interview with Girija Pande, of TCS. Wharton school.
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"I said inside large corporations you can be an entrepreneur. There is an entrepreneurial streak of just doing things and being sometimes a little more radical than others. Asking questions, which [other] people don't ask. " Girija Pande, TCS.
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I used to go and tell all my people when I used to run treasury in the bank, "If you get it 75% of the time right you have done very well." That is a very powerful statement to your team -- that you will tolerate failures, you will allow them to innovate. Otherwise, they will wait for you for an answer.
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So clearly I act as a coach to my team. If you are going fast they will ask you, "You tell us and we'll do it." The minute that happens you are in a prescriptive mode. You want to say, "What do we think? This is the challenge." And there are ideas bubbling forth. You will moderate it with your experience. You will finally have the stamp on it. They understand that. But that is the open coach that you need to [be] to bring this team its best.
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Second, Confucian thinking, which dominates the Chinese mindset in everything they do, has a lot of respect for authority and a lot of respect for a certain restraint on leadership. It is a very top-down driven issue. There are no arguments. I always have a challenge when I am with our Chinese team. I want them to argue. I encourage them to argue. I say to them, "All knowledge does not reside in me. In fact, the least resides in me. I am here to listen and hear from you." It is difficult. In India, you open a room full of young people and you don't have a chance to talk.'
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Third, over the years the Chinese have realized the value of delivering on time. In that country it is sacrosanct. You don't miss deadlines whether they are building a bridge or they are building an IT system. Customers expect it.
That is how they build bridges. That's how they build large organizations and cities -- with an amazing amount of military precision. Indian organizations don't yet know the value of that. I think they are learning. But if you ask me the difference -- the execution capability in China is absolutely outstanding.
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Sometimes there are losses, especially in China, because many of their companies are not driven by the stock market. So large investments are made, which are sometimes wasteful. I think they are struggling with that.
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many of them were in this country (the United States). I have seen some very good talent that is coming back to China. Then they have a pool of talent around Hong Kong or Taiwan and some of the Southeast Asian countries which have ethnic Chinese. So they have that big pool to draw from -- that's about 50 million. India has a pool of 20 million people outside India. Many of them in [the United States] are doing well. We have to start using that pool better, especially in global affairs.
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http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4500
Saturday, July 24, 2010
From Wharton Biz school
Friday, July 23, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Microfinance & Mary Ellen Iskenderian
"When someone trusts low-income women with capital, often for the first time, they can become agents of their own change."
Mary Ellen Iskenderian
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The debate over microfinance and mission drift has intensified as some researchers maintain that there is more to developing an entrepreneur than providing credit. "Credit alone is not a panacea," notes Jonathan Morduch, a professor of public policy and economics at New York University. "The boldest claim for microfinance -- that it can single-handedly eliminate a large share of world poverty -- outpaces, by a long distance, the evidence accumulated to date." At the same time, however, analysts like Morduch emphasize the success of microfinance groups that combine lending with other initiatives, such as education and health care
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Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker and Nobel Peace Prize winner whom many experts regard as the founder of microfinance, has said that interest rates should be 10% to 15% above the cost of raising money, with anything beyond that range amounting to a "red zone" of loan sharking. Yet by that measure, 75% of microfinance institutions would fall into the red zone, according to a March 2010 analysis of 1,008 micro-lenders by the MIX, a website where more than 1,000 microfinance companies worldwide report their own numbers. Many experts label Yunus's formula as overly simplistic and too low, and fear that a pronounced backlash against high interest rates will prompt lenders to retreat from the poorest customers.
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As another example, poor women have traditionally managed risk in very risky ways: by relying on their husbands, pulling children out of school to work, or selling productive assets such as livestock or equipment. WWB has published a paper highlighting alternative ways for women to manage such gambles using gender-sensitive micro-insurance. For instance, women can choose another beneficiary if they don't think their husbands will protect the children properly after the woman's death. In Colombia, the life insurance offered by one company pays monthly benefits that can only be used for the purpose of educating the children for two years after the death of a parent, in order to reduce the pressure on the surviving parent to pull children out of school.
