too complex to make but one solution can be placing an intelligent machine within our digestive system which will control the absorption of nutrients. Once just enough nutrients are absorbed for the time being it will stop the absorbing that specific element. Example once enough fat is absorbed no more fat will be absorbed. At that time Vitamin -A need may not have been fulfilled, so the system will look for any opportunity to extract Vitamin-A from the food we continue to eat - the rest of the food will be bypassed.

Sounds like a science fiction? I am sure you will love it and hope this is available in the market before we die obese :)

Customer Loyalty, Acquisition Cost, Promotional offers etal.

2011-08-20T12:40:00.001-07:00

In today's marketplace Customer Loyalty is a rare phenomenon. So many companies are trying to get Customer attention and share of Customer's wallet that it is increasingly becoming costlier to acquire Customer's business. Everyday customers are flooded with Daily Deals emails, Coupons in the mailbox, Promotional offers and account opening bonuses. Most of them ignore it(never open the email or throw them in the mailbox garbage bins). Second largest consumer category - exploit the offer and move on. Only the very few accept the offer and become loyal customers. Very inefficient, yet most popular(easy solution?).

There are few rare exceptions who never(or rarely) discount their prices but still can manage to get an extremely loyal customer base. Think about Apple or Disney - Have you seen them giving away deep discounts on a regular basis or sending promotional offers through mail? They do not. Instead they concentrate in creating an amazing product which people love to buy. Delighted customers do the advertisements free of charge(Inbound marketing?).

There is another great way to secure loyal customers - by being human and providing great customer support(zappos was a great example). When a company grows big it introduces lot of processes and procedures and thus become a giant robot loosing the human mind to help customers. 'We are sorry to hear that but as per our process...' instead of ' I am so sorry, let me try something for you...'. No prize for guessing who will win customer's soul.

Both these are tough to do when you are a big organization. Hence they are so rare. But they are worth the try!

Beautiful Design and Elevator Pitch - But most startups fail to attack the big problems

2011-08-13T11:56:00.001-07:00

I was reviewing the AngelList Startups. Most of them have fantastic website design and great elevator pitch(Can someone tell me how they draft such a beautiful story with multimedia, graphics etc. - there must be some great tool I am not aware of). Unfortunately most of them are either minor modification of familiar websites(leaders can easily implement the extra features and kill these followers, I saw many mint.com type sites) or target very small market size to become really successful(I found one website for buying travel plans for russia).

Niche is the theme for startups but I think there are many niche areas which have huge untapped potential and ideal for startups.

How to guarantee your luggage won't be lost or stolen next time you fly

2011-08-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

Interesting idea...this blog is full of interesting ideas:)

Junk or Interesting - what do you think?

2011-08-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

Read here and discuss :)

People here just vanish..

2011-08-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

'There are no nameplates, no flowers and no reminders of their lives. People here just vanish'

Thanks Dr. Gupta for this story

When will we give enough importance to basics - Food, Water, Health and Education(Information)...

Interesting Eat out destinations

2011-08-10T15:06:00.002-07:00

Enjoy something new

Thoughts on Statistics

2011-08-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes statistically negligible items get huge media importance but more critical but boring stats do not. Here is a fantastic TED Talk and a fantastic article.

'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'

Drunken Ben Bernanke Tells Everyone At Neighborhood Bar How Screwed U.S. Economy Really Is

2011-08-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

Here is the News

Kiva - Best way to Help Entrepreneurs to grow out of poverty

2011-08-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

Loans that Change Lives - Kiva is offerring first $25 loan offer to get started. Believe in the power of multiplication effect, rather than helping a person with one time $25 you can use the same dollar multiple times and help multiple people by providing them Loans.

Give it a shot.

Daily Deal - Only good for buyers and deal sites

2011-07-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

It does not really help merchants, very few people really do repeat business. People who follows deal sites are opportunists – it is stupidity to expect them to be loyal and pay the retail price. See the analysis here.

This deal site business is in bubble zone. Must cool down after some time.

Career Success, becoming famous and...

2011-07-28T16:41:00.002-07:00

There are two ways.

Either you choose a career path which is very competitive and proven to be very rewarding for people on top and then be very good at it. For example you choose medical profession and join Harvard Medical School(top one percentile or less).

Or you can join a career which is new and market is yet to appreciate the potential(hence less competitive)and then be reasonably good at it. In this case you don’t need to be genius or extremely good but if the market demand increases you will automatically make it huge(early mover advantage). These people are either visionary or they are ordinary people rejected by competition from the hot career options.

This is not only true for choosing a career. It is a more generic than that. You can choose a crowded street and try all your best (dangerous) driving skills and reach your destination in one hour instead of one hour and ten minutes or find an unknown shortcut and make it in five minutes. These Information asymmetries are real.

Job Applicant screening – Unique idea

2011-07-26T11:23:00.001-07:00

See how a new startup 'Square' has done this. Here is the link

To apply, please submit along with your resume a critique of the following code:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

#

# This program encrypts and decrypts messages at the command line.

# It runs setuid root, so that it can be used by users without giving

# them access to the (root-owned) secret encryption key.

require 'openssl'

SECRET_KEY="/etc/secrypt.key"

OUTPUT_FILE="/tmp/secrypt.out"

cipher = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new('aes-256-ecb')

case ARGV.shift

when 'encrypt'

cipher.encrypt

when 'decrypt'

cipher.decrypt

else

puts "Usage:"

puts "$0 [encrypt
decrypt] "

exit 1

end

cipher.key=(File.read(SECRET_KEY))

input = File.open(ARGV.shift)

output = File.open(OUTPUT_FILE, "w")

input.each_line do
l

output.write(cipher << l)

end

Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street

2011-07-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Check out this fantastic documentary on Wall Street. Last decade saw many Scientist moving to Financial world as Quants and they loved it.When I was in college I read this fantastic article and had a dream of joining wall street someday(I loved both Physics and Finance). But I have now dropped that idea. I have a feel that there are many other areas which are more important than so called 'Financial Innovation' and gambling through high frequency trading. Finance should just have an role of intermediary for money flow - take money from investors or savers and hand it over to entrepreneurs or businesses for creating value. Instead it is earning lion's share of revenue from trading, creating synthetic instruments(CDOs etc.) and gambling with other people's money risk-free. This is not creating any value, it is actually a value-destroying activity.

Remember, sustainable wealth can be only be created by creating real value through Innovation(by creating new products and services and thus solving some problem for large number of people). Trading and creating synthetic financial products can not substitute that. And we need a substantial mindset change for appreciating that. Too many talents are wasting their time in wall-street firms just for money.

The best thing that the government can do to solve many of our problems is to change the wall-street Compensation policy(I am not suggesting a cap on compensation, but compensation based on risk-return and appropriate clawback - Hedge Fund managers can get a share of profit, but then they have to take a share of loss as well). Once this is in place, all this wall-street excess will be gone and it will be more boring place for many innovative minds. That will be good from two perspectives: Finance will limit its role to the point it creates real value for people - small firms borrowing and lending money(not like today's 'Too big to fail' gambling organizations). At the same time other industries(energy, biotech etc.) will get talents for solving real big problems the world is facing.

Leave East Coast and come to West Coast. West coast is all about casual dressing and creating real value. East coast is all about vanity fair and Financial manipulation. Its your choice!

The Biggest Financial Opportunity the World has ever seen!!

2011-07-16T16:31:00.001-07:00

Tall Claims but will it deliver?

Have some Free Computing TIme..Volunteer!

2011-07-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy. Try BOINC

Do you support bitcoin and wikileaks?

2011-07-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

I do..what about you?

Netflix Gyan - Nice!

2011-07-15T09:33:00.003-07:00

Enjoy the insights. I would love to work in a team like this.

My 2 cents - I always think the peer group comparison performance ranking, percentile ranking is never a great idea for Teamwork, which is essential for great organization. The NextGen companies are starting to recognize that fact and trying to create a 'helping organization'. Keep great people who can think beyond the obvious and the synergy will move the company ahead. The compensation should be primarily based on Team Performance. Individualistic variances will be required based on market needs but that should never be Peer-comparison rating based. It should be based on Individual meeting their own set targets.

We need Angel Investing/Venture Capital instead of Share Trading

2011-07-05T12:20:00.002-07:00

So many analysts are wasting their time on Stock Analysis and misguiding general public. They are just trying to grow trading volume so that Financial Services community (Fund manager, Trading companies, Analysts firms) makes money and general public loose out. This is a Win-Lose scenario.

Let me suggest a win-win scenario. A platform is badly needed so that common people can invest some of their money in new companies, startups etc. These New Companies new Venture Capital money and sometimes good ideas die just due to lack of Venture Capital funding. Today common men(say having investable capital less than one million or so) cannot participate in Venture/Angel funding – government rules prohibit that. Also common people probably do not have enough competence to do the due diligence before investing in new venture. Why can’t we relax the rules of Venture capital funds where anyone can invest with their small amount of money. Government should allow this as they are investing agreeing that it is a high risk-high return investment and they can lose money(it is anyway true for a stock after IPO).

If this is allowed we will see Financial Analysts will get some interesting job to do(rather than suggesting Buy on stock today and then recommending ‘Sell’ after a month)which will actually help the economy to boom. Prudent investors will get an opportunity to invest and benefit in the early growth of a company and new entrepreneurs will get enough funding to pursue their dreams. They will get much more options to ask for money than they get today.

Really Fast Food...

2011-06-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

My wife was preparing some wonderful Indian Foods yesterday. Preparing good Indian food takes a lot of effort, estimation skill( and some amount of luck) and time - you need to put all spices at the right time, fry or boil ingredients based on quantity of food being prepared etc. She spent almost her full day preparing different foods and it took just 15 minutes to eat all these good stuff. We started at finished - it seemed to be over in no time. That is frustrating for me (and I hope some of my readers think in the same line) - we should improve on this to save time on cooking.

Make no mistake, I am not suggesting that we stop experimenting with food, try new things to create exotic dishes but once we figure out the recipe we should be able to automate it and the cook can just set instructions and forget about it. It will be ready in five minutes without any supervision.

Preparing food is nothing but some chemical and physical reactions done at controlled environments. I think we have not done good research on these processes and chemical reactions - if there is a way to expedite the process through some catalysts etc. So instead of having an detail instruction of the procedure the recipe of future will just have the ingredients and the Names of Chemical reactions(which can be set into a universal 'Fast Cooker'). Probably there is way to reach same final state much more quickly and one day we can have Chicken Biriyani within 15 minutes instead of hours.

Think about it. Everyone(even people like us who can't cook) should get a chance to eat tasty food...fast.

Where should I park my car?

2011-06-23T14:36:00.001-07:00

I am not sure if somebody has already thought about it(I could not find any patents). It is a pain to just move around searching for a parking place in a big parking area(I feel whenever I enter office late).

Why can't we have a Imaging/Recognition system which can scan and inform motorists of any parking space in a big parking area? I can just check and go straight to park my car?

Are your People Over Communicating?

2011-06-09T17:42:00.002-07:00

Communication overhead is a major pain for large companies. Effective communication and right amount of Information sharing is required but what happens is too many people is trying to convey too many items to too many people in too many ways(email, phone calls, meeting, memos, Town halls). All these noise(people don’t care to what the others are saying) decreases company focus, wastes the most important resource of employees which is time and increases operational(including Technical cost).

Companies need major culture change – follow minimalist philosophy. But before that they need to do some surveys and number crunching – How many man-hours of meetings happen in the company, How many emails are sent and received(check how many emails were sent on same topic because of gap in communication), how many minutes of phone calls are made etc. and then get a pulse from employees – how frustrated they are with communication overhead and how they think this can be reduced.

This should then be benchmarked with companies of similar nature and statistics of best performing companies. Do you have any other thoughts on this?

Fix my Stuff

2011-06-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

In United States or other advanced countries there is generally no concept of fixing stuff - be it shoes, Electronics, or any other stuff. We purchase, use for some day and when some small things go wrong we just throw them out. This is because cost or time needed to fix them do not justify fixing it - it is much more easier to buy a new one. The reason is price of a new item is generally less due to scalable factory operation procedure but generally the process of fixing stuff is unorganized and not scalable increasing the per item cost.

Not fixing and just throwing them out is a very bad solution from environment and resource utilization perspective. We could have saved a lot of natural resources, energy, effort, money and pollution(waste) if we could fix things in a more scalable manner.

Why can't we have a scalable business to fix stuff in a more scalable fashion reducing the cost to a level which will encourage people to fix things rather than buy a new one. This should ideally be a factory with a high concentration of specialists as a part of gating process. They will receive a defective item - understand what needs to be fixed and channel to the right channel. Then the fixing process can be should be routinized and low cost affair providing the advantage of scale. Initially it will have entry barrier - but with time it will become much more scalable.

Revolution or Evolution

2011-05-20T08:06:00.002-07:00

Not suggesting we need a socialist country where we reward bad behaviour. But today rich are are rewarded much more than the value they create. We need to Tax rich(I support redistribution) and use that money for education and research which can solve next big issues such as Energy, Food, Health etc.We also need to ensure that we have more people moving to elite professions such as Medical profession etc. and reduce the supply demand curve in profession(commodatize elite professions to some extent).

As suggested by Raghuram G. Rajan we need education to bridge the gaps. This is the only way we can avoid revolution and move to overall prosperity by evolution.

There will be huge pressure from the Elite Lobby(such as medical school lobby) and we need a strong mass leader to lead this.

'Truly' Active Portfolio Management

2011-05-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

Read a fantastic article written by Scott Vincent of Green River Asset Management named 'Is Portfolio Theory Harming Your Portfolio?'. My view closely matches with his view on Risk Management and Portfolio construction. Historical Number crunching is not the best Risk management approach and ideal portfolio should not have any bias for specific security class. Ideally investors should look for value and concentrated approach really helps in managing the Portfolio.

That's why I want to be a farmer!

2011-05-15T19:28:00.001-07:00

Food - Why so much waste when there is so much need and why no business is working on stopping this?

2011-05-13T14:37:00.001-07:00

Per these reports(here is a more detailed report) we waste a huge amount of food every year. Any waste is bad especially when we cannot feed good quality food to everyone in the world. Leave aside the people from poor countries, even many families in economically advanced countries such as USA can’t have healthy food everyday(they consume cheap quality fast food as healthy food is costly). Food Inc. suggests that this cheap fast food culture can become very costly in the long term considering the high cost healthcare impacts(Obesity, Diabetes etc.). So this is a huge problem – social, health, economic - from all perspectives. Now any problem is an opportunity for new business – then why we haven’t seen any successful business effort to solve this problem. To answer this let’s think through the problem and see if some solution emerges.

Pre-consumption food waste due to perishable nature of food products:

This is the waste which happens during Production-Processing-Distribution stage. It is primarily supply-chain management and storage management problem. As soon as the food is produced it needs to be either taken to market or stored in Cold storage. Primarily a problem with Developing countries.

