Have a great New Year!

Best wishes to the entire PROTON family for the New Year 2010! Thank you for your friendship, respect, forbearance and patience in 2009 (and earlier).

The most significant thing that happened to me in 2009 was the birth of Ekagra. I am happy to report that just like his father, he's very fond of The Economist. You can see him here with one of the year-end editions.

"Play suspended due to unfit playing conditions"

Just a few days ago, I wrote about how process-oriented the US was, and the contrast with India. In a separate post, I also wrote about how polluted our cities were.

As though to underscore both these points, along came today's one-day cricket match at the Ferozeshah Kotla ground in Delhi.

First, the pollution and haze. You can see it in these photos. It was in fact a lot worse on TV and in real life. A friend, Dr. Vijay Kumar of Amazon, was watching the match from Seattle and sent a mail saying that what he was seeing "is essentially a black screen". And he added, much as I had indicated in my previous post, "Sad thing is, everyone you meet in India will tell you that according to their newspaper, Delhi's air is cleaner 'per capita' than world cities."

Second, the pitch. It was a scandal. One would have thought that there would be a process to ensure that the pitch conforms with international norms. One could use bowling machines, play a Ranji game, have a third party expert certify it - whatever. As things turned out, the top DDCA and BCCI honchos were sitting in the stadium as bystanders as the match referee declared the pitch unsafe. And the thousands of money-paying cricket fans were deprived of a good game of cricket and their Sunday was ruined.

"Bahut shade hai" was a phrase we used to use at IIT. It describes today's non-match aptly.

Global warming, local choking

There is nothing wrong with getting hot under the collar about global warming. But if you live in one of India's cities, you only have to look out of the window to see that local choking will get to you well before global warming does.

The biggest killer is the Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter (RSPM). It is the stuff that you see billowing out of trucks and diesel taxis. In Delhi, the RSPM levels are THREE TIMES higher than what is considered safe. And it's actually getting worse - the gains obtained from switching Delhi buses to CNG are being wiped out. The eight hour carbon monoxide levels are approximately 6,000 microgram per cubic meter – again THREE TIMES above the safe level of 2,000 microgram per cubic metre.

High levels of RSPM trigger runny nose, sore throat, burning eyes, wheezing, shortness of breath, bronchitis, serious complications in people with heart disease, and cancer. Carbon monoxide poisoning leads to nausea, headaches, shortness of breath, unconsciousness and brain damage.

So debate the Copenhagen outcome as much as you will. Stand up for our rights as a developing country if you must. But first please make sure our children will not be poisoned every day on their way to school and back.

[Source: Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)]

The most process-oriented country

The United States is the most process-oriented country I know. You can see it in the principles of scientific management by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) and the first automobile assembly line by Henry Ford (1913), to the Speedee Service System designed by the McDonald brothers for quick burger production (1940s) and more recently the cookie-cutter Starbucks expansion (pun half-intended) to 15,000 locations around the globe.

In 1870, the GDP of the US was less than the GDP of British India, and just a little higher than the GDP of Germany. Today the GDP of the US is nearly four times that of Germany and more than ten times that of India. While a part of this surge is probably due to American inventiveness and a history of free trade and open business, at least a part is due to the process mindset.

This process mindset is inculcated in children at a very young age. Sometime last year, my father was visiting my sister in New Orleans and spending an idle day organizing the things in her garage for her. Her son, then four years old, wanted to help. My father said, "You are too young to help with this, this is a big job". The little child replied, "Nanaji, when you have a big job, you should just break it down into little jobs. Then you can do those little jobs one by one".

This too is a principle of scientific management! Such process thinking is completely missing in the students the Indian educational system churns out. I can't remember ever being instructed about such things in any class, either in school or in college, even though I studied operations management.

Lead time optimization - from SupplyChainge to Infor

On a cloudy Portland day almost a decade ago, I and two colleagues - Steve Hochman and John Thorbeck - pulled up in John's black Ford Explorer SUV to the office building that housed our startup, SupplyChainge. We were discussing what to name our revolutionary optimization and operations concept and software, which we believed could double profits at most apparel and footwear companies. "I'm not going to let anyone get out of the car until we finalize the term", said Steve. So, a few minutes later, we had Lead Time Optimization, or LTO for short.

We went on to trademark the term. When we partnered with Infosys (the Infy US CEOs Phaneesh Murthy and Basab Pradhan took a big bet on us) and went out to the industry, we did so under the banner of Lead Time Optimization. You can still find an LTO whitepaper I co-wrote with an Infy colleague Anil Pahwa on the Infosys website here. And there were other partners like IBM and Sun (see a Sun press release here).

SupplyChainge had a few good successes, by our standards. But when SupplyChainge broke up due to personal issues and the assets were transferred to Predictix, we thought the term LTO was gone for ever. So we were surprised today when another SupplyChainge colleague Prashant Kumar found via Google that the multi-billion dollar company Infor has put out a solution offering called Lead Time Optimization, almost totally identical in its target customer, its terminology and its concepts to what we had developed. Their whitepaper on the subject even quotes an article by Prof. Warren Hausman of Stanford, a SupplyChainge Board member, and John Thorbeck, my SupplyChainge co-founder! You can read the Infor Lead Time Optimization whitepaper here. I am skeptical that they have actually done all the very hard work required to make LTO succeed, but am willing to be convinced.

It is somehow satisfying to see that something that was just in my head at one time, and which we as a team had slowly built up into a full-fledged concept, application and commercial solution, is now being pitched by a leading software company. As Steve Hochman, now global head of supply chain strategy at Nike, says today, "SupplyChainge was about 10 - maybe 20 - years ahead of where the industry was when SupplyChainge was founded". And we were not smart enough then to know how to bridge that gap.

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Case study: How a software usability workshop can work wonders

We have all heard the usability spiel: that technology is more or less a commodity, that ease of use – and in fact “delight of use” – should be paramount. We have also heard the horror stories of expensive enterprise and consumer applications that failed miserably because they were just too “kludgy” to use. Yet even today, for every wonderfully user-centric design (think iPhone) there are dozens of desktop or web applications that are boring at best, and simply unusable at worst.

Why is this so? Perhaps the problem is that when you are early in the software development lifecycle, there are so many other challenges and moving parts that you have little time to worry about usability. You worry that bringing the “naïve” users in for design discussions will just derail the project or send it off on a tangent. On the other hand, if you wait till you are through with version 1, you have been compromised as well – it requires great courage to admit at this point that usability is poor and that major elements of the application have to be re-designed.

These are formidable challenges. Yet we at Nagarro recently had a very positive series of usability-related discussions with a major client, which may be useful to recount in this context.

The client is one of the world’s leading travel-related companies. We are building a business-critical application for this company that will be used by a handful of users. The IT project management on the client side had invested a lot of intellectual muscle into the functional and algorithmic design of the application. We too put in a lot of effort to make mockups of the entire application UI and these were approved by the client – but by the IT project management, not by the users. The users did see the application from time to time, but in short bursts and they definitely did not have enough time to play with it and give their feedback.

Then after we had a successful development release and were reviewing progress with senior folks on both sides, we all collectively realized that the usability of the application left quite a bit to be desired. It was a depressing moment.

It wasn’t just a matter of aligning data elements or fiddling with the color palette.

It wasn’t even a matter of trying to streamline workflows to reduce the number of clicks required for each task.

It was the fact that the application’s UI looked like it had been designed by highly analytical engineers and scientists, which it in fact had. Would the users – who were neither engineers nor scientists – find it easy to use? Would they buy into it? Would they find all the features that they would need?

Luckily, the client team comprised very intelligent and wise folks. Rather than blame the team members on either side, the client’s senior VP-level executive said, “We should think of this as continuous improvement. You all did a great job, but we now see it can make it even better. Let’s see this as a positive opportunity and move forward.”

So, no blame game, no recriminations, no requests for “free rework”. The gentleman basically had the wisdom to see that when you are building something highly innovative, you may have to iterate to get the design just right.

