ET CITINGS

" Bobo s in Paradise " by David Brookes.

2011-09-01T01:34:00.000-07:00

" Through out the 20 the century, it's been pretty easty to distinguish betwen the bourgeois world of capatilasm and the bohemian coounter culture.

The bourgeoisie were the square , practical ones. They defended the tradition and middle class morality. They worked for corporations, livied in suburbs and wen to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention. They were the artists and the intellectuals - the hippies and the Beats.

In the old schema, the bohemians championed the values of the radical 1960s and the bourgeois were the entreprising yuppies of the 1990 s. The intangilble world of information merges with the matiral world of money, and new phrases that combine the 2, such as ' intellectual capita;' , and ' the culture indusry' come into bogue. So, the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products.

These are highly educated olk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldy success. The members of the new information age elite are bouregois bhomians. Or , thto take the first 2 letter of each word, they are, ' Bobo' s. These Bobo s defind our age. Theya re the new establishment. Then, hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social life. Their moral codes give structure to our personal lives !

( there is also amazon link )

http://www.amazon.com/Bobos-Paradise-Upper-Class-There/dp/0684853787/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314865416&sr=1-3

Parameters for measuring happiness : Wharton : Nic Marks interview

2011-08-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

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Idea of happiness : various measuring parameters. Limitations of GDP as an index of happiness
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http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2818

Recent book by Author Mr.Nic Marks, " Happiness Manifesto " is becoming very popular and selling millions of copies all over the world. In an interview with a Wharton Professor, Mr.Nic Marks says, there are 5 keys to increase our happiness in life. And they don't cost us anything or very little. Felt like sharing part excerpt ....
CVR

Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the other things that contribute to happiness? You talked about community relations and family relations. Those are important measures in the way that you look at things, are they not?

Marks: Yes. Every piece of well-being research will say that human relationships are the most important thing.Our relationships are absolutely key to our survival. From a biological perspective, our happiness is tied in with that.There are lots of things outside of the economy that are really, really important.

At the New Economics Foundation, we talk about there being 5 things that really generate people's happiness and well-being.

The first is "Connect," which is your social relationships.

The second is "Being Active," which is physical activity. It is great for our well-being. The fastest way out of a bad mood is to go outside, go for a walk, run or whatever it is you like doing.

Third thing is - "Taking Notice" is about allowing yourself to be moved by things around you, noticing them, noticing what is going on with other people, noticing the changing seasons -- beauty. Noticing what is coming up from within you. Listening to those sorts of doubts or those suppressed joys in your life and actually starting to act them out.

The fourth is to "Keep Learning." Curiosity is great for well-being. [That means] understanding things -- less about knowledge [and] more about an engagement with the world and actually wanting to learn new things, right through the life course. Older people who keep learning have much better health outcomes.

And then, finally, the last one is "Give." Be compassionate." I think there is actually a huge hunger in the West to give again. I think it is what people fear had been suppressed. In a way we have become quite individualistic and selfish as a society. I think there is a huge potential there for unlocking that.

In a classic experiment, people were given money at the beginning of the day. One half was told to go and spend it on themselves. . And the other half was told to spend it on someone else. At the end of the day, [the experimenters looked at] happiness and how [people] have enjoyed the day. It was measured. The ones who gave to other people were significantly happier than the ones who spent it on themselves. That is very, very interesting. One of the best ways to spend your money -- if you want to spend it for happiness -- is to think about giving away a portion of it.

Marks: Starting with GDP and what's wrong with it: There is a long list probably. But the first one is that it makes no differentiation between whether expenditures are for a good thing or for a bad thing. We call these "defensive expenditures" when they are for bad things, things that are basically done to defend quality of life rather than to promote it. So, for example, the big oil slick down off Florida (from the BP oil rig blowout) would have cost an awful lot of money to clear up. That would be added as a positive to GDP, but obviously it is an extremely negative situation.

It(GDP) does know how to do it with financial capital. It has ways of adjusting it, but not with natural capital. It just treats it as a free good altogether. There is also the fact that lots of things happen outside the economy, which are of value, but they are not valued. This is one of the things that Simon Kuznets -- the original architect of GDP -- was well aware of. Household labor, parenting, community work and volunteering ... are the core economy in many ways, and yet they are not valued. So GDP has many, many problems when you think about quality of life.

There is a tension between good lives now and good lives in the future, according to the Stiglitz Commission. That is something we totally agree with. That is actually why it is such a political issue because we often are trading off the future for the now with some of our decisions about consumption patterns and how much CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere, and things of that nature. So that is a really, really important issue !

Wharton : I don't know that you mean to separate a level of affluence from happiness, but can you talk about that dynamic? Perhaps there is a minimum level of affluence that one needs to become satisfied -- after which further affluence doesn't make you much happier?

Nic Marks : Marks: Definitely. All the well-being research suggests that there is the classic falling marginal utility of income -- that basically a thousand dollars in the pocket of a rich person is worth much less than a thousand dollars in the pocket of a poor person -- and that's clear [even at] the country level. It is the same everywhere. The idea of GDP growth is that a rising tide lifts all boats and that everyone [becomes] better [off economically]. The problem is that most GDP growth has been extremely unequal, so it is actually tipping the boats in lots of ways. Secondly, the things that are really, really critical for well-being simply don't cost so much.

So I don't agree with Wolfers' argument that you have to have rising GDP. We can see nations [that are examples] -- Costa Rica's average life expectancy is longer than the United States' -- or very, very similar. Some years it is higher and some years it is not. They have a great healthcare system there. They are much happier than people in the United States and they have a quarter of the GDP.

Knowledge@Wharton: That is a good example. Didn't they come up number one in your happiness index?

Marks: Yes. They actually come out as the happiest nation on the planet, which is a surprise result. But actually I have since been to Costa Rica -- the beginning part of this year. You can see it is very, very relational. They feel quite free, and they also have very strong family relationships, very strong community relationships. They have their problems. They have unemployment. They have rising income inequality and they have rising crime. So they are not without problems. But they are a very, very different society than several. Latin American countries also are blessed with a sort of life philosophy, which is quite vibrant and of course,

career defining decisions in life

2011-05-24T02:11:00.001-07:00

How to deal with ' career defining moments' in life ? How do CEO s do it ? A Wharton interview .

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2718

Deloitte CEO Bary Salzberg on Leadership concepts & institute

2011-05-24T00:16:00.001-07:00

Deloitte CEO Barry Salzberg, on Leadership is the Norm, not the exception ; the old command & control era is passe..

http://mytoday.com/u/1975 and

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2771
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Instead, Salzberg said, leadership needs to be "flat" today. It needs to be transparent. And to thrive in an ever-changing world, companies must actively commit to cultivating younger leaders throughout the organization, encouraging older leaders to pass on what they know. "Leadership now needs to be the norm, not the exception," he noted. "No longer is leadership about a few exceptional leaders at the top of the organization. Rather, the future is about exceptional teams and the leaders within those teams who can out-maneuver, out-manage and out-innovate their competition."-----------------------------------
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His first leadership lesson came on his third day. "Bosszilla," as he calls his first boss, asked him for a photocopy of a tax ruling. Eager to please and show off his legal savvy, Salzberg included his own two-page interpretation. "Mr. Salzberg," Bosszilla hissed, "I asked you for a copy of the ruling, not your interpretation. One copy, stapled."

"Well, I will tell you that right then I knew the kind of leader I never want to be," Salzberg said, "the kind who gives orders, not encouragement, who expects people to speak only when spoken to. I knew then, and I've proved it over and over during my career, that you never know where the best ideas will come from. If you build a supportive environment where everyone is expected to contribute, you'll get synergies and creative ideas you never imagined were possible."
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Up the 'Lattice'

That, Salzberg noted, is why leadership needs to be flat. In a global world, leaders are required at all levels of the organization, not just at the top. In fact, he said, Deloitte has "kicked away the ladder. In my organization, we talk now about the lattice, not the ladder," where people can move not just up and down but also sideways. If employees need to ease up on the intensity of work to take care of a child or an aging parent, the lattice structure allows them to do that without destroying their career. "The corporate lattice metaphor signals a shift in mindset. It's better reflective of today's employees, who want variety and flexibility and reject a one-size-fits-all approach."
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As head of Deloitte's U.S. operations, Salzberg visits as many as 25 to 35 offices every year, sitting down with partners to hear their concerns. When he becomes global CEO, he plans to travel more, he said. "There's nothing that can replace face-to-face interaction. Getting the rubber on the shoes worn out is how to do it."
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The experience helped him develop what he calls his "no ostriches, no elephants" principle. "No burying your head in the sand if there's a problem, and no ignoring the elephant in the room. Much better to name and tame an issue, no matter how difficult it is," than to ignore it or pretend it isn't there, he said. "Making sure the truth is told and discussed with all is the foundation of leadership. Without that, you can't build trust."
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"While mentoring was naturally a part of the process, it was not a hard-and-fast requirement. Rather, it was something you did if you kind of felt like it. It was optional, and nobody really monitored it. As I look back on it, the old model left too much to chance as far as developing leaders.
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The board eventually approved the $300 million initiative, and Deloitte University is now slated to open in Westlake, Tex., later this year. The 100-plus acre campus is dedicated to the idea that leaders learn best from other leaders. "Call it 'apprenticeship' if you will. It's an age-old model for turning the young into talented, experienced professionals and leaders."
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The university will give Deloitte professionals a chance share their experience and wisdom with the next generation -- a trait Salzberg believes comes naturally to good leaders. "The best leaders are ... generous with their experience, time and understanding that leadership is a life-long journey that is best made with trusted companions," he said. "If you have became a leader, the likelihood is that someone mentored you. Someone helped you, someone championed your career.
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Fiscal Attraction & Entrepreneurship

2011-05-24T00:14:00.001-07:00

Fiscal Fatal attraction and idiosynchracies of entrepreneurs
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2762

How Money Impacts Marriage

When it comes to marriage, do opposites attract? Or do birds of a

feather flock together? While men and women are known to

gravitate toward mates with personal qualities similar to their own

in most respects, Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small

found the opposite to be true when it comes to money.

find that stingy spenders tend to marry those who splurge freely,

and vice versa. The pattern amounts to "fatal attraction," the

researchers argue, because it causes conflicts over money and

thus has a negative effect on marital well-being.

"There's a lot of academic literature and interest in individual

decision making, [but what has been] largely neglected is that

people are often making decisions jointly and the outcomes of

financial decisions affect other people," Small says. "It's important

to understand that even though two individuals are involved in a

decision and are being affected by it, their attitudes and

preferences may not be aligned."

he majority of relationship research suggests that people are

attracted to those with similar demographic characteristics,

attitudes, values and even names. But Small and her co-authors

based their hypothesis of spendthrift/tightwad attraction on a

theory that men and women also tend to seek out a mate who

has qualities that are the stark opposite of those they most strongly

deplore in themselves -- in this case, the tendency to spend too

much or too little.

Two subsequent experiments asked different sets of respondents to

rate their own and their spouses' behavior on the spendthrift-

tightwad scale. In both cases, the researchers found that stingy

spenders were more likely to be married to profligates and high-

rollers gravitated toward the miserly.

People might think "that someone on the other end of the

spectrum might heal them in some way," Rick notes. "If I'm a

tightwad, I want to find a spendthrift to loosen me up, because

tightwads by definition want to loosen up. Spendthrifts also by

definition want to change their behavior.... They might think that

an opposite would help reel in that misbehavior. That [is not] what

we find."

Even though these couples may have assumed that marrying an

opposite when it came to money would balance out their own

behavior and lead to greater financial health, Small and her co-

authors discovered that such matches did not necessarily make for

happier relationships. Indeed, the research shows that conflicts

over money created more marital strife for these "opposites

attract" couplings. "We have some findings suggesting that two

spendthrifts are happier than a spendthrift and a tightwad [even

though] two spendthrifts are much more likely to end up in debt

and have other financial problems," Small says. "It's not clear that

what makes you happier is also going to make you more financially

secure."

the current findings suggest that couples should talk about

financial habits and practices early on in a relationship, and form a

set of shared expectations, plans and goals. "I think doing that

helps people recognize if the differences are too broad to

overcome," she adds.

"Entrepreneurs create so much wealth in our society, but we don't

understand what makes a person become an entrepreneur," says

Wharton finance professor Nikolai Roussanov. "This question of 'why'

is fascinating for economists because entrepreneurs benefit society

as a whole to such a great degree. We would be worse off without

them."

"Why do certain people take the entrepreneurial leap?"

His conclusion is that entrepreneurs have unique social aspirations

that other people typically don't share. "They weigh risks and

outcomes differently," he notes, which leads to atypical, but

rational, conclusions about risks and opportunities. Contrary to

common perception, entrepreneurs are not less averse to taking

chances; they simply view relative hazards with a different eye.

Socially, Roussanov says, aspiring entrepreneurs do not want to

merely keep up with the proverbial Jones; they want to get

marginally ahead of them. "Absolute wealth is not as important to

them as relative wealth." Entrepreneurs also save more and spend

less as a portion of their incomes than other people, according to

Roussanov. The consumptive value of money isn't their motivation.

Rather it's the social esteem that comes with achieving

incrementally greater wealth than they had previously, and than

their perceived peer group has. Of course, "Who 'the Jones' are

changes as you progress," Roussanov points out. "First you think, 'I

know these guys are successful and I would like to be like them.' But

as you progress, you change your comparisons. You want to be in

the Forbes 400, then in the top 10 and so forth.

In his paper, Roussanov notes that "if the satisfaction brought by

'getting ahead of the Joneses' outweighs the danger of falling

behind, risky activities with highly idiosyncratic payoffs, such as

entrepreneurship, can be particularly attractive." By contrast,

"Other people may not have this preference for status. They look at

the risks and say, 'This is too much for me.'"

What is perplexing about an entrepreneur's endeavors, Roussanov

adds, is that, "from an economist's point of view, the risk in

entrepreneurial ventures is high." These people "commit a large

fraction of their human and financial capital to their ventures, thus

exposing themselves to large undiversified risks," he writes in the

paper. "Economic theory predicts that higher risk should be

compensated by higher average return, [yet] returns on

undiversified entrepreneurial investments are no higher than the

average return on publicly traded equity."

For Luxury Goods Aficionados, Knowledge Equals Wealth

Many consumers buy high-end products to signal wealth and

status to those around them, aided by explicit branding such as a

large Mercedes symbol on the front of a car. But if consumers buy

expensive goods in part to clearly communicate things like status

to others, why would shoppers spend thousands of dollars on

handbags or other goods that have no visible logos?

In the paper, "Subtle Signals of Inconspicuous Consumption,"

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger and Morgan Ward, a

marketing professor at Southern Methodist University, suggest that

manufacturers of consumer goods wanting to sell to a high-end,

niche customer base should offer exclusive product lines with

smaller logos and more subtle branding elements. Based on studies

of consumer preference among ordinary shoppers and those who

were more fashion conscious, the researchers found that "insiders"

in a given consumption range (e.g., fashionistas, car enthusiasts,

etc.) prefer products that identified them as being "in the know"

only to a select group of peers.

The consumer study groups examined products with both highly

visible branding, such as the word "Gucci" emblazoned in tall

letters on a handbag, and more subtle signals of price -- for

example, the signature cherry-red soles on Christian Louboutin

shoes.

The majority of "typical" consumers preferred the products with

larger brand identifiers, and tended to misidentify products with

subtler branding. Among products with subtle signals, "typical"

consumers "thought the high-priced options were no more

expensive than their cheap alternatives," the authors write. But

the "insiders," in this case fashion students or people with an affinity

for high fashion, not only could tell the difference between a low-

cost generic item and a high-priced item with a tiny logo, but also

preferred the subtly-branded products.

To understand such "insider" shoppers, companies need to realize

that the handbag these shoppers carry or shoes they wear is

largely about sending signals, Berger notes, almost like

communicating a coded message to members of a select group.

"A Rolex is a widely recognized status symbol, but might be looked

down upon by true watch enthusiasts," the paper states. "A

Vacheron Constantin, on the other hand, will be invisible to most

people, but respected by watch aficionados."

Another lesson, conversely, is that being selective with branding

techniques comes with risk. A consumer goods company that

wants to target high-end shoppers might select a subtle pattern or

small logo, but that could turn off the majority of shoppers -- those

who can't tell the difference between a cheaper product and the

expensive item."Most people think a $6,000 Bottega Veneta bag is

no more expensive that a cheap Wal-Mart bag that has no logo,"

Berger says.

According to Berger and Ward, from the point of view of an

"insider," being identified as such is vitally important, to the point

that they will opt for possibly being mistaken for lower-end shoppers

by the masses in exchange for recognition by their fellow high-

fashion fans. The researchers also suggest that "discretely marked

products, subtle but distinct styles or high-end brands that fly

beneath the radar" have a longer life on the market than their less

expensive, more loudly branded alternatives.

"The value of signals is that they distinguish social groups, so when

outsiders start copying insiders' signals, insiders may abandon that

product and search for a new signal," Berger says. "Because explicit

signals, like large logos, are easier to observe, they are more likely to

be poached or copied, and thus more likely to eventually be

abandoned in favor of a new group marker."

That has clear implications for products with explicit brand

markings, even on expensive high-end products. "Explicit status

symbols may generate large sales in the short term, but this will only

persist if enough of the buyers are truly wealthy," the researchers

write. "If not, the symbolic value will shift towards being a marker of

the wannabe rich, and sales will decline as consumers search for

the next aspirational symbol."

More generally, the researchers suggest, the role of wealth as a

status marker is changing, being replaced by knowledge or

"cultural capital." With the expansion of credit and leasing

programs, and the wider availability of knockoff items, "it is a lot

easier now for someone who is not truly wealthy to be able to

purchase something that seems expensive," Berger notes. "Cultural

capital, though, remains elusive. Acquiring the right knowledge

requires time, effort and the right connections -- things that are

hard to fake."

branding, consumer beh, signals, cultural capital

2011-05-11T04:11:00.001-07:00

Fiscal Fatal attraction and idiosynchracies of entrepreneurs

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2762

How Money Impacts Marriage

When it comes to marriage, do opposites attract? Or do birds of a feather flock together? While men and women are known to gravitate toward mates with personal qualities similar to their own in most respects, Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small found the opposite to be true when it comes to money.

find that stingy spenders tend to marry those who splurge freely, and vice versa. The pattern amounts to "fatal attraction," the researchers argue, because it causes conflicts over money and thus has a negative effect on marital well-being.

"There's a lot of academic literature and interest in individual decision making, [but what has been] largely neglected is that people are often making decisions jointly and the outcomes of financial decisions affect other people," Small says. "It's important to understand that even though two individuals are involved in a decision and are being affected by it, their attitudes and preferences may not be aligned."

he majority of relationship research suggests that people are attracted to those with similar demographic characteristics, attitudes, values and even names. But Small and her co-authors based their hypothesis of spendthrift/tightwad attraction on a theory that men and women also tend to seek out a mate who has qualities that are the stark opposite of those they most strongly deplore in themselves -- in this case, the tendency to spend too much or too little.

Two subsequent experiments asked different sets of respondents to rate their own and their spouses' behavior on the spendthrift-tightwad scale. In both cases, the researchers found that stingy spenders were more likely to be married to profligates and high-rollers gravitated toward the miserly.

People might think "that someone on the other end of the spectrum might heal them in some way," Rick notes. "If I'm a tightwad, I want to find a spendthrift to loosen me up, because tightwads by definition want to loosen up. Spendthrifts also by definition want to change their behavior.... They might think that an opposite would help reel in that misbehavior. That [is not] what we find."

Even though these couples may have assumed that marrying an opposite when it came to money would balance out their own behavior and lead to greater financial health, Small and her co-authors discovered that such matches did not necessarily make for happier relationships. Indeed, the research shows that conflicts over money created more marital strife for these "opposites attract" couplings. "We have some findings suggesting that two spendthrifts are happier than a spendthrift and a tightwad [even though] two spendthrifts are much more likely to end up in debt and have other financial problems," Small says. "It's not clear that what makes you happier is also going to make you more financially secure."

the current findings suggest that couples should talk about financial habits and practices early on in a relationship, and form a set of shared expectations, plans and goals. "I think doing that helps people recognize if the differences are too broad to overcome," she adds.

"Entrepreneurs create so much wealth in our society, but we don't understand what makes a person become an entrepreneur," says Wharton finance professor Nikolai Roussanov. "This question of 'why' is fascinating for economists because entrepreneurs benefit society as a whole to such a great degree. We would be worse off without them."

"Why do certain people take the entrepreneurial leap?"

His conclusion is that entrepreneurs have unique social aspirations that other people typically don't share. "They weigh risks and outcomes differently," he notes, which leads to atypical, but rational, conclusions about risks and opportunities. Contrary to common perception, entrepreneurs are not less averse to taking chances; they simply view relative hazards with a different eye.