Consumer Food waste:

This happens after the consumer has purchased the food. Primarily a Problem of Plenty – Purchase more food than they can consume before it gets wasted. Sometimes this is a problem with lifestyle in wealthy countries.

What are the Possible Solutions and Business Opportunities:

Supply Chain and Food Storage Management:

There is a huge infrastructure gap(especially in poor developing countries) for quickly processing food, storing food in cold storage(warehouses) at right temperature and then managing the supply chain using FIFO or appropriate algorithm. In many developing countries 30-40% of food wastage can be avoided if these are taken care of. There are problems of politics and local power play as well impacting the scaling up of these systems. Instead of these issues I think there is a huge opportunity of supply chain and Food storage management business(especially in the developing countries).

Demand dependent Supply management:

Storage of Perishable food is a big challenge and this add to the cost of the food (also has Greenhouse impacts due to Cooling requirement). This problem can be avoided if Supply cycles can be matched closely with the demand cycles. For example a company can provide intelligence to the local producers based on the typical historical consumption/sales data. Just in Time(JIT) Production from local Producers can really help in minimizing the waste.

When producing corps farmers can divide their field in 12 small sections and target the harvest in each month. This way we can minimize the need of food storage and also produce a uniform distribution of food. This will also help farmers to streamline their revenue-cost cycles and reduce the risk of waste/lower cost of produce.

Waste of Food in Restaurants:

Two ideas – Restaurants should have capability to offer Real time deals (similar to what Groupon is going to offer) when they see they cannot sell their food at standard price.

Also in case they cannot sell the food there should be some collection agency collecting the food from restaurants which can be offered to the poor people on food stamps. The Restaurants should be given some Tax breaks as a motivation. A social Business(NGO/Government sponsored agency) can offer the service of collecting the food and distributing to the poor people. Great if these agencies can have intelligence on the demand-supply needs and expiry date of the collected foods to make intelligent decisions etc. This will allow these agencies to transfer the non-perishable food to poor countries as well.

Waste of Food in Households

Again we will love to have an intelligence on our future food needs and have suggestions on when to buy at what quality. A portal can provide this intelligence – I will enter what all I plan to eat in next few days and based on my availability of grocery in my freeze it will suggest what else I need to buy in my next supermarket visit.

How boring life can be - A short film

2011-05-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

Housewives live such a boring life - terrible waste of human energy. I think they want to do good work - but due to different reasons they can not. It sounds great that you have no work, you can enjoy all your time in seeing TV but in reality it is terrible life. See the comments in the movie - one guy could not even see this 10 min film. Then just think how painful it can be for the housewives who live such life years after years!

Happy Mother's Day - Valuing mom's work

2011-05-09T17:07:00.001-07:00

Here is a great article which does the valuation of the work moms do which generally gets unnoticed, and unrecognized.

Mom's contribution in our lives is priceless but do we always appreciate it?

http://amazingnews.org

2011-05-07T21:21:00.003-07:00

Air India - How TaxPayer money is getting destroyed by the Dishonest Politicians

2011-05-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

There has been a great story around AirIndia - how the minister-industrialist nexus destroyed the institution. I am not against the privatization of Government owned institutions (considering the historic mismanagement of Taxpayers money) but we need to make sure it is sold at right valuations.

We have seen similar cases in the privatization of other government owned companies - where the valuation was less than even their book value(or Networth).

Not sure if we can stop this, but it is always worth a try..at least post Lokpal satyagraha success.

Remembering a Modest Billionaire

2011-05-04T11:00:00.002-07:00

Great Read from Wealth Report.

How to make a better workplace

2011-05-03T19:50:00.000-07:00

I am a great fan of Jason Fried of 37signals(Frankly speaking my dream company to work for). Check out this TED video on making a better workplace - no meeting, less manager disturbance.

Also read a great book from them.

Simply Jaw dropping:Computing a theory of everything

2011-04-30T16:54:00.002-07:00

Example first, theory later!

Here is the Demo for Wolfram|Alpha:

And here is the Theory and more discussions from Stephen Wolfram:

Interested? Try yourself here

My Two cents...this is not exhaustive, but a wonderful start!!

Some Fantastic Life Lessions from ZenHabits

2011-04-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

Read, Enjoy and Implement.

Pmail - More Control, Less Resource and Better User Experience

2011-04-28T22:07:00.001-07:00

As per the April 2010 Radicati Group study around 90 trillion emails are sent every year and approximate email users in the world are around 1.9 Billion. Unfortunately 90% of these emails are Junk.

These numbers are alarming when we consider the inefficiency associated with the Productivity Loss, Network usage and Email Server usage. In present avatar email systems have huge redundancy. Consider the case when an email with 2 MB attachment is sent to 1000 people (email sent to groups/Reply all/Spams) out of which only 10 persons are interested or need those data. But everyone receives a copy; the transmission takes huge bandwidth, Email servers take huge storage and ultimately People need to spend thousands of unproductive hours to delete those emails.

There are other issues with email. In today’s form once you press the ‘Send’ button you don’t have any control to restrict the content. This is because all receivers get a personal copy in their local mail box and you don’t have access to Delete that data. But ideally the sender should have a control to restrict the data even if the sender sent the email by mistake (controlling confidential data).

From the receiver’s perspective controlling unwanted emails is a pain. Sometimes we receive unwanted emails as Reply Alls and then the chain continues – everyone pressing ‘Reply All’ and flooding everyone’s mailbox. This should be changed – if the receiver marks an email as ‘unwanted’ – no other email (Reply All emails) on the same topic should not reach the receiver’s mailbox.

Permission MAIL (pmail) – a new avatar of email

Here I propose a new permission based standard of email communication – Permission mail or Pmail. Here are the basic features of Pmail communication:

· When a sender sends a Pmail he/she do not send the whole content of the email to everyone – only a lightweight version with the links to open the content is sent to everyone. The content is stored as a single copy in the sender’s email server. Multiple copies are not created and send to everyone.

· If the receiver is not interested in the email he/she can delete the Pmail – Deletion of a Pmail means the read/copy access to the mail is lost. The original mail content is not changed/deleted.

· If the receiver is interested he/she will have an option to copy the content in his/her local email server – for future reference. Ideally the receiver keeps a local copy only for Business critical emails (Just to ensure sender cannot in future revoke his/her access to read the Pmail).

· If the receiver is not interested in the email he/she will have a control to avoid any further mail discussion on the same topic (no reply all emails will come to his/her mailbox). The receiver will also have control to mark the mail as spam and in that case no mail sent from the sender mailbox will reach his/her mailbox.

· The sender will have control to restrict the access of an email sent. As only an access is sent to the recipient (instead of a local copy) the sender can control that access in future. Of course if the recipient has already read and then copied the mail to his/her local mailbox this feature won’t work.

· In case someone ‘Reply/Reply all’ to the original Pmail a new single copy will be generated in the sender’s email server and everyone else will get a permission link to read the follow-up conversation.

· Anyone can again delete the follow-up mail – which simply means the deletion of the access to the original copy.

Benefits

There are various benefits to this plan – for every key stakeholder, Sender, Receiver, Email Service Provider etc. Here are some of the benefits:

· Huge savings in resources by reduction of redundancy – Huge saving of Network bandwidths, Email Server Space utilization etc. Only the interested people will download the email and associated files to local folder.

· Less pain from Spam mails – Today Spammers send huge amount of junk emails causing big wastage of email servers and network bandwidth. In the Pmail protocol spammers need to own the data – saving corporations lot of email server space and network bandwidth.

· More Control for sender – You can still restrict even after hitting the ‘send’ button.

· More control for the receiver – Better Customer experience– No junk reply all need to be entertained. No need for frequent mailbox cleanup.

· Balance between Control and Contract – In this protocol both Sender and Receiver has Control over the Content. If the Sender had full control over the content he/she can refuse sending any such email – which can be against the contractual obligations between two parties. To avoid this receiver has a permission to create the local copy. At the same time Receiver has right to control the access of the data sent to unintended recipients.

· Huge reduction in Carbon footprint by the reduction in server needs.

Implementation challenges

This is still a theoretical concept and needs Technical Implementation. Here are the known challenges for Implementation:

· Agreeing on the new standard by all players – This is an epoch-making change the way we communicate through electronic mails. It will take time to convince all the players to move to this new Protocol. But considering the huge benefits a tipping point will be reached and it will become the ‘Next Practice’.

· Initially the users may be uncomfortable in this new format – they may not like that they need to access a centralized place for accessing the email content. To reduce this risk the change needs to as transparent as possible to the user. The pmail can have one or two line content(summary will help reader to decide if the email is relevant to him/her) and then a link to read the full content. The users also need to trained for the new helpful features of Pmail.

· There may be some security concerns around this model- Public access (although restricted to the recipients only) to email servers may not be acceptable to companies (fear to hacking). In my view the email can become a cloud service and with proper User Access Control the data security issue will be greatly reduced.

· There may be ‘unknown unknowns’ – which can adversely impact the acceptance of this protocol. This fear is more after the so called failure of ‘Google wave’ although I feel ‘Google wave’ is a wonderful product and may have been killed due to Google Internal failures.

P-email adoption in business – private cloud model

Within an organization most of the emails exchanged are internal. This makes a good case for Pmail implementation as a Private Cloud based service. Private Cloud model will ensure that no Data security is compromised as well as resource duplication is reduced. Message Archiving and Storage takes major chunk of the cost for email. Reducing email content duplication in email servers can dramatically reduce this cost. At the same time it will save money on Network use, reduction of operational costs etc.

Once Pmail is successfully implemented within Business different Public email providers (gmail, yahoo etc.) will start using the model. But for Inter domain email exchange a common standard/protocol need to be created. Different organizations such as IEEE, W3 etc. need to be involved to create the mail exchange protocol.

Ric Elias: 3 things I learned while my plane crashed | Video on TED.com

2011-04-27T23:05:00.001-07:00

US Higher Education - in Bubble zone

2011-04-24T20:31:00.003-07:00

Some good ideas from an artist

2011-04-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

Austin Kleon wrote a fantastic blog entry on some of his secrets. Liked his concept of Newspaper Blackout. You can buy the book from amazon.

Analyst who makes sense

2011-04-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts on US Laws

2011-04-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

I was watching a CNBC Program on Divorce Wars and some thoughts came to my mind on US Law and Enforcement system (although CNBC Reporters generally create all the undue noise and misguide people, the 'CNBC Originals' series is worth your time).
In one divorce fight the wife made an allegation that her husband watches and stores child pornography. To prove that she took her husband's Laptop and produced in the court. Now Storing or even viewing Child Pornography is a serious crime by US laws and the Husband was facing life-changing punishments.
During the investigation, it was found that all the Internet Browsing history was deleted from the Laptop.

But the Lawyers were able to restore those histories and found a suspecting pattern which indicates that the person did not visit any pornographic site except one day on which all the materials were downloaded. Also it was found that on that date the husband was far away from home but the local offers(which pops up based on your IP address) were all from his hometown. This proves the point that the person did not downloaded the materials but probably his wife did to make a powerful divorce case. The wife wanted to ruin her husband's career as well.

The program asks some serious concerns over the marriage, financial impact of divorce, divorce laws etc.but today my point of discussion is something different. I am concerned the way laws are formulated and the way they they are enforced. I am concerned if the lawmakers really want to stop a crime or they just want to keep a law for helping lawyers and government to make a good business from the law. Let me explain the reasons for my concern:

Let's take the case of Child pornography or a more generic case of pornography. All the lawmakers and Law enforcement authorities know that pornography is a big business in US and all over the world. It is very easy and very common for everyone to access pornography in the Internet. If lawmakers and enforcement authorities are really concerned about the society and they really want to stop the curse they have easier way to stop it rather than making allegations on few people: They can just block the sites promoting pornography.
Similar is the logic for stopping cigarette . We all know cigarette kills people and no less harmful than drugs, but lawmakers have not banned cigarette. They say they are discouraging smokers by increasing taxes, adding warning etc. But not just make it illegal to produce? They won't because they make good money out of this business. Policymaking is an art - behave!

This is not really specific to US but a very generic problem all over the world. In India we have no less laws- but all laws are meant to be broken. It helps police, politicians, lawyers and journalists...and probably everyone except the unfortunate few.

Real Time calorie and Nutrient Counter

2011-04-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

We need an instrument which can measure calorie and Nutrient intake from food real time and suggest diet against the target numbers. We should also have an instrument which will measure calorie consumption from each and every activities, walking, breathing, seating, running in gym etc. When someone can see the In-n-Out numbers in Real time Dieting will be so easy.

Think about it. I start with a heavy breakfast and as soon as I have take the food the instrument in my stomach ticks and alerts that I have 500 calorie. Now I go to office and do some work. Before the lunch I see that I have consumed around 400 calorie. In the Lunch I take some salad and the instrument in my stomach reads 400 calorie. Also it reads that I have consumed x ml sodium, y ml of Vitamin A etc. when I go to diner it will suggest that I should take some 200 calorie dinner and also x ml of zinc and y ml of Vitamin C. Based on these numbers and also my diet targets and preferences it will suggest that I should take some Hawaiian Delight and go to bed!

Nice, huh?

Corruption Vs Lobbying

2011-04-20T21:27:00.000-07:00

Rich and powerful people always try to influence policies and results for their needs. In India it is done through Bribes or violent mental pressure. In India we call it Corruption. Sometimes, although not very common, these people face legal trials as well. As in the case of 2G scam.

Here in US we have lobbying power. But surprisingly this is legal and not a case of Corruption.

The frustration is nicely put forward here:

'There are some fund managers who need to get their heads examined. If they are particularly from the western world, then they have no right to say anything about India's practices. They are coming from countries that have completely given law the go by. In the whole subprime scam, not even a single person has been arrested till date. In the case of 2G spectrum, there is virtually no scam in my view. It has been a media creation.

Till now, I have not seen the evidence of Rs 20000 crore being paid to A Raja. Maximum you can question the lack of an auction, why a fixed price, but there are plenty of views on both sides. However, in the subprime, there is absolute scam, fictitious profits, fictitious assets, fleecing poor homeowners, rigging the whole economy, making the whole world economy crash and not even a single arrest. That is the way the US deals with this.'

Just to be clear I don't think corruption is good anywhere in the world, but I am just pointing out the way west looks at east and never bother to fix its own problems.

Two ideas worth consideration

2011-04-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

Reducing Transmission Loss in Electricity Distribution system(Power transfer) and improving the efficiency of battery capacity in Regenerative Braking…two ideas worth consideration.

These have huge potential for reducing the energy wastage.

Simplify Tax Rules

2011-04-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

We have a complicated Tax system which supports the rich and dishonest people. We have too many loopholes for avoiding Tax. We need to have a simple Tax structure - fixed percentage of Income as Income Tax, Profit as Corporate Tax and Sales value as Sales Tax. No deductions, No Credits.

I understand it will discourage some spendings such as Charity spending, spending on buying a solar panel etc. But there are other ways to help those industries or organizations. Government can create a fund to support specific initiatives.