Still, on our part, we offered the client a free usability workshop with our best consultant, a person skilled at combining “right brain” creative thinking with the “left brain” analytical thinking required for software design. The users were the star participants in the workshop, which started from first principles – what exactly is it that the users want to achieve? Our engineering team got the chance to put itself into the shoes of the users and try to come up with metaphors and overarching design principles that would work for them and, hopefully, delight them.

The workshop ran for two days and turned our previous thinking on its head. Yet everyone was thrilled with the insights and we agreed we’d run such workshops for each new project. The client agreed to fund a few person-months of effort to upgrade the user interface. Perhaps the cost of the overall development rose by 10%. But as a result, the chances of the application being very successful and useful in the hands of the users probably doubled or tripled.

And that’s always the most important metric!

[This article was first published on the Nagarro blog.]

The Double Slit experiment

It's Sunday, and while others may today visit a temple or a church or a mosque, I will be reading one of those books on quantum physics that are meant for lay people like myself ("In Search of Schroedinger's Cat", by John Gribbin). It is a thrilling read. Quantum mechanics results are so whacky and difficult to wrap one's brain around that they're almost mystical.

Let me tell you about one of the simplest experiments that shows the weirdness of the world we live in - the double slit experiment. Perhaps you performed this experiment in school - we did. All you need to perform it is a small light source (a bulb, let us say), an opaque sheet with two fine slits in it, and another sheet to act as a screen. If you put the bulb on one side, the slits in the middle and the screen on the other side, what will you get?

You might think that you will get two bands of light on the screen, one for each slit from the light passing through. But reality is different. Let me turn to Wikipedia to describe it accurately:

The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through both slits to interfere, creating an interference pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen. However, at the screen, the light is always found to be absorbed as though it were made of discrete particles, called photons.

So you have individual photons not going in a straight line to the screen but instead hitting the screen in certain areas but not others. When you look at the total picture created by thousands of photos, you see these alternating bright and dark bands.

Yet if one of the slits is closed, the interference collapses and all you see is one single line on the screen, not alternating bright and dark bands. The photon acts like a particle moving in a straight line. Hmm...

But it gets weirder...

The most baffling part of this experiment comes when only one photon at a time is fired at the barrier with both slits open. The pattern of interference remains the same, as can be seen if many photons are emitted one at a time and recorded on the same sheet of photographic film. The clear implication is that something with a wavelike nature passes simultaneously through both slits and interferes with itself — even though there is only one photon present.

So:
One photon, one slit = Particle moving in a straight line
One photon, two slits = Something going through both slits and ending up as a particle on the screen (not necessarily in a straight line with either slit)? Yet if you send one photon after another, you will see each crash onto the screen at what seems like a random point, but gradually a pattern will emerge - the same dark and light bands that can be statistically predicted.

Something very interesting is going on here. Feynman once said that the double-slit experiment "contains the only mystery".

The art of successful interviewing

Some weeks ago, I had given a talk to our Indore and Ahmedabad students (Ahmedabad over our video link) about how to interview successfully for a job. I am not a total expert on the topic, but I have interviewed scores of candidates for various jobs, and I thought my experience might be helpful.

Here I recount the basic ideas that we discussed that day, in bullet points.


The five steps to clearing a job interview:

1. Know and feel the company
2. Know and feel the role
3. Decide and feel your “avataar”
4. Know the selection process
5. Perform well on the big day!



1. KNOW AND FEEL THE COMPANY

CHECKLIST for what you should know
a. What it does
b. How does it differentiate itself
c. Structure and size
d. Locations
e. Internal culture - which aspects is it proud of?
f. Clients
g. Competitors

Where to go for information?
a. Website
b. 3rd party sites – Hoovers, Fundoodata, etc.
c. Intelligent web searches
d. YouTube
e. If you are lucky, people you know



2. KNOW AND FEEL THE ROLE

CHECKLIST to understand completely the job offered:
a. Title
b. Job description
c. What you will do day to day
d. What skills they consider compulsory
e. What skills they consider "good to have"
f. Career path related to this job
g. Recruiter worries (e.g. is this a job where the biggest worry is that the candidate will get bored and move on?)

Sources of information:
a. Careful word-by-word reading of the job posting
b. Similar job postings on the Internet (e.g. naukri.com) by the same company or similar companies

FEEL the role - imagine yourself in that job.



3. DECIDE YOUR AVATAAR!

The 2-4 reasons why are you the best person for the job.

What might you have that they are they looking for?
a. Positive attitude?
b. Attention to detail?
c. Computer skills?
d. Patience and persistence?
e. Summer internship experience?
f. Process oriented mindset?
g. Specialized education?
h. Ability to communicate well?
i. Writing skills?
j. Long term view on salary?


Choose your avataar and address the interviewer always FROM, AND ONLY FROM, THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE JOB BEING OFFERED.

Tailor your resume so that it shows how you fit the job being offered.

Prepare yourself for the interview to show how you fit the job being offered.



4. KNOW THE SELECTION PROCESS

Don't be surprised. And if you are surprised, don't be. :-)



5. PERFORM WELL ON THE BIG DAY!

a. Show enthusiasm and eagerness
b. Dress very well - wear a new white shirt
c. Watch your mannerisms
d. Be comfortable, moderately polite and confident
e. Give your answers from the interviewer’s point of view!! Don't give general answers!
f. If you make a claim about yourself, explain why. (Not "I am a team player", but "I am a team player, which may come from playing in the college football team".)
g. Ask intelligent questions
h. Show you understand the company and the role being offered
i. Don't forget to offer references
j. Remember your avataar!

Where is the law?

Some days ago, I came across this sign at Gurgaon. It said, "NO PARKING ZONE: VEHICLES SHALL BE DEFALTAD (sic) BY ORDER - PRO FAC".

I was quite impressed with the severity of the order, and the fact that it seemed to be working - notice there are no parked vehicles behind the sign. Then I began to wonder, "What does PRO FAC stand for?"

Turned out PRO FAC is not the title of a government officer, it is the name of a private security agency employed by the nearby residential complex! What right does a private security agency have to put up a signboard on what is apparently public land? More, how dare a private security agency deflate anyone's tires?

Is there any provision in law for even the traffic police to deflate tires as punishment? I don't think so. Neither is there a provision for a traffic policeman to swing his lathi at rickshaws and rickshaw pullers, or even motorcyclists. But all this happens. (By the way, no traffic policeman would dare to swing his lathi at a car, especially an expensive car.)

This "might is right" approach is seen everywhere in India, and mostly results from the absence of adequate laws or appropriate methods of enforcement. People, including individual policemen, then take the law into their own hands.

Can you imagine that before 9/11 and Guatanamo, I was far more comfortable facing a US police officer than I was facing an Indian policeman? In those simpler times, I could more or less expect full due process under law in front of the US cop, which I could hardly hope for in India.

Zero Percentile now in bookstores at Indore and Ahmedabad

Some weeks ago, I had written about my friend Neeraj Chhibba's first book, Zero Percentile. I am now finding this book prominently displayed at bookstores all over India. Rupa appears to have a strong distribution channel.

So I checked and confirmed that it is also available at Indore (Sohan Book Store) and Ahmedabad, and of course it is also available on www.flipkart.com as I mentioned earlier.

If you want, we can invite Neeraj Chhibba to Proton once you've read the book and want his autograph on your copy.

Forcing sleep: Techniques that work for me

I am fascinated by the subject of sleep and dreams. I hope that I have some time later in life to do some research and experimentation on this subject.

Luckily, I never have a problem falling asleep. I use the following three techniques and find them quite useful. While the first two are fairly common, I don't know any one who has tried the third - in fact I have not heard of it elsewhere. But it works for me unfailingly.

