Jayakumar Balasubramanian

The scientific inventions have brought too many new things to this world. There is no second thought that these inventions have made life easier. But still this science is not able to answer one question: ‘What is the purpose of human life?’ If we take a minute off from our busy life, we are also left with the same question. The science will not be able to answer this question but Indian philosophy can. Sounds interesting? Read on. The fundamental paradigm of Indian philosophy is built on the basis of ‘Consciousness’. The modern day science is only able to answer ‘rational’ questions but there is a limit to the level of human thinking. The ‘Consciousness’ paradigm is beyond what humans can explain. It’s more to be experienced than explained. Sounds confusing? Let me take a modern day example and then try to explain this concept. In the year 1943 Abraham Maslow proposed human beings hierarchy of needs. Starting from physiological needs Maslow lists safety, love, status and actualization...

Author: Satheesh Krishnamurthy Price: 60 INR ISBN: 81-8368-103-4 Being a techie, I have only exposure to ‘software development life cycle’ and it constitutes only 15% of the ‘product life cycle’. To put it in other words if any product is sold at $100 at the shop, only $15 is spent towards ‘engineering’ that particular product. Assuming that $15 is the profit margin, the next simple and obvious question is where the remaining $70 constitutes to? Also in my previous company we had a wonderfully ‘engineered’ product, but it became a big time ‘failure’ in the market. Why did it fail? What was wrong with our product? These questions have been lingering in my mind for a long time and this book gave me answers. The answer is ‘marketing’ :-) The author (Satheesh Krishnamurthy) starts the book with the answer for my question by saying ‘Marketing is the only difference between the success and failure of your business’ and goes on explaining various aspects of marketing. Starting from the 4Ps o...

The thumb rule of leadership says ‘The success of the real leader is determined by how many leaders he or she has created’. Leadership is all about ‘enabling others’ and this can be applied to all walks of our life ranging from family to corporation. The latest form of leadership is ‘thought leadership’ as the world is in knowledge era. The knowledge is considered as the most powerful entity than anything else. In Indian tech industry I have been observing two leaders and thought of comparing their leadership styles. They are none other than Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji. Looking into them more closely, we can say they both are totally different personalities and their companies reflect their personalities. We can take the following examples: Premji built Wipro as a ‘family owned’ company, whereas Murthy built Infosys as an ‘employee owned’ company. Murthy believed in sharing the wealth with their employees by making them as ‘stakeholders’ which is not true with Wipro. Premji never b...

The IT ‘outsourcing’ boom in India is now slowly turning into ‘off-shoring’ boom. The earlier one was more of doing the ‘non-core’ software development for any of the north-American companies just because of low cost advantage. The later one is more of doing ‘core’ product development from India and it requires real ‘quality’ engineers. If at all India wants to capitalize on this boom, number of quality engineers needs to be increased. About a month back I was watching the ‘walk-the-talk’ program in NDTV in which Mr.S.Ramadorai, CEO of TCS appeared. He gave the real statistics of the ‘skill-shortage’ problem and the excerpt goes as follows: Shekhar Gupta: You employ 60,000 people already, most of them well-educated, technical people. Do you have concerns over where more of these people will come from? Are you beginning to see a problem there? Mr.Ramadorai: I definitely have some worries on this. The reason I'm saying that is, if you're producing six and a half lakhs of engi...

All my friends know very well that I am a ‘vegetarian’ and I would like to be the same. Then you might be wondering what I got to with ‘suguna tender chicken’ and write a blog on it. There is an interesting business story behind it. So please read on. During December 2005 I got a chance to visit Coimbatore and observed that there is huge number of ‘suguna chicken’ boards are kept in small road side chicken shops. I thought it might be a local chicken brand and forgot about it. But last week when I went to my native town Erode (Which is 100 kilometers from Coimbatore) I could see the same boards (Same font, same logo similar to McDonalds or Pizza hut boards) appearing in my home town road side chicken shops as well. Apart from that, I observed couple of things in local Tamizh news papers: A column named ‘Today’s suguna broiler chicken rate’ and it was mentioning that day’s broiler chicken rate per kg. Lot of local farmers gave half page color advertisements (imagine of doing it in a sm...