Socially, Roussanov says, aspiring entrepreneurs do not want to merely keep up with the proverbial Jones; they want to get marginally ahead of them. "Absolute wealth is not as important to them as relative wealth." Entrepreneurs also save more and spend less as a portion of their incomes than other people, according to Roussanov. The consumptive value of money isn't their motivation. Rather it's the social esteem that comes with achieving incrementally greater wealth than they had previously, and than their perceived peer group has. Of course, "Who 'the Jones' are changes as you progress," Roussanov points out. "First you think, 'I know these guys are successful and I would like to be like them.' But as you progress, you change your comparisons. You want to be in the Forbes 400, then in the top 10 and so forth.

In his paper, Roussanov notes that "if the satisfaction brought by 'getting ahead of the Joneses' outweighs the danger of falling behind, risky activities with highly idiosyncratic payoffs, such as entrepreneurship, can be particularly attractive." By contrast, "Other people may not have this preference for status. They look at the risks and say, 'This is too much for me.'"

What is perplexing about an entrepreneur's endeavors, Roussanov adds, is that, "from an economist's point of view, the risk in entrepreneurial ventures is high." These people "commit a large fraction of their human and financial capital to their ventures, thus exposing themselves to large undiversified risks," he writes in the paper. "Economic theory predicts that higher risk should be compensated by higher average return, [yet] returns on undiversified entrepreneurial investments are no higher than the average return on publicly traded equity."

For Luxury Goods Aficionados, Knowledge Equals Wealth

Many consumers buy high-end products to signal wealth and status to those around them, aided by explicit branding such as a large Mercedes symbol on the front of a car. But if consumers buy expensive goods in part to clearly communicate things like status to others, why would shoppers spend thousands of dollars on handbags or other goods that have no visible logos?

In the paper, "Subtle Signals of Inconspicuous Consumption," Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger and Morgan Ward, a marketing professor at Southern Methodist University, suggest that manufacturers of consumer goods wanting to sell to a high-end, niche customer base should offer exclusive product lines with smaller logos and more subtle branding elements. Based on studies of consumer preference among ordinary shoppers and those who were more fashion conscious, the researchers found that "insiders" in a given consumption range (e.g., fashionistas, car enthusiasts, etc.) prefer products that identified them as being "in the know" only to a select group of peers.

The consumer study groups examined products with both highly visible branding, such as the word "Gucci" emblazoned in tall letters on a handbag, and more subtle signals of price -- for example, the signature cherry-red soles on Christian Louboutin shoes.

The majority of "typical" consumers preferred the products with larger brand identifiers, and tended to misidentify products with subtler branding. Among products with subtle signals, "typical" consumers "thought the high-priced options were no more expensive than their cheap alternatives," the authors write. But the "insiders," in this case fashion students or people with an affinity for high fashion, not only could tell the difference between a low-cost generic item and a high-priced item with a tiny logo, but also preferred the subtly-branded products.

To understand such "insider" shoppers, companies need to realize that the handbag these shoppers carry or shoes they wear is largely about sending signals, Berger notes, almost like communicating a coded message to members of a select group. "A Rolex is a widely recognized status symbol, but might be looked down upon by true watch enthusiasts," the paper states. "A Vacheron Constantin, on the other hand, will be invisible to most people, but respected by watch aficionados."

Another lesson, conversely, is that being selective with branding techniques comes with risk. A consumer goods company that wants to target high-end shoppers might select a subtle pattern or small logo, but that could turn off the majority of shoppers -- those who can't tell the difference between a cheaper product and the expensive item."Most people think a $6,000 Bottega Veneta bag is no more expensive that a cheap Wal-Mart bag that has no logo," Berger says.

According to Berger and Ward, from the point of view of an "insider," being identified as such is vitally important, to the point that they will opt for possibly being mistaken for lower-end shoppers by the masses in exchange for recognition by their fellow high-fashion fans. The researchers also suggest that "discretely marked products, subtle but distinct styles or high-end brands that fly beneath the radar" have a longer life on the market than their less expensive, more loudly branded alternatives.

"The value of signals is that they distinguish social groups, so when outsiders start copying insiders' signals, insiders may abandon that product and search for a new signal," Berger says. "Because explicit signals, like large logos, are easier to observe, they are more likely to be poached or copied, and thus more likely to eventually be abandoned in favor of a new group marker."

That has clear implications for products with explicit brand markings, even on expensive high-end products. "Explicit status symbols may generate large sales in the short term, but this will only persist if enough of the buyers are truly wealthy," the researchers write. "If not, the symbolic value will shift towards being a marker of the wannabe rich, and sales will decline as consumers search for the next aspirational symbol."

More generally, the researchers suggest, the role of wealth as a status marker is changing, being replaced by knowledge or "cultural capital." With the expansion of credit and leasing programs, and the wider availability of knockoff items, "it is a lot easier now for someone who is not truly wealthy to be able to purchase something that seems expensive," Berger notes. "Cultural capital, though, remains elusive. Acquiring the right knowledge requires time, effort and the right connections -- things that are hard to fake."

" Art of Start " by Guy Kawasaki

2011-05-03T23:26:00.000-07:00

The Art of Start
---------------------

" There are many ways to describe the ebb & flow ; the Yin & Yang ; bubble-blowing and bubble-bursing phases of business cycles ! Here is another one : Microscopes and Telescopes !

In the MICROSCOPE Phase, there is a cry for level headed thinking, a return to fundamentals, and going ' back to basics'.

Experts magnify every detail, line item and expenditure and THEN demand full-blown forecasts, protracted market research and all-encompassing competitive analysis !

In the TELESCOPE phase, entrepreneurs bring the future closer ! The dream up ' The Next Big Thing' ; change the world and make late-adopters eat their dust. Lots of money is wasted but some crazy ideas do stick ! And the world moves forward.

When Telescopes works, everyone is an astronomer, and the world is full of stars !

When they don't , every one whips out their microscopes, and the world is full of flaws.

The reality is that, you need BOTH Microscope and Telescope, to acheive success.

The problem is that, this means, gathering information that is spread among 100 s of books, magazines and conferences ... Our goal is to help you , use your knowlege, love, and determination to create something great without getting bogged down in theory and unnecessary details. Our presumption is that - your goal is to change the world - not study it ! "

Excerpted from : " The Art of Start " by Guy Kawasaki.

Amazon review link :

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Start-Time-Tested-Battle-Hardened-Starting/dp/1591840562/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304489741&sr=1-2

Breathe Deeply

2011-04-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

BREATHE DEEPLY !
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By Michelle Robin
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Think about the last time you were looing forward to some thing really exciting ! Did your breathing speed up ?

Could you feel, your heart in your chest ? Did you gasp in surprise or delight ? Did the moment quite literally take your breath away ?

When you are practicing deep breathing, it can be helpful to visualise the exhalation as starting from the center of your brow and washing down over your body like a waterfall.

Visualise the exhalation as the emotions or negative energy you need to relese.

Now, think about the last time you felt anxious about something., or afraid ,. Did your breathing speed up ?
Could you feel your heart in your chest ?
Did you gasp in shcok, horror or outrage?
Did the moment lock up your muscles, causing your to hold yourself so tightly , that even your breathing ceased ?

Good or bad, high or low, our emotions are intimately connected to our breathing. We reveal our inner state by the way we breathe. Every feeling, every experience we have , affects our breathing. And the reverse is also true !

The way we breathe affects our experiences and the way we process our emotions... Breathing well is arguably the most important thing you ccan do for your health.

Without breath, there is no life at all ! If is for this reason, that, human beings from earliest times have connected the life force within to the breath. Before the advent of machines thta regiset precisely when the brain dies, the moment of death was the moment one stopped breathing !

Art of Pricing in Services industry . what's ' fair' pricing ?

2011-04-23T01:20:00.001-07:00

A Wharton article on pricing of services
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http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2751

These are charges for special services and modifications, like using an out-of-network ATM. Docters, who is also the author of Winning the Profit Game: Smarter Pricing, Smarter Branding, says that these premium fees can be well received if explained properly and understood by the consumer. He notes that companies often use these kinds of fees, or the lack thereof, to reward valued customers -- like high-mileage air passengers who are often exempt from the extra charges levied against less frequent fliers.

Making people pay $5 for a sandwich seems reasonable on a short domestic flight, for example, but if airlines start charging for basic beverages on international flights, where consumers have no other options, that seems unfair and is more likely to provoke outrage. "Consumer perception of fees is less about money and more about fairness," Berger notes.

With regulators drastically restricting overdraft fees in mid-2010, banks are looking to make up this income in other ways. Last month, Bank of America announced a new suite of accounts that include monthly maintenance fees, some as high as $25. Overall, the number of banks and credit unions that offer free checking declined 11% from 2009 to 2010, according to a study by Moebs Services. The study points out that, to recoup these lost fees, banks are pushing e-statements and direct deposit and may levy fees against customers who decline to use these features.

By way of explanation, he points to "prospect theory," which states that people prefer their gains in smaller increments to spread out their joy, but want losses to be concentrated so the pain arrives in one hit. "It's ... ironic that companies don't charge enough to begin with," and then compound their problems by spreading out the rest of the cost in the form of unpopular fees, Fader says.

According to Bell, for consumers to accept fees, three factors need to be in place: Customers need to understand the need for the fees, perceive them as fair, and feel that they have received some benefit from the fee. "Absent these conditions, consumers are likely to be frustrated."

"Fees must reflect the context of the event prompting the fee. If the fee is consistent with a customer's expectations, then customers tolerate a surprising level of fees."

valuations in M&A

2011-03-25T02:39:00.001-07:00

http://mytoday.com/u/1846 : Mergers & Valuations.

---------------------------------------------

Plenty of merger deals should never happen: Buyers are too often attracted to "false positives" in targets that are overvalued. Less noticed are the deals that get away, but shouldn't, because of "false negatives" -- an undervaluation based on outdated methodologies that leads to a losing bid. The true value of a target company can be determined only if the buyer looks beyond current core operations to include future potential, argue three M&A experts.

What are often overlooked, though, are the deals that could have been big wins but didn't happen, because of false negatives. By that we mean instances, such as the one faced by Bank X, in which a much-needed acquisition was lost due to analytical and valuation methodologies that we think are outdated.

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The problem that we hope to mitigate stems from the pressure to make deals pay off quickly in terms of earnings per share, a goal that creates a systematic bias to discount value creation that is tied to future time horizons.

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necessitate a valuation methodology that takes into account more than the net present value (NPV) of the target. We call this the Opportunity Value (OV) of an asset. OV allows us to consider the potential upside of an acquisition through a disciplined analysis that is based on range estimates relating to how the future might unfold. Because OV provides a positive view of uncertainty, itcomplements the NPV, which treats uncertainty negatively, and the two together provide an inclusive but not inflated valuation.

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creativity kills leaderships?

2011-03-06T04:12:00.001-08:00

http://mytoday.com/u/1801

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Creativity mars leadership potential ?

http://mytoday.com/u/1801

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Mueller and co-authors Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell and Dishan Kamdar of ISB undertook three studies to examine how creative people were viewed by colleagues. The troubling finding: Those individuals who expressed more creative ideas were viewed as having less, not more, leadership potential.

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But understanding the need for creativity within a large company is not the same as actually fostering it. Indeed, Mueller's work shows that those who think outside the box may be penalized for it.

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"By definition, people will say creativity is positive," Mueller states. "It is almost impossible to get people to say they don't want creativity. But when someone actually voices a creative idea, there is a response of, 'Wow -- What is that?' This issue really comes to life at the moment the idea is voiced. There is discomfort when people encounter creativity."

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The value that leaders have for groups is in creating common goals so the group can achieve something," Mueller notes. "And goals are better the clearer they are -- you don't want uncertainty. So leaders need to diminish uncertainty and create standards of behavior for everyone in the group. And they create those standards by conforming to them."

being the boss by Linda A Hill

2011-01-26T05:46:00.000-08:00

BEING THE BOSS: 3 IMPERATIVES FOR BECOMING A GREAT LEADER

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| Author: Linda A Hill |

It's a common mistake to think management is defined by formal authority — the ability that comes with a title to impose your will on others. In fact, formal authority is a useful but limited tool. You may think people are perverse or stubborn, but there are many reasons they don't always follow your instructions. They disagree with you. They think there's a better way and feel free to exercise their own judgement. They think something else is more important... Managing people primarily by exercising your formal authority is far less likely than a more open approach to capture that full value.

Insisting on “I'm the boss!” places a huge burden on you. The head of a large high-tech company told us of a discussion she once had with her head of HR. Her company had installed a program to encourage broader participation in decision-making, and she was frustrated that product development seemed to be moving too slowly. “Maybe we have to go back to the old command-and-control system,” she said. “If that's what you want,” said the HR person, “I'll help you. But you have to be right all the time.”

Laughing, the CEO said, “I'll never forget what he said. I told him, 'That's never going to work.' “No one person can possibly possess the knowledge, experience, and wisdom needed to make every decision... Less authority-driven organisations are more likely to elicit and take full advantage of the talent and experience of their people.

Amazon review page of the book. 5 star rated.

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Boss-Imperatives-Becoming-Leader/dp/142216389X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296049472&sr=1-3

'Creating Money' by Sanaya Roman

2011-01-16T09:19:00.000-08:00

Creating Money
| Author: Sanaya Roman |

Money is a tremendous force. The way you earn your money, accumulate it, and spend it determines whether your money will be a force that creates good or doesn't create good for you and others. It is important to hold new thoughts about money that will help it be used as a force for good on the planet.

Form follows thought; by holding new thoughts you can create new realities about money for yourself and others.

Each of you can act as a powerful broadcasting station, sending out positive ideas about money and contributing to a higher vision of money on the planet.

Beliefs in scarcity help create your wars and the taking of more than is needed from the earth.

If everyone could create the abundance that is his or her natural birthright, you would have fewer reasons for war or to harm the earth.

Your new beliefs will draw to you ways to create abundance for everyone, ways you have not even conceived of yet that tap into sunlight and other unlimited resources.

The universal supply is infinite, and it is within your technology and reach for every human being on the planet to live with enough food, warmth, clothing, and shelter.

Until you believe that, you won't experience it, but you can start by believing that it is possible to have all your own needs met. There is no limit to what you may have!

Embrace fully your capacity to create, to think in unlimited ways, and to pursue everything that you have been wanting. Be flexible, open, and willing to let the new come to you.

Winning in Emerging markets by Tarun Khanna

2011-01-02T23:59:00.000-08:00

Winning in emerging markets
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January 3, 2011 | Author: Tarun Khanna |

A business school in some sense is an institution that, in addition to training and teaching people to think about their role in society, serves a variety of functions from the standpoint of a potential employer.

It helps screen talent and certifies that it is of high quality... Executive search firms also complement this process.

By institutional void, we refer to the situation in most emerging markets when specialist institutions and intermediaries such as executive search firms and business schools are either completely absent or not functioning as well as they might.

So, in this example, buyers of talent can't get together as easily as they might, with sellers of talent (such as graduates of business schools).

For managers, if their business growth is predicated on hiring appropriate amounts of talent as it invariably is what do they do to compensate for the absence of support services that they might take for granted in the US or in other more mature markets?In the book we discuss at length how companies adapt to these missing institutions.

We also describe different kinds of institutional voids and give examples of companies trying to adapt.

A useful starting point for managers is to construct an institutional map and see what the institutional voids are.

It's important to have the right kinds of conversations and identify the problems that need to be resolved over and above the core function in a business of making anything from widgets to washing machines to life-saving drugs.

Amazon link on the book by Tarun Khanna, is HERE !
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Water Conflicts and spirituality - Aaron Wolf

2010-12-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

Interview with Mr.Aaron Wolf. Geology, water resources and conflict management specialist. Trying to bring the element of spirituality into conflict resolution practices.
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"I realized that science only got you so far with water resource management and you had to understand human systems, I felt that understanding human systems from a rational perspective was very limiting. And I think most mediators feel that way: When it comes to dealing with real values or core issues, most people refer to the energy in the room, the transformation or being present."
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Knowledge@Wharton: Did you have a transformative moment yourself?

Wolf: In our training, we show a map of a watershed with the political boundaries. Then we take the boundaries off the map. For a lot of people, it's the first time they see their world in a different light. You can feel a jolt in the room when they see their watershed in a way they never have before. The idea came from someone who worked for a major development bank. He had a deep spiritual side and he said that the maps worked like an analog for spiritual transformation. That was my "Aha!" moment

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2 questions. First, how do spiritual traditions construct concepts or emotions such as conflict or anger? Second, what tools do they use to create settings that are conducive to transformative processes.
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Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think about claims that the next world war will be fought over water?

Wolf: I don't think that will be the case. The assumption is very simplistic that because we're running out of a critical resource, people will fight across international borders. It doesn't take into account any aspects of human creativity, ingenuity, markets or history. There's only been one war over water and it was 4,500 years ago.
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Knowledge@Wharton: Do you meet skeptics, people who don't buy into the spiritual discourse?

Wolf: You have to distinguish between religion and spirituality. As soon as you start talking about religion, half the room gets tense. You can see it in the body language. People will also comment on the irony that religion is at the root of most conflicts.

If you really want to focus on processes, such as transformation or transcendence, you have to find a common ground, such as recovering from an accident or having a baby. Your world is profoundly rocked when you become a parent; you can't explain it in rational terms. People also find spirituality in fly-fishing, rock climbing or whatever else, and as long as we're talking on those terms, most people get it.

There are a lot of situations where I don't use the words religion or spirituality. If we're talking about the four needs, for instance, I can draw just as easily from Maslow as I can from the Bible. I try not to push people past their comfort levels.

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Businesspeople will recognize that. When you're sitting down for discussions or negotiations, even in a regular meeting, how many times have you asked someone a question to understand more about how they feel? We need to learn to set aside the things we want to put on the table and profoundly and deeply listen to others until we really understand what their issues are. That process is transformative. People who feel they have been listened to are generally willing to listen in turn. That's the moment in the room when the whole dynamic changes.
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Knowledge@Wharton: So using your BlackBerry in a meeting and checking e-mails is not going to be conducive to great outcomes?

Wolf: I don't think so. Presence is something that most spiritual traditions emphasize. The power of presence, of silence, of reflection, of really being there -- it is something that we need to learn to do better. If you're multi-tasking, you're not doing anything brilliantly.
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Knowledge@Wharton: If you had one piece of advice for a businessman, what would it be?

Wolf: I would learn to listen. It is the most underrated yet transformative quality there is. It's like meditation. It sounds simple, until you try it.
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"Extremeness Seeking " by Dilip Soman

2010-12-28T23:13:00.000-08:00

Extremeness seeking

| Author: Dilip Soman |

Decision researchers have long been interested in behaviours that deviate from rational choice.

Of these, the compromise effect has received considerable attention, with it repeatedly shown that the probability of choosing an item increases when that item is a middling, as opposed to extreme, alternative in a choice set. The term extremeness avoidance has been used to describe the reason underlying this phenomenon.

In this research, we argue that extremeness avoidance behaviour depends on assortment type, with consumers displaying extremeness avoidance for alignable assortments, but systematically and predictably displaying extremeness seeking for non-alignable assortments. Across three studies, we show the extremeness seeking effect, contrast it with extremeness avoidance, and explore its underlying cause. As the variety of choices available to consumers grows in size and those choices vary in their distinct features, consumers often prefer the options at either extreme — either the basic model or the fully loaded model.

While getting some consumers to trade up to the ‘fully loaded’ model may seem desirable for a seller, it is not clear that the overall effect of such polarisation will be positive.

Rather than encourage consumers to choose a basic or fully loaded product, product providers may wish to turn an uncertain customer into a certain customer by offering an alternative that best meets the customer's needs.

Ethics of Wiki Leaks

2010-12-24T07:04:00.000-08:00

http://mytoday.com/u/1532 : wiki leaks & ethics
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WikiLeaks is a fascinating microcosm of a larger trend -- that the Internet allows freer flow of information, including things we want to be available and things we don't," says Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics Kevin Werbach.
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For many, the WikiLeaks case has opened up a fundamental debate over privacy of information versus public access on the open web. In a column on The Guardian's website on December 6, John Naughton wrote: "The most obvious lesson [of the WikiLeaks case] is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing."
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Bruce Schneier, an author of books on cyber-security and founder of BT Counterpane, a security firm, argues that WikiLeaks rose up because of an excessive amount of classification of information and a weak press that "acts like a stenographer" for the government. He adds that the U.S. government is now experiencing what the music and entertainment industries have endured during the past several years -- digital distribution networks that sprang up as alternatives to the systems that recording labels and producers tried to control.
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It is also "reasonable for companies to be thinking about whether WikiLeaks crossed the line in its most recent disclosures."
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Merits of employing Older workers

2010-12-24T07:03:00.000-08:00

http://mytoday.com/u/1561 dated 24.December.2010
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Ageing people coming bak to work is called ' Silver Tsunami'.