1. Progressive relaxation: This is similar to a technique used to enter shavasan, as far as I know. Start with the toes - tense them for a few seconds, relax them to the point that they no longer exist for you. Then the middle of the foot - tense and then relax and imagine it no longer exists. Then the back of the foot, the ankle, and so on up the body. By the time I get to the neck and start up the back of my head, I am so peaceful and relaxed that I fall asleep. I have NEVER finished the entire exercise and found myself awake. The sleep you get in this way is usually deep and restful.

2. Blackening out your vision: I close my eyes and then begin imaginarily layering black paint across the back of my closed eyelids starting at the top left. One band from left to right and the next band a little lower from right to left and then the next a little lower from left to right again and so on, a little like raster scanning in traditional CRT televisions and monitors. This too never fails to put me to sleep. The sleep is light though and it takes some time for you to fall into a deep sleep.

3. Flashing images ("Imagening"): This is my own invention and it works the fastest. I just close my eyes and generate random images in my mind - perhaps a crow, a book, a horse, a car - it is important that they are as randomly selected as possible, right at that point in time. I keep each image in my mind about 2-3 seconds, which gives my eyeballs some time to trace a part of its outline in the act of "seeing", then I just think of another image and "see" it in my mind for 2-3 seconds, then the next image, and so on. After perhaps the third or fourth image, the images start to flash involuntary (i.e. I am not consciously deciding which picture to flash next) and right away some dream plot begins to evolve and I am asleep... mostly in less than a minute, often in 15 or 20 seconds! This sleep is most dreamy although not very deep.

Do you have any favorite techniques of your own to fall asleep?

Opposites attract, but birds of a feather flock together

Some weeks ago, Deloitte came recruiting to Indore. They were offering a modest paycheck, and I suspect many of the PROTON students flubbed the aptitude test and interviews so as not to be offered a job that they'd have to take as per the student body's own placement rules.

Today, it is clear to the same students that industry has tightened its collective belt. If a company is recruiting, it is going to try to pay as less as it can. It is a buyer's market. Those students must be regretting their actions.

This topic brought the proverb to mind, "Do not look a gift horse in the mouth".

Instantly, I thought of a saying that argues for quite the opposite approach. "Beware of strangers bearing gifts".

Most times I think of a proverb, I am reminded of another that seems to advocate the exact opposite.

"Well begun is half done". But "it is not over until the fat lady sings".

"Curiosity killed the cat". However, "nothing ventured, nothing gained".

I found a few lists of such pairs of proverbs on the Internet.

I guess life is all about balance.


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The best educational institution in India is...

... industry!

Yes, the best educational institution in India is not an educational institution at all. It is industry.

Indian industry takes hundreds of thousands of graduates with a low-quality education, trains them, and makes them fit to do work that competes with the output of companies around the world.

Our industry is approaching world class, whereas the bulk of our education system is far below global standards.

World class Indian software companies like TCS, Wipro and Infosys hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. There can be only so many IITians among them - and the typical quality is rather poor. As a web article puts it,"Nine half-literates are produced by our colleges, by Nasscom’s numbers, for every graduate of passable quality."

At Nagarro, we need high quality engineers because our projects are technically challenging. We find we need to scan 1000 resumes for every three hires!

Nagarro's final hires are typically very good (since we need to hire only a hundred or so each year), so I really have a lot of respect for the larger software companies who have to hire many more, far less capable candidates, and train them, teach them to code, teach them a work ethic, teach them to think, teach them to write, teach them to talk, and teach them to run projects.

The finished engineers command hourly rates of at least Rs. 1000 per hour! Talk of value addition!

The IT outsourcing and BPO revolution set off by these companies has given India a chance to modernize. It has helped build the country.

But it is highly ironical that even as the private sector is training tens or hundreds of thousands of people and making them fit for world class work, vested interests are trying their best to limit the participation of the private sector in formal education!

It is time for would-be students to stand up and ask for the right to a good education - even if it is to be provided by Reliance or Tata or Wipro in a "for-profit" mode.


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A quiet revolution

A quiet revolution is underway in India. It may possibly have more significance than the IT-BPO revolution, and almost as much significance as the Green Revolution or the liberalization of the early 90s.

We could call this the Governance Revolution (taking a cue from Thomas Friedman who coins various terms and tries to popularize them - the latest being ET for Energy Technology).

All across the board, well entrenched methods and structures are being overturned. For example:

• The Right To Information (RTI) Act has made big inroads into the opacity of the government.
  
  
• A brand new income tax code is being circulated (click here for the draft). This is a bold move aimed at simplification of the entire income tax regime.
  
  
• There is a towards a generic Goods and Services Tax (GST) to replace a maze of taxes such as octroi, stamp duty, entry tax, central sales tax, state sales tax etc. If this succeeds, the long lines of trucks at state borders will become a thing of the past.
  
  
• There have been highly significant amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), somehow missed by most of the mainstream press (see here). The need for these is apparent from a report of the National Police Commission that 60% of the arrests are unnecessary and unjustified. Also given the big delays in India's judicial systems, many people languish in jails for no fault of their own, awaiting trials that can take decades.
  
  
• The school education system is being re-thought, and hopefully higher education will also get a re-think.
  
  
• The Unique ID project, handed to ex-Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, is a big step in the right direction. Under Nandan, it is sure to be professionally executed.
  

The full impact of these changes has not yet been felt, but I am very hopeful. Even more than the changes themselves, the courage to change is most remarkable. Legislation otherwise tends to be a one-way process: it has a tendency to simply create more and more complicated and senseless structures. So this is new and very welcome!

One gets the feeling that the central government is being run by professionals, not ideologues or crooks or ultra-nationalists or caste-warriors. Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, Sam Pitroda, Nandan Nilekani - these are people that we can identify with. These are not the typical politicians we had gotten used to. This too is new and very welcome!


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"Goongey ki mithaai"

In today's New York Times, David Brooks writes in appreciation of the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in particular, and of the Obama administration in general. He is praising their pragmatic handling of the economic crisis. You can read the entire article here.

About Geithner, he writes:

He also talks like a historian who sees common tendencies in certain contexts, not a philosopher who seeks clear general principles that apply across contexts.

And later...

Some administrations are staffed by hedgehogs, who are guided by a few core principles. But this one is staffed by foxes, who respond flexibly to situations. In the administration’s first big test, that sort of pragmatism paid off.

It is thrilling to read newspaper commentary so precisely articulated and insightful. It links an analysis of a current scenario with two timeless modes of failure of human nature - either being too constrained by rigid philosophy, or being too flexible and unfocused.

Yet my delight is difficult to share in an India TV world. My grandfather used to refer to such pleasures as goongey ki mithaai - it can be enjoyed but hardly discussed.

I hope things do not get any worse than they are today. For example, I hope that even the unintentional hilarity of India TV doesn't become goongey ki mithaai as years go by!

Click here for more fun stuff.

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MBA and ROI - the story of Nandan and Neeta

To me the MBA hiring in India seems generally slow and cautious, except at the very top and perhaps at the lower end. In this scenario, I heard that current and prospective students are wondering about return on investment or ROI.

Wow, ROI on education... in India! I did not expect this.

I grew up in a world where education was about educating oneself, not seen as an investment.

More practically, I also found that the models these students are constructing are rather simplistic and in fact plain wrong (E.g. "I paid x so I should get a starting salary of x, otherwise where is the ROI?")

Which led me to think - is this what they learnt about ROI in their MBAs? :-)

So I thought I'd give a US perspective. In the US, the MBA has been a good investment over decades, through many cycles of good times and bad times. So we in India can learn from the models used there.

5 or 10 year payback:

In the US, the ROI is typically calculated OVER FIVE OR TEN YEARS (see the Forbes MBA ROI calculator for example, which in fact you too can use by putting in rupees instead of dollars).

BTW, the average payback period for the MBA in the US is 4.5 years (see this site for more details).

It's personal:

The ROI depends on the individual. This is mainly because it depends on the salary and annual raises the person can expect without an MBA, and the salary and annual raises the same person makes with the MBA (for a thorough treatment of the subject, see this Excel sheet).

