Over the years life has become tougher for bowlers, I don't know how can a youngster watching Cricket nowadays will get motivated to become a bowler when a bowler is thrashed to all parts of the ground.
Mediocrity is something which can be appreciated by more number of people and this is precisely the reason why Cricket authorities are trying to woo the audience by making pitches full of runs. It might make batting look more spectacular but it comes at the cost of being unfair to bowlers.
I still remember good old days when bowlers like Wasim, Waqar, Donald, Mgraw, Ambrose, Kumble, Warne use to test batsman for their skill, there use to be a great anticipation for contest between the bat and the bowl. Are we seeing it any of it these days ? It looks like we are just watching batting and not Cricket.
Sometime I really don't understand how can someone call a dead pitch devoid of any life for bowlers as a good cricketing pitch. Making the teams score 400 runs in 50 overs might be making Business sense for the Cricket Lords now but i strongly believe that its a short term trend and eventually people will get bored out of it.
Read the book stay hungry Stay foolish , found it really motivating, interesting and a must read for all budding Entrepreneurs. I have noted down the parts I liked most.
Naukri.com
Don’t do it for money, Do it for your Passion!
Don’t exaggerate the cash flows, under commit and over deliver
Be generous with stake sharing.
Employ people who are smarter than you or atleast smart.
Learn the art of delegation!
Funding is important, don’t hesitate on Venture Capital Funding.
Educomp
Look for Need Gap.
The scalability of the venture.
Even if your salary is 15lpa, in 5 yrs you will earn 50 lakhs after tax , If you run a business for 5 yrs , it will be in crores very easily.
Feed Back Inc
Apni Aukat mai kaam karo , check the level of risks you can take
Adequately capitalized
A complete team , competency Mapping
Don’t bother about the peer pressure , “ Koi phikr nahi hai apna kaam kar “ ?
Mastek
If you want to keep your friendship with your college buddies for life, start a firm in a partnership.
Choose a leader not based on shareholding, age but on trust, respect and competence.
Team with trust for each other.
Implemented Balanced score card and incentive schemes very early.
Get 4-5 years of experience; learn at somebody’s cost, get a bit of feel, financial stability and savings.
Don’t just think of it, don’t just wish for it, Jump in it and do it if you are really serious.
More than synergies of skill, synergies of attitude and values is more important.
Subhiksha
Join the company where you want to operate
Work for smaller companies to get the exposure to the nuts and bolts of the company.
Shree RENUKA Sugars
The kinds of jobs which comes on Campus are not suitable for budding Entrepreneurship.
TEGA
Don’t give it up half way.
Have patience during the difficult time.
Plan to put 50% more money than you have calculated .
For midsized company, don’t spread in too many geographies as the management focus will dilute.
Eklavya School ( Sunil Handa )
Can join a company for 2-3 years
Join a company which makes you a CEO of a sick unit, and gives you power to make it profitable
Or
Join a company which provides you opportunity to work fully on a new project from planning till implementation.
Or
Executive Assistant to the CEO , Promoter
Narayan Murthy – Give capital stake to people who add value to your company, not to attract capital.
Edelweiss Capital
As human we grossly overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.
Financial literacy is very important to run a business.
Make a person head, with slightly more equity holding, not more than 4 partners. Equal partnership is not possible.
Don’t worry about temporary loss of status, money and address.
India Infoline
Be prepared to fail, if you can’t take failures, Entrepreneurship is not for you.
Work for a good medium to big size company before jumping, It helps.
Select a leader, having 3-4 equal share partner and looking for consensus is the worst thing.
EXL
Don’t start fresh out of college, spend some time in industry.
BE conversant with Finance, VCs don’t teach you that, you should know the finance well.
Orchid Pharma
Aim to create value, lasting value, no dearth of capital in the country.
Mphasis
Diversify wherever possible, as u can’t see the future.
Not be over emotional about your company
Important Traits – Networking, Risk Appetite and Luck!
Promoter has to spend lot of time with customer; sales people cannot match yr energy and passion.
As a small company you need to very transparent, refund the money yourself if you did a bad job.
Learn about networking, cash flows, loans, negotiations before taking a plunge in entrepreneurship.
Try to tell your negatives first in power point, than come to your positives.
Take customer reference (Written) to add value to your power point.