Olders workers cost less on Medi care bills since, they no longer have dependent children on them.

When it comes to job performance, older workers frequently outdo their younger colleagues, says Cappelli. Older workers have less absenteeism, less turnover, superior interpersonal skills and deal better with customers. "The evidence is unbelievably huge," he notes. "Basically, older workers perform better on just about everything.

And contrary to the belief that older workers resist learning new things, older workers ranked "job challenge and learning" as a top source of satisfaction with their work, says center director Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes.

Many myths about older workers reflect 20th century views of retirement that have proved to be short-lived. "Historically, the idea of people working full-time and stopping completely is an anomaly of world history," says Cappelli. The notion of retiring at age 65 came in with the Social Security system and employer-based pensions, he says. But full retirement was never what most employees wanted, he notes, adding that "what they want is to keep working in some fashion. They want to change the way they work, but not stop altogether."

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When the Society for Human Resource Management conducted its most recent survey of attitudes toward older workers in 2006, 60% of the 308 personnel managers surveyed said that older workers are more reliable and 59% said older workers have a stronger work ethic than younger ones. On the flip side, 49% said that older workers do not keep up with technology and 38% said such workers cause health care costs to rise.
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Ads targeting such workers often mention the benefit that the age group values most: flexibility. One former ad invited recruits to "Use our employee discount to shop for your grandkids."

Retirement doesn't end ties between employees and the Freeport, Maine-based company, which encourages retirees to return to work on a seasonal basis. "We find that many retirees bring a high level of maturity," says a company spokesperson. "They understand the importance of a good work ethic" and have no problem with flexible schedules. "More than half of our seasonal workforce comes back year after year."
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A study sponsored by the MetLife Foundation and Civic Ventures, a think tank that helps people find "encore careers," predicts as many as five million job vacancies by 2018 if the baby boomers retire at the same rate and age as current older workers. Many of these vacancies will be in social service fields such as health care, education and non-profit positions. Not only will there be jobs for older workers to fill, says the study, "but the nation will absolutely need older workers to step up and take them."
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Gardner envisions partnerships and mentoring relationships between older workers who seek meaning in phased retirements and younger individuals who are looking to build their careers. Gardner himself has no plans to step down from his job researching the college labor market and recruiting trends. "At 64, people are asking me to stay until I'm 70," he says. "I'm having fun with what I do, so why quit? Why give up a job I love?"

Auctions , Governance & Transparancy : The devil is in the detail

2010-12-08T03:47:00.000-08:00

http://mytoday.com/u/1518
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'Governance and transparancy : the devil in the details : auctions are by no means a panacea for achieving efficiency.
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For a nation that has no tradition of auctioning scarce public resources to private-sector organizations, the recent outcry over the 2G spectrum scandal is both intriguing and encouraging.
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If the slivers of airwaves providing 3G mobile services -- to a young and mobile population in an economy that's growing at close to double-digit rates -- can ring up more than US$22 billion for the country's exchequer, one wonders about the fair economic value for all other air, water and land resources that belonged to you-the-nation, but was allocated to you-name-it company for a you-name-it purpose using -- to put it kindly -- less than transparent and economically efficient mechanisms!
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In the case of mobile spectrum, the resource allocation mechanism needs to be efficient in two ways. First, it should be able to identify the operators that are the most likely to roll out mobile services successfully to as a much of the population as possible in the shortest possible time, with great enough profitability to ensure the service's sustainability -- after all, there's little value in bankrupting operators while maximizing spectrum prices.
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If mobile spectrum licenses on a first-come, first-served basis are allocated to, say, construction companies that have no prior expertise in rolling out such services and they then hoard spectrum, the nation fails to roll out its critical information infrastructure to large sections of the population. This is a huge social loss !
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For example, a farmer might not be able to get a critical weather forecast before fertilizing a field, which might subsequently be washed away by unseasonal rain, or taxi drivers might not be able to pick up a few extra fares if their dispatchers are operating inefficiently.
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one step forward to enforce the welfare-enhancing rollout could be by mandating a use-it-or-lose-it rule -- that is, insist that all allocated spectrum is used and monitor usage based on a simple, observable measure. Meanwhile, a secondary market could be facilitated for reallocation, giving operators with capital access to spectrum, and perhaps recovering some of the money the government left on the table.
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The potential for efficient mechanisms in India seems immense, even if they seem complicated from afar.
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U.S. unemployment rate and repercussions

2010-12-08T03:37:00.000-08:00

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2619
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"With a national unemployment rate of 9.6%, many of them cannot

find jobs. Some have had to move back home with their parents;

others are scraping by with low-level work that is barely enough to

pay back the four and five figure loans they took out for college. "It's

not looking particularly good for Gen Y," says Matthew Bidwell, a

Wharton management professor. "And I don't think it's going to go

away by the next graduation season in May. A lot of forecasts are for

a slow and hesitant recovery. We're not going back to 2007 any time

soon."
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"It takes them longer to get into the workforce so they are not

acquiring the skills they need. In addition, they are more apt to take

a lower level job or an unpaid internship. And once the economy

improves and they land a better job, it takes these workers longer to

climb the ladder because they have to learn skills they should have

been developing immediately out of college. In the meantime, they

are at risk of being leapfrogged by new graduates."
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"If you don't get a decent job in your first five years in the workforce,

do you ever? You don't develop the stable work habits or the self-

esteem to move up the corporate ladder," he says. "It's a horrendous

waste of human capital."

Pfizer's Amy Schulman on What Women Need to Succeed in their Careers

2010-11-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

According to Schulman, women also tend to internalize the dynamics of a situation more than men, and moderating this mental attitude is critical as well. She should know: Not only did she rise up the ranks with more male than female colleagues, Schulman also has three sons at home. This experience helped her observe that when men lose a ball game, they say the field was wet or the referee was outrageously unfair. But women say, "'I let everybody down. I can't believe I didn't handle better the fact that the field was so slippery,'" she noted. "It's the difference between internalizing and externalizing."
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Women and men interpret the same message differently, she said, and being aware of this difference can be critically important to thriving in the workplace. Schulman recalled that at one law firm, bosses were less than effusive with praise because that was their style. So at partnership reviews, mid-career female lawyers would be told they were doing OK. Women would react with surprise and disappointment. "[They would say] 'OK? It's just OK? What do you mean just OK?'" Schulman said. But the men saw the same message more positively and believed that "Everything's OK! I'm on top of the world!" Later, when both sides compared reviews, Schulman noted, the men would brag about their stellar evaluations, while the women told the group that they had been judged as mediocre. In fact, they had both received the same message.
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Women should recognize that whatever choices they make at any given point -- be it to spend more time with family or to accept a promotion even if it means working longer hours -- are not necessarily set in stone for all time, Schulman said. Be open to non-judgmental conversations about choices between family and career, and realize that these choices may change. Once a decision is made, be at peace with it. "There is no doubt that I am not the parent or the mother I would have been had I been home full-time or even part-time," Schulman noted. "I'm not sure I would have been a better parent or mother or wife.... I just would have been a different one."
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how to overcome copycat marketing ?

2010-10-31T10:59:00.001-07:00

Break from the pack

Posted on October 29, 2010 | Author: Oren Harari | View 7

Welcome to the Copycat Economy, where everyone has access to the same resources and talent, where the web is the great equaliser, and where the market’s twin foundations are imitation and commoditisation.

It’s a world marked by the ‘me-too’ syndrome, where competing vendors benchmark, imitate, and build off each other, offering customers an ever-increasing array of choices, most of which lookpretty much the same.

First of all, keep in mind that it’s not only stickers that become commodities.

Every organisation faces the challenge.

IBM is discovering that even its traditional discrete consulting services are slowly becoming commoditised, a term IBM itself uses.

Companies like Wipro — based in Bangalore, India — are replicating some of IBM’s consultative offerings at much lower prices, which is why, to IBM’s chagrin, companies like Louis Vuitton and Target are turning to Wipro for basic IT and datamanagement expertise.

When I consulted at a major mutual fund a few years ago, I was told at the first meeting, “Oren, the first thing you have to know is that MFs are commodities.”

The company vice president said, “There are thousands of MFs that compete directly against ours, and over the long haul, we pretty much have the same yields and performance, so our main job is to figure out how to differentiate ourselves so that investors will choose our products.”

Twenty years ago, not many people even knew what MFs were, much less invested in them.

Amazon link for the book ( 5 star rating)

http://www.amazon.com/Break-Pack-Compete-Copycat-Economy/dp/0131888633/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288547863&sr=1-1

wharton on CWG

2010-10-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

Wharton on CWG.

http://mytoday.com/u/1429

" The total cost of the games is shrouded in Mystery. The difference over the actual expenses in the CWG is also because, the private sector has put in a lot of money and this is obviously not reflected in the Govt's tally. It's difficult to apportion. "

" Tourism did not deliver. Hospitality industry's occupancy has not lived upto expectations because of terrorism threat. These 2 industries during CWG made huge losses. "

" Beginning from Mexico 1968, virtually every city that had hosted such an event ( as Olympics) has plunged into debt for the next 25 to 30 years. The games never pay for themselves ; it is the public money that falls into the hands of hands of the private busisnessmen. "

Sandeep Bazmai, news editor , Headlines Today : " India simply doesn't have sporting culture. Play for fun. A sport is organized play. India just plays ( barring cricket). "

Daniel Johnson, Colorado college's economics department : " There is a linkage between per capita GDP and sporting performance . Linkage between Olympic medals and per capita income". ( he proved it with 90% accuracy).

" When ever Team India loses a one day match ( to any country), their stock market took a beating , on the following day ! " A research report from Monash University in Australia.

Any one willing to verify ?

Too BIG to fail bogies !

2010-10-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

The Coming Meta-Boom and Meta-Bust -- One Economist's View

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund and author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, says the recently passed Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act does little to prevent the biggest financial risk of our time -- banks that are becoming "too big to save," either because potential losses could overwhelm government resources, or the public will refuse to sanction another large bailout. Either way, the world economy could crash. But preceding any crash, watch for a worldwide "meta-boom." Following a recent talk Johnson gave at Wharton, he discussed this and several other issues with Knowledge@Wharton, including how shrinking big banks could ward off financial meltdowns, Ireland's solvency-threatening debt burden and the implications of Basel III.

Knowledge@Wharton: The other interesting stat in the book, I think I've seen this elsewhere also, is the percentage of corporate profits that the financial industry represents. I might be off a little, but I think this is roughly right: that up through the beginning or middle of the 1980s, or maybe even a little bit later, the most the financial system ever took up in total corporate profits in the U.S. was about 15%. But just prior to the crash, it was up to 41%. In other words, the financial services industry was earning 41% of all profits in the U.S. That's something that we never even got close to in the past. It suggests that maybe something was out of whack. Why didn't anybody see that? Well, I know some people did. Where are we now and how long do you think it might take before we get back up to that, according to your view of what's likely to happen?

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Knowledge@Wharton: The other thing that's interesting -- and you talk about a number of different problems with "too big to fail", such as taxpayers ending up on the hook for all the money -- is this idea that because of the backup, the backstop, the implicit guarantee, the moral hazard is basically there, but only for the very largest banks. The next tier down, say large regionals and so forth, are actually put at an unfair disadvantage competitively because they don't have that subsidy, and therefore they can't operate in the same way. So it's not a level playing field. And yet we don't see too much opposition from them either. You just talked about the corporate sector in general, what's going on here?

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. But "too big to fail" is not the worst of our potential problems. That would be Too Big to Save. Think about Ireland.
Knowledge@Wharton: Too Big To Bail.
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Knowledge@Wharton: Can you define moral hazard for those people who aren't clear what it means?

Johnson: Moral hazard is very simply that when I give you insurance, you're going to be a little bit less careful.
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But in essence, I think Eve is right. The essence is, if the media doesn't get it, if the smartest journalists whom you respect and read every day who write on the front page of major newspapers and on leading analytical serious websites run by those papers, if they don't get it, if they don't understand what the financial sector is doing, why and how, then that definitely contributes to the problem.

With reference to :

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com

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Knowledge@Wharton: And talking about concentration, after this crash, it turns out that -- I don't know if that was 13 banks that you were referring to in 13 Bankers -- some of the bigger banks, in an effort to salvage the system, took over competitors. And so now there are really six large banks. Could you talk about them, just how much they control and some of the points you make about them in your book?

Johnson: Sure, well the six banks are, I think, the heart of the problem. Those six banks control, have assets -- the size of the banks and balance sheet -- of roughly 63%, maybe 65% of GDP right now. Before the crisis, they were 57% or 58% of GDP. And if you go back to the early to mid 1990s, that same group of banks and the other banks that they gobbled up along the way, that same group was 16% of GDP. So they have become much larger relative to the economy. There's a very important point, that the U.S. is not a country based on big banks. We don't have a big banking tradition relative to other countries. We don't have a tradition of bank concentration or of concentration relative to the size of the economy.

There are no benefits that anyone can point to from a broader economic point of view of this increase in bank size. So at the very least, we should roll the banks back to where they were before this merger movement, before many of the barriers on their activities were taken off. And we should also consider very seriously putting other controls and restrictions on the ability of those banks that are essential to our credit system, essential to our payment system, to take huge amounts of risk should be severely curtailed.

( to be continued)

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Art of Execution by Ram Charan

2010-10-05T01:27:00.000-07:00

Execution: The discipline of getting things done
Posted on October 5, 2010 | Author: Ram Charan | View 2

If you don't get the people process right, you will never fulfill the potential of your business.

The people process is more important than either the strategic planning and decision-making or operations management
processes.

After all, it’s the people in an organisation who make judgments about how markets are changing, create strategies based on those judgments and translate strategies into operational realities.

A robust people process does three things.

It evaluates individuals accurately and in depth. It provides a framework for identifying and developing the different types of leadership talent the organisation will need to execute its strategies down the road.

It also fills the leadership pipeline that is the basis of a strong succession plan.

Very few companies accomplish all of those objectives well.

One of the biggest shortcomings of the traditional people process is that it’s backward-looking, focused on evaluating the jobs people are doing today. Far more important is whether the individuals can handle the jobs of tomorrow.

We have seen many people who led business units well but who did not have the capability to take the business to the next level. Companies often wait until the financial results are in before making corrections in key leadership positions...

It’s not hard to identify the person who is wrong for a job because of his behaviour, but it’s better to make sure such a person doesn’t rise to a critical job in the first place.

Happiness Transformation

2010-10-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

The happiness transformation
Posted on October 2, 2010 | Author: Andrew Lawrence |

PART of true happiness involves being of service.Being of service to others.Being of service means helping others.Without being of service and helping others,you will never feel totally happy,you will always feel incomplete and somewhat unfulfilled,as if something is missing from your life.

There are many ways you can help others.Being of service to others can take many forms and can be active or passive.Active service can be volunteering or donating your time through organisations that help others.You could volunteer at your local Red Cross,hospital or one of the many charitable organisations in your area.Or you could donate money.Or you could make an effort to help people directly,by being available to people who need help and could benefit from your talents and experience and expertise.Lawyers do this when they supply their legal services pro bono,for free.Each of us has a unique and special talent for something.Each of us has something that we love to do,that we do exceptionally well.That something,that natural talent and ability,is a good thing to use in helping others.

And,in doing that,in helping others,you will be fulfilled,you will fulfil your higher purpose in life.It's not always about having professional experience and expertise or special education in a given field (such as law,medicine,finance,etc.),it's about helping others.Being of service to others,helping others,can make you happy.And it can change the world.

Human Rights policies at World Bank

2010-09-15T04:08:00.000-07:00

If translated into policy, the legal approach to human rights would slam head-on into another bureaucratic barrier: the Bank's incentive system. According to one Bank official quoted in the report, employees get their "brownie points" based on successfully getting a loan out the door rather than a project's long-term results. "Staff are promoted based on the numbers of loans they get approved, and the amount of money in those loans," Sarfaty states. "Since [the loan-funded] projects often take many years to yield results, promotion is not tied to favorable long-term outcomes."

The result: Staff members resist policies that are perceived to slow down loan activity. For example, the Bank has a number of operational "safeguard" policies, which are designed to avoid detrimental social and environmental impacts of lending. (Although there is no safeguard policy yet on human rights, several existing policies address human rights-related issues, like involuntary resettlement.) Sarfaty found that the loan approval-focused incentive system indirectly resulted in non-compliance with the Bank's safeguard policies.

"Although employees are required to apply the policies in borrower countries, they do not consistently do so in practice," she writes. "The Bank promotes its safeguard policies as indicative of its concern for environmental and social goals, but its implicit incentive system suggests that these goals are not primary. In fact, most employees perceive the policies as impediments to lending because they add constraints to tasks and thereby reduce efficiency and opportunities for promotion."

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interview with Tata Fiance's CEO Praveen Kadle

2010-09-15T01:18:00.001-07:00

( Interview with Praveen Kadle, CEO, Tata Finance)

These were systemic problems, especially the high cost of operations. The market share was coming down and [there were problems with] product acceptability in the car division. It was quite clear that the company had to clean up its act as soon as possible. So from 1999 or 2000, we started looking at the cost structure. We brought down costs significantly. We improved employee productivity significantly. We restructured our operations. Some of the non-performing assets (NPAs), or underperforming assets, were either sold or were made to sweat a lot so that we could get back returns. I think working capital management was one of the key areas where we did significant restructuring. We used to have a huge inventory problem and about 27% of our total revenue was locked in net working capital -- not gross. So we decided to make the company get into some kind of reverse mode. From positive net working capital where a lot of money was blocked, we thought that we should get into negative net working capital.

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So in 2007, we started Tata Capital.

Also, India requires a huge amount of financial inclusion. Therefore, one can also get the social objective achieved without compromising on the commercial aspects of doing the business. We are in the corporate finance business, where we lend to corporate clients, mostly to mid-size and small companies, which are today not getting the right kind of credit from the banking system. We are also in investment banking, where we support mid-size companies [that] are not getting the right kind of financial advisory or investment banking advice. We are looking at the capital market in a big way, both in equity as well as in the debt market -- especially the debt market, which needs to be strengthened.
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Kadle: Unfortunately, Indian regulations don't allow large corporations like the Tatas to get into full-fledged banking or commercial banking. So we are registered as a non-banking financial services company, which doesn't allow us to get access to the low-cost current accounts and savings accounts of retail consumers. So we certainly have a cost disadvantage on the funding side. But what we are trying to do is to keep our operations cost-efficient by using technology and by using highly-motivated employees to have much better employee productivity and the right kind of processes.
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ndia Knowledge@Wharton: What has been the biggest leadership challenge you have faced in your career? How did you overcome it? And what did you learn from it?

Kadle: That is a difficult question. In terms of leadership challenges, I worked as a CFO all along and now I am a CEO. A CFO is always supposed to be a critic of the company's financial health and tries to help the company improve its financial health. As a CEO you are supposed to set the whole game plan in terms of growth and at the same time, sound financial health, sound processes and all that. So from being a bean counter to now actually be somebody who is executing, I think, is a key challenge.
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India's Food security woes

2010-09-14T23:58:00.001-07:00

"Markets can't do everything," says Donaldson, declining to comment directly on the court order. "One of the things they can't do entirely on their own is accommodate basic needs or satisfy basic human rights. What needs to happen is for governments to be more creative about using markets so that they can accomplish policy objectives like satisfying basic needs." Governments cannot shy away from the responsibility of distributing food to the hungry by citing economic inefficiencies, Donaldson says. "When the government says it is not efficient to distribute food in some instances, the problem with that is that efficiency depends on where you look for it." He offers the example of a trucking firm that finds it is not going to be paid enough to deliver much-needed human blood supplies to victims of an earthquake. "It's true that it's inefficient for the company to do something that will create a small loss for it. But it is pretty clear here that it is not efficient for society as a whole to have that blood and not use it. So what is efficient for a government may not be efficient for society."
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Rajesh Chakrabarti, assistant professor of finance at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. "But the question here is this: If there was no surplus food grain available, should we not have said that the government should import food to feed the poor? In other words, hunger is inexcusable, with or without surplus stock."
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Bangalore-based Akshaya Patra Foundation, which runs the world's largest school mid-day meal program -- be roped in to oversee the distribution of the grain and integrate that effort with other welfare programs along with private initiatives.
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ne-year-old, escaping the 1943 Bengal famine that claimed three million lives. "What [Sen] found was -- and we find this again and again -- there was adequate supply of food. This is the tragedy we have discovered about famines. In most instances -- even in the context of famines -- there typically is enough food to go around, but you have panic buying, hoarding, price-gouging and government mismanagement." He points to nonprofits in the U.S. that collect and redistribute food and other supplies that would otherwise go waste: Surplus Distribution Co. of Akron, Ohio, and Philabundance in Philadelphia; the latter has arrangements with large grocery chains to collect surplus food and distribute it to the poor and hungry.
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India's situation of excess food grain stocks goes hand-in-hand with what many see as a preoccupation with food security. That can be traced to the insecurity that gripped the nation in the mid-1950s, when it averted widespread starvation by importing U.S. food grains under the so-called PL-480 program of the then Dwight Eisenhower administration. In fact, some media reports claim the government prefers to hold excess food grain stocks even at the risk of wastage, rather than run the risk of shortages. After all, governments in earlier years have fallen under the weight of high food prices.
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Kavitha Kuruganti, trustee at Kheti Virasat Mission, an organization that helps farmers in India's Punjab state cope with the effects of "intensive agricultural models" or excessive cultivation. "Today, it seems we have grain we should be distributing free of cost because the Supreme Court orders [it] or because that seems to be a just way of dealing with it. But why has it accumulated in the first instance?" she asks. "It's got something to do with the impoverishment we are subjecting most people in this country to."
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Meanwhile, India's population of poor families rises and falls with every statistical redefinition. The agricultural ministry's records had about 65 million poor families covered by its PDS umbrella. But after the Supreme Court's upbraiding, Pawar agreed with the Tendulkar Committee's report which put India's poor at 81 million families, or 37.2% of the country's population. Devinder Sharma, a food policy analyst and chairman of the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, feels the government should go by the United Nations Development Program's estimate that 55% of Indians are below the poverty line !
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Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki

2010-09-10T02:52:00.000-07:00

Rules for revolutionaries

Posted on September 10, 2010 | Author: Guy Kawasaki | View 4

Thinking digital means using technology to look at real data, track interactions with customers, and mine for information to serve people better. It requires thinking clearly and precisely rather than relying on hearsay, habits, and prejudices. Acting analog means using a personal touch.