The annual raise part is important in India because the shortage of the best-skilled keeps getting more acute year on year (see the IT industry salaries, for example, they rise fastest as a percentage for the most skilled employees, at least for the first few years).

Let us make a simple model, keeping out the effect of taxes and loans, and see how the ROI calculations might fare in India.

Pre-MBA salary:

The first step is to figure how much you would earn without an MBA. Let us take two people - a Mr. Nandan and a Ms. Neeta.

Let's say Nandan does not have a professional degree and no work experience. His English is fairly ordinary. If he did not do an MBA, he would join a BPO. Let us say his starting salary would be Rs. 8,000 a month or Rs. 0.96 lakhs a year, but increasing every year. "Agle saal hi das hazaar ho jayegi," he feels.

Neeta has an engineering degree but no desire or skills with regards to software. Still, she can expect to make Rs. 2 lakhs a year right away and Rs. 3+ lakhs after a couple of years. But she thinks an MBA will help her "polish" her skills and advance her career faster.

Annual raise without an MBA:

As a BPO operator, Nandan's salary does not increase much year after year. Let us say (for the sake of simplicity) that the inflation rate is steady at 10%. Then Nandan's salary may increase by perhaps 20% a year. So in Year 2, he may make about Rs. 10,000 per month. By Year 7, he may make Rs. 24,000/month, which is not bad. But almost half of the true value of that would be eaten away by inflation (in terms of Year 1 rupees).

As an engineer, Neeta's salary is set to increase faster. Let us say that her salary increases at 25% per year without the MBA. By Year 7, she may be at nearly Rs. 65,000/month or almost Rs. 8 lakhs a year, which is a comfortable salary. But again the true value of that would be just a little more than half that at Year 1 rupees, because of inflation.

Salaries without an MBA:

We express the amounts they make both in terms of the cash they receive and the value of that cash in Year 1 terms (which is lower because of inflation).

NANDAN

Year 1: Rs. 0.96 lakhs
Year 2: Rs. 1.15 lakhs (but worth Rs. 1.05 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 3: Rs. 1.38 lakhs (but worth Rs. 1.14 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 4: Rs. 1.66 lakhs (but worth Rs. 1.25 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 5: Rs. 1.99 lakhs (but worth Rs. 1.36 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 6: Rs. 2.39 lakhs (but worth Rs. 1.48 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 7: Rs. 2.87 lakhs (but worth Rs. 1.62 lakhs in Year 1 money)


NEETA

Year 1: Rs. 2.00 lakhs
Year 2: Rs. 2.50 lakhs (but worth Rs. 2.27 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 3: Rs. 3.13 lakhs (but worth Rs. 2.58 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 4: Rs. 3.91 lakhs (but worth Rs. 2.93 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 5: Rs. 4.88 lakhs (but worth Rs. 3.36 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 6: Rs. 6.10 lakhs (but worth Rs. 3.79 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 7: Rs. 7.63 lakhs (but worth Rs. 4.31 lakhs in Year 1 money)


Cost of MBA and post MBA salary:

Both Nandan and Neeta go for an MBA to the same school. Let us suppose they pay Rs. 3 lakhs per year as fees. Since they are living in a hostel, let us suppose they spend a few thousand rupees more each year than they would if they were working. Let us say they spend Rs. 1 lakh EXTRA over the two years, after adjusting for internship stipends etc. and what they would have anyway spent otherwise without the MBA.

All MBA grads do not get similar jobs! Some jobs have good initial salary but flat growth paths (as we saw with the BPO example) while some have relatively low starting salaries but aggressive growth paths (a job with Deloitte this year, e.g.!) Also a lot depends on the backgrounds of the students.

So let us take some practical numbers.

Say, Nandan gets a job with a bank at Rs. 2.75 lakhs a year, with a 35% annual raise instead of the 20% he would have gotten at the BPO. Five years after the MBA, his salary is at Rs. 9.13 lakhs, fully three times what he would have gotten at the BPO, but still highly achievable.

Neeta gets a job as a business analyst at Rs. 4.5 lakhs a year, with a 40% annual raise instead of the 25% she would have otherwise gotten. Five years after the MBA, her salary is at Rs. 17 lakhs, more than twice what she would have otherwise made, but again a highly believable number (I think of how much Anishka can expect to make at Nagarro in 2016, given the inflation of 10%).

Salaries and expenditure with an MBA:

So let us recount these "with MBA" numbers again:

NANDAN

Year 1: investment of Rs. 3.50 lakhs
Year 2: investment of Rs. 3.50 lakhs (but worth Rs. 3.18 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 3: Rs. 2.75 lakhs (but worth Rs. 2.27 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 4: Rs. 3.71 lakhs (but worth Rs. 2.79 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 5: Rs. 5.01 lakhs (but worth Rs. 3.42 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 6: Rs. 6.76 lakhs (but worth Rs. 4.20 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 7: Rs. 9.13 lakhs (but worth Rs. 5.16 lakhs in Year 1 money)

NEETA

Year 1: investment of Rs. 3.50 lakhs
Year 2: investment of Rs. 3.50 lakhs (but worth Rs. 3.18 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 3: Rs. 4.50 lakhs (but worth Rs. 3.72 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 4: Rs. 6.30 lakhs (but worth Rs. 4.73 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 5: Rs. 8.82 lakhs (but worth Rs. 6.02 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 6: Rs. 12.35 lakhs (but worth Rs. 7.67 lakhs in Year 1 money)
Year 7: Rs. 17.29 lakhs (but worth Rs. 9.76 lakhs in Year 1 money)

Payback and ROI:

If you compare the without-MBA and with-MBA numbers in Year 1 money, you will see that the MBA has paid for itself in 5 years (use money in Year 1 rupees for accuracy).

Note also: though Nandan graduates with a Rs. 2.75 lakhs job while Neeta graduates with a Rs. 4.5 lakhs job, their payback period is incidentally almost the same - it is about 5 years. This is because Neeta would have done better than Nandan even without the MBA. Nandan's investment is not much worse than Neeta's despite what it appears at first glance!

The calculations also appear to be realistic. I believe that in this market situation, the payback period for an MBA is going to be similar to the typical US payback period, i.e. 5 years. If the market improves in 2012, say, the payback might be faster.

Is ROI/Payback Period even a good metric?

The most significant lesson from this exercise is what the situation looks like in the long term. Without the MBA, Nandan might be making Rs. 24,000 a month in Year 7. With it, he might make Rs. 76,000 a month in Year 7.

Though his payback period is 5 years, should that be a reason not to do the MBA?

Think of Nandan in both cases - Rs. 24,000/month vs. Rs. 76,000/month.

Is this even a choice? Does the 5 year payback reflect the human angle?

Because life does not stop 5 years after the MBA! Most Indian MBA students have at least 35 years of work ahead of them. What on earth does ROI mean in this case?!

Effect of the quality of the MBA:

Let us say that Neeta had a choice - do an MBA from an "El Cheapo" private school with Rs. 3 lakhs as fees, vs. the more serious one with Rs. 6 lakhs as fees. Let us suppose she is so self-motivated that even with the El Cheapo school, she can get a Rs. 4 lakh job instead of the Rs. 4.5 lakhs job and she can get the same kind of annual raises in both cases. She wonders if saving Rs. 3 lakhs in fees is worth it as the final impact on the starting salary is just Rs. 50,000/year.

But the salary difference stays and is compounded in ways mathematics cannot capture. Every little thing you learn in class, how you learn to compete, how the school's brand is perceived - all this is more important. In the long run, the fees are a small component.

THE FINAL LESSON

My father, who brought up four children on a government salary, always says: "Never try to save money when you are buying books."

(And he never did. We children also went to the best schools we could manage to go to. Today, all four of us children are doctors - two of the real kind and two of the "doctor of philosophy" kind. One sister is the director of a cancer institute in the US, another is a neonatologist. My brother is a senior exec at Facebook.)

So to my father's saying, I will add, "Always get the finest education you can afford. To hell with ROI!"