This will ensure people can not make false claims for Tax deductions, simplified Tax codes will reduce the need for Billion dollar Tax Preparation industry(which does not add any value to the society) and government can reduce Tax Audit related overheads.

All can spend their time on more productive activities.

Think about it!

Foreclosed Houses on Rent

2011-04-18T22:49:00.000-07:00

We have excess capacity in the Housing market(1 million homes were foreclosed in 2010 and 13% of all the homes in the United States are sitting empty). Banks and Investors are loosing money on these assets.

At the same time Rent is increasing across US. This is absurd. There is an imbalance.

Why can't Banks start renting the Foreclosed houses at lower rents(less than mortgage payment but they will still make some money and still own the asset for future appreciation). The Rents will be reduced across US and eventually the balance will return to US Housing market.

I think it is a much better proposition than Banks trying to sell the properties which is again reducing the value of the properties(+ve feedback loop moving the House prices downwards).

Need of the hour:Remove the Guesswork from Driving

2011-04-16T23:20:00.000-07:00

Left Turns, Blind Spots, Lane Changes, Back Gears - Just consider if we could remove the guesswork from driving! I think we can avoid thousands of car accidents, millions in medical and insurance costs if we can arrange better sensors and have a handshaking mechanism(wireless signalling based protocol) in place. Let's consider different cases:

Left Turns and Lane changes: We need to have new devices, protocol and laws to eliminate the guesswork. When a Car wants to change the lane or take a left turn(driver can indicate through Indicators) the other stakeholder car driver(which must agree to avoid the collision) will get a notice(using some wireless signals activating some alert sounds) to 'approve' the request for lane change. The car requesting the lane change can only take the turn once this request is approved(again through a wireless signal). This Request Approval process will be recorded and in case of any accident during the lane change the history will be analyzed. If the driver made the turn without the Approval - it will be his/her fault. But if the other driver 'approved' the turn and still hit the car during lane change - the driver approving the Turn will be at fault.

Blind spots and Sudden stops: Blind spot driving(backing or taking left turns in a 4-way crossing) and Sudden stops cause lot of car accidents. We need sensor mechanism in place so that driver knows that a moving car is nearby reducing any guesswork. Also the need to stop(forcefully) if it recognizes a potential collision(the car in the from suddenly stops or while backing driver is going to hit a wall etc.).

Introduction of these technologies is not that difficult. I think the difficult piece is the agreement of this protocol(may require new driving laws) and corresponding unlearning and relearning by all the drivers. But considering the huge potential this is worth the effort.

TED - How it can close the Digital Divide and Democratize Ideas worth Spreading

2011-04-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

TED (stands for 'Technology Entertainment Design') is one of the best nonprofit organizations in the world. Its mission: spreading ideas - really good ideas. TED arranges conferences in different parts of the worlds where remarkable speakers and innovators share their thoughts. The best thing is even if you don't have time and money to attend those conferences you can listen to those 'TEDTalks' online, free of charge whenever you want(there is even a shared list of TEDTalks available here). They have even extended their reach through different initiatives such as TEDx events(designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level), TED Open Translation Project(TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, interactive transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide),TED Books(imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution), TED Conversations(discussions in TED.com on different issues) etc. This is truly an outstanding accomplishment!

TED has potential to change the world in a big way. TED can democratize the process of Innovation and provide new meaning in millions of lives around the world. I dream of a day when an inquisitive mind in the poorest village of a developing country will have access to TEDTalks. Motivated by an inspiring speech she will do some experiment(may be just mind experiment) and suggest a solution to a major problem facing us. TED will share those incremental innovations with Businesses, Nonprofits and Governments. Someone will find value in those ideas and try it in a big way and thus those ideas will become the 'Next Practice'. The talented, poor village girl will be able to contribute and get recognition which is unthinkable today. I envision TED as a Global Hub for Innovation. The democratization of Innovation and open exploration of different perspectives(people from developed and developing countries can provide rich perspectives which can accelerate Innovation) are absolutely necessary for a sustainable future world and TED can make that happen.

Next consider a different perspective altogether. There is no lack of good ideas - but they don't reach the tipping point. What is lacking is the promotion of those ideas among masses and creation of a meaningful social transformation. Consider the case of Healthy Lifestyle - we have great ideas around this. But many people do not have right information or there is no social drive to follow this. Healthy or Green Lifestyle practices can dramatically improve our lives but what is frustrating to see is the lack of execution. I believe people are not inherently lazy, stupid or selfish but they need leadership, engagement and tangible motivation to drive a change. Most of the media has miserably failed to guide and engage society. You need examples? Let me start with TV. Serials and Soaps - everyone is conspiring to harm others - this is 'mind pollution', if you always see the world through negative lens how can you expect people to behave friendly and trust each other? Movies - another major source of 'mind pollution' - Violence,destruction and hatred. Newspapers and New channels - noise of Stock performance(buy this, sell that) discussions(by so called 'Technical Specialists') to help the Financial Services industry to make money. Sorry I missed out another Big Item - 'Reality Shows' -tremendous wastage of your time. I think most people in the world do not have a choice today to see programs around meaningful discussions, Infotainments and opportunity for mass engagements to drive the change. I think most of the people can differentiate good from bad and there is an opportunity, an unmet need for providing good content through different distribution channels(TV, Cinema, Live Discussion etc.).

Let's consider one more issue before I discuss some proposals. This is the issue of 'Digital Divide' - 'Havs' and 'Have-nots' of Internet era. Many people in the world still do not have access to High Speed Internet or even computers. It is true even in developed countries such as USA but is more prominent problems in Developing countries such as India. In India many people even can't read or write(I am not talking about English literacy, there are millions of people who can't read/write in any language) and access to High Speed Internet is a distant dream for them. How can we access these population and help them to make informed decisions? Teaching them How to Read and write - good idea but we have not have enough resources(time, money, people) to reduce adult literacy. Increasing Internet Access in poor villages- again good idea but it needs time and money(need government subsidy support as many poor do not have money to pay for the service). Why don't we try things which are already available? We have movie halls, we have TVs we have convention theaters(even if in some primitive form) even in the remotest places. And instead of written material why can't we provide the audio-visual content in local languages(which everyone can understand making it very appealing).

Here are some of my proposals for a sustainable TED revolution around the world. TED ideas are still limited to very small group of people who can access in some form(Paid conferences, Online through High Speed Internet etc.). We need to scale up the access around the world through different delivery channels. This needs considerable resource(money, people etc.) and TED can arrange that by changing the Business model to some extent. TED can partner with different TV channels, Movie distribution houses, Cable operators, Local Non-profits to deliver the content in the form of small TV Programs(sponsored by Ads), short films dubbed in local languages(multiple TED Talks on similar themes), On Demand TED Talks(paid cable content), TED Talks recordings in Non-profit conferences etc. As told before we have a unmet market need for good content around the world and if distributed(in right language, in right place and in right form) and promoted properly it will be well-accepted.

Skeptics will say that we already have Discovery channel and other Infotainment channels available globally, and they have not been very successful in capturing the market share. Most people still see Politics, Soap or Reality Show when they watch TV or they prefer an Action thriller when they try Video-on-demand. My take is that they have not perfected the content delivery and promotion piece to keep viewers engaged. The programs need to be planned around themes/serial format(not just some 30 minute random Informational programs), they need to be more interactive(for viewer participation and engagement) and they need to be customized based on viewers socioeconomic demographies(one Indian village farmer may not be interested on modern art in Europe but may be very interested in Solar Energy solutions). They have other delivery issues - the content is not delivered in local languages and the format is created towards more elite audience(assumes some familiarity with the terms, issues etc.). Also the convergence is missing - we do not have uniform collaborative interface between web, TV, Movie, OnDemand video and other delivery channels. People love to see results and they love collaboration. If after seeing a program on Healthy Living they can collaborate(through remarks, live conversations, meetups) and really see improved results(by competing with their peers they also able to reduce the bodyweight etc.) they will be more engaged and that will be the tipping point of this revolution.

New Generation Microfinance –Financial Inclusion beyond microloans

2011-04-02T22:39:00.002-07:00

Microfinance has become a big phenomenon in developing countries in last decade. Private Equity and Venture Capital investors recently made a lot of money in the SKS Microfinance IPO in India. But after that SKS and other Microfinance organizations were in the center of the controversy for charging very high interests to the poor (political parties alleged they are behaving like loan sharks and poor people are committing suicide for their harassment). In Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank (which have a different Business philosophy from SKS and other Indian counterparts – they don’t believe in Capital Market participation and for-profit role of microfinance) was also part of different controversies including charges of corruption. In this article I will propose some solutions beyond microloans and how that can benefit poor and at the same time be a profitable business (win-win case).

I believe present form of Microfinance Business practice is not sustainable. A poor with no business experience can not take a loan with 24% Interest and still make money. This must go down a lot. The only way you can do this is by taking Banking License and getting cheaper Deposits from the poor. This is also beneficial for the poor as they will create a habit for saving money. My thought: take deposit @5% rate and provide loans @15% max.

Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) should create Credit rating program to assess the risk (both individual credit risk as well as systemic risk). A person having multiple loans and not using the fund for Asset generating purpose should not be given new loans. We need to consider Loan/Income ratio (Responsible lending), usage of loans and other responsible lending practices. Lending growth without considering the quality of growth can be catastrophic (similar to subprime crisis)

MFIs need to create new Business opportunities such as Micro mutual funds - Few people venture to start their own business, but they can invest some money in Stock market and create wealth. MFIs should start their own asset management business (low cost Index funds) for the poor. After MF Entry load was abolished no MF distributor wants to sell Mutual Products (MF) to the rural or urban poor. There has been a major gap to tap this market. Capital market penetration in India is still very poor. MFIs can leverage their existing relationship and infrastructure to service this market.

MFI Network can be leveraged for selling Bottom of the pyramid plays such as alliance marketing revenues for related products for the poor (which really helps them, not just for making money). Informing the Indian poor (having no access to Internet) about New Product/Services can be an win-win proposition for the Product/Services vendors, Poor consumers as well as the MFIs.

Green Business Solution – Different Perspectives

2011-04-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

Changing user attitude is the toughest part of any sustainability solution. More or less we all understand our carbon footprints and how we can lower that impact. But this is a Game Theory problem – ‘Even if I do my part of sustainable living others will not and we all will face the same circumstances. Then why should I compromise?’ My solution tries to address this problem. Here are my proposals:

Charge as you use (variable pricing) and increase the rate enough to motivate people to stop wasting:

Consider the use of water – we pay fixed rate slabs for using water rather than using per gallon. Meaning you may use anywhere between 0-500 gallon and still pay the same price (say $20 per month), 500-1000 gallon and still pay a price slightly more than 0-500 gallon usage (say $30 per month). As you see the price of Natural resources such as water is still very low (who cares for $20 or $30 if you earn $5000 per month) and the fixed slab pricing does not allow enough rewards to motivate sustainable usage. I provided the example of water but this is true for almost all natural resources including oil (oil price is not enough high to motivate people to use public transport or carpool or at least consider reasonable use of car driving – people can afford to drive 60 miles every day to go to office and then another 20 miles to buy groceries – they don’t care to live near office or do grocery shopping once a week), paper(we all fire printouts without considering the need – the price of paper is so low that it does not matter), meat(meat prices are not high enough to motivate people to eat vegetarian food) etc.

My proposals –

Follow the best practices of Steady State Economics (SSE). Let’s first understand the basic philosophy of SSE

Basic Concept of Steady State Economy:

We measure the Progress of an Economy by GDP growth numbers or Performance of a Company by Earnings growth. Higher the growth, better the case for it.

But proponents of the Steady State Economy think that perpetual economic growth is not possible considering the fact that the natural resources are limited. We have limited space in this world (till the time, we can colonize other planets) and hence if we continue to increase the population and everyone starts to consume more and more each day (conventional concept of growth) we cannot sustain. We won't have enough food to eat, enough place to live and enough clear air to breath. On the other hand recession or economic contraction is not healthy or sustainable. Hence a new model was created: Steady State Economy (SSE). In SSE we don't look for growth but concentrate on improving the quality of existing life. A SSE provides a better means for current and future generations to achieve a high quality of life without undermining the life-support systems of the planet. SSE tries to price resources in an itemized manner (for example Cap-and-Trade) so that right kind of checks-and-balances is in place ensuring right amount of usage by everybody.

"A steady state economy features policies that aim for sustainable scale, fair distribution of wealth, efficient allocation of resources, and high quality of life. Living in such an economy would be more satisfying for citizens today and provide more opportunities for future generations. One way to think about a non-growing economy is simply to look around at the current state of affairs. If the economy stopped growing today, we would have just what you see out there. We would have our current population and stock of natural and human-built capital into the foreseeable future. Investment would be redirected toward maintaining those stocks of capital. Energy usage would stabilize (or decrease if we started using energy resources more sparingly and more efficiently). The difference in income levels between the richest and poorest people in society would shrink. Society would focus on economic development (such as educational empowerment, poverty alleviation, and high-quality employment opportunities) rather than uneconomic growth." 1

Price natural resources on variable basis ($.1 per gallon for first 50 gallon, $.2 per gallon for next 50 gallon of water uses etc.) – this will ensure people control the use of resources for their own financial benefit.

Price natural resources at much higher rate - Account and include the Carbon footprint price to increase the price – Price of water, oil, paper, meat need to increase to motivate people to moderate the consumption.

Benchmark people’s behavior against acceptable use:

People perform better if they get constant feedback on how they are doing. Today we do not have intelligent metering systems suggesting the usage of natural resources.

My proposals –

Provide intelligent metering and alerting system so that people can measure their performance against the acceptable numbers: example- if acceptable use of water for a bath is say 10 gallons – once a person has consumed 5 gallon of water he/she will get an alert that “You have consumed 50% of the acceptable water use for one bath”. Once the usage increases to say 15 gallon it will stop the water flow and provide an alert that “You have consumed more than 150% of the acceptable use of water. Think Green. If you really need water to complete this case please restart your count as a separate case”. Stopping the water flow will make sure two things – 1. If the water flow was accidentally on it will be stopped thus reducing any wastage. 2. If the user is overusing resources it will make a serious case for him to change his behavior.

Case for office us of Paper, Electricity etc.- Create a alert and accounting mechanism for responsible use of office supplies – You will get an alert if you are printing above specific number of pages or your computer is Switched on at night.

Use Smart Devices/Processes to reduce waste

We waste a lot of natural resources which can be stopped by introducing smart devices. If we need hot water we have to keep our water flows open for some time before hot water starts flowing. That creates a lot of water wastage.

Similarly when we send emails to multiple people they each receive individual copies of the same email – what a waste of server space!!

My Proposals –

For minimizing water waste: Create an intelligent device which will start hot water flow when the water is ready hot (say at a set temperature).

For minimizing email server space wastage: Rather than sending separate copies of emails to each recipients keep a single copy and provide read access to that copy as email. If someone ‘deletes’ the email only the view access is deleted for him/her and not the actual email. If someone ‘Reply All’ the original email another conversation copy is generated only for the added comments and appropriate access is provided to the ‘reply All’ recipients. Again if someone deletes the Reply all email the access is deleted and not the whole email.