No revolution ever succeeded without a high degree of analog contact — no matter how great your product, how leveraged your marketing, or how cool your website.

When all is browsed, e-mailed, voice-mailed, and faxed, it's still an analog world ... Great as it can be, digital technology can also create negative feelings by invading people's privacy or simply being a pain in the ass.

Digital power is easy to abuse, so keep these third principles in mind when you're thinking digital. First, never require customers to give you, personal information. The information might be crucial for your database and direct marketing efforts, but that's your problem, not your customers'.

Second, if your customers are willing to give you this information, use it but use it judiciously. That is, don't inundate them with marketing and sales crap. Third, don't collect information if you're not going to do something with it.

Ideally, you and your customers should both derive value from the information they provide. Short of this, at least your customers should get some value.

But if it's only you that derives value, then you're hassling your customers for insufficient reason. Being a customer of your company should never entail the burden of being mere data for your research projects.

From ' Rules for Revolutionaries' by Guy Kawasaki.

Amazon link, here !

NIIT's CEO Thakur

2010-09-09T03:38:00.001-07:00

The other is even more interesting. It [is based on] ... the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment, [in which a scientist] set up a computer [on an outside] wall of one of our software factories, which was adjacent to a slum. He observed the behavior of the slum children when they saw this computer sticking out from the wall. To his amusement, he found that, within a month, without any formal education, these slum children were actually surfing the Internet. He came to the conclusion that there is a much better method of imparting education and he coined the term Minimally Invasive Education. In traditional education, people are put into classrooms. This experiment found that if you provide children with the tools they are able to learn by themselves. This was a very interesting concept, which was deployed in rural education. We set up these kiosks on school playgrounds and [they included] nothing but computers. That was another strong initiative.
Arvind Thakur, CEO , N.I.I.T
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(NIIT)Thakur: Our whole move to make our business nonlinear meant that instead of just providing services, we needed to provide complete solutions, where a good part of the solution knowledge was built into the intellectual property. With SATS, we actually built the cargo ground handling solution, which has been very successfully deployed in Singapore's Changi Airport. For the past 10 years, we have been supporting, enhancing and building in all the features that I just talked to you about. We have a deep understanding of that application. We then entered into a partnership with SATS [saying] 'Here is something that's working extremely well for you. Can we take this intellectual property and build services around it and implement it in other airports? Obviously, it's your intellectual property so you will commercially also benefit from this partnership'.... We took that IP and we implemented it in Taiwan, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Bangalore and, more recently, in Indonesia and Vietnam.
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service biz , leadership and management

2010-09-09T03:21:00.000-07:00

ook. The other was focus on new service lines that were essentially nonlinear. If you look at a traditional business, which is really service business, growth in revenues implies proportional growth in head count. And since it was important to improve the cost structure, we started focusing on business lines where growth in revenue did not imply proportional growth in head count.

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Tweeet : "if those idiots in Florida proceed w/their "Koran burning" festival on 9/11 it will do more for Al Queda recruitment than Abu Grahaib! "

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Worse still, this distinction seems to be used as a reason for leaders to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve. I remember hearing of a cell phone company CEO, for example, who never visited the stores where his phones were sold — because that was a management task that was beneath him — and kept pushing strategies that reflected a complete misunderstanding of customer experiences. ( in linked in too)
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This ability to go back and forth between the little details and the big picture is also evident in the leaders I admire most who aren't usually thought of as dreamers.( linked in)

(wharton) younger boss-older worker conundrum

2010-09-08T02:01:00.000-07:00

f one looks at the research on older workers -- those who are at or close to retirement age -- one finds what Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, calls "an incredible amount of discrimination, bigger even than discrimination against race or gender." Older people, he says, often find it difficult to get a job, partly because relatively young supervisors are reluctant to hire and then manage employees who are decades older, even though these employees are the type of worker many employers say they want

an incredible amount of discrimination, bigger even than discrimination against race or gender." Older people, he says, often find it difficult to get a job, partly because relatively young supervisors are reluctant to hire and then manage employees who are decades older, even though these employees are the type of worker many employers say they want.

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re quite young to have some serious responsibility. As start-ups get a little bigger, for example, they have to reach out for talent -- such as marketing experts and chief operating officers -- who will help them reach the next level of growth. The founders don't want to hire a kid; they want to look for somebody who has done this before, such as an executive looking for a second career. You see that quite often.

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If you look at the research on older workers, you see an incredible amount of discrimination against them, bigger than race, bigger than gender. Older workers struggle to get hired. And yet these are individuals who are perfectly suited to what employers say they want -- somebody who can hit the ground running, who knows how to handle work-based problems, who is not interested in a long-term commitment from the company, and who is self-motivated and self-managing. All this exactly defines older workers. They are ideally suited for many of these jobs, and yet when push comes to shove, younger supervisors won't hire them.
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They can serve as mentors to younger employees. If older workers stay with the same company, they carry on the culture. They have tacit knowledge that you can't find in a book. And surprisingly, if you look at job performance data related to age, it turns out that older workers perform better on every dimension of job performance. They turn over less, are absent less, their performance appraisals are better and, contrary to prevailing assumptions, they don't cost employers more than younger workers. Wages are higher for experience, not seniority, and higher wages for experience reflects productivity advantages.

On the health care side, the assumption is that older people are sick a lot and will use the health care system more. That's true. But they don't have dependents. In most companies, the actual costs for employers are highly associated with an employee's dependents, not with the employee. So older workers may not even cost more for health care.

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In addition, smart companies know that older workers are less motivated by money, and more interested in meaningful work, social contacts, etc. So when you go down this list, the interesting thing is that older workers sound like younger workers -- those who say they don't want to make long-term commitments to an organization, who say they are motivated by the mission of the company and are looking for work-life balance, time to pursue interests outside of work, and so forth.... In some ways, the quirky part of this is that people in the middle of their careers are the unusual ones. They are stuck because they need money for mortgages, their kids' education and other commitments. They are the ones who can't move and can't be as flexible.
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To the extent they keep working in their company, it's as a consultant or as a part-time employee. That's the typical model.
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And in fact this book is written mainly from an employer's perspective. The goal is to point out the opportunities that hiring older workers provide, and to examine why these opportunities are not being taken up. We are suggesting ways that employers can take advantage of this opportunity. There are many surveys about what older workers want, but not about employers. So the bigger puzzle was on the employers' side
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The part of this book that is unique is that it calls attention to the whole issue of younger supervisors managing older workers. Awareness of the issue is a big point. We also go into ways to address this issue, which revolve around changing the ways that younger supervisors manage. For example, they can't boss older employees around based on their formal authority and expertise, because older workers will have more expertise than the supervisors. And you can't threaten or bribe them. The usual model is to say, "You have to do this or we will fire you." Older workers obviously don't want to be fired, but it is not as big a deal as it is for workers who are 40. Supervisors have to manage in a way that is more empowering. They have to say, "Here is a project; we want your ideas on how to get it done."

Another issue is that younger supervisors sometimes undermanage older workers because they are afraid of them. So they just don't deal with them, don't talk to them. That's a problem as well. We discuss these issues and how to solve them.
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Are some industries more hospitable to older workers than others?

Cappelli: Places where there are labor shortages, like health care, pay attention to this. In health care, a lot of employers are trying to keep older nurses and technicians around because they are in short supply. In more creative fields, there are increased efforts to retain research scientists -- in the pharmaceutical industry, for example. These are places where there are individual contributors who work independently. Some efforts are underway in some corporations to bring back expertise for consulting arrangements. Big companies realize they have gotten bad at managing knowledge. An example is a company that suddenly discovers nobody in its ranks has met any of the partners in its Japanese subsidiary because the only people who knew them have just retired. Or consider the power company that discovered there were only a few people who knew where all the underground lines were and they had just retired as well. They were brought back in as consultants. There are a lot of places out there that aren't thinking about these issues ahead of time.
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interview with Shankar Mahadevan

2010-07-27T04:02:00.000-07:00

Musician Shankar Mahadevan: Creating Means Taking Risks in 'Untapped Territory'
Published: June 03, 2010 in India Knowledge@Wharton

Shankar Mahadevan views music as a friend. "When you have music in your life," he says, "you can never be lonely." Having been trained since boyhood in the Carnatic classical tradition, Mahadevan today ranks among India's top tier of young musicians. His blockbuster hit, "Breathless," was a four-minute melody sung seemingly in a single breath. How does artistic risk compare with business risk? What can corporate teams learn from the way musicians collaborate? In an interview with India Knowledge@Wharton during the recent Wharton I

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Is there a difference between learning music the way you did almost like a vocation? And then turning it into a profession? What's the difference?

Mahadevan: You can definitely become a professional. You can definitely become successful. And you can become extremely popular even without learning music. But it all depends on what you want to do. How do you want to perform this art form of music: whether you want to approach it the real hard way by knowing every single technical [element] that is involved in a song? Why get into all that? Or you can just learn a few songs. If people are talented, they can just sing. But I feel that if you learn music the hard way and you know what you are doing [at] every step, you are a confident person. And you are able to face any circumstances, any situation, any form of music. You are able to absorb easily. And you will somehow stay on for a longer time because it is not superficial. You are a learned [person]. It is like any art form. It is like literature, for example. If you are well-read and you write something, there is a difference. There is an easy way out, too. But I think it always helps if you follow the path the correct way.
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India Knowledge@Wharton: What I wonder is what can business people learn from the creativity that a musician has? Because there is a creative side to business as well.

Mahadevan: Yes. There is a creative side to anything. I feel that one thing that a businessman can learn is: do not follow a path that has already been successful. You will never be a path-breaker then. I would never want to create a Breathless [the album that gave him fame] again, because it will always be compared to my first Breathless. That's over. Every time you want to create something, you should look at a new or untapped territory. I'm sure there are untapped territories in music, in business, in arts, in painting, in dancing. Melodically, I am talking from a musician's point of view, you can go and compose something in untapped territories. The risk is very high of falling flat on your face. Like when I composed Breathless I could have just thrown the whole thing out saying, "What is this nonsense? How can anybody sing this song?"

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India Knowledge@Wharton: That is a great piece of advice. One last question for you. Based on everything you have said, music is, of course, an art. It is a vocation. But it is also a global business. And it is a global business that has been dramatically disrupted by technology. How do you see the future of a business in which intellectual property may be very hard to protect? How do you see sources of success in the music industry going forward?

Mahadevan: Since you have talked about intellectual property, I would like to talk about the scenario in our country so that people over here (US) also realize what is happening. It is a very sad situation as far as intellectual property is concerned in our country where the composers -- that is the authors and the songwriters -- don't own any of the works. You must be surprised by this. None of the works, which are created by not only us but also the great masters [are owned by us]. This is a very sad situation. It has happened because of ignorance to a certain extent and because of the music companies and the people who are managing the music taking advantage of the situation and writing agreements where you sign off all your rights. Now the government of India is bringing out an amendment in the law and they are giving ownership of the rights to the artists, which is going to be fantastic. If the law gets passed, which we pray it will, and I'm sure it will, I think a lot is going to change. My rights are [now] gone. I am worried about piracy but it doesn't affect me. It is not the money that I am supposed to earn. I feel anyway cheated and exploited because my rights have been taken away.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Are you using technology to reach your audience directly like through your own website and things like that?

Mahadevan: Yes. We have our websites and stuff like that, of course. But I feel that once this law comes into place the authors and writers will be able to retain their own rights and quality will improve. Quality will improve because it will directly affect income. It is not like you just write anything and you get paid the same amount. So things are happening.

Juggernaut called Indian Edu system !

2010-07-26T10:52:00.000-07:00

Kapil Sibal, India's minister for human resource development, reported that by 2050, the percentage of people above the age of 65 will be 39% in the U.S., 53% in Germany and 67% in Japan. India, by contrast will have only 19% above age 60, according to an International Labor Organization paper.

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Sibal's goal is to get at least 30% of India's 240 million schoolchildren into higher education over the next decade, up from the 12.4% currently. "Any nation must ensure that a critical mass of people move into the university system -- not less than 30-40%. [Otherwise], it cannot build wealth," he noted.
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Sibal moves to the next lap of creating an infrastructure for higher education to meet his 30% enrolment target. India currently has 480 universities and 22,000 colleges. In the next 10 years, it will need 700 new universities and 35,000 new colleges, according to Sibal.

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"No society worked itself out of poverty relying on foreign aid; education is the only proven long-term solution."
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"As capitalists we realize that if you pick up 300 million people from illiteracy, that is a burgeoning middle class ... and every product or service represented in this room is much more relevant when you have that middle class."
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But India could learn from the U.S. in financing educational infrastructure with endowments from wealthy individuals. "Besides the Tata group and a few exceptions, Indians don't give money for philanthropic contributions, particularly for education and health," Kumar said. Private initiatives in education in India have been largely "commercial and mediocre, and have never reached high academic standards," he added.

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http://www.mytoday.com/u/823

India & Entrepreneurship : a Debate

2010-07-26T04:44:00.000-07:00

In his own experience as an entrepreneur, Hosanagar found distribution to be the biggest obstacle in India.
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Sudhir Syal, a producer of a show on entrepreneurship called "Starting Up" on ET Now, an Indian television channel, recalled his experience at Sulekha.com, an Internet portal for classified advertisements. "In the U.S. to book an ad, you log on and punch in your credit card details -- there is no sales force at all," he said. "In India, there is a sales force that only exists" because customers come personally to offices to buy advertising space. That increases distribution, employee and infrastructure costs "and makes it extremely difficult for an entrepreneur to grow," he added.
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India's IT services industry has led the country's growth since the 1990s precisely because it was largely free of government regulation and did not need too much capital, Malik said. "In the businesses that need external capital, you are competing with guys who are very well entrenched, have access to capital, connections. In the industries where you do well, you don't have such a need for capital, or some of that has changed with deregulation."

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That may be so, said Goel, but pointed out that he comes up against cultural barriers when he goes campus recruiting. Students in U.S. university campuses say, "It's cool to work at a startup," he said, but not so in India. "In India I have spent hours with many smart kids who say they have to check with their parents," Goel said. "Some of them say, 'My dad says I won't get married if I work at a startup because the bride's family will say he works at a little company. Why can't he work at Infosys or Microsoft?'" Goel described those mindsets as "a real issue... there is little entrepreneurship by choice."

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All the same, cultivating relationships with the government is not unique to India. "Which large corporation in the U.S. does not have contacts with senators or other politicians?" he asked.

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Patil said he sees opportunities in the educational sector for his business of taking classic Indian comics based on folk tales to digital and animation formats. But he wants to stick to services and avoid products or rely purely on online channels. "I'd be skeptical of any Internet-alone opportunities; also, products are inherently harder to sell than services in India," he said. He found services an easier market to enter, especially for startups, "because cash flow problems are fewer, you get your money upfront and you have a direct relationship with the customer."
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Wharton Link :

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4499

From Wharton Biz school

2010-07-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

Friday, July 23, 2010

interview with Girija Pande, of TCS-China Vs India

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

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

Wharton on Cyber Attacks, Hacking & Data Security

Challenges for I.T. Engineers : cyber attacks and 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

IT industry & HR strategy : circa 2010

2010-07-24T11:30:00.000-07:00

Last month, the company released newspaper advertisements wooing back former Infoscions through what it has called a "green channel" approach, promising a smooth and hassle-free re-entry. (Incidentally, earlier this year Mphasis, the HP-owned IT services company, launched a similar initiative called "Homecoming" to attract its ex-staffers.) "We believe that the Infosys experience lasts beyond one career step, and there is value to both the individual and organization through a second innings," says Nandita Gurjar, senior vice president and group head, human resources, at Infosy.

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"All the noise over iRace is because, in effect, we have told the employees that growth will be slower, promotions will be restricted, there will be lower salary hikes and fewer onsite assignments. But employees need to be aware that the days of 50%-plus growth rate for the industry are over and that this is the new reality," says Gurjar.

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The economic downturn saw customers slashing their IT budgets and also becoming more demanding of their IT vendors. Cost optimization became the new mantra. This meant that IT vendors, in turn, have had to run their operations more tightly. With employee costs accounting for the biggest chunk (around 60%) of an IT company's total costs, much of the onus has naturally fallen on the HR teams
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If they want to remain ahead in the game, they have to become more relevant to their customers. "The offerings are getting increasingly commoditized, and we can ensure stickiness with our customers only by having a deep understanding of their organization and impacting their bottom line," says Pratik Kumar, corporate vice president, human resources at Wipro Technologies. "In order to do this we need to have a domain and solutions led consulting approach. This requires a different level of skill-set and understanding."
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According to Wipro's Kumar, with the basic model for creating a large number of warriors and troops in place at most of the Indian IT companies, the differentiator for organizations now will be prime talent. "Prime talent does not mean senior talent. It means people who are relevant to the organization," he says. "There is a now a need and expectation from organizations that employees will invest in learning new competencies and skills." Eighteen months ago, Wipro made it mandatory for employees to take certification tests in order to be eligible for further promotions.
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"Companies will now move away from being the best employer for all employees to being a better employer for better performers. You cannot have the same policy for everyone.
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Srinivasan of IIM-B sees another challenge. Pointing to the 2002 recession, she notes that IT organizations tend to treat employees as "assets" during the growth phase and as "cost" during a slowdown. Many of the internal measures taken during the downturn are quickly forgotten once the external environment improves

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Link :

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4496

Full Catastrophe Living - Jon Kabat-Zinn

2010-07-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

Full catastrophe living

Author: Jon Kabat-Zinn

There are many ways of looking at any thing or event or process. When your mind changes, new possibilities tend to arise.

In fact, everything changes when you can see things on different levels simultaneously, when you can see fullness and connectedness as well as individuality and separateness.
Your thinking expands in scope. This can be a profoundly liberating experience.

It can take you beyond your limited preoccupations with yourself. It can put things in a larger perspective…

When we use the word healing to describe the experiences of people in the stress clinic, what we mean above all is that they are undergoing a profound transformation of view. This transformation of view creates an entirely different context within which we can see and work with our problems, however serious they may be.

It is a perceptual shift away from fragmentation and isolation toward wholeness and connectedness. With this change of perspective comes a shift from feeling out of control and beyond help (helpless and pessimistic) to a sense of the possible, a sense of acceptance and control.

Healing always involves an attitudinal and emotional transformation. Sometimes, but not always, it is also accompanied by a major reduction in physical symptoms and by improvement in a person’s physical condition.

Dramatic or subtle, such shifts in perspective are signs of seeing with eyes of wholeness. Out of this shift in perspective comes an ability to act with greater balance, especially when encountering stress or pain.

Amazon link to this book review :

http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness/dp/0385303122/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1278680345&sr=1-1

"If success is a game, here are the rule " by Cherie Carter-Scott

2010-06-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

If success is the game these are are the rules.

Author: Cherie Carter-Scott |

There is no universal definition of ‘success.' It is both a concept and an experience, a moment as well as an evolution. It is the merging of your aspirations with reality, the weaving of your hopes and dreams with your daily tasks.