Think ROI and payback period when you are buying a car. :-)


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Zero Percentile

A senior colleague at Nagarro, Neeraj Chhibba, has surprised us all with his first book, "Zero Percentile", which is published by Rupa Publishers. It must have made it to bookstores all over the country by now and is also available online.

A lot of young Indians used to go to the Soviet Union to study. Many decades ago, my father got a PhD in geology from Moscow (he wrote his thesis in Russian). Many of my friends too went to the USSR to study engineering and medicine. But while they were there, the USSR disintegrated and everything went haywire. They saw the socialist system collapse before their eyes. Many were shunted from institute to institute and their futures were in doubt. As if that were not enough, the Medical Council of India began to raise questions about the validity of the medical degrees out of some of the ex-USSR institutes. It was a tumultous time, and the book is set in that era.

What I liked about it is that it makes you smile innocently from time to time. Although the book is semi-autobiographical (luckily I do not figure in it like my brother and I did in another friend Amitabh Bagchi's book, "Above Average") the author always seems to be making gentle fun of the story and its characters, including the protagonist, even in the most tense and violent moments.

Just BTW, the title "Zero Percentile" is a bit of a pun on www.100percentile.com, an education software company that we are also associated with.

Neeraj works long six-day weeks at Nagarro, so it is a tribute to his focus and energy that he managed to write this book. I feel motivated by this to try to publish a book of poems sometime in 2010.


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Stanley Moss in the Mint

Stanley Moss, who was recently at the Indore and Ahmedabad campuses of PROTON was next in Mumbai to receive an award at the World Brand Congress. The Mint / Wall Street Journal carried an interesting article on Stanley and some of his thoughts about Indian brands. You can read the article here.





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The frustration with MBAs

I was recently speaking with a friend who runs a successful company in the HR space. I asked him if he was looking to hire any fresh MBAs for his company.

His immediate response was, "I don't think so! Most fresh MBAs think they are God's gift to mankind. They cannot take on any responsibility for anything, and they expect you to even wipe their noses for them!"

I take it that he wasn't referring to the IIM-type MBA but to the average MBA out of the 2000-odd management schools in the country.

"Then they come to you after just three months and say that they are not seeing any 'growth' in their jobs. In just three months, I tell you!!!" He was plainly upset. "I feel like telling them - sir, why don't you become the CEO and make me your assistant?"

"Then they come and complain about the favoritism shown by their bosses. What they don't understand is that the person who works more sincerely, who works longer hours, and who comes in on a weekend to meet deadlines will definitely be treated with special consideration - that is not favoritism." He obviously had specific incidents in mind.

"And within a year these MBAs are gone on to another job that pays a few thousand rupees more! They talk about quality of work but they will run to any sad job in any no-name company for just a few more rupees."

All this was about his own experience. Then he told me something that quite shocked me.

"The HR head of company X (a leading insurance company that I will not name) has decided that he will no longer hire fresh MBAs without work experience. He will rather go for 12th pass students studying at open universities via correspondence - at least they are less likely to have a pompous attitude!"

No wonder the market for the "average" MBAs has dried up. The students of previous years have given the community a bad name.

When we started Proton, we aimed to create managers with positive attitudes and the mindset of responsible professionals.

Whether our students do well in the real world will only depend on whether we have succeeded in teaching them these basic things.


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Choking on fumes in Delhi

The air over Delhi/NCR is thick with pollutants as it is every winter, only this year it appears to be worse.

Many years ago, a PIL lodged by the Center for Science and Environment had led to Delhi's public transport switching to CNG. It was a big victory in the war against air pollution.

But in the last few years, matters have again worsened. People blame the number of cars on the roads, but the problem isn't the number of cars, it's the type of cars and the type of fuel. I'm sure my Honda cars spit out cleaner air than what they take in! The pollution checkers often ask me, looking at their monitors in disbelief, "Gaadi ka engine on hai ki nahin?"

Look at the accompanying photos to see where the pollution is coming from. Of course old "tempos" are polluting, especially in Gurgaon where they have not been forced to convert to CNG. But are new Tata diesels intrinsically polluting? Chevy Taveras? How can a Toyota diesel engine in an Innova generate so much smoke? Is the diesel fuel being badly adulterated? A lot of questions need to be answered before the winter sky in Delhi/NCR will be blue again.

While all cars on the road theoretically meet the maximum emission norms and get a pollution-under-control certificate periodically (often with money changing hands or with some temporary tinkering with the engine), I would dearly like to know what even these measured emission levels are, categorized by car type/year. While the limits for diesel vehicles are much more generous than those for petrol vehicles, I am sure that there will be far more diesel vehicles coming in just below the limits than petrol ones.

Diesel is subsidized with respect to petrol, so more people buy diesel cars, but we all pay for this behavior with our health (a massive negative externality). I know there are super-clean diesel engines available, but apparently not on Indian roads. Why can't we restrict the subsidies only to CNG?


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Taming "video-game capitalism" - Part 1

I've been trying to think of an all-encompassing metaphor for what supposedly ails capitalism - the superhuman greed, the recklessness, the immense volatility, and the lack of ethics - and for what supposedly are capitalism's strengths - the courage, the focus, the absence of passivity. The metaphor that seems to come the closest is that of the video-game.

Most capitalists are not crooks or thieves. They are more akin to video gamers, taking big bets with bravado and no fear of consequences (and no fears of consequence, either, if you know what I mean). If you get killed, you just re-start that level and try again!

In a way, this is by design. Many decades ago, Schumpeter trumpeted the virtues of the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalism.

But such creative destruction adds little value to human progress when the "creation" is not speculation in a genuine innovation (such as an entrepreneur pursuing a new technology) but simply speculation (as during the Tulip Mania in the 1600s for example). And there can be a large human cost, as livelihoods are lost and lives are ruined.

For sure, it is difficult to separate "good" creative destruction from "bad" creative destruction in practice. The first pet store in a town may be an example of an innovation, but the tenth such store might not be particularly innovative and yet its bankruptcy may have a high human cost (even if the pets did not mind). We all know how bad central planning is at mandating which ventures are worthwhile and which are not - in India, we probably lost decades of growth as the government tried to figure out just how many licenses should be issued to produce motor cars, television sets and light bulbs.

Still, is "video-game capitalism" going too far? Perhaps playing pure finance by the numbers is a bit like persecuting a video-game war such as the Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, where CNN carried almost-live green-tinged infrared footage of Paveway bombs floating towards and then striking their targets. The ripping of bodies, burning of skin and spilling of bloody guts was all sanitized.

How do we tame "video-game capitalism" without snuffing out the very essence of capitalism?


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The first job: glass half full or half empty?

When I went for training in the US to get used to the fast bikes and the fast roads, one thing the trainers would always say was, "Remember to look THROUGH each turn.... and if you encounter an obstacle, look THROUGH the obstacle to where you want to go. Don't look so hard at the obstacle that you crash straight into it!"

This phenomenon is called target fixation. There's a nice video about it here:


I believe target fixation happens in life as well. If you only see the obstacles, you are likely to hit many of them!

When you look at your first job, what do you see?

• Do you see the glass half empty? Do you see only the humdrum details of what you will be doing from day to day till the weekend comes around and gives you some relief? Do you worry about how you will manage to put up with the boredom or with the hard work, as the case may be?
  
  If yes, you are probably not going to do as much with your life as you could have. It's sad, but it's true. I am willing to bet on that.
  
  
• Do you see the glass half full? Are you excited by the bigger picture of where the company is headed? Do you feel that you can't wait to get started? Have you already identified the simple skills you plan to learn on the job that will help you in later life?
  
  If yes, you are certainly on your way to success. I am willing to bet on that.
  

For my first job, I joined Dr. Ramachandran Jaikumar, professor at the Harvard Business School, as a modestly-paid associate because I wanted to be near the great man and learn from him. As it turned out, those years were very precious. I realize today that I have copied many aspects of his style of thinking. Every venture that I have been involved in has benefited from that.