Less is more in Green IT - Tao minimalism can make organizations more effective, profitable and green:

With the coming of cap-and-Trade and other Green regulations IT will have more importance in reducing the waste, minimizing the costs and increasing the profits. Organizations can improve their Green strategy by integrating it with the Core Business strategy and changing the Organizational culture. The Organizations can become more competitive and create long-term shareholder value by following a minimalist approach and focusing on the core competencies.

Two different (conflicting) roles of IT:
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has potential to reduce the Business As Usual(BAU) Carbon footprint by 15%(Re-Engineering save of around USD 1015 Billion by 2020) by creating smart systems(smart energy greed, Intelligent Transportation system etc.)
At the same time global IT industry generates almost 2% of the Global Carbon Dioxide emissions (equivalent to greenhouse gas as the world's airlines as per Gartner study) and this share is increasing because of information overload (Typical Data center capacity double every 5 yrs etc.).

To optimize the role of IT industry we need to make sure we build smart systems which can make smart Decisions to reduce the Carbon footprint by improving the Processes, reducing redundancies, improving utilizations etc.

At the same time we need to make sure we minimize the share of Global Carbon footprint of the IT industry. This can be done either by improvement in Technology (such as Virtualization etc.)Or by minimizing the unnecessary data Processing (this is like either you control the population or minimize the per capita consumption to control the overall effect).

In this solution I will concentrate on the strategies to minimize this Information overload and thus making organizations more effective, profitable and green. The aim of this solution is to show that by integrating Green Strategy to the Core Business strategy and by making an Organization-wide culture change organizations can achieve this goal.

Culture change: An Inevitable component of Green IT strategy

Corporations have historically given more importance to doing more things. The employees have been encouraged to do more: Deliver more Projects, Manage more People, Create more knowledge artifacts, send emails to more people (Distribution list and Reply all), attend more meetings, stay more time in office etc. Unfortunately this mindless growth culture is not effective. We need to appreciate the fact that by doing less we can achieve more. We can save time, money and energy by selectively creating what we do best and increase our effectiveness.

We think the organizations can improve their Carbon footprint by following a minimalist philosophy. Too many activities go on in large organizations without any planning and focus on the long term vision. We do too many Projects which are not aligned with Long term Business strategy. We have many activities or processes which are redundant and can be avoided (thus reducing cost and carbon footprint). We spend too much time on doing and too less time on thinking “What is the best thing to do and how best we can do it”. We produce too much unnecessary things and thus focus less on which is really important. We need to stop this noise and concentrate on core things which are really important. Let me provide you an example:

Green enthusiasts always push for minimizing the use of paper. This is absolutely necessary and a must for Green IT strategy. But what we generally miss out is the cost and carbon footprint associated with Electronic documents. We create millions of documents related to Projects, processes, Knowledge artifacts, financial reports, emails etc. but never care about the quantity and quality of those documents. Many times they are just simple crap, do not add any value, redundant and can be eliminated. Just consider the Storage Server utilization and related power costs. Worse we make these documents searchable (Intranet or Internet). Just consider the recurring cost, time; power and energy we waste on these searches (consider the carbon footprint of all these servers). Good example: Company Knowledge repository – thousands of copy-paste documents without adding any value or any Google search producing too many unnecessary items.

If we run the numbers these costs are serious. Just multiply the number of documents with number of users making number of searches every day.

How to improve?
Assess the IT Infrastructure and processes for redundancy and quality of data. Put stringent quality control on the documents which can be searched across the Enterprise or Internet.
Minimize junk data entering the system. Design an intelligent IT system which will have controls in place to persuade users to enter right/True data. This can be done by integrating IT systems across the organization and putting logic in place to validate the entered data based on available data in the system.
Concentrate on reuse and minimizing redundancy. Rather than creating multiple similar Know-how documents create a single one and allow everyone to improvise it (wiki style).
Encourage quality over quantity: Allow your employees to think and come up with something really good rather than ordering them to create twenty ordinary items. Improve effectiveness and productivity (by quality not by quantity perspective).
Discourage email (especially group emailing), meetings and other time-waster wherever possible.
Block Junk websites and emails as much as possible through Security policy implementation.
Sensitize employees on the importance of green behavior and how small changes can ultimately lead to big savings. Create right reward and recognition scheme for motivating employees to come up with innovative ideas to save.
Use automation for implementing green behavior. Create a popup form if some user fires a printout of more than 5 pages (ask about the need of the printout and audit the responses).

Integrate Green Strategy with the Core Business strategy:

Beside the culture change, we need top management focus to align Green IT strategy with core business strategy. Superficial execution of Green IT strategy will not be successful. Green IT Strategy needs to be integrated with the Core Business Strategy of creating Long term Shareholder value. From that perspective Green strategy can be simple: Focus only on your key strengths, do less, do it smart, avoid waste and achieve more.

Strengthen your core Business and selectively invest on Projects which creates long term shareholder value. Gartner research shows 80% of the IT Investment money is ‘dead-money’ - simple waste of resources.2 These investments do not add any value to your business but add to your Carbon footprint and cost numbers. Improve the quality of Investment Decision making system to minimize this waste.

How to improve?
Focus on High Impact Investments and minimize the waste. Consider improving the Investment Decision making process by creating an intelligent system based on actual data (rather than vague estimates).
The best business case for Green IT can be minimizing waste, reducing costs and thus increasing profit. In future with Cap-and-trade and more regulations in place Green IT will be the core differentiator in the marketplace.
Analyze your Organization cost and carbon footprint (including Energy audits for operational costs) and find out which are the big impact areas you can attack to control it. Focusing on small number of Projects will make it more effective. Do something really meaningful rather than selling ‘The idea of Green’ and spending big money on PR (Green contest, Earth day or Green apparel).
Effective use of Green IT strategy can help to reduce the Carbon footprint of other departments within the organization if the strategies of these departments work hand-in-hand. As a real-life example, international retail giant Tesco found that IT’s contribution to the company’s total carbon footprint is only 4% — but that IT has the enabling potential to reduce total carbon footprint by 20%.

How we can solve world obesity crisis, food crisis and green energy crisis in one go

Let’s analyze some history. Today our primary source of energy is fossil fuels such as coal, oil, natural gas etc. They were created millions of years ago from the decomposition of forests etc. They are so-called non-renewable sources of energy because it takes millions of years to recreate that (we consume them at a much faster rate). Their energy density is very high and that’s why they are much easier to use than renewable sources of energies such as solar, wind etc. But bottom-line is ultimate source of energy in earth is sunlight. And photosynthesis by plants (green) is the only process to capture that energy which can be used by living organisms (plants and animals etc.). We need to find out how (chemical or physical transformation process) the decomposition of forests improved the energy density of the fossil fuels – was this just the addition of millions of years of stored energy in a very less volume or something different. That is critical but even if we don’t understand that we can still find some temporary solution. We have seen biofules such as ethanol mixed with gasoline to supplement our energy needs. Only problem with that is ethanol comes from sugar – and sugar plantation needs a lot of water and agricultural space. Critics say, use of biofules increase the price of food (simply by demand supply curve – biofules provide better price for farmers than rice or other foods and hence they are encouraged to plant sugar than other food items) and thus cause world food crisis.

Now let’s analyze the problem of obesity. Evolutionary biologists suggest that our body was built to do a lot physical activities. With the development of Technological innovation the need for such physical activity has reduced dramatically. But we have continued to consume the same amount of food/energy intake causing mass obesity. Doctors suggest doing some physical activity in the gym such as running in the treadmill etc. to compensate for the extra calorie intake. Now let’s see how all these problems can be merged into a single solution.

My proposed solution
Instead of consuming electricity driven treadmill why can’t we create man driven small electric generators (instead of motors we will create generators so that the energy conversion is just the opposite from mechanical to electrical). Also we will create different ways to capture manual energy (mechanical energy) and transform them into electrical energy. Possible ways - pressure while walking in roads can create electricity etc. Advantages – we can continue to consume enough yummy food we like to eat (no diet and as we can eliminate biofules our food prices will be within control – no food crisis), we will still have to do physical exercises to keep ourselves in shape but at least it will have motivational aspects (we can generate our own energy and reduce our electricity bill rather than increased electricity bill for gym machines). We need technological innovation (such as smart grids etc.) but I believe still this is a viable solution for obesity, energy and food crisis. I am not suggesting this can replace fossil fuel use 100% but with other renewable energies such as solar, wind etc. we should be able to meet a major portion of our energy needs.

References:
What would a steady state economy look like? http://steadystate.org/discover/faqs/

Gartner Research that 80% of the IT Investments is dead money http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=497088

A new beautiful world

2011-04-02T22:21:00.001-07:00

Problem Statement:

Aristotle said,"Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction".We all want to look good,to be more successful in career,sex life and personal life.But unfortunately most of the people in the world do not know have the aesthetic sense to work on their personal beauty. For a few quick makeovers they can look much more beautiful. But they are not aware of this. They also do not have enough resources(time,money,availibility of trained people etc.)to take help of professionals.

Opportunity Statement:

1. We should work on making the people of the world more beautiful. It is frustrating for eyes to see so many ugly looking people around us.We can not make all of them Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie with these changes. But surely they can look much better with few small changes.

2. This will revolutionize the Healhcare/beautycare/cosmetic industry by democratizing opportunities and making resources available to all of them. Considering the size of this industry market potential is huge.

Product/Solution Details with Implementation Ideas:

1.Two part:Hardware and Software Implementation. Whenever a customer wants to consume this service he will be first scanned using some Camera and scanning machines for their present body structure,Face Details,shape,Hairstyle etc. In short first activity is to scan the body with preplanned views to get a detailed data of his/her present body status. We may also add few standard questionare to understand his/her food habit,lifestyle data,ethenic background etc.

2. Next we need to analyze the data, check with an existing database and recommend solution to the customer.Let me detail down the concept of this history database. This will be a huge database with the physical data of people having a higher beauty quotent than a trigger point. The database can be started with the data from celebrity beauty data(famous actors/models/dancers etc. from different ethenic class)and then more data can be added to that database.Whenever a consumer uses this service his/her after makeover data will be stored in the database. Any new consumer can refer to those data and rank them in a scale of 1 to 10. Any person having an average score(say after 20 rating is done) of say 8.5(higher beauty quotent than a trigger point) should be set as a standard beauty and will be referenced for suggesting makeover solution to the new customers. To create the history database we can also take help of creative people like artists,makeup artists,fashion designers etc. They can suggest their dream beauties for different ethenic classess.

3.Once the scan and data reference from the history database is done the customer will be shown the result in the increasing order of difficulty of attaining those states(considering time,money,ease of changes etc.).For example it is easier to change your hairstyle or remove your mustach than to reduce your bodyweight by 30lbs. The customer will also have tools to simulate their own looks by customizing the suggested looks obtained from the software(we should not have typecasted profiles in the world,beauty lies in the variety). Once the customer finalizes his/her dream look he/she will be given action item recomendations to achive that look(example, dietary changes,cosmetic procedures,lifestyle changes,increasing exercises etc.).

3. This service can be sold using a franchise model or web service model. In franchise model you sell the product/solution to francises who will have their own beauty centers all over the world. Also it may be easier to make this a web based service where the customer reach will be more than franchise model. An Web camera can be used to do the scanning and the rest of the computation process can be done from the centralized servers.Revenue generation should be subscription based and to attarct largest amount of customers this fee should be set as low as possible(if I can not save on the price and time why should I use this service,I can take help of beauty professionals).Another USP of this offerred service is to create simulated looks which can not be done in a standard parlour.

Ensuring Data Quality: Negative Feedback Control System

2011-04-02T22:19:00.001-07:00

Good quality data is essential for Intelligent Decision making. We can build top-class Data Analytics system but if the raw data is distorted the Decision made based on those data will also be wrong (Garbage in-Garbage out).
We have over invested in the Development of Decision making systems but underinvested in the effort/process/systems to ensure quality data entry. Unfortunately we have huge amount of junk data in the system and hence although we are using smart analytics methods we are making biased/wrong decisions.

The junk data is entered into the system for the following reason:

Users are careless of entering true data. For example in a web-survey, people can answer the questions without even reading the questions (just to save time).
Users can purposefully enter wrong data to make their case and meet their short term needs. For example companies can overstate profits to ensure better year-end bonus for the executives.
Users are aware that most of the times they will not be caught for entering wrong data. They can manipulate data in different systems as and when needed. There is no integration, verification or reconciliation of the data in most of the systems.

The proposed idea is a generic framework which can be used to ensure that good quality data is fed into the system.

Basic Principle

Design an intelligent IT system which will have controls in place to persuade users to enter right/True data. This can be done by integrating IT systems across the Enterprise and putting logic in place to validate the entered data based on available data in the system.

Case for Better Technology Investment Process
For example, consider the Investment Decision making process. Many of the times these are not objective and depend on the face-value of the champion of the project. To make the case of a Project the champion can show very high Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) numbers and get Finance/Top management approval. The Decision making body do not have enough tools to analyze the case based on historical data. Also the champion never fears to be questioned for artificially inflating CBA/ROI numbers.

If we can create a system where the Project cost (including the maintenance cost/operational cost) and the business benefits (revenue growth, cost save etc.) can be tracked and then matched against the actual CBA/ROI we can improve this gap. The Finance department/Investment decision making body will have better information to make the Investment decision. The Project owner/champion will also make sure the CBA/ROI numbers are realistic as this will be tracked against his/her performance (if Proposed CBA does not match against the Actual CBA). This way we can make sure right/realistic data is fed into the system and the decision making process is improved. Just as a data point, Gartner research shows 80% of the IT Investment money is ‘dead-money’ - simple waste of resources. If we can improve the situation even by 50% that will be a huge benefit.

How we can do that?

We need to integrate different IT systems which work in silos and then make a decision making system which reconciles data from different systems to create Business insights. In the previous example we need to integrate Time Tracking/Project management systems (source of cost numbers) with Marketing and Finance system (Profit/revenue numbers).

What is the USP of this solution?

The Intelligent System which can ensure that Users can not manipulate data for their own need and thus enter correct data. This can be achieved by integrating different systems of record in the Enterprise (single view of Project Management system, Revenue Accounting system, HR Management system etc.) and creating intelligent Business logic for verification of entered data (query system, reports).

This follows the famous Negative Feedback Control Theory. In this process the users strive to enter correct data for their own need. Let’s take the same example of IT Decision making system.

In case the users enter an abnormally high CBA values for a Project to push the case of the Project (reason may be some emotional attachment with the Project/people or some other personal motif) and in future the Project could not deliver the promised benefits the Decision maker will be asked for explanation: to justify the case for providing high CBA numbers.

At the same time if someone puts very low CBA (just to be safe and conservative) the Project will not be rolled as there will be Projects with higher CBA numbers which will be considered as more attractive investments.

Hence the user will try to do their due diligence to provide honest numbers. This way he/she will ensure that he/she minimizes the risk of not making his/her initiative or being responsible in future for providing false data(-ve feedback).