Precious Formals
Business plan can be made by anyone, but plans are not enough.
I was just searching on net the value of cos 30 and I came across a very informative website. They had displayed a easy way of remembering sine/cosine values.
sin 0° = sqrt(0)/2 sin 30° = sqrt(1)/2 sin 45° = sqrt(2)/2 sin 60° = sqrt(3)/2 sin 90° = sqrt(4)/2
cos 0° = sqrt(4)/2 cos 30° = sqrt(3)/2 cos 45° = sqrt(2)/2 cos 60° = sqrt(1)/2 cos 90° = sqrt(0)/2
The website http://www.mathisfunforum.com contain other interesting Mathematics games , puzzles too.
US President Mr. Barack Obama's ceremonial dinner party in honor of the Indian Prime minister being attended by uninvited guest has came as a funny yet serious incident. I am not too sure how would have the Washington taken it, had it been US president visiting India and we could not provide the proper security.
It also shows the serious problem which is being faced by the security agencies today . If they do too much of scrutiny with regard to the identity of the person, it might look little rude and people often feel offended. This is something which preciously happened with Shak Rukh Khan at the Newark Airport and he left no stone unturned to get the mileage out of it .
If the security agencies don't do the necessary due diligence and maintain the security of the place, it might lead to more serious security issues.
A new feature has been added to Farmville, a internet game on facebook, its called Crop Mastery . The mastery concept makes the whole Farmville game even more interesting. The mastery as name suggest is the farmer mastery in a certain crop , hence after a certain fixed number of crop harvest person is reaches a level of mastery in the crop. For example for soyabean after 150 harvest one star is given. Their is extra bonus of coins and XP for reaching each level (star) of mastery in the crop, for first start that bonus is 500 coins and 25XP.
One can easily see the number of crop harvested by him by clicking on market and taking the cursor on the crop for checking the number of harvests and crop total number of crops required to reach next mastery level.
I am yet to explore if after reaching 3 star mastery if we can gain some extra xp per harvest but from now on it makes much more sense to stick to good profitable crop with good XP/Day for some time for reaching level 3 of crop Mastery.
Today browsing through internet I came across an amazing piece of trivia regarding Google Inc which I found both interesting and hilarious.
The founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin are so fond of mathematics that they created virtual Mathematical Jokes while taking important financial decisions. Google went for S-1 IPO filing in April 2004 to raise as much as 2.718281828 Billion Dollars; here the number might sound familiar as it is exponential function (Inverse of natural Log).
When Google actually went for the IPO in August 2004, they sold 14142135 shares out of their own and rest of sub stakeholders. Here again the figure is precisely chosen as it represents square root of 2 (1.41412135)
They did it again when in August 2005 Google announced to sell another 14,159,265 Shares, this again closely represents Pie (3.14159265).
The numbers must be fitted or chosen after deciding the roundabout requirement of financing by rigorous financial analysis but it still speaks loud about a company which is so fascinated by the power of Mathematics that they live it every day.
Recently I started playing Farmville internet game on Facebook. Initially the game seemed boring but the graphics and animation attracted me and after 2 days I found the game really interesting and started playing it for nearly 1 hour per day.
Yesterday I tried to analyze my decision making regarding my crop selection in Farmville. Initially I thought why should I waste time in analyzing it and just visited my neighbor farms to see what they are growing but was unable to find any similar pattern in them. It might be because of variant individual likes and dislikes for different fruits, vegetable and flowers. Finally I decided to do some analysis on crop selection myself and found some really interesting patterns.
As I had reached level 11 only few crops are available to me for cultivation. I did the hourly profitability analysis based on real cost price (Cost price of crop + Ploughing charges)/crop and compared it with the selling price. Experience gain per crop is also an important variable in the game and hence it is again required to be used as a active decision variable.
Now if we refer to the table here we found that Bell peppers provide us gain of $ 2.25 Coins/hour in comparison of wheat which has low return per hour of just $ 0.9 Coins/hour. It will take the wheat farmer to harvest 2.5 crops to match the earning of one crop of Bell peppers in the similar time and on top of it one will even earn more XP/day.
Soyabean might just provide 1.38 Coins/hour but it provides good XP/day(3) , hence as per the need of the hour one can pick and choose any of them.