Sandeep Manudhane took up tutoring a few children not because it was a sexy job, but because in his mind was the vision that became Professional Tutorials (now PT Education) and led to Proton and SBM as well.

Tony Nicely joined the insurance giant GEICO as an insurance clerk at the age of 18 and rose to become its CEO. Some people think he may replace Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway as GEICO is an important company in Buffet's portfolio. Not bad for someone who started off as a clerk!

Mark Hurd started his career selling computers in Texas for NCR. That must have been a tough job! But he rose to become CEO of NCR. Then he became CEO of HP!

Steve Jobs started his career with Atari as a technician, trying to save money for a spiritual trip to India. We all know what he did with his life!

Jack Welch was the son of a train conductor and a housewife, and started his career as a junior engineer... at GE.

Even Prof. Jaikumar started his career selling consumer products all over Africa if I remember right, to save money for further education in the US. That was not the kind of job that a typical mechanical engineer from IIT would have liked.

Don't get me wrong - all these people had big dreams and ambitions. Most of them had already put in a lot of hard work before they took their first job. But that did not mean that they were snooty about what work they did in that first employment.

In fact, what I really learned - or tried to learn - from Prof. Jaikumar was his unending optimism. He was never negative, always excited, always positive, never snooty. He saw an opportunity in everything.

So to those of you trying to decide on your first job - see the opportunities, don't see the pitfalls.

More to the point, your ultimate success will mostly depend more on what is WITHIN you - what you have learned and what you bring to your job, including hopefully a positive attitude - rather than where you start out.

It's very simple. Think about it for a while.


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Knowledge management at Nagarro Software

Knowledge management (KM) has been gaining in visibility for several years. As Nagarro grew, we realized that we would have to do something on the KM front if we did not want to waste all the experience and knowledge we were acquiring in different parts of the organization over the years. It was no longer possible to carry all the knowledge of the company in your head!

On the marketing and sales side, we would initially create each proposal and presentation from scratch. It took a lot of time and a lot of mistakes would creep in. We then went in the opposite direction and created a single standard deck, but then it was not very customer- or industry- or technology-specific and so was not very effective by itself. We had to approach this in a more sophisticated way.

With a lot of effort by my colleagues and over some time, Nagarro developed a fairly sophisticated KM process for the sales and marketing material. Presented in a simplified way, this is how it works:

1. When we come across a sales opportunity, a request may go to the KM group asking for slides on, say, "Europe, manufacturing, chemical industry, SAP, automation, manufacturing execution systems".
   
   
2. The KM group will go to their Microsoft SharePoint repository and pick out all slides on these topics and send them to the sales or presales (technical sales) folks.
   
   This is the RETRIEVAL and DISTRIBUTION of knowledge.
   
   
3. Now, outside the KM group, the slides may be modified for this particular customer, new slides may be added and some may be subtracted.
   
   
4. When the presentation is finally delivered to the client, it is compulsory for a copy to be sent back to the KM group. The KM group takes the presentation and stores it as such in its repository in a systematic way.
   
   You may call this the STORAGE of knowledge.
   
   
5. But the most important thing the KM group does is to take the presentation, slide by slide, and identify which slides are new, and which slides have been modified from the original. Incidentally, with new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) technology, such identification can be automatic if the slide was edited while the user was connected with the MOSS.
   
   
6. The KM experts give new slides relevant tags (e.g. "factory planning") and store them for future requests after carefully editing out customer-specific details.
   
   
7. In parallel, the slides that have been modified are studied carefully to see if they are a) improvements on existing slides, or b) new flavors of existing slides (such as a "Europe" slide with a "Germany" flavor"). Improvements on existing slides are saved as newer versions after checking with senior personnel. New flavors of existing slides are also stored separately as such.
   
   Steps 5-7 comprise what may be loosely called the IDENTIFICATION and CLASSIFICATION of new knowledge.
   
   
8. Of course the work does not end there. The slides have to all be kept up to date. For example, if at any time in the future, anything changes on a slide (let us say Nagarro gets a new European quality certification and someone modifies the Europe slide), the different flavors of the same slide must also be updated.
   
   One may term this the MAINTENANCE of knowledge.

I am not an expert in this area, but this cycle of Identification, Classification, Storage, Maintenance, Retrieval and Distribution of knowledge has saved us a lot of time and has tremendously improved our sales efficiency. This is Knowledge Management at work!

A couple of our friends run overseas KM centers - Nitin Seth runs the McKinsey Knowledge Center and Nitin Aggarwal runs the ZA Associates Knowledge Center (he was formerly the head of the McKinsey Knowledge Center too). Alok Aggarwal co-founded Evalueserve which is a pioneer in this general area. Do click on these links and see what these folks are up to.

You may also want to check out the technology aspects of KM using Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) or look at the Wikipedia entries on the subject.

My best sales lesson

I was once in a room with Tarik Taman, VP EMEA of Oracle Retail and a bit of a sales legend. I asked Tarik, "How do you pull off these multi-million dollar deals?"

Tarik replied, "When I leave the customer, the customer must believe that I BELIEVE THAT I AM THE BEST OPTION FOR HIM OR HER."

Note, not "good enough" but "the best". And note the emphasis on what the sales person believes.

Tarik explained, "The customer may or may not believe that I am the best option, but he or she must be sure that I at least believe so."

Then Tarik said, "Further, the customer must REMEMBER THE TWO OR THREE REASONS WHY I BELIEVE that I am the best option for him or her."

Wonderfully put! I memorized Tarik's lines and have used them profitably ever since. They are worth memorizing, because much of professional life involves the rhetoric of sales.


A footnote for the graduating class:

Even in a job interview, you cannot simply portray that you are good enough for the job. There must be thousands who are good enough! IMHO, you have to believe and convey - with all appropriate humility and tact - that you are the best for that particular role. And you have to arrive at the two or three reasons why you are the best for it. It could be your background, it could be your skills, it could be your interest, it could be your sincerity, it could be your desire to work for less money, it could be your openness to learning, it could be your knowledge of the city, it could be your skills with a language, it could be your personality - whatever.

The Times Ascent article on career planning

I had mentioned being asked a few questions regarding career planning by a journalist. Here is the resulting article in the Times Ascent.

Estimating the Diwali spend on pyrotechnics

I am no expert on firecrackers and firewords, but this Diwali I was awed by the sheer amount of explosives and light on beautiful display at Dehradun. I thought I would estimate the total spend.

I was at the outskirts of the city. I could hear a steady bursting of crackers. It was a continuous sound in the background. I estimated about 20 crackers were going off every second within my audible range. For perhaps 3 hours (including the previous day's crackers etc.)

How much did each "pop" cost? I had no idea. But I estimated it at Rs. 10.

So Rs. 200 per second. 3600 seconds an hour or Rs. 720,000. Three hours = Rs. 21 lakhs.

I guessed my audible range was 1 km. The city is 5 km in radius, say. 75 sq km, of which I was hearing 3 sq km. I had to multiply by 25.

25 times 21 lakhs = Rs. 5 crores.

Is this the right number? I don't know. But I checked on the net a few minutes ago and it seems that Lucknow spends Rs. 30 crores on firecrackers each Diwali. So Rs. 5 crores may be reasonable.

I tell you, I love this number-checking.

The importance of sticky strategies

An airline industry veteran was talking about Lufthansa's success even as other European airlines have fallen behind. I asked him, "What do you think that Lufthansa did different that enabled it to succeed?" His answer went something like this: "I think Lufthansa has had a clear vision of what it wanted to be, and has stayed true to this vision regardless of management changes. This probably best explains its success." Today the combined reputation of Lufthansa as an airline and Frankfurt airport as a hub eclipses that of British Airways plus Heathrow or Air France plus Charles de Gaulle for many travelers.