It is simultaneously tangible and ephemeral, and gives the illusion of being universally quantifiable. Success is externally evaluated yet intrinsically experienced; it is both objective and subjective.

To some success looks like grand achievement, to others it resembles daily rewards, and still others measure it as the accomplishment of an underlying life mission.

It may mean being a good friend, or raising socially responsible children, or being a loving grandparent. For some the achievement looks like having lived ethically, honourably, or according to their values and conscience.

The true essence of success, beneath the visible markers and goals, lies in your own personal sense of satisfaction and fulfilment... The first basic rule of success, and perhaps the most important, is that there is no one universal definition of fulfilment.

We each have our own, and every one is equally precious and worthy.success is amorphous, and like the other vast intangible —love — there is no universal means by which we can measure it.

What it means for one person may not resonate for another. It may be the collective goal of many, but it ultimately has only one true judge.

You, and only you, can assess your success, for it is you alone who determines what success really means for you.

Amazon book link for this book : a 5 star rated one.

http://www.amazon.com/Success-Game-These-Are-Rules/dp/B000300A20/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275384660&sr=1-5

Her book on Transformational Life Coaching : here !

Here is her amazon books link : some are truly useful for you.

Link, here !

If Love is a game, here are the Rules !

Read them in leisure. To start with, the reviews !

"Linked " by Albert-laszlo Barabasi

2010-05-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

Linked

Author: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

How many times have you met a stranger hundreds or thousands of miles away from your home, just to realise after a five-minute discussion that you have a common acquaintance? You say, “Small world...” But how is it that we’re so close to perfect strangers?

How is it possible to have a path of three to five handshakes to just about any of the six billion inhabitants of our crowded planet?

The answer lies in the fact that society is a very densely connected network in which we are nodes, and links represent our numerous social, professional, or family relationships. Recently, we’ve learned that the small worlds we experience in society are just about everywhere. Three years ago, my research group showed most web pages are 19 clicks from each other, and that between any two chemicals in our cells there is a chain of three reactions...

Economists have realised that all Fortune 1000 directors are fewer than five handshakes from each other through the boards on which they jointly serve. Yet, the most important revelation about networks — the one that is exciting scientists from all disciplines — has little to do with small worlds. Rather, it is the realisation that the networks appearing in all different segments of nature and society are indistinguishable.

We now understand that real networks are far from being a bunch of nodes randomly linked to each other. Instead, a few hubs, nodes with an exceptionally large number of connections, keep most networks together. A few individuals with an extraordinary ability to make friends keep society together.

Post Script : This book got 5 star rating on Amazon.com. Link here :

http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else-Means/dp/0452284392/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275157429&sr=1-1

Life Place - Bio-regionalism by Robert L.Thayer

2010-05-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

Life Place

Posted on January 25, 2010 | Author: Robert L Thayer |

Somewhere in the swirl of life, each of us ponders three essential questions: “Who am I?” “Where am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?”

We often consider the first question in isolation, as if it were the true key to our existence — as if the matter of who we are could be resolved independently of the two remaining questions...We wander the postmodern landscape like hunter-gatherers, searching for bits and pieces of meaning, unconsciously emulating the atomised consumers of economists’ elaborate models. Governments and transnational corporations expect us to substitute a shallow awareness of the entire globe for whatever deep wisdom and affection we might have had for a specific place.

In the process of becoming postmodern, we have abandoned the notion of “home,” and like innocent natives presented with beads and trinkets of shining lustre and unfamiliar purpose, we have surrendered our former homelands to the new gods of consumerism, transience, shallow information, global communication, and eve rexpanding technology.

We are trained in schools and universities to “become” before we “locate.” The ends of these hopeless wanderings, in terms of both purpose and place, very often elude us. Our places and communities have been usurped by machines, sprawled out by the automobile, homogenised by consumer culture, seduced by the globalising economy, trivialised by TV, and disconnected from deep wisdom by the shallow superficiality of the “electronic superhighway.”

Excerpted from : "Life Place - a bio-regional thought and practice " by Robert L. Thayer.

Amazon review Link :

http://www.amazon.com/LifePlace-Bioregional-Robert-Thayer-Jr/dp/0520236289/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

"Mixed Source" by Ramon Casadeus-Masanell

2010-02-16T21:37:00.000-08:00

( meant for Software Developer friends and those from I.T.Marketing)

" Mixed Source " by Ramon Casadeus-Masanell

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" We study competitive interaction between profit-maximizing firms that sell software and complementary goods or services. In addition to tactical prices competition, we allow firms to compete through business model reconfigurations. We consider 3 business models.

(1) The proprietary model - where all software modules offered by the firm are proprietary .

(2) The Open Source Model - where ALL the modules are open sourced. And,

(3) Mixed Model - where a few modules are open.

When a firm opens one of its modules, users can access and improve the source code. At the same time, however, opening a module sets up an open source ( free) competitor. This hampers the firm's ability to capture value.

We analyse 3 competitive situations !

(a) Monopoly (b) commercial firm, versus non-profit open source (OS) project and (c) Duopoly.

Our research shows that, firms may become ' more closed' in response to competition from an outside OS project : firms are more likely to open substitute, rather than complementary, modules to existing OS projects : when the products of two competing firms are similar in quality, firms differentiate through choosing different business models : and low-quality firms are generally more prone to opening some of their technologies , than firms with high-quality products. Firms may become more closed in response to competition from an outside OS project, and are more likely to use a proprietary model. Firms are more likely to open substitute modules to existing OS projects. "

From " Mixed Source " by Ramon Casadeus-Masanell.

"unclutter your life in 1 week!" by Erin Doland

2010-01-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

" Simplicity is revolutionary !

Being over worked, over booked, and over-whelmed is passe ! It's outdated. Right now, you have a choice to make.

Do you want to live a stressful life controlled by your possessions and the demands of things that don't matter to you ? Or do you want to be relaxed and living a remarkable , uncluttered life ?

When your surroundings, schedule, and thoughts are chaotic, it's hard to move through the day. If you are constantly late for work because you can't get out of the door, then, you may have problem in organization. If your house is in such disarray, that you can't invite your friend over for a dinner, then your problem is with the physical clutter.

If you are overwhelmed with the Email at Work and Laundry at Home, then you may be using bad process.

If you are repeatedly missing some client deadlines, then, you may ned some Time Management help.

The list of distractions is endless, and only YOU know specifically, how clutter is interfering with your life. By getting rid of clutter and organising your Work and Home life, you will free up Time, Space, and Energy -- so that, you can focus on what REALLY matters to you !

The Official Unclutter Motto - has been passed down from generation to generation by parents, teachers etc. " A place for everything and everything in its place ". Nothing in your home or office should be - without its designated living space.

From " Unclutter your Life in one week " by Erin Doland.

Amazon book review link : HERE !

"Positive Thinking" by Susan Mitchie

2010-01-23T02:06:00.000-08:00

" You are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticize yourself for errors, doubt yourself, or expect failure. Negative damages confidence, harms performance, and paralyses mental skills.

If you find difficult to look at your negative thoughts objectively, imagine that, you are your best or a respected mentor or coach.

Look at the list of negative thoughts and imagine the negative thoughts, were written by someone you are giving objective advice to, and think how you would challenge these thoughts. When you challenge negative thoughts rationally, you should be able to see quickly, whether the thoughts are wrong or whether they have substance to them.

Where there is some substance, take appropriate action. In these cases, negative thinking an early warning system showing where you need direct your attention. Thought awareness helps you to understand the negative thinking, unpleasant memories and misinterpretation of situations, that may interfere with your performance and damages self confidence.

Rational thinking is a technique that helps you to challenge these negative thoughts and either learn more from them or refute them as incorrect.

Positive thinking is then used to create positive affirmations that you can use to counter negative thoughts.

These affirmations neutralize negative thoughts and build self confidence. It is also used to find the opportunities almost always present to some degree in a difficult situation. "

"Positive thinking" by Susan Michie

' Fixing Gloabl Finance' by Martin Wolf

2009-09-02T01:23:00.000-07:00

Finance rests on promises - which, by their very nature, can be broken ! Above all, the recipients of the promises know that, they can be broken ! This makes financial system vulnerable to changes in expectatins about an inherently uncertain future......... Governments are always essential players in any set of financial promises, even if they themselves have not made them ! They provide the institutions that help make certain that, promises re kept, and they can intervene to ensure that they cannot be kept !

The debts they incur and the money they issue are the basis for any set of financial contracts.

Trust in foreign governments is often limited, since outsiders know that, such a government is not accountable to them ! It is particularly limited in the governments of emergining market economies, whifch tend to be more corrupt, more inefficeint, and often more populist than those of the high-income countries.........

The macroeconomic question is - how adjustment of the global balance of payments might occur. A key issue is the time horizon, since that is likely to have an important impact on the needed changes in real ( and nominal) exchange rates, the slower adjustment, the smaller these changes will need to be. But a deeper set of questions must be addressed : whether there exists a set of policy changes and developments, that would allow a liberal global financial system to tranfer capital to emerging market economies without participating in large scale crises.

From ' Fixing Global Finance' by Martin Wolf

Take Charge at work !

2009-08-29T03:26:00.000-07:00

" Take Charge at work ! " by John Selby
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The key question is this - what variables at work are BEYOND your ability to control, and what variables can you , in fact, take charge of, and change to your benefit ?

You know all the external variables at work, that you DON'T HAVE CONTROL over. Your job is certainly defined with very few opportunities for alteration. If you could change the external situation at your work, you already would have !

But there still remains, the most important variable of all ; the moment-moment choice of where you aim your mind's power of attention - which in turn, determines for each new moment, what you focus on and experience ; how you respond to your fellow workers ; and what you achieve at work !

You will find that, you can employ two primary mind-management methods quickly and uobstrusively, right in the heat of a busy work day. No one will know what you are doing inside your own mind, but, they will notice that, suddenly, your mood brightens ; you flash with great ideas and , you are a pleasure to work and spend time with !

If you don' successfully manage your own mind and moods, the non-stop tensions and uncertainties will tend to knowck you down, generating reduced health and emotinal discord plus a host of stress induced performance problems.

The truth is - you probably cannot change the world of work - but you can most definitely change how you feel and how you perform at work ! Specifically, youcan decide to improve your own interior experience at work, learn to take charge of your own mind.

( excerpt from ' Take charge at work !' by John Selby

"The upside in times of slowdown" by Amar Bhide

2009-05-07T04:42:00.000-07:00

The deck gets reshuffled in a recession as habits are re-examined and patterns of behaviours are broken, perhaps to greater degree than , when things are humming along at a steady pace. And that's what creates business opportunities !

With a down turn, overall incomes, consumer spending, and capital expenditures fall, but not to the same degree for all individuals, products, or businesses !

About 20 years ago, I studies a 100 founders of Inc.magazine's 1989's list of 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. Virtually all of them had started between 1981-83 in the midst of an awful recession. But that didn't prevent those founders from starting a new venture - in fact, in many ways, it may have helped !

Several of those successful entrepreneurs , had lost their jobs and hence, were not risking steady careers - and they were able to hire employees, where didn't have great job prospects on the cheap.

Landlords offered leases without asking too many questions about credit histories. Suppliers were willing to wait to be paid. And even though the old economy and the rust belt was in deep slump, the personal computer was taking off, and with it , opportunities not only for new hardware and software professionals but also for retailers, resellers and even magaine publishers.

More than a third of the founders I have studies had started computer related businesses. What were the worst times for the economy as a whole , turned out to be one of the best times for resourceful and opportunistic entrepreneurs !

" upside in times of slowdown " by Amar Bhide

"On Goverance " by Dani Rodrik

2009-05-06T22:45:00.000-07:00

"Good governance by which I mean transparency, accountability, rule of law and bureaucratic competence and effectiveness, is clearly desirable as an objective in itself. We might even say that good governance is what development is all about. Fine and good.

The problem here is that I doubt economists - whether in or outside the World Bank - have much to say on how to achieve governance - as-an-end. On the other hand, we often also refer to govenrnace in an insturmental sense : better governance. We say, should enhance investmetn and entrepreneurship - and through these , stimulate economic growth. Except that we actually do not know that it does.

Al the evidence we have on the relationship between good goverancne and growth is about the long-term : there is virtually no evidence that improved governance stimulateds growth over the time horizons that policy makers care about.

And the experience of countries such as Vietnam, China and Combodia - all of which are the cases of high growth with very poor governance according to standard criteria ( like YSR Govt in Andhra Pradesh between 2004-2009? ) - should make us sceptical that there is such a relationship. So how can economists conribute ? Where economists have comparative advantage is in designing institutional arrangements for the specific policy reforms targeted at binding growth constraints 0 whether in trade, monetary policy, or education. This agenda differs quite a bit from the broad-brush governance agenda on which discussion tends to focus.

Dani Rodrik - ' On Governance'

All marketers are liars - Seth Godin

2009-05-06T22:37:00.000-07:00

If you don't like what's happening in your company, the only way to change the story is to allow direct interaction between your employee and your customer.

Personal interaction cuts through all the filters. Personal interaction is the way human beings actually make big decisions - by looking people in the eye , by experiencing them first hand. That's why it was so hard for the dot-com s to build a loyal following - they couldn't afford to provide the interactions that are built into the retail experience.

Personal interaction comes from allowing people to be people, not script readers !!

When a consumer talks to a telemarketer, reading a script from a cubicle in New Delhi or Omaha, there is no interaction. but when a human being works with the consumer and takes independent action on her behalf, something changes.

Allowing your employees ot post an honest blog or to engage in direct instant-messaging conversations with your customers is a way to promote honest communication. If it makes you nervous to do that, may be you need to worry about authenticity a little more. Sometimes the interactions are nasty or rushed or even selfish. But when they are genuine, they have an impact.

Seth Godin, from ' All Marketers are Liars '

Marketing Know : How - John Quelch

2009-04-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

Congratulations ! Your business is surviving the slowdown ! Here are my seven top recommendations for marketers looking to plan ahead :
1.Focus on high potential customers. Make sure, you focus on building relationships with ambitious customers in growth industries where pent-up demand is going to be unleashed once the economy turns the corner.

2. Don’t assume a return to normal. The longer and deeper the recession, the more likely, the customers will adjust their attitudes and behaviours permanently. Assess your target customers trust in your brand. Assume that your target customers still trust you, but plan to add service support and old their hand more firmly in the short term, even though your service quality, measured objectively, has remained constant. Stay focussed on costs. Economic recovery will not allow producers to let up on tightening cost controls and improving productivity. Know your lead indicators. Every good marketer knows the specific indicators , macro or micro , that predict demand for his or her product in the next period. Use common sense. Develop scenarios.

Know how you can source supplies and expand distribution in a hurry if demand suddenly spikes. Et ahead of the crowd. Craft your recovery plan now and pull the tgrigger when your lead indicators say go. Marketing will again come to the fore as a differnetiator , between successful businesses and also-rans.

"Writing a Great Business Plan" by William A Sahlman

2009-02-01T22:46:00.000-08:00

"Writing a business Plan is a seminal moment in the life of a new venture. Doing it so entails, committing to paper, a vision of factors that will affect the success or failure of the enterprise.

A business plan can't be a tightly crafted prediction of the future but rather, a depiction of how events might unfold and a road map for change.
Successful entrepreneurs constantly seek right mixture of............

people,
opportunity,
context, and ...
the deal !!

The anticipate what can go wrong, what can go right, and they try to balance risk with reward.

Over the years, I have received many emails from folks trying to craft a business plan. They want feedback ! I explain that, I would need to get to know them and their opportunity much better than, what is possible in an email and that, the written document is NOT as important as the PEOPLE writing it !!

Writing a business plan is not science - it's an art and a craft. Successful ventures have competent people pursuing sensible opportunities, using resources that help, in a favourable context , striking mutually beneficial deals !

Yes ! The context is very challenging today. But challenges creat opportunities. If gaining access to capital is hard, sometimes that means, there will be fewer competitors. This period is almost the antithesis of the Internet Bubble when, almost everyone could raise money and start a company , regardless of how lamebrained the idea !

His book, ' Entrepreneurial Venture' gotten a 5-star rating. Can be read here !

The Making of the Fittest - Sean Carroll

2009-01-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

" The new science of " genomics" - is the comprehensive and most especially, comparitive study of species DNA - is profoundly expanding our knowledge of evolution of Life. Genomics allows us to peer deeply into the evolutionary process. For more than a century after Darwin, natural selection was observable only at the level of whole organism such as finches or moths as differences in their survival or reproduction.

Now, we can see how the fittest are made. DNA contains an entirely new and different kind of information than what Darwin could have imagined or hoped for, but which decisively confirms his picture of evolution. We can now observe specific changes in DNA that have enabled species to adapt to changing environments and to evolve new lifestyles. The DNA record reveals that, evolution can and does repeat itself !

This is powerful evidence that, confronted with the same challenges or opportunities , the same solution can arise at entirely different times and places in the history. This repetition overthrows the notion that , if we rewound and replayed the history of life, all of the outcomes would be different. Many of our genes bear the scars of natural selection - of the battles our ancestors fought with the germs that have plagues human civilisation for millennia.

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/** His book received a 4.5 rating at amazon.com. Here are editorial reviews.

"From Publishers WeeklyPicking up where scientists like Richard Dawkins have left off, Carroll, a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo), has written a fast-paced look at how DNA demonstrates the evolutionary process. Natural selection eliminates harmful changes and embraces beneficial ones, and each change leaves its signature on a species' DNA codes. For example, the Antarctic ice fish today has no red blood cells; yet a fossilized gene for hemoglobin remains in its DNA, showing that the fish has adapted over 55 million years by losing the red blood cells that thicken blood and make it harder to pump in extreme cold. The fish has developed other features that allow it to absorb and circulate blood without hemoglobin. . Carroll points out that by examining the DNA of these ice fish species, it's possible to map its origins as well as the history of the South Atlantic's geology. He also uses dolphins, colobus monkeys and microbes to demonstrate how deeply evolution is etched in DNA. While searches for the genetic basis for evolution are hardly new, Carroll offers some provocative and convincing evidence. 7 pages of color illus.; 50 b&w illus. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From BooklistSensing that many people misunderstand evolution or don't believe it, geneticist Carroll here hopes to teach the interested and convince the doubters. He uses popular interest in animals as his lure and selects specific creatures, beginning with bloodless fishes of the Antarctic seas, as stages for his substantive points about evolution. More particularly, Carroll focuses on specific genes carried by his cast of animals to demonstrate natural selection. Carroll considers the animals' most favorable adaptations, preserved in what he calls "immortal genes"; several hundred are common to all domains of life. Carroll then scales up to the macroscopic and considers traits such as color vision in monkeys; the vision and anatomy of fish, including the famous coelacanth; and the sickle-cell trait in humans. In each case, Carroll explains how the DNA code of the gene responsible for the trait is inferred to be the result of natural selection working on mutations, which occur at a steady rate. Here is evolution clearly explained and stoutly defended. REVWRCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Link here :

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Fittest-Ultimate-Forensic-Evolution/dp/0393330516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230822741&sr=1-1

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Another book, ' Space time geometry' too, received a 5 star rating.

http://www.amazon.com/Spacetime-Geometry-Introduction-General-Relativity/dp/0805387323/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230822741&sr=1-2

Editorial Reviews:
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Product DescriptionSpacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity provides a lucid and thoroughly modern introduction to general relativity. With an accessible and lively writing style, it introduces modern techniques to what can often be a formal and intimidating subject. Readers are led from the physics of flat spacetime (special relativity), through the intricacies of differential geometry and Einstein's equations, and on to exciting applications such as black holes, gravitational radiation, and cosmology. For advanced undergraduates and graduate students, or anyone interested in astronomy, cosmology, physics, or general relativity. From the Back CoverSpacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity provides a lucid and thoroughly modern introduction to general relativity. With an accessible and lively writing style, it introduces modern techniques to what can often be a formal and intimidating subject. Readers are led from the physics of flat spacetime (special relativity), through the intricacies of differential geometry and Einstein's equations, and on to exciting applications such as black holes, gravitational radiation, and cosmology. For advanced undergraduates and graduate students, or anyone interested in astronomy, cosmology, physics, or general relativity.

