Sthlm - that is the short form for Stockholm. The city made up of fourteen islands.
This evening, driving over a bridge with the imposing King's palace and Parliament on our left, and on the right the building where the Nobel prizes are given out, I wondered what kind of human energy would allow a sophisticated civilization to thrive in this land of dark freezing winters! In contrast, most of India has much less lethal weather.
Yet there is no energetic frenzy here in the people. It is just a quiet efficient country. Most people work only from 8 am to 4 pm (yes!) and 4 to 5 pm is rush hour. People enjoy a lot of holidays, 6 months maternity leave, 3 months paternity leave... and the country is still so much richer than India. Everyone seems productively employed, efficiently employed.
Productivity is the key... We have to make every Indian productive. PROTON is a small start but a good start.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Sweden
I write this post from an office in Stockholm. Outside the skies are gray, the air is cool, and everything is quiet and clean. The office itself is typically Swedish, light colored wood furniture, white board walls, a simple spare aesthetic. The Swedish aesthetic is reflected in one of Sweden's best known brands, the assemble-it-yourself furniture company IKEA.
The Swedes are an interesting people. They are quite international in their outlook, and Stockholm is bustling with people of all colors of skin. Most of them speak English well.
They are also early adopters of technology, as are many other Scandinavians, which is perhaps why the mobile phone giants Nokia and Ericsson occupy this small corner of the world. Some of Ericsson's buildings can be seen from my window. These plain, warehouse style buildings are fitted luxuriously inside, including with indoor swimming pools.
The Swedes have a very open and flat corporate structure. They are proud of the fact that you can pick up the phone and call the CEO of any company and he will probably answer the phone himself or herself and talk to you without arrogance. There is a whiff of socialism in the air, also reflected in the astronomically high tax rates.
The Swedes are famous for the way they make decisions. In the Swedish style of management, everything is consensus driven. There is little place for individual egos or centers of power. "In another country, I can get an okay from the CEO and the deal is done," lamented a Swede at lunch today. "Here I have to talk to the entire management team till they all agree." It is considered all right to have many meetings without a decision. The upside is that when a decision is taken, the consensus is very solid and things move quickly.
The Swedes are known for their love of coffee, which helps them fill up the time in the winter when there is hardly any daylight. They also laugh at themselves for their little good-natured eccentricities, like a love of the "take a number and wait" systems at every Swedish service office.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Please go back to my post on handheld technology
I did not see any comments - perhaps it was because I published a few posts all at once and people only read the latest ones.
Do go back and read that post on handheld technology. I am really looking for ideas there.
Do go back and read that post on handheld technology. I am really looking for ideas there.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Investing in the stockmarket
Over the course of your life, you will probably invest at some point or other in the stockmarket. It is important to understand what the stockmarket is and what it is not. I will outline some very basic ideas below.
The stockmarket is a risky investment. If you invest in a broad-based way (that is, covering many types of companies in many sectors), you have lower risk because while some of these may do badly, chances are that others will do well. At the other extreme, a single stock by itself is quite a risky investment.
The risk also reduces over time. If you think you may need your money at short notice, the stockmarket is not the right place to invest it. Put money in the stockmarket only if you don’t mind leaving it there for 5-7 years.
Beware of people who promise to invest your money for you claiming that they will get you better returns than the market. Even if you escape the Madoffs of the world, remember this: it has been proven that most money managers are no better at picking stocks than monkeys throwing darts. And unlike the monkeys, the money managers don’t work for peanuts!
Be even more skeptical of business newspaper columnists. If they knew how to predict the markets, they’d be retired! I read everywhere these days that “this is the perfect time to buy a house”. Haha, this is definitely some PR money at work.
The only way to possibly beat the market is to develop great understanding and intuition about how things will evolve. Not many of us will get there. A few people like Warren Buffett have managed to beat the market on the average, but even they are wrong once in a while. This is why they do not go and bet all their money on a single outcome. They know that at the future is always a gamble and they gamble wisely.
The investor who is most dangerous for himself or herself is the person who first invested when the market was in a bull run, i.e. rising continuously. He or she does not have the experience of markets that go down and stay down for years. That is why I am warning you – you are lucky to grown up in a time of resilient markets that cannot be kept down for long. But that may also prove unlucky if, by the time you have money to invest, you start to believe that markets will always give you supernormal returns.
There is no free lunch.
The stockmarket is a risky investment. If you invest in a broad-based way (that is, covering many types of companies in many sectors), you have lower risk because while some of these may do badly, chances are that others will do well. At the other extreme, a single stock by itself is quite a risky investment.
The risk also reduces over time. If you think you may need your money at short notice, the stockmarket is not the right place to invest it. Put money in the stockmarket only if you don’t mind leaving it there for 5-7 years.