If someone can login to play the game after every 2 hours in the day he can cultivating Raspberries and can grow 12 hour crops rice in the night, by this process one can make maximize the profits and also earn maximum experience credits. If putting so much time in the game is not possible, one can choose Strawberries for slightly reduced profitability but more comfortable 4 hour cycle.
Getting ribbons also bring lot of money and XP in the game so one should carefully plan to hit them to increase the earnings and becoming a good farmer.
Similar profitability and experience analysis can also be done for the plants, animal and other interesting variables in the game.
I was just going through Sachin's ODI record today and though of finding some averages. It might sound like a crazy idea and many people say that Indians are crazy about Sachin but I think we have all the reasons in the world to do so..
Today after reaching milestone of 17000 runs in ODIs, he has also made his 45th century . Going by 424 innings he had played till now it takes him less than 10 (9.42) innings to hit a century and less than 5 (4.66) matches to hit a half century. Doing it consistently for more than 20 years is a awesome achievement.It wont take you a second look why he is the Best player in the world. Generations past might feel jealous that they could not see a player of such a caliber . Thats why he is called the GOD of cricket.
The kind of innovations google is coming up nowadays is simply awesome. If I analyze my internet usage, more that half of it uses google in some way or the other . Why its only the goolge which is coming up with best of the world innovations and not the other companies ?
I agree they have the best brains of the world, but still believe that new innovations might not always emerge from them. They might be good in finding solutions but finding the problems is not often done by the best brains ..
Is it actually possible to find out the biggest problems one after another , what are all others companies doing ?
Are we searching Google or is the Google Searching Us !
Travelling daily by auto in Delhi for last 5 months have taught me lot of intricacies about the behavioural aspect of the auto drivers in Delhi. Most of them don’t own an Auto but rent it on a daily basis, the rent for a single shift is around 250 Rs (12 Hours) and for both the shifts it is 450. So time is the essence for revenue generation for them. Few of the interesting aspects I noticed are:
1. They try to make up for the time lost by charging extra money , for example if there is a auto waiting for passengers for more than 1 hour, he will always quote higher price as he tries to make up for the lost time and this behaviours results in loss of more time. To get the best price always approach a auto which has just reached its destination.
2. Most of them want to talk to you and know what you do.
3. They understand demand and supply better than us, knows when in demand with too many people chasing them, they will increase the rate exponentially.
4. Very well versed with the current affairs, especially news related to the city.
5. Will never go by meter, in 5 months, I travelled by Meter reading just once.
Interestingly the behavioural aspect and the way of doing business of Mumbai auto drivers are completely different from the one in Delhi. Mumbai Auto drivers try to focus more on last mile drive whereas Delhi auto drivers are always looking for longer distance travellers.
It’s been a year when the biggest event of last year occurred, 15th of September 08 is not someday one can forget too easily. I still remember that everyone was so concerned in the college. The placements were nearing and after the last year windfall, people were expecting great rewards for the 2 years of the Degree course. Ultimately it affected us all and so many of us are still struggling due to something for which they were not responsible.
The reporters from different news channel surrounded the Lehman head Office on the death anniversary and my friend managed to get few clicks holding the CNBC mike in front of the Lehman Brother's Head Office in NY.
We often feel that India is struggling and China has moved ahead of India due to our weak infrastructure . The roads , bridges , flyovers , basic amenities are simply missing here . We are wasting so much time and energy working in these conditions . Life is so good outside , every things happens on Internet, you don't have to struggle to reach your office everyday.
I agree with most of it but two days back when I had my first Delhi Metro ride , I found something interesting. I think we have a great opportunity now to make a mark provided our politicians start working on it.
The Delhi metro is just amazing , the ride is smooth , metro stations are amazing and infact I found the experience better than what I had in New York metro and here lies the opportunity.
Most of the existing infrastructure in western world is atleast two decades old and India can easily adopt the inexpensive yet better new technologies and leap frog in the new era. We are not required to do the experiments which other countries did and simply pick the best of the world technologies which fits into our country. This will not only develop the new infrastructure but it might even give us a competitive edge.
The toughest part here is the political will and issues of corruption which eats into most of the resources. If we are able to cross these hurdles we can have the best basic infrastructure in the world.
Most of us while studying in B schools dint spent much time in studying the intricacies of human behavior and Human resource Management as a subject. Today when I work with daily issues in the company I think it is the toughest and most important element of the business .