"How 2 B a good customer?" John Quelch

2008-08-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

Prologue : You must have read a lot on ' How to be a super salesman' but rarely do we come across some Guru, telling us, ' How to be a good customer?' !! Contrary to conventional wisdom,
(a) being a good customer is NOT about being a ruthless customer. (b) NOT about being a great negotiator and equally , (c) NOT ( only) about getting the Best Deal / Highest Value at the Lowest cost or about extracting MOST from a vendor, while paying the least !! Most of of sell, in profession and earn money and then, we are CUSTOMERS most of the time, when we are spending it. IN 99 % of occasions in life, we are CUSTOMERS first , and then, sales people !! Hence, this small piece assumes a great importance !! Lastly, those of you married men, please forward this to your wife or take a print out, as , it's the Queen Bee which makes most of the domestic purchases. Also, share it with at least ONE sales person you know. Being good customers first, makes better at sales ! cvr ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- " How to be a good customer " by John Anthony Quelch ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- " We all know that, not all customers are treated equal ! "Big customers get better treatment than small ones. Frequent customers get better treatment than occasional customers. Most of us recognise, and accept, such discrimination. But how can you punch over above your weight as a customer to get better treatment than your importance to the seller, deserves ? You can, by doing the following : (1) BE DEMANDING : Make sure, the vendor knows, you have the other options. That, you are going to seek out, more than ONE BID. (2) BE RESPECTFUL : If you want your vendor to do a good job, DON'T be haughty. Be on time. Ask his / her opinion ! Spell out your need, in detail. (3) BE RELIABLE : Do - what you say you will do. Pay on time. Do't try to ' Nickel and Dime' the seller ! Don't ask for the free, value-added services, that WERE NOT THE PART OF THE ORIGINAL deal. This is most important, often neglected, part of buying. (4) BE SURPRISING !!! : Reward a job well done ! How ? You can, (a) leave a tip (b)Pay - ' a little over' the contracted price, if the seller's costs clearly exceed the expectations. (c)Promise to refer the supplier to a friend and keep up the promise. Give him / her a new customer. (5) BE ENGAGING : Differentiate yourself as a customer, by engaging in a friendly conversation. Treat your vendor as EQUAL, not as a mere supplier or order-taker. Obviously, when demand exceeds supply, customers know - they are going to have to get in line, perhaps , pay more than the list price or wait longer than usual , for service. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EXERCISE : ------------ Did you like this ? If you did, do the following : (1) SOUL SEARCHING : OF the 5 things mentioned above, how many you thing you do normally ? How often ? What are the things ( among the 5 above) you do not do ? Resolve to do - what you normally don't do !! (2) Share this with at least one married woman ( I am sharing with my wife first), who does all the household purchase. (3) Share it with at least ONE sales man / woman you know. Tell them, they must become BETTER CUSTOMERS first, so that, they can be super sales-persons !! (4) Share it with at least one person - who works in a purchase dept / in-charge of procurement. cvr -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BIO: ohn A. Quelch is Senior Associate Dean and Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Between 1998 and 2001 he was Dean of London Business School. Prior to 1998, he was the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Co-Chair of the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Quelch is well-known for his teaching materials and innovations in pedagogy.

Book review of ' Greater good', his book.

http://www.amazon.com/Greater-Good-Marketing-Better-Democracy/dp/1422117359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219815124&sr=1-1

"Deep Economy" by Bill McKibben

2008-08-13T23:38:00.000-07:00

For the most of human history, the two birds, ' More ' and ' Better ' , were roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope, to hit them both !

That's why, the centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production.

The idea that individuals, pursuing their individual interestes in a market society, make one another richer and the idea that increasing efficiency, usualy by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth has indisputably produced ' More ' .

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this : ' Better ' has flown a few trees over, to make her nest !

Growth is no longer making most people wealthier, but instead, generating inequality and insecurity. And Growth is buming against physical limits. New search from many quarters has started to show that, even when growth does make us wealthier, the greater wealth no longer makes us happier !

Given all that we now know about topics ranging from the molecular structure of carbon dioxide to the psychology of human satisfaction, we need to move, decisively to rebuild our Local Economies !!

Shifting our focus will not mean abandoning Adam Smith or doing away with the markets. Markets, obviously, work . Building a local econonoy will mean, however, ceasing to worship markets as infallible - and consciously setting limits of their scope !

"Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007)" ISBN 0-8050-7626-3 -- by Bill McKibben.

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Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the need for more localized economies.

Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent. Al Gore wrote in 2007 that "when I was serving in the Senate, Bill McKibben’s descriptions of the planetary impacts... made such an impression on me that it led, among other things, to my receiving the honorific title ‘Ozone Man’ from the first president Bush.”
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The Age of Missing Information
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...Human beings--any one of us, and our species as a whole--are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky. --The Age of Missing Information, p. 228

...We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' . We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information. --The Age of Missing Information, p. 9

...It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. --The Age of Missing Information, p. 22
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Enough

...They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips.
—Enough, p.198

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
—Enough, p.199

Right now, plenty of people feel the peacefulness of their lives degraded by sprawl, or worry about the way consumerism has eroded the quality of our communities. For them, the idea of enough is not completely alien or distasteful, though it remains difficult to embrace. We've been told that it's impossible – that some force like evolution drives us on to More and Faster and Bigger. 'You can't stop progress.' But that's not true. We could choose to mature. That could be the new trick we share with each other, a trick as revolutionary as fire. Or even the computer.
—Enough, p.220

"us and them " by David Berreby

2008-07-28T22:36:00.000-07:00

"Scientists , when they turn their attention to people, usually talk about the entire human race or about the individual human being.

Truth about all is truth about each ; a theory about the mind or morality applies to everyone who ever lived, as well as to YOU in particular.

Either perspective yields big explanations, which make many predictions to test and suggest many experiments. It's where researchers like to be ;working on "the" genome, or "the" brain, or "the" self.

Human kinds, whose memberships fall between ALL and ONE, map a much more variegated world than that one-size-fits-all label " Homosapiens".

Why is all this variety possible ? That's not a question that can be answered by looking at the political, economic, or cultural aspects of human kinds,as important as those aspects are. The issue is not what human kinds are in the world, but what they are in the mind - no how we tell Tamils and Seventh-Day Adventists and fans of Manchester United from their fellowhuman beings, but why we want to !

After all, other creatures get along fine without dividing themselves into such tribes. Many people today find themselves struggling, again and again, with a difficult question,
" Who is on our side ? "

Today, it is clear as never before that, human kinds don't depend on what people are, but on what people BELIEVE !

" US AND THEM " by David Berreby

"The Zen Approach to Project Management " by George Pitagorsky

2008-06-27T23:17:00.000-07:00

" From the point of view of Zen, managing projects is both a quest in and of itself and a vehicle for awakening.

Essentially, we are going to reveal how project management can be used as a Zen art !

In Zen, there is a tradition of taking apparently mundane daily activities and elevating them into art forms that create paths to awakening. What makes an activity like project management an art or ' The Way' is to practice it both for the immediate result and with a view of purifying , calming and focusing the psycho-physical apparatus , the body-mind complex.

The Zen approach will not only benefit your project work tremendously, but it will allow you to extract more personal value from it !

The Zen activity becomes a focal point for concentration as well as a vehicle for addressing all the personal and relationship issues that arise when we are actively trying to accomplish something with a high degree of excellence under challenging circumstances.

While practicing outer work, important inner work is done, and awakening takes place !

Have you done complex things like things like driving a car, riding a bicycle, running on a treadmill or managing a project while spaced out to the extent that you have no recollection of how you got to where you are ?

How does it feel to be completely engaged in an activity while being completely relaxed and aware of everything that is going on in and around you ? "

Excerpt from : " The Zen Approach to Project Management " by GEORGE PITAGORSKY.
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( from amazon.com, about the same book)

Product Description

The Zen approach to Project Management brings together sound wisdom, a nuts-and-bolts grasp of practicalities, and original insights. It's the Zen that's been missing in all too many of today's business books, and George Pitagorsky is the master we've needed.

Projects are often more complex and stressful than they need to be. Far too many of them fail to meet expectations.
There are far too many conflicts.
There are too few moments of joy and too much anxi¬ety.
But there is hope.
It is possible to remove the unnecessary stress and complexity.

This book is about how to do just that. It links the essential principles and techniques of managing projects to a wisdom approach for working with complex, people-based activities.

Project management becomes a metaphor for how we can live our lives and, if we follow the wisdom traditions, the way we live our lives becomes a metaphor for how to manage projects.

The book guides readers in exploring how to: Remove unnecessary stress and complexity from your projects.
Apply mindfulness and open mindedness to cut through the barriers to personal self-actualization.
Manage expectations to ensure that people get what they need, when they need it and for the cost they expected to pay and that they accept what they get.
Manage performance to cut through interpersonal and intra-personal issues that get in the way of excellence.
Break free of self-imposed barriers to creative thinking, conflict resolution and problem solving.

Remain calm and energetic while being active and effective in the face of chaos, fear, resistance to change, unrealistic demands, conflict and the other aspects of project life that cause stress.

"Predictably Irrational " by Dan Ariely

2008-05-21T04:32:00.001-07:00

" Let me start with a fundamental observation : most people don't know wht they want unless they see it in context !

We don't know what kind of racing bike we want - until we see the champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular model. We don't know what kind of speaker system we like - until we hear a set of speakers that sounds better than the previous one.

We don't even know, what we want to do with our lives - until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing. Everything is relative, and that's the point.

Like an airplane pilot landing in the dark, we want run-way lights on either side of us, guiding us to the place where we can touch down our wheels. Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly.

For instance, we don't kow how much a six-cylender car is worth, but we can assume it's more expensive than the four-cylender one).

High priced items on the menu boost revenue for the restaurant, even if no one buys them. Why ? Because, even though people generally won't buy the most expensive dish on the menu, they will order the second most expensive dish !! "

Excerpt from " Predictably Irrational " by Dan Ariely.

"System Improvement " by Sam Carpenter.

2008-04-19T00:14:00.000-07:00

Learn to work the system !!

And not just one ; work ALL systems in your control, viz., social, work, financial, biological, and mechanical. Life is serious business, and whether you know it or not, your personal systems are the threads of the fabric of your life. Together, they add up to you.

But, if you are like most people, you negotiate the day enmeshed in haphazard detail without seeing the systems of your life - as singular entities that they are, some working well and some not working so well.

If you are like most people, you defensively deal with the products - the results - of inefficient sysetms !!

In the complexity that is your life, what if you could distinctly see each of these separate systems ? Then, what if you could reach in and pluck a 'not-so-perfect system' out of that complexity, and make it perfect, and then re-insert it ?

What if you could perform this mechanical process with every SYSTEM that comprises your life ?

How can you take control of life and things and be on the offensive ? The short answer is that, by assertively repairing yours systems of your life - by implementing the process of system-improvement, you can build the life you want !

It's a simple reality that - if all the sub-systems of a primary system are working superbly, the primary system will work superbly , too !

With this system-improvement approach, you can re-engineer your life, piece by piece, to make it exactly what you want it to be, without having to count on luck, providenc, or someone else's largesse.

Exercises :

1. Review all ' sub-systems' of your life. Social ( relationships), work ( professional), Financial , Biological ( health and wellness) , and mechanical ( daily routine).

Which aspect are working well ? Which aspects of each sub unit, not working well. What are the things that need improvement ?

Realistic time frames for bringing in the needed improvements ? Days / weeks / months ?

By bringing in the needed improvements, will ' over all change in life' happen ? How ?

Excerpt from " System Improvement " by Sam Carpenter .

"Getting Things Done" by David Allen

2008-04-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

" Most often, the reason something is " on your mind " is that, you want it to be diferent than it currently is, and yet ; you haven't clarified exactly the intended outcome !!

You haven't decided what the very next physical action step is, and / or you haven't put the reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust. That's why it's on your mind !!

Until those thought have been clarified and those decisions made, and the resulting data has been stored in a system that you absolutely know you will think about as often as you need to, your brain can't give up the job ! You can fool everyone else, but ou can't fool your own mind. It knows whether or not you have come to the conclusions you need to, and whether you've put the resulting outcomes and action reminders in a place that can be trusted to resurface apropriately within your conscious mind.

Even if you've already decided on the next step, you'll take to resolve a problem, your mind can't let go until and unless you write yourself a reminder in a place it knows you will, without fail, look. It will keep pressuring you about that untaken next step, usually when you can't do anything about it, which will just add to your stress. The reason most organising systems haven't worked for most people is that, they haven't yet transfomed all the ' stuff' they are trying to organise.

Most of the ' to-do lists' I have seen over the years ( when people had them at all !! ) were merely listings of ' stuff' , not inventories of the resultant real work that needed to be done. "

" Getting things done" by David Allen.

Mr.David Allen is the ' Personal Productivity Guru' for many leading CEO s. Most of his books are widely read and practiced.
From Amazon :

"As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic.Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). "

"This book is for all those who are overwhelmed with too many things to do, too little time to do them, and a general sense of unease that something important is being missed.

Everyone has experienced times when everything seemed effortless, and progress limitless. David Allen has captured ways for you to achieve that wonderful state of mind and consciousness more often. ?"

For More : Link :

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207036383&sr=1-1

"The Caring Economy " by Gerry McGovern

2008-01-22T06:59:00.000-08:00

In the digital age, it pays to care ! How will business differentiate3 itself in a world becoming increasingly commotditised ?
In a world that is becoming increasingly automated ?
There isn't an economy in history that is ruled by price alone !!

To differentiate itself, a company can start by using the internet to engate with its cusomters more, seeing them as partners so as to develop solid, long-term,mutually profitable relationships. By developing product that truly match customer needs. By focussing on service. By being friendly and helpful.

Because human relationships cannot be automated, cannot be commoditised.

Machine, at least for now, cannot be pgogrammed to care ! People care. And let's not forget, in this haze of technological change and often illusory promise, it's people who buy our products and services. We are an intelligent , lften logical and driven species ; that is accepted.

We are also a sentient species. We feel. We are . Like to be cared for. We care about our food ; clothes ; our family ; community and nay, nation. Yes, we belong to a Caring Society.

Having said all that, it has to be acceptd that we live in a society where caring is increasingly self-centred,.It is vital that we are able to look at the world with fresh eyes and are willing to learn new things, new busines practices.

It is vital that we take nothing for granted. That we assume nothing. That , we question everything.

Link to This book on the amazon :

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1901657612/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?%5Fencoding=UTF8&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R3AC2XHNOE2N24

One of the reviews here :
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This book was written by a man you really seems to know where we are going as a society / race. I work in I.T. myself and I often feel that no one really knows where we are going to end up, not Lou Gestner, not Bill Gates. Sure these guys know what the technology will be, they are going to sell it to us, but they don't seem to know or care where the technology will leave us as people.

That's what is great about Gerry Mc Govern's book, he is trying to share his vision of how the Internet and related technologies will effect us as human beings.

The book offers a vast array of facts from meticulously researched sources about the way the Internet has developed and is developing. Throughout there is a consistent message: this is a new era, there are new challenges here's how I think we can deal with them.

In case you are wondering, McGovern's basic suggestions for the Digital age is A new age requires new thinking technology doesn't matter - people do. Price isn't event that important - but people are. Your business should look after / care for people - your staff, your customers, the people in your region, the people who visit your website, etc. - that way you will succeed.

He may eventually be proven wrong but at least he sets out a vision. Now that I have a firm idea of where one person thinks we are going I will find it easier to critically evaluate what others are saying, so if just for that alone - this is agreat book.

Another of his Book," Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand (Paperback) " has received a 5-star rating. Link here :

http://www.amazon.com/Killer-Web-Content-Deliver-Service/dp/071367704X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201013510&sr=1-1

"The Future of Management " by Gary Hamel

2007-12-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

How do you discover radically better ways of leading, organising, and managing ? The short answer : You look far beyond the boundaries of today's " best practices ".

To glimpse the future of management, you must search out the " positive deviants", organisations and social systems that defy the norms of conventional practice.

The web has evolved faster than anything human beings have ever created - largely , because it is not a hierarchy. The web is all periphery and no centre !! What is the chance of tomorrow's most successful organistions will be as different from today's corporate behemoth's - as the Internet is different from plain old telephone service ?

The answer : A lot higher than you think !! Unlike your company, the Internet already is adaptable, innovative and engaging.

I believe we are now on the verge of " Post managerial " society, perhaps even a " post organisational " society. Just as coming of the knwledge economy didn't herald the death of heavy( manufacturing) industry, a " post managerial " economy won't be entirely free of executives, supervisors, administrators and overseers.

But it does imply a future in which the " work of management " is less and less responsibility of " managers " . Activities will still need to be co-ordinated, individual effortrs aligned, relatinships nurtured, objectives decided upon, and knoledge disseminated.

From :
" Future of Management " by Gary Hamel.

'career & self growth' by Michelle Casto

2007-11-15T23:33:00.000-08:00

" Career growth experts say that people will change careers ( not jobs) 5 to 7 times in a lifetime. This being true, career management is an important lifeskill to develop and cultivate.

In the assessment stage, you are getting ready for your life's work. You start to feel like you want to know more about yourself, and make a consciuos effort to get in touch with who you really are.

In the investigation stage, you are researching what works exist in the world. You may feel overwhelmed with all of different opportunties that exist as you begin the process of reserach the modern world of work.

In the preperation stage, you are still getting ready to do your life's work. This is stage is charactarized by feelings of excitement, as you think of how wonderful it will be to perform meaningful work.

In the committment stage, you willl feel confident , in that you have figured out what you mean to do . Sometimes people have known all along what they are meant to do . But were not able to committ to the process of making it happen. For what ever reason.

In the retention stage, you will feel comfortable in your career field. As you will now have figured out, how things work in your industry. You will want to remain committed to your career by continually updating your skills sets and staying current with industry standards.
The transition stage is charactarised by feelings of discomfort. In that you are unsure of what you will be doing next.

In the next stage, you will learn to make conscious changes in your career direction.
ACTION EXERCISES :

1. At What stage YOU are in presently ? Some 6 stages have been mentioned above.

2. What SHOLD YOU DO, to go to the next stage ?

-- Excerpted from " SELF GROWTH " by Michelle Casto.

"integrity in leadership " by Peter F Drucker

2007-11-15T23:27:00.000-08:00

The proof of the sincerity and seriousness of a management is uncompromising emphasis on integrity of character. This , above all, has to be symbolised in management's " people" decisions.

For , it is character through which leadership is exercised ; it is character that sets the example and is imitated. Character is not something one can fool people about ! The people with whom a person works, and especially subordinates, know in a few weeks whether he or she has integrity or not. They may forgive a person for a great deal : incompetence, ignorance, insecurity, or bad manners. But they will NOT forgive a lack of integrity in that person. Nor will they forgive higher managemen for chooosing him !

This is particulary true of the people at the head of an enterprise. For the spirit of an organisation is created from the top. If an organisation is great in spirit, it is because the spirit of its top peope is great.

If it decays, it does so because the top rots ; as the proverb has it, " trees die from top :".
No one shold ever be appointed to a senior position uless tp managemen is wiling to have his or her characterserve as the model for subordinates.

Action point : Evaluate the character of the CEO and top management when considering a job offer. Align yourself with people who have integrity.

" Integrity in leadership " by Peter F Drucker

"overcoming epistemology"by Charles Taylor

2007-11-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

OVERCOMING EPISTEMOLOGY " BY CHARLES TAYLOR

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The ideal of self-responsibilty is foundational to modern culture. It emeres not only in our picture of the growth of modern science through the heroism of the great sceitist, standing against the opinion of his age on the basis of his own self responsibilte certainty - Copernicus, Galileo ( he wobbled a bit before the Holy Office, but who can blame him ? ), Darwin, Freud. It is also closedly linked to the modern ideal of freedom as self-autonomy. To be free in the modern sense is to be self-responsble, to rely on your own judgement, to find your purpose in yourself. And so the espistemological tradition is also intricateed in a certain notion of freedom, and the dignity attaching to us in virtue of this.

The theory of knowledge partly draws its strength from this connection. But, reciprocally, the ideal of freedom has also drawn strength from its sensed connection with the construal of knowledge seemily favoured by modern sceience. From this point of view, it is fateful that this notion of freedom has been interpreted as involving certain key theses about the nature of the human agent ; we might call them anthropological beliefs. Whether these are in fact insepreable from the modern aspiration to autonomy is an open question, and a very important one.

Seems to be great writer on philosophy, human anthropology etc. Wrote on Self, Hegel, Multiculturalism, Society,and there is his biography Mr.Nicolas H.Smith which received a 5 point rating.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-2012925-3923129?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=%22Charles+Taylor%22&x=15&y=27

Read on .