Beware of people who promise to invest your money for you claiming that they will get you better returns than the market. Even if you escape the Madoffs of the world, remember this: it has been proven that most money managers are no better at picking stocks than monkeys throwing darts. And unlike the monkeys, the money managers don’t work for peanuts!
Be even more skeptical of business newspaper columnists. If they knew how to predict the markets, they’d be retired! I read everywhere these days that “this is the perfect time to buy a house”. Haha, this is definitely some PR money at work.
The only way to possibly beat the market is to develop great understanding and intuition about how things will evolve. Not many of us will get there. A few people like Warren Buffett have managed to beat the market on the average, but even they are wrong once in a while. This is why they do not go and bet all their money on a single outcome. They know that at the future is always a gamble and they gamble wisely.
The investor who is most dangerous for himself or herself is the person who first invested when the market was in a bull run, i.e. rising continuously. He or she does not have the experience of markets that go down and stay down for years. That is why I am warning you – you are lucky to grown up in a time of resilient markets that cannot be kept down for long. But that may also prove unlucky if, by the time you have money to invest, you start to believe that markets will always give you supernormal returns.
There is no free lunch.
The tipping point
I am writing this on the Jan Shatabdi train from Dehradun to Delhi. I am traveling by the AC chair car. I am musing how this train can be improved so that foreigners of all types can travel without disdain, not just the extreme-India-loving or hippie types.
The most remarkable aspect of the train at the moment is the cockroaches. There was one walking about in the aisle near my foot until someone stepped on it accidentally. Its body lies there, half squished. There was one on the door as a lady in front of me opened it without noticing the creature – I wondered what would be the scene if it fell on her. There is one by my own window. They rule the place.
I don’t know if you have read the book “The Tipping Point”. It tries to show that things do not always change gradually – often a point of inflection is reached after which things change precipitously. The story of crime in New York City is a key example. By policing and preventing minor crime such as graffiti on walls or free riders on the trains, the nature of the city changed dramatically and more serious crime dropped.
I see the same thing at the apartments where I live. Every once in a while, the common areas are whitewashed. Things stay pristine for quite a while. But when we get the first squirt of paan-juice in a basement corner and it is not taken care of at once, we know that part of the planet is going to change quickly. Very soon, that corner will become a shrine to the Betel Nut and Associated Products. It will be anointed by more red paan stains, a few lighter colored gutka stains, and showered with empty gutka packets.
Similarly, once the first obscenity is scrawled in the lift and it is not painted over, there is an avalanche of stunted minds expressing their immature frustrations on the lift’s walls. I think this is the tipping point phenomenon in action.
(WHOO – A COCKROACH ALMOST CRAWLED UP MY ELBOW JUST NOW !!! I regret to say that I swatted at it and probably killed it. I’m not feeling very animal-friendly at the moment…)
In the Indian Railways, I think the tipping point we need to end the direct dumping of excreta (feces in other words, or more plainly, shit) on the tracks by the toilets which are essentially just holes in the floor, and to banish the cockroaches from the coaches. If we can get rid of these two symbols of disrepair and decrepitude, we might be able to fix the rest of the system rather quickly. What do you think?
The most remarkable aspect of the train at the moment is the cockroaches. There was one walking about in the aisle near my foot until someone stepped on it accidentally. Its body lies there, half squished. There was one on the door as a lady in front of me opened it without noticing the creature – I wondered what would be the scene if it fell on her. There is one by my own window. They rule the place.
I don’t know if you have read the book “The Tipping Point”. It tries to show that things do not always change gradually – often a point of inflection is reached after which things change precipitously. The story of crime in New York City is a key example. By policing and preventing minor crime such as graffiti on walls or free riders on the trains, the nature of the city changed dramatically and more serious crime dropped.
I see the same thing at the apartments where I live. Every once in a while, the common areas are whitewashed. Things stay pristine for quite a while. But when we get the first squirt of paan-juice in a basement corner and it is not taken care of at once, we know that part of the planet is going to change quickly. Very soon, that corner will become a shrine to the Betel Nut and Associated Products. It will be anointed by more red paan stains, a few lighter colored gutka stains, and showered with empty gutka packets.
Similarly, once the first obscenity is scrawled in the lift and it is not painted over, there is an avalanche of stunted minds expressing their immature frustrations on the lift’s walls. I think this is the tipping point phenomenon in action.
(WHOO – A COCKROACH ALMOST CRAWLED UP MY ELBOW JUST NOW !!! I regret to say that I swatted at it and probably killed it. I’m not feeling very animal-friendly at the moment…)
In the Indian Railways, I think the tipping point we need to end the direct dumping of excreta (feces in other words, or more plainly, shit) on the tracks by the toilets which are essentially just holes in the floor, and to banish the cockroaches from the coaches. If we can get rid of these two symbols of disrepair and decrepitude, we might be able to fix the rest of the system rather quickly. What do you think?
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