You can have very fancy strategies, full involvement of the top management but communicating the message to all the people in the organization and motivating them to implement a particular strategy is not easy . Every man wants importance and good roles, how will you satisfy every one and yet bring them to accept a change. At times even automation which eases jobs of the people brings lot of dissatisfaction amongst the employees as they are left to do very mundane tasks which even a ordinary person can do. After every few years the best people will leave the organization and the others will be left who are not even half as good. How to cope with this issue . Providing them good incentives to stay ?
Incentive structures to motivate the people can back fire. Against the popular perception, money is the least important thing for most of us. In blue collor jobs where the salary are the lowest, people are not concerned about it , they are happy in there 2 meal a day. If you provide them high incentive to improve their productivity, they might work for only 5 days and enjoy the rest 2 days. There monitary needs gets fulfilled in working just 5 days, this leads to mass absenteeism which is not good in any setup.
The great Lehman Brothers gave amazing bonuses to their top management which induced them to take more risks. The ultimate result is known to everyone . So is this fixed salary and a incentive scheme actually works ?
Its been a year when I wrote the first Post on this blog and it really feels great to write this post on the first Birthday of Freedom !
I want to thank all the people who have encouraged me to keep posting on the blog and also spent their valuable time on writting comments and reading the post . Thanks Alot !
Nothing seems real these days, the milk we consume, the sweets we eat, the edible oil we use, the pulses we eat, most of them are getting adulterated as people are poisoning them to make some easy bucks and putting life of thousands of people at risk. This is turning out to be a bigger risk today, even bigger than the external threats which we read in newspapers every day.
Past two weeks have been rather low as I am down due to Typhoid. The reason behind the illness is again spurious water I consumed from our regular supply of Kingfisher Water. Until now it appeared to be genuine but only after both I and my friend got Typhoid, we found out that it’s spurious. The bottle and even the seal will look genuine but some people have perfected this art of selling poison to such an extent that it’s difficult to find out what is original and what is duplicate. So even after paying 3 Rs/ litre for something which should be free for me I am not sure whether it is genuine.
The biggest setback is the lost of trust. Just yesterday my father asked me to buy all the medicines again from some good medical store as he thought the one I bought earlier might be spurious. The story doesn’t end here, as per the latest reports from RBI there is a significant fraction of currency notes which are spurious. So right from food to the currency notes, the complete system is getting poisoned.
Where exactly are we heading, what will technology and growth do if we can’t even tackle such basic issues. How is the government safe guarding the interest of the people who are suffering due to the menace of adulteration? I don’t know any of these answers.
Jaswant Singh might not have had the slightest idea of getting impeached from the BJP party over his praise for the founder of Pakistan. What prompted him to write such a piece of literature which is totally against the ideology of the party which he served for 30 long years is a big question?
The case of Mr. Singh is not the only case where BJP has lost its image in public but unfortunately there had been countless number of cases and incidents off late which had made BJP suffer in public. Ever since the fall of the “ Indian Shining “ campaign BJP has not recovered yet and is not able to provide good competition to Congress. It’s not that they are not able to digest the defeat in the election but I believe their downfall is has more fundamental intrinsic and extrinsic reasons behind it.
Succession Planning : - Not only the corporate world but even the political parties requires proper succession planning , With the ageing of the founding members of BJP there is no clear leader which had been identified to take on the responsibility of the next leader and it had made people fight for posts inside the party . With Gandhi’s as a controlling centre of the Congress it had never been the case with Congress.
Conflict about Hindutva Ideology: - With the growing liberal face of Indian society and a major proportion of Indian population being in mid twenties, it had become rather confusing for the party to stick to their long term political ideology of Hindutva. This confusion has created a loss for BJP as even the staunch supporters of BJP are now confused about what BJP really stands for.
Rise of SP/ BSP: - Success in UP was one of the reason which made BJP prosper in the national politics. There was a time when BJP used to win 50 seats in UP. The rise of BSP and SP had made the equation very tough for BJP in UP where elections are closely integrated with the game of caste politics. Now we have four ways fight in the UP elections with Congress emerging as a strong force. This year assembly elections might be very interesting and there are strong chances of revival of Congress in UP.
