Two Days at TransIndus

Back from Bangalore after spending the weekend attending the E4SI concluding workshop. The heady cocktail of funding models, impact models, double bottom line, triple bottom line, microfinance and a host of other insights and tips about the citizen sector space, just leaves you high and motivated to make a difference. Featuring experts like the renowned author Gurcharan Das, Bindu Ananth from IFMR, Laura Perkin from NEN, Harish Hande from SELCO, Ayan Sarkar from McKinsey and others, together with over 20 motivated peers, the weekend helped cement whatever had been floating around in my head for sometime now. More on that to follow.
PS: Got bumped by HBS. Aah Never Mind ;)

The Triumph of the Nerds

An account of the rise of one of America's largest industries, after automobiles, arms and illegal drugs, the personal computer industry. Cringley, who prefers to be called an explainer rather than a historian, attributes the growth of the PC industry to accident. He describes the brains behind personal computing giants like Apple, HP and Microsoft as people who had just been trying to find ways of amusing themselves and giving themselves a sense of security from the bullies in the park who used to push them around when they were wiry, gawky, bespectacled kids. Focusing not on the companies but on their founders, the man builds a caricature-ish picture of each one of them. While he portrays Bill Gates as a megalomaniac, he paints Steve Jobs as a sociopath. Anecdotes of how kind Lady Luck and Lord Murphy had been on these amateurs are interesting and also helpful in understanding America's last great success story. The book also explores the new baggy tees, soda cans, basketball playing corporate culture that Apple, MS etc spawned as opposed to the suit-and-tie, coffee, golf playing cultures of IBM, Ford and Citicorp. Full of juicy insider gossip, the book is an OK/Globe for tech-buffs.

The Death of an Empire

A case study on why Product Innovation is vital to the growth of an enterprise. Introducing daily soap operas targetting the country's middle class petticoat brigade housewives and their mothers-in-law, Ekta Kapoor turned the fortunes of a dying family business. Churning out products involving women who were either extremely dumb or extremely spiteful, industrial houses where takeovers could happen in a 4 hour period, where the ladies still spent all their time in the kitchen, wearing kanjeevarams and dangling magalsutras, she indentified a market that would eagerly lap up the trash her production house was churning out. However, expecting even that market segment to still be loyal to version 1.0 was pretty naive. Just to bring new products into the market, she launched clones of the previous products, for lack of an innovative product idea. Back in the early years of the decade, she was looked upon as an entrepreneur of great skill, with even the Times magazine running a feature on her. What followed countless K-serials later, was a court battle after her 8 year long daily soap was unceremoniously terminated along with the exclusivity contracts. With the stock prices having crashed and all the recent productions tanking, it seems Balaji telefilms is heading towards its demise.

Recession is Good

Before you all choose to hunt me down for this utterance, pray read on:
Some of the deepest recessions that hit the global economy during the past few decades have given the world companies which we are today proud of. These successful giants trace their origins to the financial mess that has plagued the world from time to time.
1. IBM: founded as the Tabulating Machine Company during the recession of the 1890s, incorporated its present name in 1924, during the Great Depression
2. Hewlett-Packard: born at the end of the Great Depression in a Palo Alto Garage
3. Microsoft: the company that rules close to 90% of the world's desktops was founded during the economic crisis of 1975
4. Symantec: one the largest companies offering information security solutions, Symantec Corp was founded in 1982, when the world was reeling under the deep financial crisis of the 1980s
5. Wikipedia: Founded in 2001 following the burst of the dotcom bubble, the company rode through the post 9/11 recession due to its non-profit structure


Courtesy: indiatimes infotech