Strategy is long-term by definition. Yet very often "strategies" get dropped by the wayside at the slightest and new strategies adopted with much fanfare. Only to be dropped themselves. Poorly run companies do this all the time. Remember Air India and Indian Airlines? Remember the Maharaja logo? The IA logo? Remember Vayudoot? Remember the re-branding as "Indian" and the re-painting of the aircraft? And now the merged entity is called Air India once again. Just what is going on?




Some change is good and no strategy should be set in stone. But if you yourself don't know what you stand for, how can you expect the customers to know it and believe in it? You should try to stick to your strategies.

Now, when I began to write this post I was talking about strategies in general and not creative strategy in particular. I just happened to use the entire Indian Airlines + Air India logo fiasco to make a point. But then, on a hunch, I went to Google and searched for the history of Lufthansa's famous logo. I found it here and this is what I found!

Testing the numbers, on the fly - part 2

Let me give another example of testing the numbers on the fly. And this time, I really mean "on the fly"!

Some years ago, I was traveling by air and looking out of the window when I saw a plane flying parallel to us but going in the other direction. In a few seconds it was gone. Now we were nowhere near an airport when this happened, so this was out of the ordinary. It made me think how much distance there had been between the planes, and whether their being so close in the middle of nowhere had been a chance occurrence.

As I tried to estimate the distance between the planes, I felt instinctively that the other aircraft "had looked a few centimeters long". Then I reflected and realized this measure does not make any sense until you define just how far from you those centimeters were! That is, a centimeter in a ruler near your nose looks different from a centimeter in the same ruler at arms length, and that in turn looks very different from a centimeter one kilometer away. I concluded on some reflection that when we say, for example, "the man was so far that he looked one centimeter tall" we instinctively tend to refer to the angle subtended at our eye by a centimeter placed somewhere between a half to one arm's length away. For the sake of simplicity, I assumed that our measure is taken one meter from our eyes. This is a non-obvious insight, and tremendously useful.

What does this mean? This means that if a man is 2 meters (6 feet) tall and he shrinks 100 times to appear just 2 cm high, he must be 100 times 1 or 100 meters away. If he looks just 1 cm tall, he must be 200 m away.

In other words,

If an object looks "1 cm high/long", its distance from you is 100 times its height/length!

How convenient!

The plane had looked, say, 2 centimeters long. So how far away was it? Well, that depended on how long it was in reality. It had looked like a commercial Boeing airliner and those often have 30 rows of seats, I thought. A meter per row, so let's say 40 meters, nose and tail included.

So if the plane was 40 meters long and looking like 2 centimeters, the multiple was 2000x. Therefore the plane was probably about 2000 meters away - two kilometers.

Then I wondered if the other plane had been taking off or landing in this wilderness. How could one tell? Well, by seeing its speed. So how fast had it been going? I guessed that it had covered a 90 degree angle in my eyes in about 6 seconds. The distance was the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle (remember school geometry?) with one side of 2 km or 1.414x2 in length or about 3 km. So it appeared to cover 3 km in 6 seconds (say) or 1800 km per hour. Now this was relative speed. Part of this speed was ours - I could find our current speed on the in-flight TV. I don't remember what it was exactly but it was clear that the other plane had been going very fast too, at cruising speed. So it was probably not taking off or landing at that time!

Needless to say, I got immense satisfaction from running these rough numbers.

Something similar had happened one day when I was still at school, watching the Air Force Day celebrations on a TV set. As part of the day's events, air force aircraft carried out mock sorties on some gasoline-filled targets at Hindon air force base. They would fire a missile at an "enemy tank" and it would burst into a fireball with a loud explosion on TV. As I watched, I began to realize that every time a "tank" was blown up on TV, the windows of our apartment would reverberate a half minute later. Highly excited (having been solving Agarwal Classes JEE problems in that year), I calculated 300 m/sec (speed of sound) times 30 seconds = 9 km approximately. Which was approximately the distance between where we lived and Hindon!

Some of you may be thinking this sort of number-checking is just a nerdy engineering trait. I don't think so. I find all intelligent management practitioners asking similar questions. The best venture capitalist wants to probe your business plan numbers in the same way - by quickly running a set of independent calculations in her head. The good CEO does quick back-of-the-envelope numbers to see for himself where, say, working capital can be best shaved. And so on.

In fact, doing this sort of number-checking is like a secret handshake of a secret society - jo ise jaante hain wo iska mahatva pehechaante hain!

Testing the numbers, on the fly

I wrote in a recent post about how I love finding links between different facts that I have learnt. I also thoroughly enjoy linking this with some quick "number testing".

Last Saturday, I was driving from Dehradun to Delhi with my family when my father said, "We had gone to see an old hydel power project that takes water from a river. They have built a tunnel through the mountain for this and all the equipment is buried in the earth. Though it was built in the 1970s, it is in good condition and looks very impressive. The tunnel is about 15 feet across and the total head of water is about 100 meters of height. The plan was to generate about 100 MW through 3 stages, of which 2 have been built."

My first reaction was, "100 MW through just a 15 feet tunnel? That's too much!"

Then I began to calculate. 15 feet is about 5 meters, say. That is, 2.5 m radius. Or area of about 6Pi or 18 sq m approximately.

Now every meter length of the tunnel contained 18 tons of water (one ton of water is 1000 kg). This was falling 100 meters. Work done is force x distance. Force here is 18000 kg mass into 9.8 m/sec sq acceleration (due to gravity) or 180,000 Newtons. So if this acts for 100 meters, we are talking of 18 million Joules of potential energy from 1 meter of water.

What would be the speed of the water? We have all seen how water rushes out of such hydel tunnels. 20 meters going out in a second is not inconceivable IMHO. So we have a possibility of 18*20 million Joules/second or 360 MW. So we are in the same ballpark.

Now, there will be a loss due to conversion efficiency etc. The tunnel may not be full. So a 100MW generation is plausible.

I hope my calculations are correct (I am now a rusty engineer!) My estimates may also be off by a bit, so the numbers might be quite inaccurate. But here I'm emphasizing more the need to start to cross check these calculations - whether in engineering or in business or in general life - rather than just accepting what is given to you. I think this is an important trait of the best executives.

I'll give some more examples in the next post.

Blog policy

From time to time, students submit "comments" for the blog that are not directly connected to the blog topics (perhaps they appear connected to them but not to me) and so I do not publish them. I request those folks to send me emails instead, so that I can respond to their questions and concerns. All the students at Indore and Ahmedabad have my Proton email ID.

Linking things small and big

I *love* to see patterns and make connections between seemingly disparate things. It makes all the reading, thinking and education seem worthwhile. (Perhaps these patterns are sometimes illusory, but as long as they keep me smiling....)

This is today's example:

When I try to publish this blog, I often find it unresponsive. I used to think something was wrong with Proton's FTP server but at such times, I began to find that www.blogger.com was itself inaccessible. And that has nothing to do with Proton's FTP server.

So I checked further and found that at such times, even Gmail was often unavailable. But there was no corresponding online uproar. I don't think Gmail is down that often. So it was a local issue. But other sites (like the New York Times) were opening just fine.

Then I read in the Economist that Barack Obama is a proponent of keeping the Internet free of controls. For example, he does not want to let US ISPs reduce the bandwidth available to users to access data-heavy sites such as YouTube. Access should be uniform, he believes.

Then yesterday, I put two and two together - the problem I see is probably because Indian ISPs are limiting the bandwidth going to Gmail, Blogger and other Google sites because that is where much of the traffic is. When there is a bandwidth crunch, these must be the sites to become inoperational first. If India were to adopt what Obama proposes, this would not happen - all sites would slow down together.

Anyone know if this is true? It is an interesting theory.

Hobbies and happiness

One of my favorite writers and guiding lights is the British philosopher/mathematician/writer/historian Bertrand Russell. He was such an amazing intellect that I will devote an entire post to him sometime. But here I am only concerned with one of his suggestions in "The Conquest of Happiness": to be happy, pick up a hobby.