The intelligent decision making system should be an ideal repository for analyzing past data and thus improvising the estimation numbers for the future projects. This will also help in creating an enterprise wide Technology spending management system where unallocated/unused funds/resources will be tracked and then utilized in a timely fashion (early automatic adjustment of resources for maximum utilization).
Enterprise Wide operational data consolidation and intelligent analysis for improvement of Operational efficiencies: Following similar fashion we can create Intelligent Data Analysis systems for checking enterprise-wide Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Operational efficiency data (system availability, system-uptime, confidentiality, Data Integrity, Server/CPU and storage cost etc.). e.g. if we see a lot of problem tickets from a system, it indicates we need to reengineer the application and thus some improvement opportunity exists(Need Development/ReEngineering Projects).
This idea can be implemented in various systems as described below:

Case Studies:

Better Quality Compliance: Historically speaking, the existing compliance laws (SoX etc.) have miserably failed to stop corruption. At the same time these laws have huge cost implications for the corporations. We create huge number of compliance related documents and this needs huge amount of cost and effort. Many of the times those documents are dead data – Data not updated properly and not verifiable. Worse: As we increase the quantity we decrease the quality of the people who creates these documents and have limited audit opportunity(lack of manpower) to check if the data entered are correct. This is not a smart system and huge amount of productivity gain is possible by freeing resources doing compliance related documentation. The FED, SEC and other compliance bodies can think of standardizing the whole audit process making it smarter. What I suggest is to create a generic data system framework where the data will be fed by the companies in the specific format (web based forms/questionnaires). There will be guidelines to generate theses data from the raw granular level data and the companies need to align their internal Information system to support these numbers. The compliance and the regulatory bodies will have access to the data and intelligent tools to automatically verify the truthfulness of the data. The data points need to be designed in a fashion so that data manipulation is not possible (this need to be improvised on a continuous basis). The regulatory bodies can benefit by efficient (verifiable), low cost (automated) audit system and thus improving better compliance. The companies can benefit by reducing stuff in the compliance and documentation related work (reduce cost) and engaging them in revenue generating activities (sales, innovation etc.). Overall the economy will be benefited by increasing the efficiency of audit and compliance process through 100% automation of validation and verification, better resource utilization and lower compliance related costs.
Better Cost Transparency of Customer Servicing and Intelligent Customer segmentation Even with smart CRM systems in place most of the companies still have very inefficient Customer Servicing and Segmentation processes. We spend huge amount of money in wrongly targeted Promotional activities. For example a big US bank provides customers to customize their Debit card with personalized photographs. Whenever such an activity is initiated the Business rule creates a Promotional mailer for a Travel related service. This Service is Free for a month and you get a Risk free Prize for enrolling into it (iPod/ Portable DVD Player etc.). If you cancel within a month you keep the Prize and you are not charged. This looks to be a pretty standard promotion and should help the Bank to generate charges for the Travelers program. But the part is even if someone has cancelled the program and again requested for a Customized card similar promotional offer is sent to him, although he has cancelled before and received the Prize. A better approach could be to integrate the Prize fulfillment system with the Marketing department and not to send the Promotional offer again (high chance that he will repeat the same activity). We need to have a system where we can see the Total cost of ownership of a customer (Servicing cost etc.) and the Potential revenue that he can generate over time. We need this kind of CBA transparency at the most granular level (customer level) to make right segmentation decisions.
Better People management: We don’t have objective systems in place for Performance appraisal of the people, Business units etc. Many of the cases the appraisal process is subjective and not based on true data. We have very inefficient compensation system where we don’t objectively measure the return on investment of a specific employee. Most of the times employees can manipulate the data and take undue advantage.

Let me provide some more details around the opportunity. In a typical IT organization we have different Employee Activity Tracking system (this is a typical case in India, in US we generally don’t track and micromanage employee activities and are more result oriented for performance appraisal etc.) – We track Entry and Exit time of an employee (for attendance record), Computer Login and Logout times for making sure they are shutting down their systems before going home (green IT perspective + Tracking activities for security reason/audit etc.), Timesheet for measuring the effort data(which is the baseline for future estimation) and a Performance appraisal system for doing Employee appraisal( which ultimately decides salary, promotion etc.). Unfortunately all these systems are not integrated and do not have intelligence to verify if the employees are entering junk data. This creates a bad employee culture –either they work more or just to show they are working more they stay late in the office (probably doing their personal work, surfing Internet etc.) and at the same time showing they are working only eight hours in the timesheet thus increasing their productivity numbers. This has multiple effects - underestimated effort data (in case a critical project demands an effort of 100 unit and even though they took 100 unit to complete the work they report 70 unit in the timesheet – thus base lining 70 unit for a Project which actually requires 100 unit – causing missed revenue opportunity, high employee stress, bad work-life balance, increased risk to the overall Project timeline), misrepresented employee productivity(although taking 100 hrs to complete the work they are reporting 80 hrs and thus improving their chance to get better performance rating), high Operational cost(even they have no work employees are staying late in office, causing more electricity cost for AC, Computers)etc. But if we can integrate the systems and place negative feedback control systems in place we can reduce this problem. Now if they are reporting 8 hrs of work in timesheet but their Computer login and logout data shows 16 hrs or office in and out data shows similar trend they will be asked questions. This will ensure they report honest data in the system and the management can get true picture of employee effort and productivity.

A smart HR system, integrated with different other systems, can ensure right data is put into the system and the decisions made are objective. This can be extended even to Outsourcing decisions and vendor management systems. We can create intelligent systems tracking their performance (against the contract) and make decisions for next contract (whether to renew or negotiate the contract etc.). Benchmarking against the industry standard for estimating the effort needed for Developing a System/solution will ensure vendors are not overcharging.

Create better Surveys: My gut feel is most of the Survey responses are junk data. People generally hate surveys and in general they are negligent in filling the data. Also they sometimes fill biased data. Executives make a mistake in taking those survey results as truth and acting on those decisions. We need to create intelligent surveys where contradictory responses will be questioned and a better quality data will be generated.

Biomimicry - new hope

2011-03-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

Need Smart Chemists - I want to get rid of Flatulence in Public restrooms

2011-03-05T16:47:00.001-07:00

Sourced from wikipedia:

The gas released during a flatus event frequently has an unpleasant odor. For many years, this was thought to be due to skatole and indole, which are byproducts of the digestion ofmeat. However, gas chromatography testing in 1984 revealed that sulfur-containing compounds, such as methanethiol, hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell) and dimethyl sulfide, were also^[2] responsible for the smell.^[3]

Can someone create some chemical which can absorb these unpleasant gases(I know there has been some patent around charcoal) or do reactions to create pleasant smells?

Smartphone Meeting App for Jetsetters

2011-03-05T16:17:00.002-07:00

Remembering meeting pass codes and entering them one by one is so pain! Why can't smartphones be integrated with email systems so that as soon as I tap the invite it connects me to the meeting(entering the pass code happens in the background automatically) as well as opens up the sharing window in the browser or in a app.

Specially useful for Microsoft Livemeeting, WebEx or GotoMeeting. Any smartphones iPhone, Android, RIM should offer this.

Want to avoid market manipulation

2011-02-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

Track and Analyze Stock gurus/insiders advice and their action...unfortunately I could not find any good website tracking this..probably this will stop the Big Financial Services industry...hence huge pressure might be the reason!

One of the best(obvious) suggestion on US Healthcare(as well as Education system) Reform

2011-01-09T09:33:00.003-07:00

Here is a wonderful link for US Healthcare reform. This solution sound obvious but nobody worked on this because US is full of different powerful lobbyist groups.

I have one followup suggestion. The supply of doctors can't be met by only US educated doctors. We need healthcare profesionals as well as Medical Education Services from outside. This will allow reduction of overall costs.

On the same Demand-Supply logic we should plan our University curriculum.We have many courses in our schools which do not provide jobs(simply because they are too academic and do not have practical value). At the same time we have few skills in very high demand and enjoys premium pricing. Why can't universities re-plan their course capacity as per society needs? Think about it :)

My thoughts on IT Investment Management

2009-12-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

Information Technology (IT) spending and IT investment is increasingly becoming a major share of Operational cost and Capital investment in many large organizations. But this money is not always spent prudently and as Gartner research finds out eight out of ten dollars that enterprises spend on IT is “dead money”, which does not create any business value1 . This paper analyses different pain points and improvement opportunities of US Information Technology (IT) spending from an industry internal’s perspective.

Business should drive Technology, Cool Technology should not dominate Business

Over the years so called ‘Cool’ technology has been sold to business by different IT vendors creating redundancies (both data redundancy and systems redundancy) and huge operational and maintenance costs. Many of these IT investments did not create any long term Business value and business people understood this truth too late. Information Technology was a completely new Business story and the orthodox business leaders had no idea about this. They had very few information to ask meaningful business questions to the IT vendors and the vendors were able to easily sell the products with complex jargons and trendy packaging of their services. Also a competition was created among competitors to stay ahead with the latest technology available in the market. People never thought whether the new technology is really needed or whether it can be integrated with the existing IT infrastructure or how costly it will be to manage the new system. The result: Huge maintenance bills to support the ‘legacy’ systems and high reengineering costs to move to new technology.

We have not improved much on this front and still today many of the IT products and services are ‘sold’ which does not create any business value. Following are the improvement areas as experienced by the author:

We need to integrate Business and Technology groups in IT Project planning and execution.
Take serious effort in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of Business Requirement gathering process. Most of the times the Business and Technology groups are not clear of the actual requirements and these grey areas can have catastrophic impact on the successful implementation of any IT projects.
Recruit Tech people in Business groups and Business people in Tech teams. This way both the groups can have better perspectives from their end.
Understand the present IT infrastructure first and decide on new Technology adoption or adding new Services or Systems based on the scope of integration with the existing system and the future business needs. Also plan for production support and maintenance costs for any new developments(typically $1 spent on any new development creates $.60 per year maintenance cost for the life of the system).2
Reuse the existing data, services, systems and infrastructure as much as possible. Focus on system integration activity to reduce redundancy.
Proper Cost benefit analysis (CBA) and Project cost tracking with correct (honest) data is another improvement area for successful IT investment.

Bottom-line: Business should drive Technology investment and not the vice-versa.

Outsource effectively

Research has shown that outsourcing increases the competitiveness and profitability of US corporations. But still the outsourcing practice has not leveraged all the benefits possible from effective outsourcing. Outsourcing, still in many companies is handled in Body shopping mode. We have a client side Business Team (consist of Business Director, Project Managers, Business users and analysts etc.), Client side technology team(Typically consist of Technology Director, Client end Project Manager, Lead Business Systems Analyst and Portfolio Architect), a vendor side onsite team(consist of Vendor end Onsite Project Manager, Business System Analysts, Technical Leads, Test Coordinators, Test Managers etc.) and a offshore team(consist of Developers, Offshore Project Managers, Technical Lead, Independent Test Team etc.). This duplication of similar roles create huge amount of overhead costs and a lot of confusion in communication between different teams. This increases the Total cost of ownership, affects the target dates and the quality of deliverables. Following are the improvement areas as experienced by the author:

Outsource the whole portfolio to a single vendor at least for a year. Make sure your vendor selection process is stringent enough to select only the matured and capable vendors having significant outsourcing experience. Also do an annual appraisal for the vendor and if needed change the vendor by opening a new bidding process. If this sounds too risky choose two vendors(but not more than that)and distribute the Development and Production Support efforts(again don’t mix the efforts, let vendor A do the development and Vendor B do the Production support and not like both A and B doing some part of development and production support). This will ensure that you don’t have complete dependency on a single vendor but at the same time provide the vendors the chance to manage the portfolio in most cost efficient manner and create the needed synergy, technical and domain competence for a sufficient time.
Make sure to minimize the overlapping of similar roles. Most of the times this introduces a lot of communication gap, duplicated and unplanned effort in documentation and most importantly huge overhead and training cost.
Offshore effectively based on the Cost Benefit Analysis and after considering proper Risk-return payoff. US business thinkers have a tendency to think that off shoring reduces costs and thus should always be preferred. The off shoring companies also sell that idea to increase their profit margin. But offshoring is not always profitable. Many a times we add three offshore resources (approximately 3*$30=$90 per hour) for a work which can be easily done by a single onshore resource ($60 per hour). Think about it.

Explore all the business possibilities of IT

Organizations are still underinvested in IT and yet to explore all the epoch-making effects of Technology usage in different business processes. Wal-Mart and Dell has shown how proper technology usage in inventory management can dramatically improve their competitive advantage. Very few organizations are considering similar IT deployment in integrating similar business processes like Human resources management, Finance, Marketing and Operations etc. Following are some of the case studies in scope for future IT deployment:

IT application in HR: Dynamically Allocate tasks and resources across boundaries and time-zones, track employee activity and effort, measure employee performance more objectively from correct data, collect employee aspiration and satisfaction statistics and help employees in matching their work with their potential and thus maximize optimize employee talent management.
IT application in Marketing and Customer relationship management: Many value added services can be added to Internet Banking applications helping customers in planning their money better and at the same time tracking customer spending to promote financial services products to the customers.
Corporate planning and Integrated Return on Investment monitoring: Strategic planning needs integrated view of all the operations, investment data and resource utilization. Integrated Business Intelligence reporting has lot of scope for improvement.

There are lots of such possibilities which are low hanging fruits and should be explored for creating sustainable competitive advantage.

End note:

The observations, as the author feels, are not specific to any client and although this paper analyses only the Banking and Financial Services companies, these may be a general trend in most of the US Fortune 500 companies. We hope that from this TRIZ case study decision makers can find generic solutions on today’s IT investment challenges and can apply those to their specific industry verticals. We also believe that if implemented properly we have significant opportunity of creating business value through IT spending and investment.

Reference:

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=497088
http://www.gartner.com/4_decision_tools/measurement/measure_it_articles/july01/mit_spending_history1.html

Unique Strengths of USA:Why USA will continue to lead the world for a very long time

2009-10-09T19:27:00.003-07:00

Four key reasons I think USA will continue to lead the world for a very long time:

Unique culture of Innovation and melting point of the best brains in the world

USA is the home for the best brains in the world. It's not that the average IQ of an american is by default higher than that of people from other countries, america has successfully created an environment where the best brains of the world come and collaborate. Best of the class talents from different countries come to america and call it their home for rest of their life. That's how America can invent the best practices, products or services long before other countries can do so. US universities and private entrepreneurs are the key to this innovation journey. US has undue competitive advantage in this front which is very tough to replicate for other countries.

Strength of US Dollar

Still US Dollar is the reserve currency of the world and although its long term value may depreciate the process will take a very long time. During the Economic crisis US FED could just print money(I would say Free money) and the whole world was ready to accept dollar loans without any value depreciation of the USD. I don't think the model where US consumers continue to consume without creating similar amount of value and the rest of the world supply money and services to them is sustainable in the long term. But till the time we see an alternate global currency US dollar and as a result of that US will continue to dominate world economy.