VALUE INVESTING' by BRUCE GREENWALD

2007-11-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

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iF YOU THINK THAT STOCK PRICES NORMALLY OVER OR UNDERVALUE A CMPAN'S WORTH, YOU WILL FIND THIS BOOK FASNCINATING. tHE ETHODS AND INVESTORS OUTLINES HAE SUCCESSFULLY BEATEN THE MARKET AVERAGES FOR DECADES. sO, WHETHER YOU TRY TO APPLY THE CONCEPTS FOR YOURSELF, OR HAVE YOUR MONEY INVESTED BY ONE OF THESE TOP VALUE INVESTMENT MANAGERS, ALUE INVESTING IS A DESCIPLINE THA CAN HELP YOU ACHIEVE SUPERIOR INVESTING RESULTS. iN SOME OF HTE MANY BACK TESTS RUN IN RECENT YEARS TO TEST FOR MARKET EFFICIENCY CONCERNING STOCK PRICES, SIMPLY BUYING STOCKS WITH LOW PRICE / EARNINGS AND PRICE/ BOOK RATIOS PROVES TO OUTPOERFORM THE MARKET AVERAGES. mORE THOUGHTFUL STOCK ICKING CAN DO EVEN BETTER. bUT THE IDEAS IN THIS BOOK AR FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT. vALUE INVESTING SHOWS THE MANY WAYS THAT SITUATIONS WHERE SECURITIES ARE UNDERPRICES CAN BE FOUND AND EXPLOITED. YOU SHOULD REALISE THAT VALUE INVESTING IS AN INTELLECTUAL AND CROSS CHECKING EXERCISE, FAR REMOVED FROM EMOTION OF TTHE DA-TRADING AND THE THRILLS OF FOLLOWING TRADING MOMENTUM. yEARS CAN PASS WIHTOUT ANY GOOD OPPORTUNITIES ARISING. yOU WILL OFTEN SELL STAOCKS FAR BEFORE THEIR ULTIMATE PEAK. ONE OF HTE HARDEST THINGS TO ACCOMODATE IS THAT OUR RESULTS WILL LOOK WORST WHEN EERYONE ELSE IS PICKING UP EASY MONEY., MINDLESSL, BY RUNNING WITH THE HERD OF RAMPAGING BULLS.
for

"Becoming a Manager" by Linda Hill

2007-11-10T09:32:00.000-08:00

" Through my research, teaching, and consulting over the past 10 years, I have come to understand more deeply than ever, that the best managers are those who have an appetite for learning and are willing to work on themselves.

Management is VERY HARD !! Even the most gifted people must commit themselves to lifelong learning and self-development.

Although some of the qualities of effective managment are " innate " and inborn, or acquired principally through pre-work socialisation ( personal integrity, high energy level, and a drive to lead), much of leadership is learned ! Management is primarily learned from the on-the-job experiences-by doing, observing, and interacting with others. As unsettling as it is, we hae found that the essence of development is DIVERSITY AND ADVERSITY.

As many have observed, however, people do not always learn from their experiences ! To make meaning from their experiences, managers need to reflect on and and consolidate the lessons of those experiences.

To change and grow, they must be prepared to engage periodically in introspection. The difficulty in remaining objective about oneself, however,is well documented. There are mechanisms that keep people from honestly evaluating themselves. The more candid feedback that managers can obtain from varied sources, the more accurate and precise their assessment will be . --

From " Becoming a Manager " by Linda A.Hill.

"Brazen Careerist"by Penelope Trunk

2007-11-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

" If you want people to like you, give them compliments. If you understand what worries someone, and what he is trying hardest to achieve personally, then you will easily spot opportnities for praise. Don't just say , " good job " for the sake of it ! in fact, don't just say " good job ". The most effective compliments are very specific. And creative words are more memorable than standard words.

The most common types of praise are about possessions " Nice car" or about actions " great shot". Praise of character is the most rare and most memorable praise of all ! Bu it's also the most difficult because it requires you to understand the person you are praising and be thoughtful about how you talk to them.

To find genuine ways oto compliment people rquires spending a lot of time looking for the good in people. To increase the weight of your compliments, establish yourself as a trusted resource.. to make a genuine connection, give genuine compliments , but balance them with insightful criticism. With the right balance people will view you as a smarter person and they will take all your comments ( compliments and criticism) seriously.

So, concentrate on the good in people, and compliment it throughout the day, you jsut might feel like you are actually surrounded by kind, competenet and interesting people. And research shows that they will find you to be more kind and competenet as well.

ACTION EXERCISES : 1. First, do it with yourself. Take a paper and write all that is good in you . And balance it with construcive self criticism. ( Time : 15 minutes)
2. List 5 people you have a ' troublesome relationship'. Do it with them. Write down all their possible plus points. Tell them.Balance it with constructive criticism. (Time for prep : 20 minutes)

Excerpted from : " Brazen Careerist " by Ms.Penelope Trunk.

" On Liberty " - John Stuart Mill (citings 26 june 2007)

2007-06-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

" Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities.

Society can and does execute its own mandates. If it issues wrong mandates instead of right, it practises a social tyranniy more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more ddeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough ; there needs proection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling ; against the tendency of society to impose, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them ; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence ; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensible to a good condition of human afairs, as protection against political despotism.

STRATEGY SAFARI - HENRY MINTZBERG

2007-05-13T04:40:00.000-07:00

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Strategy is a pattern, that is , cnsistent in behaviour over time. A company that perpetually markets the most expensive products in its industry pursues what is commonly called a high end strategy, just as a person who always accepts the most challenging of jobs may be described as pursuing a high risk strategy.

Organisationas develop plans for their future and they also evolve patterns out of their past. We call one, intended strategy and the other , realised strategy .........

To some people, strategy is a position, namely, the locating a particular products in particular markets. To others, strategy is a perspective, namely an organisation's fundamental way of doing things. As position, strategy looks down - to the " x" that marks the spot where, the product meets the customer, as well as out - to the external marketplace.
As perspective, in contrast, strategy looks in inside the organisation , indeed, inside the heads of the strategiss, but it also looks up - o the grand vision of the enterprise.

The problems is that, eventually, situations change - enviromments destabilise, niches disappear, opportunities open up. Then all that is constructive about an established strategy becomes a liability !! That is ,why, even though the concept of strategy is rooted in stability, so much of the study of strategy focuses on change. But, while formulas for strategic change may come easily, the management of that change, especially when it involves shifting perspective, comes hard !! ------------------------------------------------------

Amazon link for the book review ( 4.5rating) is here :

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Safari-Through-Strategic-Management/dp/0743270576/ref=sr_1_4/104-1940432-0583906?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179056946&sr=1-4

How Countries compete ? - Richard Vietor

2007-03-20T22:33:00.000-07:00

" Let us think a bit about the near term future using scenarios. We should start with Singapore, the most developed state in Souteast Asia. For the foreseeable future, Singapore is being incresingly pressed by China and India on the low end, and more competitively by Korea, Taiwan, the US, and Europre on the high end. Either its strategy of low taxes and networked culsters, particularly biotechnology, will work - or it won't.

If it works, we can expect Singapore to become a services powerhouse in Southeast Asia, quickly catching up with the income levels of Europe. But if not, what would happen to Singapore's growth as it loses lower-end jobs and investments to China ? Developing scenarios for China is a more striking exercise...

China has been growing at more than 8 % annually and running larger surpluses on its current account....

If Hu Jintao encourages consumption , allows the renminbi to apreciate, and gradually liberalises the polity, his trading relations ( and thus foreign relations ) will doubtlesslyl improve.

If he agressively helps banks write off bad debt, creates a reasonable system of governance, and further privatises the state-owned sectors, then, China can continue to grow fast for at least another decade.

But if China continues on its present path, growting exports too rapidly without liberalising trade, then trouble will certainly be coming. I suppose the odds favour continued growth and gradual reform.

Richard Vietor book review page at amazon is here :

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-3711215-2568031?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=%22Richard+Vietor%22&Go.x=6&Go.y=11

One book of his, " Business Management and Natural environment " has gotten a five star rating at amazon.

Book DescriptionBusiness Management and the Natural Environment presents the new set of managerial and strategic challenges posed by environmental questions. By drawing from concepts throughout the traditional business management curriculum and applying them to this new set of managerial challenges, the authors demonstrate the impact of environmental problems on every functional area: marketing, production, finance, control and strategy.

stocks for the long run by Jeremy Siegel

2007-03-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

" STOCKS FOR THE LONG RUN " by Jeremy Siegel --------------------------------------------------------------------- tHE FOCUS OF EVERY LONG TERM INVESTOR SHOULD BE THE GROWTH OF PURCHASING POWER - THE MONEARY WEALTH ADJUSTED FOR THE EFFECT OF INFLATION. tHE GROWTH OF PURCHASING POWER IN EQUITIES NOT ONLY DOMINATES ALL OTHER ASSETS BUT ALSO SHOWS REMARKABLE LONG-TERM STABILITY. dESPITE EXTRAORDINARY CHANGES IN THE ECONOMIC , SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTS OVER THE PAST TWO CENTURIES, STOCKS HAVE IELDED BETWEEN 6.6 % AND 7 % PER YEAR AFTER INFLATION IN ALL MAJOR SUBPERIODS. tHE SHORT TERM FLUCTUATIONS IN THE STOCK MARKETS ARE INSIGNIFICANT WHEN COMPARED WITH THE UPWARD MOVEMENT OF EQUITY VALUES OVE TIME. iN CONTRAST TO THE REMARKABLE STABILITY OF STOCK RETURNS, REAL REURNS ON FIXED-INCOME ASSETS HAVE DECLINED MARKEDLY OVER TIME. sOME ECONOMISTS HAVE MAINTAINED THAT, THE SUPERIOR RETURNS TO EQUITY ARE A CONSEQUENCE OF CHOOSING DATA FROM THE us, A COUNTRY THAT HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED FROM A SMALL bRITISH COLONY TO THE WORLD'S GREATEST ECONOMIC POWER OVER THE LAST 200 YEARS. However, the ability to create value also springs from skiful management, a stable political system that respects property rights, and the capacity to provide value to consumers in a competitive environment. Swings in investor sentiment resulting from political or economic crises can throw stocks off their long term path, but the fundamenal forces producing economic growth enable equities to the regain the long term trend.

" capital rules" by Rawi Abdelal

2007-03-09T04:19:00.000-08:00

" The idea that capital ought to flow unrestrictd across the globe became the reigning orthodoxy of international finance over the course of the 1980 s and the 1990 s, that orthodoxy is already in decline and its reign in question.

As a matter of capital flows, global finance is as strong as ever. But when it comes to the norms and rules of global finance, the very ideas and laws that sustain the system, th height of this era of blobalisation has already been reached.

Policy makers understand the international financial system very differently in the first decade of a new century.

Caution toward full capital mobility now previls within the international fianancial community.

The IMF, oecd, AND CREDIT-RATING AGENCIES HAVE BEEN CONGRATULATED, OCCATIONALLY BY ONE ANOTHER AND TEHMESELVES, FOR HAVING " LEARNED " VALUABLE LESSONS FROM THE EMERGING MARKET FINANCIAL CRISES AND THEIR APPARENT CONTAGIOUS SPREAD ; THE DANGERS OF EMBRACING HOT MONEY INSTEAD OF LONGER TERM CAPITAL FLOWS ; AND THE IMPORTANCE OF A COUNTRY'S DOMENTIC INSTITUIONAL FUNDATIONS FOR A SOUND BANKING SYSTEMS AS A PRECONDITION FOR THE FULL LIBERALISATION...

The internatinal financial community has formulated lessons for itself of the rises of the 1990 s that, in both principle and language, are nearly identical to those that policy makers believed they had lerned from the crises of the 1930 s.

Brand Strategy by David Aaker

2007-03-08T21:28:00.000-08:00

BRAND STRATEGY
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â€œ by David Aaker â€œ
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The strategic brand is one with strategic importance to the organisation. It is a brand that needs to succeed and therefore should receive what ever resources are needed. The identification of strategic brands is a huge step toward ensuring that brand building resources are allocated to the strategically most important business arenas.

There are , in general , three types of strategic brands : A current power brand ( or mega brand ) now generates significant sales and profits and is not a candidate for a cash cow status. Perhaps it is already a large , dominant brand and is projected to maintain or grow its position. Microsoft Windows is in this category. A future power brand is projected to generate significant sales and profit in the future, even though it is now a small or emerging brand. Centrino would qualify for Intel.

A linchpin brand will indirectly influence ( as opposed to â€˜ generateâ€™ ) significant sales and market position in the future, serving as the â€˜ linchpinâ€™ or leverage point of a major business area of the firm. The classic problem is that, if future power brands and linchpin brands have no current sales base, they get starved of resources.

The other side of the coin is when emerging areas and the linchpins of the future organizational vision get too much attention, and the existing power brands get neglected. Discipline must be used to identifying and prioritizing strategic brands based on future prospects.

"management craft " by Ram Charan

2007-03-07T04:01:00.000-08:00

" MANAGEMENT CRAFT "
by Ram Charan.

All companies have a budget. It is, however, astonishing how little detail about revenue and sources of revenue growth you can find htere. Almost all of the lines in the budget are cost related. Few, if any, identity resources explicitly earmarked for growth.

The growth budget provides a foundation that will allow a compay to increase revenues instead of just talking about it. It includes all critical actions over the short , medium, and long terms that require resources to achieve revenue growth goals. One of the key missing links for generating revenue growth at most companies is - upstream marketing.

What most people visualise as marketing involves advertising, promotion, brand-building, and communicating with customers though public relations, trade shows, and in store displays. Those activities are primarly " down sream " in nature - they enhance the acceptance of a product or service that already exists.

Upstream marketing takes place ast a much earlier stage, by developing a clear maket segmentation map and then identifying and precisely defining which customers segment to focus on... In any company of reasoanlbe size, nnovtion is a social proces that required collaboration and communication for idea generation, selecting those ideas for revenue growth that are to be funded. and shaing those ideas into product prototypes and launchin g them into market place.

"General Theory " - John Maynard Keynes

2007-02-26T05:52:00.001-08:00

From the time of Say and Ricardo , the classical economicsts have taught that supply creates its own demand. Meaning, that the whole of the costs of production must necessarily be spent in the aggregate, directly, or indirectly, on purchasing the product.

Those who think it this way are deceived by an optical illusion, which makes two essentially different activities appear to be the same. They are fallaciously supposing that , there is a nexus which unites decisions to abstain from present consumption with decisions to provide for future consumption........

Our knowledge of the factors which will govern the yield of an investment some years hence is usually very slight and often negligible.

If we speak frankly, we have to admit that our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent medicine, a building in the city of London - amounts to little and somtimes , to nothing ; or even five years hence,.

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic.

Most , probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits - of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction.

"General Theory " - John Maynard Keynes

2007-02-26T05:52:00.000-08:00

"creative destruction" by Richard Foster

2007-02-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

By the end of the 1990 s, we were well into what Peter Drucker called the " Age of Discontinuity ". Extrapolating from the past patterns, we calculate that, by the end of the year 2020, the average life time of a corporation on the S&P willhave been shortened to about 10 years as fewer and fewer companies fall into the category of " survivors". The Age of Discontinuity arose from fundamental economic forces. Among these are :

(a) The increasing efficiency of business due to dramatic decline in capital costs .
As industry shifted from goods to services, there was a consumer decline in interaction and transaction costs. These costs declined because of the advent of IT and the steady rise oin labour productvity due to advances in technology and management methods.

(b) The increasing efficienty of capital markets, due to the incrasing accuracy ( and transparency ) of coroprate performance data.

The global GDP will double in the next 20 years , creating approximately $20-$40 trillion in new sales. If, through the productivity improvements the world can save 2% of the $25 trillion new produced, the market value of those savings willrun into the trillions. Incumbent firms have an unprecedented opportunity to take advantage of these times.

The one hundred or so sompanies in the current S&P 500 that surviveinto the 2020 s will be unlike the corporate sruvivors today. They will have to be masters of crative destruction,- built for discontinuity, remade a like the market.

" creative destruction " by Richard Foster

" The Weather Makers " by Tim Flannery

2007-02-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

" THE WEATHER MAKERS " BY TIM FLANNERY
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For the last 10,000 years, Earth's thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of around 57 degrees F . On the whole, this has suited our species splendidly, and we have been able to organise ourselves in a most impressive manner. Finally, over the century, we have created a truly global civilization.

Given that in all of Earth history, the only other creatures able to organise themselves on a similar scale are ants, bees, and termites - which are tiny in comparision and have concomittantly small resource requirements - this is quite an achievement.

Earth's themostat is a complex and dilicate mechanism. At the hearth of it lies carbon dioxide, which plays a critical role in maintaining the balance necesary to all life. It is also a waste product of the fossil fuels that almsot every person on the plante uses for heat, transport, and other energy requirements. On dead planets such as Venus and Mars, CO2 makes up most of the atmosphere, and it would do so here too - if living things and Earth's processes did not keep withing bounds.

As it is, CO2 makes up around three parts per 10,000 in Earth's atmosphere. It's a modest amount, yet, it has a disproportionate influence on the plant's tempature. Because we create CO2 every time we drive a car, cook a meal, or turn on alight, and because the gas lasts around a centure in the atmosphere, the proportion of CO2 in the air we breath is rapidly increasing.
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Tom Flannery has written many books on Ecology. This particular book, " the weather makers " got 4.5.

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Mammologist and paleontologist Flannery (The Eternal Frontier), who in recent years has become well known for his controversial ideas on conservation, the environment and population control, presents a straightforward and powerfully written look at the connection between climate change and global warming. It's destined to become required reading following Hurricane Katrina as the focus shifts to the natural forces that may have produced such a devastating event. Much of the book's success is rooted in Flannery's succinct and fascinating insights into related topics, such as the differences between the terms greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change, and how the El Niño cycle of extreme climatic events "had a profound re-organising effect on nature." But the heart of the book is Flannery's impassioned look at the earth's "colossal" carbon dioxide pollution problem and his argument for how we can shift from our current global reliance on fossil fuels [...]. Flannery consistently produces the hard goods related to his main message that our environmental behavior makes us all "weather makers" who "already possess all the tools required to avoid catastrophic climate change." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Link here :

http://www.amazon.com/Weather-Makers-Changing-Climate-Means/dp/0871139359/sr=1-1/qid=1172163587/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9888563-0212052?ie=UTF8&s=books

Another book, ' The Future Eaters ' ( those who eat our future ) has gotten 4.5 star rating.

From Library JournalDuring the ice ages, when the sea level was low, Australia, New Guinea, Tasmania, and smaller islands reemerged as a single landmass known as Meganesia, connected to Antarctica. Harsh conditions selected those species most adapted to the cold: amphibians, marsupials, monotremes?species with lower metabolic rates and low energy needs. When Meganesia separated from Antarctica 36 million years ago, species extinctions began. Isolated from the rest of the world, Australia developed unique flora and fauna to become a land rich in minerals and fossils but having the poorest soil of any continent because of geological inactivity. The first Australians consumed without replacing resources they would need in the future; later-arriving Europeans destroyed even more. In this fascinating, thought-provoking ecological history of his homeland, Flannery, a senior research scientist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, reveals how humans?and other species?transplanted out of their original habitat become "future eaters" by the indiscriminate consumption of a land's resources. Flannery voices his theories and opinions while also presenting opposing viewpoints, creating a well-balanced, extremely readable treatise. Highly recommended for all collections.?Gloria Maxwell, Kansas City P.L., KansasCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information

Link here :

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Eaters-Ecological-History-Australian/dp/0802139434/sr=1-4/qid=1172163587/ref=sr_1_4/002-9888563-0212052?ie=UTF8&s=books

Another one has gotten a 5-star." Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the Fantastic Worlds They Inhabit (Hardcover) .

Book Description

From the authors of A Gap in Nature, a breathtaking visual adventure showcasing ninety of the world's most astounding creatures. Sumptuous birds of paradise, amazing soft-shell turtles, frogs that look like tomatoes, and terrifying fish (including the deep-water angler fish from Finding Nemo) are just some of the extraordinary creatures that can be found in Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten's new book, Astonishing Animals. Superbly illustrated in lifelike full-color paintings, Astonishing Animals details ninety of the world's most amazing animals from around the world. In this book you will find the Hairy Seadevil, the spectacular Sulawesi Naked Bat, and in the depths of the limestone caves in Slovenia, the Olm, a pink, four-legged, sightless salamander that lives for a hundred years. In fascinating vignettes, Flannery offers the true evolutionary tale of how each of these bizarre creatures came to look the way they do. Alongside each historical account is a stunning hand-painted color reproduction (life-size in the original painting) by Schouten. Filled with purple-faced apes, jagged-toothed dolphins, and antlered lizards, Astonishing Animals is a remarkable collection of the world's most incredible creatures and the stories behind their remarkable survival into a modern age.

Link here :

http://www.amazon.com/Astonishing-Animals-Extraordinary-Creatures-Fantastic/dp/0871138751/sr=1-6/qid=1172163587/ref=sr_1_6/002-9888563-0212052?ie=UTF8&s=books

THE NEW FINANCIAL ORDER " BY Robert J. Shiller.

2007-02-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

The primary subject matter of finance is , the management of risks. Picture vast international markets that trade major macroeconomic aggregates such as the total outputs of countries like the US.., Japan, Paraguay, and Singapore. Or Indexes of single family home prices both in cities - from New York to Paris to Sydney - and in regions, such as shoreline properties on the Riveiera or rubber plantations of Indonesia . Portfolio investors will be able to take positions in a wide array of such markets with little cost.