Down with typhoid I went to the doctor for a X Ray and while I was returning back home I went to a Fruit vendor to buy some fruits, When I enquired about the prizes , I found them astronomical high. I asked him “ Bhaiya you are quoting really high , what is the reason ? “ He immediately replied in the local language , “ The supply of fruits is reducing due to less rainfall and delayed monsoon , and as more people are falling ill the demand of fruits is increasing which is driving the rate up due to demand supply mismatch “ . I felt that half of the people even after MBA can’t give such an apt reply, what is he doing here selling fruits.
When I was returning back after buying 2 kg of fruits he added one more dimension which was even better , he told me “ As the rate of fruits increases people tends to buy them more ,as the people thing that the dearer the prices better the quality “ . Wow behavioral aspect of fruit selling business!
China is now the major suppliers of Arm and Ammunition to Srilanka which is fighting a War against LTTE. Is it a strategic mistake by India?
India is surrounded by host of unfriendly nations, China being the most powerful and seen as the next superpower after the decline of USA. In such a scenario allowing Srilanka to be used as a new base for China puts India in a scary position. When Rajiv Gandhi sent the Indian Peace Keeping Force to Srilanka it was not seen as a logical decision as we were putting life of our soldiers at risk but if we see the diplomacy behind it, it was a great decision. It prevented Srilanka from becoming a new base for both USA and China.
India should have done what China did for Srilanka , it would have also improved relations between the nation which are becoming sore due to problem of Tamil killings and Tea exports.
Is the pressure of coalition politics that high that we can compromise with the National Security?
Mamta Bannerjee presented a wonderful Railway budget this year with lots of emphasis on improving the railway infrastructure of the country which is coming under pressure due to rising population. Apart from announcement of new trains the schemes for backward areas, budget tickets for students and nonstop trains came as the pleasant surprise this year.
Inspite of all these good announcement there were few sweeping statements made during the budget session, one of them was “Indian Railways are not a profit oriented Enterprise but a Social Enterprise “.I beg to differ on this completely.
Another observation about budgets is the lack of visibility on the implementation aspect of the various schemes. The government commits huge sums of money towards the development schemes but lot of funds leaks during the bureaucratic process. I believe we need a new department for reducing the inefficiencies of the various ministries by developing the implementation strategies of various schemes in close coordination with the ministries.
Sensex may have crashed 600 points after the announcement of the budget, but I still found the budget very responsible although it has fair share of negative policy decisions too .
Positives
1.Government high degree of spending on rural and poor India clearly signals the accountability to the people of the country. They are fulfilling the promises made in the general elections.
2. Infrastructure spending will give boost to the manufacturing industry which is facing trouble due to recession. It will also have increased multiplier effect and will boost the overall economy.
3.Increasing MAT to improve the tax revenues from the company which are avoiding tax due to tax incentives given to them. If we see companies like TCS, INFY, they have established themselves well and don’t really need any tax breaks further. Ideally there should be a limit set on net profits and the time company crosses the limit, it should be taxed as a normal company.
4.Boost to agriculture sector in the form of 7% loan will improve the rural economy further, it will improve the purchasing power of almost 650 million Indians.
Negatives
1.No announcement of disinvestment in both loss and profit making companies is really shocking news. When the country is sitting on huge fiscal deficit and borrowing nearly 34% of the money used for spending, disinvestment could have been a trump card solution which is missed.
2.Imposition of Fringe Benefit Tax was a smart move by the earlier government, by abolishing it tax revenues will be reduced as companies will start paying its employees in the form of benefits and perks to reduce their tax load. This may also increase the fiscal deficit even further.
3.Reducing duties on Plasma TV, Mobile Phones and imported Car - This may be one of the decisions for the galleries, but it really doesn’t help the rising fiscal deficit of the country.
I think the major issue of this budget is clearly the lack of fiscal management by the finance ministry, increased borrowing by the government will cause following effects: -
1.Sovereign Ratings: - Increase fiscal deficit to more than 6%, it may also affect our sovereign ratings and increase the cost of borrowing by the government and the institutions.
2.Crowding out Effect: - Government is borrowing almost 34% of the expenditure from the markets. It will reduce the options for the private sector to get easy funding as it will be competing against the government to secure funds.
3.High Interest Burden: - Around 19% of the budgetary expenditure goes in just paying the interest on the loans taken by the government. High interest burden and increased borrowings is a negative sign for the growth targets of the country.