US Military Power and strength in Global political diplomacy

US has unmatched military power and because of that it enjoys unmatched political supremacy. The might is always right and hence it can push for laws and sanctions which give them an undue advantage.

Scale of Operations

'Bigger the better' or 'Big is Beautiful' is not always true. But it is true that this american philosophy has helped america to create unique scale of operational efficiency, infrastructure development and use of Technology.

The more I see america, the stronger is my conviction that we will see more americanized world. This is not a perfect system but probably one of the most successful experiment done in this world.

How to stop the wastage Slowly but surely

2009-10-09T17:27:00.002-07:00

We waste a lot starting from food, energy, water and other resources. Why do we do that? Are we fundamentally bad and don't care about our earth and limited natural resources? I think it this is not always a good or bad problem, it is a problem of accountability.

Most of the wastages are done when we are not accountable for those. For example consider wasting food in a office party(company pays it) or wasting water in our bathroom(we pay a fixed price for water and utilities and don't care how much we spend the water or how much garbage we generate).

Now consider the scenarios where we care. We care to drive in the right way(because if we get a ticket, our insurance premiums will increase) or when we buy food for ourselves in restaurant we buy within our capacity or at least pack it for next day.

It may sound simplistic, but I think the best way to solve the wastage problem is to make user accountable. We need to eliminate any free lunch. Let me discuss my idea with few examples.

We need to introduce pay per use pricing and remove any fixed pricing(at least some mixed model where variable component is present with a minimum fixed price). Let me start with water, utilities and garbage collection. Instead of a fixed monthly price let's meter the usage and price per the usage. Similarly let's consider healthcare cost. Our insurance covered model allows us to waste money in unnecessary tests etc. We should reduce the insurance premium and increase the co-payment or co-insurance. That way we can ensure accountability. Also we should have a guarantee program where the providers will provide guarantee of any treatment done from their facility. That way they will also make sure unnecessary costs are not involved and proper care is taken during the treatment.

We have huge business wastage. This is simply because nobody cares when the money involved is not personal money. I propose to introduce personal responsibility in corporate resource usage. The accountability should be at the most granular level and any cost save will have direct connection to that person's remuneration. This is a delicate balance but this will work.

Ownership of any transaction and personal accountability are the key here...

Five investment themes which can make big money

2009-09-19T07:34:00.008-07:00

The secret of sustainable money-making is to provide the products or services having greatest appreciable value to the mankind at any point of time. Hence I believe to make sustainable wealth you need to do something which really helps most of the people, which really improves the quality of life. Wall-street Financial Engineers has once again proved the fact that you cannot fool all the people all the time and continue making money. Hence my themes will not be cosmetic manipulations. They are targeted towards improving the quality of human life and creating value through sustainable business models to create long term wealth.

This discussion will be generic enough for global investors and venture capitalists; but I will provide the examples from my own country India (not for the fact that I have a bias towards India but because I can relate best to this market). I request readers to keep an open mind while reading this post because some of the ideas mentioned will be new and may come as a culture shock. Enough introduction;Let's begin.

Agriculture

Sounds crazy? We knew for decades that Agriculture-based economy=Poor Economy, Industrial/Service oriented Economy= Prosperity right? Yes, it was. But my feel is that we have come a full circle. Increasingly we are seeing the chance of global food crisis and increasing commodity prices. Specifically for India agriculture has huge importance in its macro economy. Still today almost half of the population is dependent on this sector. Sad part is that the Indian agriculture system is at least a decade behind the western system. We have very poor productivity (most of the people in agriculture field are under-employed), huge resource wastages (due to lack of proper distribution system and warehousing), low use of Technology (still agriculture is very much dependent on rainfall) and lack of scale (we do not have fields where large scale automation is possible). These are the problems creating a huge business opportunity. I see a growing market (Increasing Food prices because of global food shortage) and underutilized industry with a scope of huge productivity improvement. That makes it a ideal case for venture capital investment. Keep in mind although I mentioned the examples from India, this is applicable for most of the emerging economics which has not fully utilized the power of technology in agriculture space. Also this investment opportunity is for global investors (especially for those companies who have the knowhow of the use of Technology in agriculture space). The niche areas which can be exploited in this space are: Use of Biotechnology in creating better seeds, manures, pesticides (environment-friendly alternatives), Use of better storage and distribution system (Logistics management), Use of Technology in all the automation opportunities including the use of water-resource management and Food-processing, Introduction of large scale firming through cooperative model or company ownership model etc.

Sex

Here I am not talking prostitution (which is anyway the oldest and one of the most profitable businesses of the world) but providing resources and services for healthy sexual needs. Again my discussion will be around the emerging markets such as India because Developed countries have already explored this theme for years. India has probably seen much more sexual activities than its western counterparts but unfortunately most of the Indians are still not comfortable discussing their sexual needs and also lead a very low quality sexual life. India and many third world countries have more cases of prostitution, child-trafficking, rape and other sexual exploitations, HIV and other STDs (due to unprotected sex) than the advanced countries. One of the reasons for this distorted sexual lifestyle is due to lack of Sex-education and a social mindset which consider sex as something bad and unacceptable. This is a huge problem and that creates the enormous opportunity. Let me provide some ideas which can be exploited here: Internet Business for providing quality sex education (people prefer Internet for its interactive and privacy features), furniture for maximizing sexual pleasure(niche but very premium market), matured mating sites(boys looking girls, girls looking boys etc.), Quality matured content(Indian adult content industry is very unorganized producing very low quality content),Sex tourism, Sensual massage services, Theme parks and nightclubs where couples can enjoy quality sex/romantic time without any verbal abuse of police or external parties(two agreeing adults should be provided freedom to live a sexual life), sexual counseling for better sexual health, helping women with sex issues(STD control) etc. Investing in Sex is tricky especially in third world countries because politicians and police always try to make money by making rules which prohibit many sexual acts but still allowing them to continue when you pay the price (bribe). Still my conviction is that you will have a huge market helping millions of people in leading a quality sexual life and at the same time making enormous amount of wealth.

Religion

Religion is another sensitive and unconventional theme for investing. Many people hate to consider mixing religion with Business. But I think Religion should be considered a natural service. Let me clarify my point because I know this is controversial. Music and movies are considered service. People go to see opera for enjoyment, entertainment, relieving stress and enriching themselves with new ideas. Same for religion; we want to pray for relieving our stress, getting new ideas, getting mental strength etc. Hope you appreciate the similarity. My point is both should be considered Service and hence to provide good quality service money has to be spent by the consumers. Huge amount of money is actually spent in religion. But most of the time this is unorganized, poorly managed and lack proper accounting (money goes to the selective few, typical ‘executive pay’ problem). My proposal is to make religion a standard business with right pricing (ticketing) and corporate accounting practice(balance sheet, shareholder review etc.), quality products(better hygiene in temples, mosques and churches) and services (research on theology and providing new life perspectives through lifestyle coaching) and new Social Servicing opportunities(Religious institutions will also help NGOs in Fundraising).

Education

This is a more conventional theme but still has a scope for ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’. Huge amount of Human resource is wasted for the Lack of Education in poor Developing countries. I think people have started appreciating the importance of education but many do not have access to quality education. We have scope for improving our curriculum, delivery method and the scale in which we provide education. We have a huge market for this service in the so called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ which has not yet been explored.

Green

They say that Green is the next big thing and it really is. Environmental Protection, Renewable energy sourcing, waste management, Biodiversity control: all of these are major issues facing the mankind and epoch-making Technological breakthrough is needed to really solve these problems. Many small companies have ventured into this uncharted territory but still much more research and funding needs to be in place to keep it going. Sustainability will be the next big business (if at all we can continue doing business) and prudent investors need to put money into this theme.

Happy Investing. Eager to hear new ideas from my readers.

Mutual Fund Performance based Asset Management Fees and Compensation Policy

2009-04-08T10:48:00.001-07:00

Most of the Mutual Funds in the Industry have flat Asset Management fees and Asset Manager Compensation Policy. This needs to be changed. Previously I had suggested a compensation policy in line with Hedge Fund. It should have a low flat fee and Percentage of Profit sharing above the High water Level level(meaning the Profit sharing starts only after a Benchmark return is achieved). I can think of another improvement over this plan. We can have an Industry standard set for all Mutual Funds for following this policy. Let me provide the outline of this policy. We should have a Benchmark set for each MF. Also we should have a Record Date for Uniformity in Performance Measurement(many MFs show their best return period in their advertisement which does not truly protrait their performance). For example for a Diversified Equity Fund the Benchmarking Index can be Nifty. The record date can be January 1 of each year. The Asset Management Fee structure will be as follows:
Return Below Benchmark return(Does not matter if the return is Positive or Negative, in a bear market less negative means good performance)- A small Fixed Asset Management Fee. Say .25% of the Asset under Management(AUM)
Return matching Benchmark return .5% AUM
Return more than Bechmark return not exceeding 10% - Asset Management Fee should be 1% AUM
Return more than Benchmark return exceeding 10% - Asset Management Fee should be 2% AUM
Out of this 50% of the compensation should be in cash and 50% of the compensation should be in managed fund's unit having a lock in period of at least 3 years.
These numbers can be changed but this should be the compensation philosophy.

Creative destruction:We don't need GM, we need kiva!

2009-03-09T21:45:00.002-07:00

American Car industry is an inefficient, old, dying industry. It has huge operational and overhead costs. American cars are not technologically competitive with Japanese or German cars. I can see that we can not save them in the long run(at least in their present form) even if they make Electric cars or Fuel-efficient cars(as advised by Barack Obama) because of the fact that they are fundamentally inefficient. Still we are bailing out huge amount of money(although people don't think Billion is a large unit nowadays after we started this Bailout concept). Even the lawmakers and the company executives are pretty much sure that they can not survive in the long term. But just to save some jobs(which can not be saved in the long run) we are trying to infuse oxygen to a dying patient. This is a very wasteful use of resources.

Steve Jobs called death the "single best invention of life". We need to get out of old dying industries to create the new ones, which are efficient, meaningful and promising. Rather than prolonging the life of a dying patient we need to give birth and provide education to the new generation. That is the idea of creative destruction. We need more kiva and less GM. Let the GM Fail and let these people get resources from kiva(Goverment may bailout kiva for that matter) to start their own small companies. We need new Technology inventions, new process innovations and new entrepreneul sprits to get out of this recession. It's a tough and painful process in the short term but that is the best way the world can see a new sustainable prosperity. To quote Tom Peters, "Fail fast, succeed sooner."

We need Futurists and not Analysts

2009-03-08T19:28:00.002-07:00

Let me define these two terms in my own way. Analysts are those people who collect historical numbers(company quarterly performances etc.) and analyze them to suggest right decisions. Futurists are those people who analyzes future trends and try to suggest better options(which include new thinking, disruptive change ideas). At a high level both analyze the present situation and information available. But there is a small difference. Analysts think in the domain of existing human knowledge but futurists think beyond the obvious. To give an example an analyst will try to explain the Economic crisis in historical terms(like how we managed to rescue from the great depression, how the future stock price should behave based on Technical Analysis etc.). But there is a high probability that this crisis is something completely new and may not be described by any of the past trends. To face this crisis we need new ideas and new solutions. Futurists are the people who will suggest these ideas. Futurists will offer out of the box ideas to fix this great crisis.

Let me tell you why I am frustrated with the analysts. We waste a whole lot of time for analysts. Every quarter we need to show results to these analysts. Many intelligent people need to spend whole lot of time in these crappy number collection, report preparation etc. In one word these are boring stuff to do and does not add any value to the business. What is more dangerous is the short term planning needed for fairing every quarter. Many of the times executives manipulate numbers just to look good. In a complete business cycle you can not be good in every quarter. But the analysts demand that just to keep your stock value afloat. I feel for best results we need long term planning and execution. We need more prudent risk taking attitude and think beyond quaterly results. Many of our excutives waste a lot of time in planning the statement for media and analysts. They can better use this time in research and innovation.

Proper and timely information is needed for efficient price discovery by the market. This helps to reduce account manipulation to some extent. So we can not and should not stop the market reporting process completely. What I am proposing is to try something new. Let's start reporting Half-yearly results instead of Quaterly results. In this way we will keep the best of the both world. Executives will be able to concentrate on long term company performances. At the same time analysts will also allow the capital market to function properly.

Recession effect:Increase in crime rate

2009-03-08T18:08:00.002-07:00

The USA can see huge increase in crime rate and deterioration of public safety system in near term. People are loosing jobs at aceelerated rate, media is creating a panicky and hopeless picture of the economy and investors loosing their wealth through decreasing home and equity prices:all of these creating an enormous amount of frustration. People are angry and frustrated and this frustration can turn into violence and mass disobediyence of law and order.

At the same time budget cuts have forced the Federal and state goverments to reduce security measures including number of police per capita. This creates another threat to the overall security.

The USA has another problem for people safety. People here can legally keep guns and I believe this creates another vulnarability for the angry and frustrated society.

Tough Problems need tough solutions:

I propose few solutions which may not be acceptable to typical US culture but can help to solve these problems:

Ban the personal use of guns.
Use food for work program to increase the number of police and security officers per capita. This way you can reduce the frstration of a few unemployed people and at the same time increase homeland security.

Americanized world need a culture shift

2009-02-25T22:39:00.007-07:00

As they say:The world is not being globalized, it is becoming Americanized. The USA has tremendous influence on the world. Most of the new ideas come from US and the rest of world blindly accepts it without any second thoughts. Such is the power of America. Fortunately, most of these are wonderful ideas and the world has benefited by pursuing these. There are plenty of such examples: from Freedom of expression to Internet, and from Free Market Economics to Conveyor belt Batch process. Largely american ideas have shaped the world for a better place to live in.

But today I want to discuss few 'American' ideas which went terribly wrong. The US as well as the 'Americanized' world need to take immediate steps to correct them to see a better tomorrow. And unfortunately we have not seen any radical action or paradigm shift in the mindset of the americanized world to correct those mistakes.

Let me start with the great American Greed. Some say that greed is good and for progress we need greedy people. Greed motivate people to start new things, take risks and make large breakthroughs. But I feel there is a very fine line between ambition and greed. Ambition is working hard and trying new things for a better future. But greed is a mindset to make fast and easy money without much hardwork. In most of the times greed is associated with dishonesty and fraud which harms majority of the stakeholders. Social cost of greed is huge and today's subprime and credit crisis are example of that. The americanized world need to change its mindset. From peer pressure, rat race and greed to have enormous wealth we need to focus on more phylosophical themes of life like: Peace, Honesty, Satisfaction, Living in Present, enjoying small beauties of life, harmony with people and nature etc. 'There is enough for every man's need but not greed.' Once people can differentiate the need from the greed we can have a more sustainable and inclusive prosperity.