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"It's not always size that makes the difference in [microfinance]," Iskenderian said. "People make the difference with their energy and their resolve.... Single individuals and the choices they make have a tremendous impact on the world." - Mary Ellen Iskenderian.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2540
Mary Ellen Iskenderian
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The debate over microfinance and mission drift has intensified as some researchers maintain that there is more to developing an entrepreneur than providing credit. "Credit alone is not a panacea," notes Jonathan Morduch, a professor of public policy and economics at New York University. "The boldest claim for microfinance -- that it can single-handedly eliminate a large share of world poverty -- outpaces, by a long distance, the evidence accumulated to date." At the same time, however, analysts like Morduch emphasize the success of microfinance groups that combine lending with other initiatives, such as education and health care
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Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker and Nobel Peace Prize winner whom many experts regard as the founder of microfinance, has said that interest rates should be 10% to 15% above the cost of raising money, with anything beyond that range amounting to a "red zone" of loan sharking. Yet by that measure, 75% of microfinance institutions would fall into the red zone, according to a March 2010 analysis of 1,008 micro-lenders by the MIX, a website where more than 1,000 microfinance companies worldwide report their own numbers. Many experts label Yunus's formula as overly simplistic and too low, and fear that a pronounced backlash against high interest rates will prompt lenders to retreat from the poorest customers.
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As another example, poor women have traditionally managed risk in very risky ways: by relying on their husbands, pulling children out of school to work, or selling productive assets such as livestock or equipment. WWB has published a paper highlighting alternative ways for women to manage such gambles using gender-sensitive micro-insurance. For instance, women can choose another beneficiary if they don't think their husbands will protect the children properly after the woman's death. In Colombia, the life insurance offered by one company pays monthly benefits that can only be used for the purpose of educating the children for two years after the death of a parent, in order to reduce the pressure on the surviving parent to pull children out of school.
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"It's not always size that makes the difference in [microfinance]," Iskenderian said. "People make the difference with their energy and their resolve.... Single individuals and the choices they make have a tremendous impact on the world." - Mary Ellen Iskenderian.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2540
Wharton on Cyber Attacks, Hacking & Data Security
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From a corporate perspective, experts say the required response to these threats has two sides. The first is protecting IT infrastructure, meaning the systems, hardware, software and networks used by an organization. The second involves protecting the actual information or data that is supported by that infrastructure, whether the information is in motion, in use or in storage. Complicating those efforts, however, is the need to protect the business environment while ensuring that employees have access to the information and services they need to do their jobs.
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"We have witnessed companies going under, or being severely hit, due to a single untoward event. As a result, how to better manage and finance extreme events is now a question discussed by many more board of directors than five or 10 years ago."
( reminded me of ' Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
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"What has changed is that both companies and hackers have grown sophisticated. So the good news is that most security software will protect us from the most basic threats, which was not the case in the past. But the bad news is that malware and viruses have become more sophisticated, so even advanced users can fall prey to them."
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Experts say that the recent attacks on information security suggest at least three things: First, that hackers increasingly know exactly what they want, while their targets often struggle to understand the threat or where it is coming from. Second, that attackers continue to rapidly develop new ways to access what they want, and as a result, the threats can come from anywhere. (For example, The New York Times disclosed this year that hackers were trying to use online advertising on the newspaper's own website to disseminate malware.) Finally, observers believe that almost everyone and every company ultimately is at risk, a result of today's highly networked global economy and communications infrastructure
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Here, monitoring and controlling access to information become even more challenging, as systems must be able to work both in-house and virtually, especially in cases of multi-tenant systems, where several companies or accounts may have sensitive information managed by a single server. CIO magazine recently reported that 51% of CIOs cited security as the greatest concern surrounding cloud computing.
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One approach often used in military scenario-planning exercises, for example, is to split key participants into two teams and run a one-day exercise where one team cooks up potential cyberattacks while the other team designs a response. "You will be surprised by how imaginative your employees can be about what is your true weak link," Michel-Kerjan points out. "Keep in mind here that what can seriously hurt you will not be a 'usual' scenario."
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From :
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2535
Labels: Knowledge at Wharton