International markets for human capital will emerge as well for occupations and the professons, to the careers of actors and performers to common labour.

Thes markets will facilitate the creation of livelihood insurance policies on every major career and job category, and home equity insurance policies on the value of everyone' s home..

By lightentning the burden of risk,a new democratic finance will encourage all of us to be more venturesome. As a thought expreiment, consider a young woman from India, living in Chicago, who wantes to be violinist. She finds it worrisome to borrow the money for her training given that her future income as a musician is so uncertain. But the new financial technology enalbles her to borrow money on-line that need not be fully repaid if an index of future income of violnisits turns out to be disa ppointeing. The loan makes it easier for her to go into her favioured career by limiting her risk.

" NEW FIANCIAL ORDER " BY ROBERT J SHILLER.

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He wrote this book, " Market Volatility " which has got 4.5 star rating at amazon. Link is
http://www.amazon.com/Market-Volatility-Robert-J-Shiller/dp/0262691515/sr=1-4/qid=1172079542/ref=sr_1_4/002-9888563-0212052?ie=UTF8&s=books

Book Description
-----------------------------
Market Volatility proposes an innovative theory, backed by substantial statistical evidence, on the causes of price fluctuations in speculative markets. It challenges the standard efficient-markets model for explaining asset prices by emphasizing the significant role that popular opinion or psychology can play in price volatility.Offering detailed analyses of the stock, the bond, and the real estate markets, Shiller discusses the relations of these speculative prices and extends the analysis of speculative markets to macroeconomic activity in general.Robert J. Shiller is Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics at the Cowles Foundation, Yale University.

Another book of his, ' Irrational Exhuberance' got 4 rating.

From Library Journal

Taking his book's title and thesis from Alan Greenspan's 1996 description of investors, Shiller (economics, Yale Univ.) studies the current booming U.S. stock market in historical terms. His research into past U.S. and international markets indicates that during every speculative bubble there was always widespread consensus that high valuations were justified by each market's special circumstances. Every large market correction seemed to result from popular consensus rather than specific events or news. Shiller says that past bull and bear markets, though often based initially on sound fundamental reasoning, fed upon themselves to go beyond what the facts justified. He challenges the efficient market theory, demonstrating that markets cannot be explained historically by the movement of company earnings or dividends. He concludes that the current U.S. stock market is a speculative bubble awaiting correction. While the book certainly belongs in all academic business collections, public libraries should also purchase it as a counterweight to the plethora of get-rich-quick investment guides.-Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA
Link here :

http://www.amazon.com/Irrational-Exuberance-Robert-J-Shiller/dp/0767923634/sr=1-1/qid=1172079542/ref=sr_1_1/002-9888563-0212052?ie=UTF8&s=books

'cycles ' by Maddy Dychtwald

2007-02-17T02:26:00.000-08:00

age as a defining parameter ( 17 feb 07)

" We are at the dawn of a Life Cycle revoluton. Spurred by the convergence of a number of poweful cultural , technological, and demographic forces, the way we live, work, and buy -is beginning to change radically.

We no longer live life in a series of predictable life passages. We are breaking free of age related lifesyle expectations that defined us. We are no longer buying produts and series based on this neat , age-oriented marketing model.

What is happening is that, we are moving from a rigid linear approach to life - to a more flexible , cyclic life ; a new path that ins't as straight or narrow as it used to be. There are more curves in the road and a multitude of divergent side paths that some of us might choose to try. Perhaps the most important is the fact that the roles and activities we choose are much less likely to be determined by how old we are !

It not unusual to see a 35-year old or a 65-year old starting a new career or business ; a 30-year old or a 60-year old getting married ; a 45-year old or a 25-year old graducating from a school.

Age is no longer the ultimate definer of who we are, what we're doing and how we feel on the inside,what groups we're a member of, or the products and service we demand from the markeplace.

We are being liberated from a life of one-way passages to a life cycle with a nearly unlimited set of choices, options, and possibilities availagle at ANY age - to anyone with the vision and courage to seize the day !!

" CYLCES" by MADDY DYCHTWALD

"who's afraid of globalization ? " -Suzanne Berger

2007-01-29T05:28:00.000-08:00

A more concrete definition of globalisation is the acceleration of the processes in the international economy and in domestic economies that opeate toward unifying world markets.

A majority of Americans and Europeans thinks globalization raises theier standard of living ; a majority also believe that it is bad for employment and job security.

For the questons about who winds and who loses in the new global economy, there is no one right and answer.. When we disocered that there were different solutions to the same economic challengers, and found that a number of these solutions are about equally likely to produce success in the market place, we realised we could no longer fall back on " globalization " as an all-purpose explanation. Dell, the American computer compnay that focuses its own organisation on the distribution and outsources al the manufacturing of composents oversaesa, is a reapidly growing proficable business - bu so is Samsung, a vertically integrated electronics company that makes almost everything under its own roof.

FFM is strugling to survive in economies with high - wage labour. Toyota, whih keeps much of its porocution at home or in other advanced countries, is thriving. Most american apparel retailers outsource all their puducton , but the fasterest ghrowing retailer in riech countries is Zara, a Spanish company that makes more than half its clothing at home.

Suzanne Berger's book , National Diversity and Global Capitalism (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) (Paperback) received a 5 star rating at amazon.com./

Link is http://www.amazon.com/National-Diversity-Capitalism-Cornell-Political/dp/0801483190/sr=1-11/qid=1170077076/ref=sr_1_11/102-0536785-5500133?ie=UTF8&s=books

here.

"Behind the closed doors " Johanna Rothman

2007-01-24T02:56:00.000-08:00

" It is worth learning how to be a great manager - both in human and in economic costs. Because managers amplify the work of others, the human costs of bad management can be even higher than the economic costs.

One of the reasons , good management is so hard to learn is that, much of management takes place behind closed doors. Generally speaking, you can observe only the public behavios of managers. Some people think management is all about the people, and some people think it is all about the tasks.

But great management is about leading and developing people and managing tasks. If you want to lead people, you need to know them ; and their unique strengths, aspirations, and patterns of behavious. If you want to manage work, you need to see what people are doing and understand how it fits into the context of the group's mission.

You ned ot learn three things when you enter a new organisation or job : who the people are - their strengths and interests - and what they are working on : the stated mission of the group and how the group provides value ; how your group fits into the largetr organisation.

It would be great to learn this information on your first day and in nice neat boxes. But it doesn't work that way. the information will emerge and coalesce as you uncover information and perform management wok. Start with the people first in order to build trust and lay the foundation for cohesive team. "

Johanna Rothman's book page on amazon is here.

It got 4.5 rating.

Book Description : BEhind the closed doors :
---------------------------------------------

Book Description
Great management is difficult to see as it occurs. It's possible to see the results of great management, but it's not easy to see how managers achieve those results. Great management happens in one-on-one meetings and with other managers---all in private. It's hard to learn management by example when you can't see it.

You can learn to be a better manager---even a great manager---with this guide. You'll follow along as Sam, a manager just brought on board, learns the ropes and deals with his new team over the course of his first eight weeks on the job. From scheduling and managing resources to helping team members grow and prosper, you'll be there as Sam makes it happen. You'll find powerful tips covering:

Delegating effectively
Using feedback and goal-setting
Developing influence
Handling one-on-one meetings
Coaching and mentoring
Deciding what work to do---and what not to do
...and more.
Full of tips and practical advice on the most important aspects of management, this is one of those books that can make a lasting and immediate impact on your career.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another book, " Hiring the best knowledge workers " has got 5 star rating, link

here. A review :

"I found this book on the author's web site, and I must say that I am glad that I did. My department's hiring practices were in need of overhauling, and this book served as great guide. Readers will find a description of the hiring process that really mirrors software development itself.

The book begins with an overview of the hiring process, and then it looks at the various stages in detail. A hiring process should begin with an analysis of the job for the position you are trying to fill. Then you design a job description, ads, and interview questions. Next you implement the interivew questions with phone screens and on site interviews. Finally you extend offers and bring candidates in for their first day. All along the way, you evaluate what you are doing and let new information feedback into the previous steps. It really follows the pattern of iterative software development. As a bonus, the author provides templates for forms that you can use along the way during the process.

I recommend this book to anyone who is faced with implementing a hiring policy that they don't understand or who feels unprepared for the process. I found it to be quite helpful."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

2007-01-19T01:38:00.000-08:00

19 jan 2007 economic times.

" Much of what we think we know, we haven't known or thought we've known, for long. Even the notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920 s, when Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian preist-scholor, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't really become an active notion in cosmology until the mid 1960 s when two young radio astronomers made an extraordinary discovery. Their names were - Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communiations antenna owned by Bell Labs, but they were troubled by a presistent background noise - a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise came from every point in thei sky, day and night.

For a year, the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise.... Nothing they did or tried worked. Unknown to them, just 30 m iles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by robert Dicke ws trying and working on how to find the very thing they were trying to diligently to get rid of.

The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940 s , by the Russian born astrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. :"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He wrote a lot of books, most of which were given a 4 star or 5 star rating at amazon. Bill Bryson book page is here.

" A short history of nearly everything " gotten a 4.5 rating . Link is here.

" The Life and times of thunderbolt kid - a memoir " gottn a 4 star rating. Link is here.

Bill Bryson's African Diary is here.

Dictionary of troublesome words got a 4 star rating.

All, worth reading. Buy economic times, even if you are buying Biz Line. At Rs.2.50 per day, it's lower than one fag and one tea , a combo which costs you Rs.8/- per day, even if you are having only ONE fag and tea. Spend, invest a very little amount on knowledge.

Off line gives you as much knowledge as on line reading.

Neuro Economics by James Heskett

2007-01-18T03:58:00.003-08:00

Are you ready for " neuro everything " in management ? The Year 2007 will see a flood of books and articles describing findings and conclusions drawn from the growing use of MRI ( Mangnetic resonance imaging) devices for studying decision making. The research is based on increasing knowledge that different parts of the brain demostrate heightened acitivity when subjected to challenges Subjects are asked a series of questions ( often requiring decisions ) while their brains are being scanned ( or while they are hooked to lie dectctors). Among the propositions advanced from this work thus far, for example, are that ris and return are assessed in different parts of the brain, there by questioning theories regarding expected utility on which a great deal of decision theory has een based on up to now. Thus according to this research, different qualities of , say, investment dcisions are made when perceptions of risk or greed ( return) previaisl in terms of heightened brain activity.

Another line of work involves the study of the bes locus in the brain, conscious or sub-cocsous, for making various decisions. For rxample, it is thought that more complex decision involving hard-to-quantify factors are best made in the subconscious after some amount of pprepreation.

Work in newro marketing oww claims that strong brands create more exceitement in decision-influencing areas of the brain than weak brands,even for mundane products.

"collapse " by Jared Diamond

2006-09-25T07:36:00.000-07:00

" MOst people would consder the following past societies to have been famous victims of full fledged colapses rather than of just minor declines ;

The Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern US

the Maya cities in Central America

Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America

Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Eutore

Great Zimbabwe in Africa

Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia

Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean .

It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by the ecological problems ; people inadvertently destryoing the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide - ecocide - has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists , historians, paleontologists, and palynologists ( pollen scientists ) .

The processes through which past societies have unddermined themselved by damaging their envirnments fall into eight categories , whose relative improtance differs from case to case : deforestation and habitat destruction,
soil problems ( erosion, salinisation, and soilfertility losses),

Water management problems,

overhunting

overfishing

human population growth

and increased per capita impact onf people.

The risk of such collapsed today is now a matter of increasing concern.

ET Citings 25 sept 2006 mon.

Grow younger ! - Michael F.Roizen

2006-06-24T07:29:00.000-07:00

Why not live at 60 feeling like you did at 35?
Thousands of Americans are younger today than they were five years ago. How is that possible? By following the specific recommendations that reverse aging in Dr. Michael Roizen's bestselling book RealAge®: Are You As Young As You Can Be?, people who were previously much older than their chronological age have now taken up to twentynine years off their biological ages. Since that first publication, more than 10 million people have taken the RealAge® test in one form or another, and thousands of people have thanked Dr. Roizen for helping them make simple changes in their lives -- changes that have made them healthier, younger, and more vibrant.
In the last several years, Dr. Roizen and his team have learned much more about the aging process. The RealAge® Makeover makes sense of recent critical medical findings -- mportant new research on inflammation in your arteries, stress reduction, chronic disease management, hormone replacement therapy, and other choices you can make to keep aging at a distance. You’ll also find the latest on vitamins and other supplements, which are age-reducing, which are aging, and which ones to avoid if you are taking certain medications. Roizen then offers more than seventy ways to reduce or even prevent 80 percent of the diseases that make you feel older. For example, coffee or the right kind of chocolate in moderate amounts can help reduce inflammation, preserving your arteries, joints, and memory. But the wrong choice can lead to needless aging and loss of energy, such as taking too much Vitamin A. And The RealAge® Makeover tells you how much (in years) each choice is worth so you can make the choices that are meaningful to you.
More potent than any statistic or finding are the personal stories interwoven throughout -- success stories from readers who followed the RealAge program, became biologically younger, and are living happier, healthier lives. With this book, readers have more opportunity than ever to turn back their biological clock to look, feel, and actually be many years younger.

All his books are five star rated. amzon link : " Real Age Make Over "

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060196823/qid=1151158625/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-5311925-9866314?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Here's the link for Real Age Work out :

Book Description
Dr. Michael F. Roizen has empowered thousands of Americans to take control of their own destinies. How? His best-selling books, RealAge®, The RealAge® Makeover, and YOU: The Owner's Manual, have helped people reverse their chronological aging by ten, fifteen, and up to twenty-nine years by revealing simple lifestyle changes that have profound effects that control their genes -- and thus control their health and the aging process.
Chances are you picked up this book because you, too, want to be healthier and younger. The RealAge® Workout explains the importance of gradually phasing exercise into your everyday routine, because even the smallest changes in behavior can make you feel, look, and be younger. No matter how busy your schedule, Dr. Michael Roizen will show you how to gain the maximum age-reduction benefits from a minimum amount of time and effort.
Before you take your first step, The RealAge® Workout offers a series of calculations that factor in age, genetics, and lifestyle so you can determine your overall status of health and create a program to help you plan and execute your goals. The RealAge® Workout then begins with a simple, yet life-changing premise -- just by walking 30 minutes a day, every day, you can roll back the years, significantly improve the status of your overall health, and have more energy to work and do the things you love.
After you've adjusted to this change in your lifestyle, The RealAge® Workout will guide you through a series of training phases during which you will steadily develop your foundation muscles and eventually add a stamina-building program to help you maintain improved health. You will learn how to lift weights safely and effectively through step-by-step instructions with photographs and easy-to-understand explanations. Additionally, there are charts that help you determine the RealAge effect -- the number of biological years younger you become with each change you make.
Along the way, The RealAge® Workout dis-cusses common myths, addresses frequently asked questions pertaining to age and lifestyle choices, and offers tips to actually enjoy, yes, even love, exercise. So get ready to achieve optimal health and be as young as you can be!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060009373/qid=1151158625/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_8/104-5311925-9866314?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

"Success Rules " by Cherie Carter

2006-05-16T02:32:00.000-07:00

What comes to mind, for you, when you think of " success " ? ( can be an ice breaker
? )
The popular cultural definition of success in industrial nations is based primarily
on three elements : power , money and fame. It is assumed that if you are in
possession of great abundance, have status or power, or are recognised as a
celebrity, then you are, by society's definition, " successful ". If you have even
one of those three requirements, you qualify.
There is , however, one major problem with this definition. It is severely limited.
It excludes a multitude of people wh are successful in their own right and who
define success by an entriely different set of standards.
These are the people whose bank balances may not be especially noteworthy, who do
not brandish significant authority, and who are not necessarily recognised when they
walk down the street. Rather, these are the people who have realized goals and
dreams thathave been set from within rather than those dictated by societal norms.
The first basic rule of success, and the most important, is that there is no one
universal definition of fulfilment. We each othave our own and every one is equally
precious and worthy.
We are a constellation of individuals, each holding our own individual glwo. Since
each person is an individual, comprised of his or her own visions and standards,
each one defines success in his or her own way.

CITINGS : ET ; 15.may.2006. " Success & Rules " by Cherie Carter.

This Lady Author, Cherie Carter, has 4 or 5 books with 4 star and 5 star rating in amazon.

This book, " If Success Is a Game, These Are the Rules : Ten Rules for a Fulfilling Life by Cherie Carter-Scott Ph.D. (Hardcover - December 26, 2000) Avg. Customer Rating: "
The link here :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767904265/qid=1147771822/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-8810451-3750304?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Another book, " If High School Is a Game, Here's How to Break the Rules : A Cutting Edge Guide to Becoming Yourself (Hardcover) "
Link :
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038532796X/qid=1147771822/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-8810451-3750304?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Another book : "If Life Is a Game...These Are The Stories: True Stories by Real People Around the World About Being Human (Hardcover) " ( 5 star )

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0740746847/qid=1147771822/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-8810451-3750304?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Another one : "If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules (Hardcover) " ( 5 star)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767902386/qid=1147771822/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/104-8810451-3750304?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Cherie Carter seems to be no minion author. REad, all the reviews , in leisure.

Goerge Steiners - his books on philosophy and clulture...

2006-03-30T00:45:00.001-08:00

I was losing my track on " ET Citing" about which I made such a ceremonious isuse not so long ago. Went to AMP San, took out all old ET s , cut all citings and just shoved them in the house. Posting at least 2 a day would have been wonderful.
160 of them yet to be posted.

Today, I read this, " Lessons of Masters " by Gerorge Steiner, ( no relation to Rudolph Steiner the social anthroposophist). And these are his books.

Links to amazon on this book, ' Lessons of Masters', which has 4 star rating :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674012070/qid=1143707661/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/104-7914809-2154356?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

and this book, ' Blue Birds's Castle - Towards Redifinition of Culture ' has received a 5 star rating. Here's the link.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300017103/qid=1143707661/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_8/104-7914809-2154356?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Anotehr one, " REAL PRESENCES " with 4-star rating.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226772349/qid=1143707661/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-7914809-2154356?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

this one, ERRATA - an examined life" received a 4.5 star rating.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080956/qid=1143707661/sr=1-10/ref=sr_1_10/104-7914809-2154356?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

This one below, regarded as the best intro to the existentialsit master, Martin Heidegger, is highly esteemed too :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226772322/qid=1143707661/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-7914809-2154356?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

read them in leisure. Fantastic philosophy. And thanks to ' The Economic Times' for its daily column, ' CITINGS'.

Goerge Steiners - his books on philosophy and clulture...

2006-03-30T00:45:00.000-08:00

"The Seeds of Innovation " by Elaine Dundon

2006-01-07T03:17:00.000-08:00

“ The Seeds of Innovation “ by Elaine Dundon

Trend watching can help you anticipate how the landscape will change and how you can prepare for these changes. Trend watching can help you anticipate what customers might want in the future. For example, car manufacturers could anticipate that as urban centres become more dense, customers might want cars that offer more safety and control. In addition to looking at trends in the marketplace yourself, ask others what trends they believe tare shaping your industry and why they think these trends are important.

When you see a trend, ask yourself the following Five questions.
1) What is causing this trend ?
2) How will this trend affect my team and my organization ?
3) What problems will this trend cause ?
4) What opportunities does this trend offer ?
5) How can we turn this trend into a practical application ?

Noticing small changes early helps you adapt to the bigger changes that are to come. Failing to see the changing market place, or what Theodore Levitt charactarised as “ Marketing myopia” can lead to serious challenges. Insights mining, or translating new information into insights , is both an art and a science. The science part includes the ability to analyse market conditions, consumer needs, and internal circumstances and then, convert this information into insights. The art part includes the ability to be more aware of the opportunities in and , through imagination , mold this information into further insights.

Only one book by this author at amazon, cited above, which received a 5-star rating. Link here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814471463/qid=1136632646/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-6198030-2943218?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

"Encore Provence " by Peter Mayle

2006-01-07T00:32:00.000-08:00

Returning to a place where you have been happy is enerall refaded as a mistake. Memory is a notoriously biased and sentimental editor, selecting what it wants a to keep and invariably making a few cosmetic changes to past events. With reose-coloured hindsight, the good times become magical : the bad times fade and eventually disappear, leaving only a seductive blur of sunlit days and the laughter of friends.

Amazon page of Peter Mayle is here :

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=br_ss_hs/102-3954160-5250549?platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dstripbooks%3Arelevance-above&field-keywords=%22Peter+Mayle%22&Go.x=4&Go.y=15

Review of concerned page is here :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679731148/qid=1136622658/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/102-3954160-5250549?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Most of his books received 4-rating, some, 4.5 and some 5. Some author, whay ya think ?