Russell gives the example of a stamp collector who can get tremendous happiness and satisfaction from reviewing his collection from time to time. This is high quality happiness - it does not hurt anyone else, it does not depend on anyone else, it can be called up at any time.

I was reminded of this when I came upon my friend Vaibhav Gadodia's blog post on photographing a kingfisher (click here to read this and other interesting posts such as this one - you may even want to become a regular reader of Habitually Good). Vaibhav is a highly busy (and intelligent) technical person. Still he takes time out for his photography, which he started barely a year ago. The quality of his pictures has steadily increased and he posts the best ones on the web (click on the picture below to get to the Flickr photostream).



An interesting side effect is that he now has yet another thing to discuss with people he meets in the course of his work. So he does not appear as a one-dimensional techie to them. He is now even more successful at sales.

Do you have a hobby that you are proud of? What is it?

Career planning as I see it

This week, I was asked some very interesting questions by a Times of India journalist about career planning. I wrote quite a bit in reply. Then I realized that the paper would probably only carry a few snippets, so I thought I could share the rest with my own students. It will be particularly appropriate for those who are going to be making their first career choices in the coming months.


On the importance of career planning:

The most important part of career planning is the vision part – knowing who you want to be, or at least knowing what you want to achieve. In my opinion, the more tactical part of knowing exactly how to get there is less important. And the purely operational part of knowing exactly when to get exactly where is even less important.

It may be useful to have short term goals, but it is far more important to have a long term vision to which you can guide your short term career decisions.

Each month, we take many decisions that influence our career paths. Most of these are quite reversible in the short term – next month you can take decisions differently and set your career in a different direction. There is a lot of flexibility – so there are literally millions of ways to get from point A today to point B twenty years down the road!

It is most important to know what the final goal is and to believe in it and visualize it, and you will get there. If you can dream and stick to your dreams and work hard for your dreams, you will most probably make them come true! It’s really that simple.


On whether career planning should be done early in life or after getting into a career:

I do think that the vision for the career should be created early in life. At that time, the mind is fresh and has the ability to dream big. As we get older and encounter more obstacles, most of us start to limit our dreams, even as our capabilities and strengths are actually increasing! This is one of the big paradoxes of life.

I must say I really like it when young people want to be the best in the world at something. It does not matter if that “something” is a small thing. Let me give you an example. Perhaps you want to be a chef. I would much prefer you want to be the best chef in even a smaller city, say, Dehradun, in perhaps a particular cuisine, say, Mediterranean cooking, rather than just wanting to be a cook. That’s the kind of vision and clarity that you can act on to guide your career choices. For me, defining a vision such as this is the most important part of career planning.

I sometimes find young people very obsessed with their job titles and pay scales from day 1 without having a vision. They are mistaken if they think they are planning their career well! They don’t even know where they want to be in 20 years, but they are very worried and conflicted about making the wrong decision tomorrow about which job to accept and at what pay scale. I don’t think that sort of approach to one’s career is very helpful. I would even call it “needless career worrying”.

In my book, it is better to know that you want to be the best Mediterranean chef in Dehradun and working towards that, rather than having no vision but worrying endlessly about whether you should join job A which is offering you a package of X or job B which is offering you a package of Y.


On the importance of career planning during the early days of one's career:

I think the best planning for one’s career is finding out what skills (and in fact even temperament) one needs to cultivate in order to be successful in one’s final goal. I like to invoke Sri Sri Ravishankar’s advice made in another context (on how to achieve happiness): “Fake it until you make it!” That is, visualize yourself at your final goal and imagine how you will have to act for that and what you will have to know, and start to become that way. This is an ongoing task and the sooner you start, the better.

At the same time, young people should not be too obsessed with what job title and package they are getting in which year of their career.


On how career planning helps advance a career:

Most importantly, career planning helps set a goal. That is 75% of the importance of effective career planning, in my opinion. The remaining 25% is that it helps define how to get to that goal, so that the goal can be achieved in a robust and efficient way.


On the role of organizations in career planning:

The organization can play three roles – to inspire, to counsel, and to train.

Inspiration here consists of showing what is possible. Typically, the most senior people of the organization can inspire dreams in the younger employees. For example, Subroto Bagchi inspires the people at MindTree, just as Vikram Sehgal inspires the people at Nagarro.

The counseling helps assess the intrinsic aptitude, strengths, priorities and preferences of the employee and tries to fit these to potential career paths in the company. At Nagarro, we have an initiative called Best Fit Mapping through which we “show the mirror” to employees so that they can understand their own personality types and figure out which career paths suit them.

The training helps fill the holes in the employee’s portfolio of skills and capabilities in order to perform well in the career paths he or she chooses. We focus a lot on this at Nagarro, and have launched our own Nagarro University initiative to make sure that the training aspect matches the career planning.

The New York Times, and post-modern capitalism?

The obituary page of the Economist last week covered the demise of William Safire, a playful connoisseur of the English language who was a columnist at the New York Times. His discussions of the origins and nuanced meanings of English words and phrases was representative of the relatively cerebral nature of the New York Times, a news daily that I am addicted to. To me, the NYT is just as enjoyable to read - even if you are not a New Yorker and you skip the city-centric news - as the Economist. The great columnists at the newspaper include Paul Krugman, whose columns I had been reading religiously (and greedily) for several years before he recently won the Nobel Prize for Economics. When I am not travelling, I read the NYT online (www.nytimes.com allows free access - for now) and when I am on the "road", I pick up free airport lounge copies of the International Herald Tribune, which relies on the NYT for content.

But I am not writing about the NYT because of Safire's death, but because of an article there about how private equity companies have allegedly sucked the blood out of established companies like Simmons and then spat out the remains. The title of the article is "Profit for Buyout Firms as Company Debt Soared" but the title of the accompanying video is better - "FLIPPED: How dealmakers can win while their companies lose" - and the HTML title of the page is best - "At Simmons, Bought, Drained and Sold, then Sent to Bankruptcy".

While I realize that the article may be one-sided, it presents a chilling perspecive of private equity's single-minded focus on profit, even if it means exploiting the gullibility or credulity of financial institutions along the way. In some ways, it is the mirror image of the housing loan collateralization scandal.

One of the prime examples cited is that of the machinations at Simmons of the highly prestigious Thomas H Lee Partners private equity firm of Boston. (William Safire would not have liked the passive voice used in this last sentence!) Now I know a couple of current and former managing directors at THLee who had invested in one of my startups, SupplyChainge Inc. The THL link was through my co-founder John Thorbeck (incidentally, ex-CEO of the Rockport shoe company, ex-President of Bass of Phillips Van Heusen and the first VP Marketing of Timberland!) The THLee folks conducted themselves as SupplyChainge investors with grace and dignity. Yet I have seen enough of other rapacious investors with a God-complex to be able to imagine the worst.

In some ways, such purely financial investors play an important role. As the Economist points out, investors who get very much involved with the operational details of the business may tend to be too risk-averse, as banks are in Europe in their relations with businesses. At the same time, purely numbers-driven financial investors may be dangerous.

I have no issue with the money these investors make from time to time; they also lose large sums of money from time to time. And they work very hard.

I am not so troubled that they have no sense of history (e.g. shuttering a 133 year old company such as Simmons) - capitalism involves creative destruction after all. One person's romantic cry for preservation of a historical company is another's protectionism.

I am somewhat troubled that such investors cannot afford to worry about individual human suffering, when many people are suddenly laid off, for example.

But I am most disturbed that the opacities, inefficiencies and buddy-buddy nature of the financial system are probably often exploited without much fear or shame. Capitalism typically applauds anyone who can make money, regardless of the means employed as long as he can get away with it and not go to jail! It's become a bit like local politics in India.

Perhaps we will evolve a new "post-modern" capitalism. How do you propose we do it? Please offer ideas that will AUTOMATICALLY make a SYSTEMATIC change. If we get a lot of good ideas, perhaps we can try to write an essay for the New York Times, a left leaning intellectual paper and perhaps the best place in the world to publish them!