The second is the culture of wasting resources and living in excesses. Byproduct of greed, american lifestyle is an example of living beyond the means. Here are some statistics:In the US alone $48 Billion worth of food is wasted anually, American Credit Card Debt is valued at $950 billion, as per the 2003 data 291 million americans(out of which only 196 million are drivers) drive 231 million cars(more car per driver), In the US alone the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 44% of junk mail is discarded without being opened or read, equaling four million tons of waste. This Economic downturn may proove to be a boom in disguise if this can change the wasteful spending oriented mindset of americans and create a culture of living within the means. If the Obama government takes the energy issue seriously we can see more Green energy sources. At the same time we need to create a culture of public transportation and car pooling simply because those are much efficient systems from energy use perspective and having less environmental impact.

Third culture which needs dramatic change is lack of effective oversight and stopping lobby powers to misuse the laws. Instead of one of the best tracking and policing system in the world we have seen many big oversight failures in the US: Financial Frauds from Bernie Madoff, irresponsible mortgage lending and derivative trading by Wall street. Also in everyday life we see so many crimes starting from prostitution to drugs and Internet crimes to detainee abuse. Narrow mindset of different lobby powers affect the proper growth of the society. We waste huge amount of money in agriculture subsidy; car lobbyists have stopped the growth of public railways and transport system; we have a nexus of insurance companies and medical practitioners creating a inflated healthcare cost; our budget is grossly misused in ineffective programs etc.

Let's think about the solution. Let's accept that we don't have any easy solutions and we can't fix all these in one day or one month. But we need to have a vision and the top leadership need to honestly pursue these dreams. We need to change acts and laws and plan big for future. We need constant communication to the people for chaging their mindset(BTW Obama did a good job in last presidential address). We need to think beyond short term political popularity and take hard decisions. From theoritical perspective these issues look simple because we know the solutions. But in practice actionizing the solutions are challenging because these involve people and changing people's mindset is a tough job. Unfortunately we don't have a plan B.

Slumdog Millionaire and other issues

2009-02-22T09:05:00.005-07:00

Tonight is Oscar night and most of the Indians wish to see Slumdog Millionaire(SM) winning Oscar in all ten categories. I see great excitement over this film and several true SM stories in Internet.

Frankly speaking, I think the film is not extraordinary. The storytelling is good but the film looks unreal because of its use of English and Hindi. In India English is a foreign language and a slum dweller is not supposed to speak in English. I think the director could have justified more to the reality if he tried to make the film in Hindi with English subtitles. The music is just OK considering the genious and potential of A R Rahman(although I wish he wins the Oscar; it would be like Einstein getting Nobel prize not for General Theory of Relativity but for Photovoltic Effect equation). I think one of the reason the film has received so much attention in western press is because of its link to famous production house and director. India has made many great films such as Lagaan, Taare Zameen Par which could not make to the Oscar. I think the reason is that these films were more Indian in form and type with lot of music and dance, which was not acceptable to western critics.

The reason I wanted to discuss this film is something different. We have seen a lot of protests against this film. See the details from wikipedia.

"Following its release in India, the film faced criticism from various members of the public alleging that the film fuels western stereotypes about poverty in India and that it peddles "poverty porn" and "slum voyeurism".[47] Tapeshwar Vishwakarma, a representative of a slum-dwellers' welfare group, has filed a defamation lawsuit against the film's music composer A.R. Rahman and actor Anil Kapoor, alleging that slum-dwellers were depicted in a bad light which would be a violation of their human rights.[101][102] Vishwakarma's lawsuit alleged that the name of the movie is derogatory and he was particularly displeased that Indians associated with the film did not object to the use of word "slumdog."[101] Nicholas Almeida, a social activist working in Mumbai, organized a protest against the film on the grounds that it intentionally exploited the poor for the purposes of profit, and that the title 'Slumdog millionaire" was offensive, demeaning and insulted their dignity. The protesters were slum dwellers in Mumbai, holding posters like "I am not a dog"[103] who objected to being dehumanized as "dogs" in the film title.[104]
Protests against Slumdog Millionaire have extended beyond Mumbai to other parts of the country. Slum dwellers in Patna, the capital of the Indian state of Bihar, have intensified protests against the movie. Activists have reported that slum dwellers will continue to protest till the film's director deletes the word 'dog' from the title.[105] Protests in Patna intensified on 26 January 2009, when "protesters tore down posters and ransacked a movie theatre" screening the film. The following day, the police in Bihar tightened security "outside theatres in the state to thwart any further attacks."[106]
Hindu Janjagruti Samiti has protested against the film for its allegedly inappropriate portrayal of the Hindu God Rama.[107][108] The activist group believes that the portrayal of Rama is derogatory and "hurts the sentiments of Hindus". Writing for the conservative Daily Pioneer, Kanchan Gupta reiterated the objections of the activist group that the film provides a one-sided portrayal of the complexities of religious conflict in India, and that the film depicts Hindus as "rapacious monsters".[109]"

All these criticisms may be true from their own perspectives. But I see some missing points in all these criticisms. The truth is that most of the Indians are still very poor. India still faces lot of socio-economic challenges like extreme poverty, human exploitation like child labour and prostitution and religious riots. As the truth seekers press and the movie-makers have all the rights to make stories on these themes. And I think Freedom of opinion actually helps to improve the existing system in a free pluralistic modern society. Our(most of the Indians) problem is that we are not open to critism. We don't prefer to accept the critism and improve on that and rather try to attack the critic evenif we know that the fact is true. We know we live like dogs(in all possible inhuman conditions) but we get upset if someone says that. We are much more discussion oriented and much less action oriented.

We get excited about our glorious past and that is good. India is one of the most fascinating country in the world having rich culture and traditions of music, food, science and phylosophy. We should be proud of this tradition and do our best to promote this to the world. At the same time we should be open to other cultures and learn from their experiments with truth. As a nation we should become more confident in accepting the fact that we are not perfect. We have problems and we are open to learn from our own mistakes and other's experiences. We need to stop arguining whether we are 'slumdogs'. But rather we all should aspire to be 'millionaires'. We need to stop cheap day-dreaming but start dreaming big. You know that Dream is not what you see when you sleep;dream is something that doesn't make you sleep.

H1B VISA Program etal.

2009-02-07T08:28:00.009-07:00

Senate approves 'strict' rules on hiring H-1B workers and there has been a growing controversy whether H1B VISA Program should be stopped completely or at least regulated. Let me first start with the disclaimer that I am a beneficiary of H1B VISA program and continuation of this program will be good for my career. Said that I will try to access the effects of this program on American Economy and also the World Economy in general.

H1B program was created to supplement American workforce with foreign workers having highly specialized knowledge in Business or Technology on a temporary basis. It was designed to help American business to source global talent to remain competitive. And I think this program helped US in many ways to achieve that goal. Best talents of the world are still attracted to study and then work in US making it a hub of continuous innovation. And I believe that is the most important competitive advantage US Economy enjoys over other economies.

It is true that many of the times H1B program(or for that reason any worker VISA Program like L1 etc.) has been exploited by different organizations. Companies have hired foreign workers with skills available in the US mainland. They were paid lower wages than the standard prevailing rates mentioned in the program. These temporary workers have been used as onsite coordinators to move jobs offshore. US corporations and Offshoring companies used this process to increase their profitability. Because of this Nobel laureate Economist like Milton Friedman think H1B is just another government subsidy .

Truth to be told all these are true but stopping H1B VISA program will not help US or world economy in any way. Protectionist view have never been successful in a Free-trade world where companies look for value. Let me explain why this will not work and what we can do to make things better:

Offshoring work to low cost countries will continue to grow even if H1B programs are stopped. The latest trend in Offshoring is not the use Onsite H1B and Offshore Contractors model. Instead US companies themselves are moving their own operations to low cost companies(For US this means american job loss and Income tax loss, in H1B model at least Income tax revenue was not lost). In this model you can have some key employees(US nationals) in US and a huge back office operations in low cost countries like India or China. That means even without H1B program american jobs(which does not need local presence) will be lost. If the US government even tries to stop offshoring completely the effect will be worse. US companies will lose their competitive advantage and Foreign companies with access to cheap labor will rule US and world economy. In that way much more US jobs will be destroyed. In a hypothetical situation if US stops Free-trade contracts with its partners it will become a country like North Korea(enough said I believe).
I think the only way US and the world economy can prosper is through free-trade and more wealth distribution. For decades US has been living in enormous excess. US consumers have continued to spend by taking loans from developing economics. On the other hand workers from poor countries have continued to work harder to create products, services and finance options to their American sisters and brothers. They saved that money and sent to America so that their US friends can fund their offerings. I believe this model is not sustainable in the long term. We need to acknowledge that the value created needs to be redistributed or at least balanced. That means we need to see a lower consumption and more savings by Americans and less saving and more consumptions by emerging countries. That is the one of the way US and world can maximize economic prosperity and continue business operations. For this we need have more free-trade and growth of american business for world consumption. If implemented properly US can have more high end jobs(thus low unemployment), more balanced budgets and more sustainable economics. On the other hand developing countries can see less dependence on US economy(we have seen huge job losses throughout the world because most of depended on US consumer),better lifestyle and better infrastructure and prosperity. It may sound socialist, but a capitalist economy can not sustain with massive wealth accumulation in the hand of few fortunate people and the rest of the crowd left behind. We need to see money in the hand of common people(bottom of the pyramid) so that they have ability to spend and purchase products and services. Some ideal scenarios for future? An investment banker from NYC happily accepts a job in a micro-finance company in Bangladesh(because he or she will be able to maintain almost similar lifestyle and also do more satisfying job of helping people with money rather than creating synthetic derivative products) or a Indian banker can afford a honeymoon in Mediterranean cruise.
The basic difference between the US and any other coutries is that US is the country of immigrants. No other country in this world has so many hard-working, talented opportunity finders and innovators. US has always been the hub of innovation for new technologies and new ideas and the only way it can continue to survive as a prosperous country is to continue that trend. For that US should keep the border open for truly high quality foreign sudent and workers. Here quality is the keyword. I think what we need to have is a right gating process which is enough comprehensive and clear in its directions so that the exploitations can be minimized. We should ensure that only the very best gets a chance to enter the country. At the same time I think we need to increase the number of intake of foreign students and workers because we are not really doing a good job in global sourcing. I believe that there will a lot of fantastic talent available throughout the world who do not get opportunity or don't have enough information on US immigration. US can do better campaign on those counties to invite right talents by showing opportunities and also change the immigration laws to ease this gating process for the right people(today H1B Visa can only be obtained by a sponsoring company and many of the times right talents do not get those sponsors or are exploited by those sponsoring companies). At the same time US should concentrate on educating its own workforce with latest technology and skills(job skills as well as basic money management skills) needed for the next economy. US should effectively invest in higher education and research(should make affordable higher education) and work on creating a new economy( may be green technolgy, energy technology, bio-technology, space-technolgy,geo-engineering, computer science, business etc.) which will create millions of new jobs save the world from our most pressing issues.

This is the high time that we be ready for the new rules of the new economy. We can not(and should not) artificially stop companies from improving their operational efficiencies. Hence we can not save amrican jobs by stopping H1B Visa programs or offshoring. What we need to think is to create new economy, new technology and new ways we do business. That is the only way we can save american jobs(for that reason jobs all over the world) and see a prosperous world.

Intelligent Cell Phone

2009-02-04T19:47:00.001-07:00

I am not a Mobile Technology guy. But I have this idea which can solve lot of problems for busy executives.
Problem Statement:
1. If we are using calling card to make international calls we need to call a 1-800 number and once connected we need to type our registration number and password to make the calls. This is problematic for the users as they have to remember those data or type it every time.
2. For Virtual online meetings also executives need to make call to one 1-800 number and then enter meeting ID and passcode.
Solution:
The mobile phone should have facility to save the numbers (registered number and passcode etc.) associated with such numbers (1-800 number) and once connected should automatically type those numbers. In this case the user can enter the data once and for all and he can be free from remembering this data in future calls. This solution should have fantastic CBA numbers as the users will have a premium experience with their smart mobile device.

Economic Crisis: Was a Soft Landing possible?

2009-01-31T11:48:00.008-07:00

Was there a way to avoid this messy Financial crisis? Could we have avoided this in the first place or at least could have arranged for a soft landing? Lets analyze some perspectives.

Greed, fear, artificially concentrated growth and Lack of proper oversight are the four main root causes of this Economic Crisis. In last decade or so we were behind easy money. Short term results defined the success. The policymakers never thought big enough for sustainable growth which needs inclusive growth. Don't make a mistake here. Inclusive growth does not mean just communism or providing free money to poor people. But this means creating more jobs in unexplored areas and new technologies to solve the biggest problems facing mankind(like green technologies, future energy solutions etc.). To save capitalism from the capitalists we need to create wealth and buying power at the bottom of the pyramid and the only way to do that is to redistribute wealth by creating huge amount of well-paid jobs. Instead what we saw is huge difference in salary structure between the working class and the management class(The differentials between the lowest and highest paid have risen to 1:300). Very few people made enormous amount of money by doing some Investment Baking and Management jobs. Most of these people were creating some artificially inflated wealth by derivatives and different other esoteric financial instruments. They were also fantastic in packaging and selling these produts to common people who had no idea about what they were buying. For short term profit they sold home-mortgages to people who did not have capability to repay those loans. They thought that is not a problem as the price of homes will continue to increase indefinitely and in case of foreclosure they can still sellout the house and make profits. American consumer consumed like anything by taking loans from all over the developing world the world. The developing countries found opportunities in selling their products and services to the American consumer and all those earnings were again reinvested in US as Treasury bonds. Unfortunately this loop of lending and consuming can not sustain and nobody thought about systemic risks of all these transactions. People were greedy and lacked common-sense. Stock market prices of emerging markets gained like anything and people stopped valuating stocks by Financial ratios. At the same time common people were not getting the benefit. They did not have health insurance or retirement savings or consumption capacity. Still they were lured by tempting advertisements to lead a quality lifestyle by borrowing on Credit cards and buying homes on loans which they can not repay.Government and other oversight agencies never did their jobs by properly controlling this greed. Opportunistic market makers created cheat funds and ponzi schemes. Hedge funds charged crazy amount of service fees and made huge amount of over-the-counter(OTC) risky transactions. And the most interesting thing is that all these unsustainable business continued for more than a decade. And then came the shock! Home prices went down, Foreclosure rate increased,Stock market plummeted, Default rate increased on Credit card loans, million of jobs were erased, banks failed, thousands of business went bankrupt, government bailout continued without any positive results, credit market collapsed, government debt increased and everyone is today fearful and puzzled how all these happenned so soon.

Was there a way to avoid this crisis? The answer is Yes and No. Theoritically 'Yes'. We could have done right things at the right time. We could have had more effective oversight and compliance, we could have planned for right kind of human resource allocation(best minds of the nation could have done research on green technologies and work on solving future energy problems instead of creating esoteric financial contracts), we could have planned for sustainable job creation and wealth distribution for creating a bigger market. Connecting dots backwards is easy but life needs to lived only in the forward direction. Hence I believe considering the condition present at those times it was not possible to stop this crisis. When things are going good it is very tough to take hard decisions like increasing government control and executive pay, investing in not-so-attractive green technologies, controlling credit limits and thus creating better spending habbits of the people. Hence in practical sense this crisis was due.