It’s been three months since I am into ‘serious’ blogging. For people who are reading my blogs would have found my blogs are more India centric. I feel it is the rite time for me to start blogging on global technology and business trends and you can see more blogs in these areas as well. Stay tuned…

This weekend there was a career workshop organized by the ‘Silicon India’ group. This is the fifth time they are organizing such a career workshop and job fair. I attended this workshop for the fourth time and this time the theme was on ‘tech trends’. Country heads and senior directors from various organizations spoke about product development, web 2.0 and software services. It was pretty good to get senior people’s perspectives especially in the area of product development in India. Since the enterprise and retail markets in India is not showing immediate potential for software products, most of the Indian software product companies are building products for global markets from India which is a challenging task. Lack of customer awareness, time-zone difference, attrition and shortage of senior technical people are some of the problem areas that need to be addressed. It was good to listening on how various organizations are dealing with these problems. The organizers ‘Silicon India’, i...

Author: Chanakya (Translation and comments by Vishwamitra Sharma) Price: 80 INR This is a wonderful book, contains couplets written by Chanakya. Chanakya is considered to be one of the brilliant strategist and economist of all time. Due to his political wisdom and diplomatic skills he is called as ‘Machiaville of India’. The Dos and Don’ts suggested by Chanakya in these couplets are very much true even today. I could also compare these couplets with ‘Thirukkural’ (In Tamizh) written by Thiruvalluvar. This book once again proves the ‘superior’ thought process of Indians which they had thousands of years ago. But in this book Chanakya considers and comments on women in a very bad fashion which I am not able to agree. Following are some of my favorites from this book: • An industrious person can never be poor, always keeping God in mind keeps one away from sin, the silence doest not let quarrels appear and an ever vigilant person has no cause for fear. • The following six things are...

For quiet some time my mind is thinking about this ‘AND’ phenomenon wherever I go. It may sound very abstract but I could feel this pattern in almost every walk of life. Let me give some examples: 1. In his bestselling famous book, ‘Built to last’ author James Collins talks about successful habits of Visionary companies. The author has observed that these visionary companies are having a great ‘Vision’ at the same time have strong ‘Action’ towards the vision. So the ‘Vision AND Action’ is important for any organization to be successful. 2. Another bestselling book ‘Seven habits of highly effective people’, author Stephen Covey talks about ‘Dependence’ and ‘Independence’ of human beings. In the initial stages human beings were ‘dependent’ on each other and promoted collective living and sharing. But after some centuries the ‘independent’ paradigm started, driven by various ideologies. In this book the author argues, in this knowledge area there is another new paradigm emerging cal...

Believe me, its true! Indian railway minister Mr.Lalu prasad yadav is going to take classes in prestigious Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad. He is not going to talk about ‘How to make Japan as Bihar in a day’ or ‘Bainsa’. He is going to give lectures about how he has turned around Indian railways (which according to him ‘Sone-ki-panchi’) to a profit making mode. Leaving the fun apart, let us get into statistics: Indian Railways is the largest commercial employer in the world, with more than 1.6 million employees and it is one of the largest rail networks on the world. As per the 2006 railway budget Indian Railway’s revenue touched 12.3 billion USD which is really a huge number in any scale. After Lalu became railway minister, the cash reserves of railways rose to 13,000 crores compared to 240 crores in 2001-2002. Indian Railways is one of the ‘sleeping giant’, and its complete potential is yet to be harnessed fully. The success of densely populated countries like Japa...

MindTree to raise $70M via IPO Mindtree consulting is planning to raise 70 million USD in 2007, which is one of the long awaited public issues. Founded in 1999 by Mr.Ashok Soota along with senior executives from Wipro, this second generation mid-sized IT company has successfully sailed through the difficult '2000 bubble' times. I have been observing this company for quiet some time feel their IPO will open door for another 'wealth-creation' drive because of the following reasons: 1. Compared to other services companies Mindtree have their 'Services + Consulting' combination working for them, which is the next big thing. By being an early mover in the consulting space mindtree has created a strong and robust business model. 2. The senior leadership team are from Wipro but with an 'Infosys' mindset. They believe in shared wealth creation and sharing it with the society. By design they have made that the company is no-one's property. This has already ...

The infosys 'Think Flat' link After reading the book 'The world is flat' by Tom Friedman, I am able to see the 'flat' word in many places. The funda behind the flat world goes like this: The invention of Internet and emerging countries like India, China, Russia and Brazil has literally made the world look flat. The 'open trade' policy has added about 3 billion people to the existing talent pool which is totally reshaping the world. From Indian perspective Infosys is one of the companies benefited most because of this flat world. They have started the 'Think flat' blog (See the link in the beginning of the blog), where they are sharing their 'flat world' experiences with general public. This blog contains entries written by Nandan Nilekani and looks really cool. These kind of initiatives are very vital in promoting the 'Flat world' concept inside India.