Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Technorati Profile

The salary for Indian knowledge workers is going up and up. So the question comes to everybody’s mind is ‘Where is it heading? How sustainable this growth is?’ The salary inflation is reflecting in everything we see today. Let me give a simple example: To hire an Embedded Systems engineer we interview about 30 people in my organization. Even after hiring the organization is having no guarantee that the Engineer will accept the job offer and join the organization. There are multiple reasons why this is happening: 1. At present, too many jobs are chasing too few ‘good’ engineers in India. So the trend is to have at least 3-4 job offers in hand and take the final decision based on salary. 2. Among Asian countries India is witnessing maximum amount of salary raise of 15% year-on-year . This is mainly because of the double digit growth rate Indian companies are witnessing in the recent quarters. 3. The rupee is becoming weaker day by day. Organizations which are dealing in foreign currencie...

Author: Thomas Friedman ISBN: 0-713-99878-4 This is one of the wonderful bestseller in the recent past. This book is all about the Globalization and how it is reshaping the whole world and I would recommend this book as a MUST READ for people who are working in the knowledge industry. The author Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist in New-York times and made an extensive effort in this book to bring out the big picture of Globalization. According to the author opening up Indian and Chinese economy has resulted in new world where everyone is enabled with huge amount of information because of the power of the Internet. Because of this the plane for competition is leveled among the different geographies made the world ‘Flat’. The author has traveled to India, China and some other Asian countries and presented the first hand information in this book. Apart from this the author has given a very good picture of how the technology is enabling various businesses. The most interesting part of...

In January 2005 the state of California announced the location 367, Addison Avenue in the Palo Alto area as ‘ Birthplace of silicon valley ’. Please don’t jump into a conclusion this must be a hi-fi museum or a huge building. It is a small garage (See the photo) where two youngsters Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard from Stanford University started their company Hewlett Packard (HP) in the year 1938. Today HP is an 80 billion USD company and everybody knows the contributions HP has made to the technology world. After almost 60 years later another two youngsters from the same Stanford University ( Lary Page and Sergey Brin ) founded another company called ‘Google’ and I don’t need to tell anything more about that Google. The commonality between HP and Google is the ‘Stanford University’ which played a very significant role in nurturing these great people. After some time I was reading an essay by Paul Graham in which he clearly mentioned the importance of Stanford University and University...

ADVANCED INDEPENDENCE DAY WISHES !! Ahitak jiska khoon na khaula Woh khoon nahi paani hai Jo desh ke kaam na aaye Bekar woh jawani hai

The globalization and knowledge industry have brought in huge amount of opportunities to people especially in countries like India. At the same time, growing competition at workplace is causing mental and physical stress to people. Long working hours, late-night teleconferences are part of life now and they cannot be avoided. Even though organizations proclaim they provide so called ‘Work-Life-Balance’ to their employees I personally feel it is more of a ‘FUTTA’. Everyone knows that in order to keep up with the competition we need to work hard and no other way. In this scenario it is up to individuals to keep themselves physically and mentally fit. I have been struggling with this for the past four years and sharing my learning’s in this blog. When it comes to doing fitness most of us (Including me) start saying ‘Where is the time?’. I very well agree that the time is less but we should ‘Create’ time by ‘Mental Creation’. Stephen Covey in his ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ says ...

Author: Mukhil Price: 60 INR The title ‘Naadu Kattiya Nayagan’ means ‘The hero who built his country’ and it is all about Lee-Kuan-Yew who built Singapore from scratch. In 1960s Singapore was considered as a ‘Third world’ country and it had no address in the world arena. But in a matter of forty years Singapore has emerged one of the ‘Giants’ in the world and surpassed all its limitations. This remarkable ‘Nation building’ was achieved because of a single person’s vision and his consistent action towards that vision. That single person is no other than Lee-Kuan-Yew. Basically Singapore was a part of Malaysia and became a separate country in 1959. During that time Lee-Kuan-Yew formed his People-Action-Party (PAP) and became the prime minister of Singapore. From then he ruled Singapore for close to four decades and completely transformed the country. Starting with good governance he went on achieving excellence in Economy, Education, and Tourism which made Singapore as a ‘developed’ c...

I have a strong opinion that media (Both print and non-print) in India mainly focuses on ‘Negative’ aspects and written my reflections on the same in my blog ‘Moms and Megaserials’. For quiet some time I was wondering why there is not much effort put in making a ‘Positive’ media? Recently I found a company called ‘New Horizon Media’ ( http://www.newhorizonmedia.co.in ) which is making ‘Positive’ attempts in that direction. Before getting into what they do let me give some information on the people behind this company. This is started by three guys and two of them (Mr.Badri and Mr.Satya) got education from IIT Madras followed by PhD from Cornell University. These guys co-founded Cricinfo ( www.cricinfo ) and sold it off to Australian company ‘Wisden’. After cricinfo they are now into ‘Media’ domain and started publishing high-quality and low-cost books in regional language (Tamil). They have published about 150 books on various topics in a matter of just two years. I have just finished...

It’s all happening for Infosys. I was watching ‘Business Leader Awards’ in NDTV profit followed by 25th year celebrations of Infosys. Infosys got the ‘Most respected IT company award’ from NDTV profit. Also during their 25th anniversary celebration they have announced 126 crore bonus for their employees. Yesterday was another memorable day for Infosys when they rang the NASDAQ opening bell remotely from Mysore. It’s all happening for Infosys and it is standing tall among its customers, employees and shareholders. My mind started thinking about this company and its founders and thought of penning down my thoughts. According to me Infosys has broken huge numbers of barriers and myths of Indian businesses: To start with Indian businesses are mainly ‘family driven’ business where the promoter’s family holds the maximum amount of stake in the company. Also when the promoter retires their son or daughter takes over as the next chief executive of the company. Infosys is the FIRST company to ...