Let's see if there are anything good we can make out of this crisis. What are those important decisions which can help us out of this crisis soon. Following is my recommendation:

Greed and Fear are the root cause of this crisis. First it was greed: which inflated prices by creating artificial demands and then it was fear: which deflated prices to the artificial rock bottom. I call it artificial because if you think critically you will appreciate that our capacity of supply and demand should not change so drastically. We had almost same number of people living in 2007 and 2008(actually more) and the total natural resources avaiable in the world was actually less. Then why our home prices were dropped so dramatically. Why limited natural resources like gas prices can drop so significantly? Why we needed so less products or services in 2008 because of which we had to cut so many jobs? The answer is that the market sentiment changed from greed to fear. Previously people were getting much more than needed and they consumed much more than needed. After the shock it just reversed. People started a selling wave in Share market, stopped any discretionary spending and the sentiment continued to drop. One way we could have(or in that we still can) ensured a soft landing was through adjustable pricing of everything we transact. When demand drops down share, commodity and home prices fall but few things do not change in so linear fashion. For example salary or value of a mortgage loan(in general sense value of currency). Instead what we see is job cuts, or mortgage foreclosures etc. This process creates shocks in the market and creates more problem in Federal budget. People loss jobs and they bcome unproductive. At the same time they continue to cost in unemployment benefits increasing federal defecits. During the housing boom period people had baught houses in very high valuations and now those property prices have dropped creating loss for sellers and banks having foreclosure inventories. This is a vicious cycle which continue to decrease the price of the properties and the foreclosure rate. How can we solve these problems. Reprice the instruments and share the loss through mark-to-market accounting so that this process stabilise soon and we can again get back to the right track. I would suggest ban any future job cuts and foreclosures. Instead start a price discoery process to reprice the salaries and property values. Typically I am suggesting to follow simple demand-supply pricing. If the job demand is less you need to accept the paycut(it is still better than unemployment right?). If the value of a house decreases it is still better to renegotiate the loan terms and stop foreclosures. In both these cases all parties(including government) need to accept some loss but that should stop the downward spiral fast.

Economy depends a lot on the market sentiment, risk-taking mentality and consumer spending. Hence one good way to help the economy to recover is to instill consumer and investor confidence. Today both leaders and media are saying all negative things about the economy. This is actually lowering consumer and investor confidence. Instead of this if the leaders and the media(President Obama and other leaders, CNN, CNBC, FT, WSJ, NY Times)start saying some convincing but optimistic views the Economy can recover faster. If all the people again start buying stocks, houses and products the economy will be back on track very soon.

Become a Brand

2009-01-31T10:33:00.007-07:00

Christin Dior, Prada, Gucci, Rolex, Apple, BMW, Orient Express: All of these are extraordinary brands, famous for their premium products and services. Many of us do not have financial capacity to avail these brands, but we all dream of using these products and services one day. What makes them special? What helps them to charge 100% or more premium pricing for their products and services? It is their goodwill of supreme quality. They are never value players. They are never cheap yet very useful(WalMart or COSTCO). They are enormously costly but enviously wanted. They are made for class differentiation. They are made for page-3 discussion. Only the super-rich can afford show-off their wealth with these products. And that makes them special.

There are many people who work like dogs to become that kind of wealthy. Many of the times they even don't love what they do. They just slaze in office just to live better in the future. Unfortunately some of them they never think that they have earned enough money and they can now lead a good life. At that time they become greedy money making machine. Worst, they even take loans to buy these costly designer products and to repay these huge loans they need to continue to do the same monotonus hardwork which they don't enjoy.

I have a better solution for these people. You must be extremely good in some area. You need to recognize that special profession which makes you tick. How you can do that? Easy, just experiment and listen to your heart. You will surely find a profession that you love and once found just stick to your core genious. You can be rich and famous only by doing things which you love. Because to be successful you need to work hard; work hard long time; and that effort can only be sustainable if you love the job. Once you do the job you love, you will become successful and create a brand of your own. For example you love cooking. Just stick to your love and you can become a famous chef one day. That can make you the brand ambassador of one of your loved product which you wanted to own for so long.

So dream big, work hard and smart by choosing the job which you do best and never think short term. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of the last item. Never do things which you don't love but gives you easy money or buy things beyond your capacity and waste the rest of your life in paying the debt.

Become a brand for yourself by your own inner qualities and don't try to become a brand by buying other famous brands.

Reduce salaries reduce taxes but don't cut jobs.

2009-01-27T23:36:00.004-07:00

Job losses are becoming Frequency type data nowadays. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are evaporating in corporate America. Small businesses are closing down at an ever accelerating rate. It's like people care about a single death but when it is a massacre it just becomes a number. Job cut is a easy short term solution but a very tough long term problem. Unfortunately Corporate America or the Federal government is yet to appreciate the truth and it is going like a never ending downward spiral.

Let me show how this is bad and how we can manage economic downturn in a better way.

A single job loss creates multiple problems for the government and the business economy:

Loss of Tax revenue - Income Tax, Sales Tax(spending decreases as people get pink slips)

Social cost - Unemployment benefits from government.
Wastage of Company Learning and Developement Expenses, Low employee morale and productivity.
Less Spending - Means less business: which means more job cuts. Emperical study should show one job loss means X more job losses in future.
Other Financial and social issues - More credit defaults, more criminal activity, more social tensions etc.

Hence it is evident that job losses have a downward spiral effect in the country's economy. Agreed. Then what we can do for sustaining a global economic crisis like this? Here are some of my thoughts:

Government should ban(or at least control) Job cuts by companies and also should reduce any lower cap on salary. The idea is not to cut any jobs but reduce the costs by reduced salaries. This way government can still get taxes(Income and sales Taxes) and need not pay unemployment benefits.
Once people have jobs(although having less salaries) they will continue to spend(although at lesser rate but still more than if they didn't had any income). This will reduce the downward pressure on the sales numbers and make the economy more sustainable.
To stimulate the economy government should reduce tax rates at least on a temporary basis. This way both companies and customers will have more money at hand to spend. This loss of tax revenues can be compensated once the economy becomes strong by charging more taxes.

ESOP Plan for Mutual Fund Compensation

2009-01-27T23:12:00.003-07:00

Asset Managers are paid huge compensation in cash and most of the times it is proportional to the asset under management. To increase their earning Mutual Fund managers do all wrong things for the investors: They invest in risky securities and momentum stocks, do short term trading with more than 100% Turnover ratio just to increase trading and short term taxes. Why do they do that? Because most of the times they don't have big stakes in their own investment decisions. They just try to make money out of investors pocket.They are like consultants: if it is a success it is the power of the idea of the consultant; if it is failure it is the failure of the client's implementation. In either of the cases their compensation is not at stake.

How we can change it and make the asset managers more responsible for the investors? The greatest investor of the world, Mr. Buffet has the answer. His company BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC. never charges any fees to its investors for the Investment Service it provides. This is because the promoter himself has a major stake in that company and as the people buy Hathaway stocks the stock value increases and thus rewarding the promoter. We can have a similar reward system in Mutual Fund compensation. Instead of 100% cash compensation the major part of Mutual Fund compensation should be through Mutual Fund stock options at a fixed future price(which is generally higher than present value)redeemable at future date only. This should encourage the Fund managers to take care of the Long term health and sanity of the fund and to make prudent investment decisions.

TARP ETF: Wow What an idea

2009-01-27T21:39:00.006-07:00

CNBC reported the introduction of TARP ETF in NASDAQ. Typically this ETF will track companies funded by TARP bailout money. That means this index is an indicator of the effectiveness of the 700 billion government bailout program. If this index goes up it shows that Taxpayers money are being utilised in a better way,otherwise not.

Stock price is the indicator of the company management performance in the long term. The board and Executives are judged on the company stock performance. One major part of the executive compensation is linked to stock options. At a higher level market indexes are the barometers of the economic health of the country. In the similar fashion we should create different indexes to judge government performance. And government executives should be judged(and compensated) based on these indexes. At the same time investors can be benefited if the government perform well as the value of the index will grow in that case.

This has another dimension. Leave aside developing countries like India, even in the most matured countries like in the US government are not judged on a regular basis in some objective, measurable ways. Theoretically we have Freedom of Information but practically we don't have it. If introduced these set of indexes should help the people to track the performance of the elected government. This should also help in more prudent government allocation of Tax payer's money and increase the efficiency of the government executives.

We should have a Government Performance Index having different index components. Some of the components can be as follows:

1. Budget deficit reduction

2. Foreign debt control

3. Federal Expense/Investment ratio reduction.

4. Gini Index

5. National Security performance(military expenses vs. lives saved)

6. Happiness coefficient of the citizens

7. Health and Education performance

8. Level of corruption etc.

There can be some challenges in creating this kind of index due to the secretive nature of some government agencies. Many of the times we may not be able to accurately measure the performance of the military. Because of the confidential nature these departments do not disclose many of the investment or expense data. Another problem with generally military investments is that they do not have any tangible outputs or deliverable and hence it is difficult to calculate the efficiency of the system(this is also the root cause of many corruption). The index creators need to show innovation to solve these problems. They should not compromise on national security as well as should not ignore tracking of huge military expenses.

Better Accounting:Need of the hour

2009-01-14T08:52:00.006-07:00

History shows Sarbanes-Oxley Act was not successful in controlling Financial scams. It costed too much money without being able to control Accounting malpractices like Satyam scam(NYSE:SAY) and Madoff scandal. I believe there are still large number of such scams yet to be disclosed.

I think following are the reason for its failure:

The Act was too much inefficient in its implementation. It depended on too much documentation. When you have too much documents to create for a small and simple process change you become frustrated and the quality of data takes its toll. You just reuse a previously created document and change the name,date etc. and save it as a new version. You may ignore the fact that the facts and figures may have changed with time and those changes need to be documented properly. With the progression of hierarchy the number of documents to review increases enormously and it becomes quite impossible to review the documents for its truthfullness. It is even more difficult for the external parties(like analysts, auditors etc.)to review the correctness as they have even less time to review and less information about the company operations.This weakness has been exploited by dishonest company executives many of te times. This caused multiple cases of accounting scandals and completely wrong credit rating information.
US government(and consecutively other governments) allowed huge amount of Capital transaction Over-the-Counter(OTC) and through unregulated Hedge funds and Private Equity Flows. These industries have multiple weakness: Huge unaccounted money transfer, Highly inefficient Asset management Fees and Speculative Highly Levereged Transactions causing systemic risks. At the same time this creates an ethical problem of double standards: Mutual Fund companies are regulated but Hedge Fund Companies are unregulated; although both are typically in the same business.

To solve the problem the governments(it should be a coordinated effort of all the governments throughout the world) should work on two things:

We need to invent a better way of accounting to minimise the frauds. We need to minimise unwanted documentation but capture correct,reviewable and verifyable Data items standardized across the board. Also to minimize manual effort we can create Automated Business rule process for Data Validation etc.
Standardized and uniform regulation, more conservative reserve requirements, controlling (at least regulating) the Hedge Fund and OTC Market transactions.

Orkut: My Wishlist

2009-01-14T08:21:00.005-07:00

Orkut is trying to reinvent itself everyday by creating new Apps, new colors etc. But I think it is still missing the big thing with immense opportunities. The implementation of this idea is challenging, as it may need to redesign the Orkut code architecture. Still this is worth the effort.

Today, orkut has limited options to create profiles. At the high level it has Social, Professional and Personal pages. I believe those pages have some limited fields to create the complete profile of a personality. Worst thing is even if you don't fill those fields they are displayed in the page with blank values. This looks pretty bad.

I suggest to create a site in which the users will have the ability to create customized pages of their own. For example I don't want a Personal page. In that case no Personal page will be displayed with blank values. Instead of Personal Page I want a Page called 'Creative'(just to showcase my creative world beside my Social and Professional world). In that page I want specific fields of my own(not the limited fields which we have today, but say my 'Passion'). This is just an example but for this idea even the sky is not the limit!

Each AIIMS doctor costs 17 million Indian Rupee

2009-01-08T17:48:00.004-07:00

Of the 2,129 students who passed out in the first 42 batches of the MBBS programme at AIIMS -- from its inception in 1956 to 1997 -- the study team tracked down 1,477 doctors. Of them, 780 or 52.81% were found to be working abroad.

India has a dismal patient-doctor ratio. For every 10,000 Indians, there is only one doctor. In contrast, Australia has 249 doctors for every 10,000 people, Canada has 209, UK has 166 and US has 548.Hence this brain-drain is a big problem for India even if we consider the NRI remittances as creators. At the same time I think we can not stop anyone from moving abroad (ethically and practically).

Better we can think of the following solution:

We should follow the US model of higher education. Increase the cost of higher education and make sure enough Need based Scholarship and no-guarantee loans are available for full tuition funding.
This should solve the educational funding issue and help government or private to create more opportunities for higher education. More doctors will help us to improve the per capita ratio.
The difference of medical profession from other high cost profession (like engineering or MBA) is that you need physical presence of the qualified professionals in the village or remote areas. That is challenging as very few people will love to live in such a place after earning a high cost degree (both in terms of money and effort) especially when living in Indian villages is anything but comfortable and at the same time the government salary is not attractive. One way we can do that is to create a mandatory one year post degree paid training (house staff program) in village areas. That way at least we can have some resources available.
Another possibility is to create military like 10 year bond for servicing in village areas (for those students cost of medical education will be much less). There are still few people who don’t come into this profession for money. These non-profit minded guys can be used in villages. Personally I don’t like this idea but can be useful in poor countries like India if it can be implemented(people can still study with subsidies and then break the bond; in the absence of proper legal structure in India implementation can be challenging).

Dumbest moments in Business

2009-01-02T17:47:00.006-07:00

Fortune published a list of worst Business Decisions in 2008.
But I think dumbest of them is not listed in the main article.
Consumption beyond capacity by enormous amount of leveraging, greed, wrong housing market assumptions (nothing can go up indefinitely), wasting resources (4 SUV families). There are many dumb mistakes done by Americans (and so called Americanized world).
But the dumbest of all is not to work on Sustainable environment planning. We all know we can not meet our energy needs by the present technology. The best thing we can try is to create a massive research project (in the scale of Manhattan project) to invent new technologies to solve these problems. I hoped Obama will do that. But it seems Obama is more focused on creating jobs by unnecessary projects (building roads and highways, which I believe is not so urgent), bailing out(by taking new loans to make messier Federal Balance sheet)auto companies(which make crap vehicles) and stimulus packages(which may stimulate the wasteful over consumption habit of Americans and thus destroy a good habit(living frugally)recently developed within Americans).
This financial crisis can be a boon for us if we take lessons and change the way we do business. Investing in Sustainable science and engineering (geo-engineering), better accounting, better wealth distribution, minimizing wastages are few of the things we should focus now. Unfortunately we are not doing any of these and American well as world economy is becoming out of control day by day.