Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Microsoft's chairman and founder Bill Gates retired from the company yesterday . The 52 year old will Gates spend major portion of his time for philanthropy along with his wife on their Melinda Gates foundation. With his major stake in Microsoft, Gates will serve as a non-executive chairman with one day a week spent for Microsoft. According to me this truly marks end of a great era with great achievements and contributions. As a Harvard dropout, Gates wore multiple hats as an Entrepreneur, Technologist, Strategist and a great business thinker. He also set a great example for thousands of young entrepreneurs throughout the world that an individual with his dream can significantly change the world around. Hats off to this great person! My memory travels back to my hostel room, where we used to have intense debate about Microsoft and Bill Gates. Many of my friends used to argue that Gates has stolen the idea of Windows (from Apple), built software with loads of bugs, monopolized the ...

This is the third book by Chetan Bhagat. I have never read fiction ever since the reading habit caught into me. Chetan's Five point someone (FPS) changed my habit by taking me back to my good old college days. With similar expectations I bought this book and I would say I am fairly happy with the book. The most interesting point about Chetan is the canvas he uses to paint the whole story. He used business, cricket and religion as a background in this book (similar to IIT in FPS). The story starts with three friends Omi, Ishan and Govind belonging to lower middle class family in Ahmadabad. These folks are perceived as not-so-smart kind among the neighbourhood. With his passion towards building business Govind pulls in his buddies to start a shop, selling cricket accesories inside the temple's shopping complex owned by Omi's uncle. Ishaan (the local cricket buff) offers free coaching tips to customers, thereby creating a good reason for people to visit their shop. As the busi...

The reason behind any successful company is very simple : customer satisfaction. With global competition increasing day-by-day, companies are going beyond just satisfying customers. Companies are focusing to provide nice 'experience' to their customers by taking care of very small things. Recently I came across one such experience. I have been using Airtel's mobile connection for the past five years. This Tuesday (24th June) marked one more year of my existence in the earth. I had some a query regarding this month's mobile bill and dialed 121 (Airtel's customer support) for clarifying it.Upon choosing the basic option "Information regarding your account", an automated message promptly said "Airtel family wishes you a very warm and happy birthday". It was a pleasant shock for me to hear that message just by choosing the basic option. Within seconds, the automated software could recognize my number, match with my date of birth and play appropriate...

Followed by his famous book 'The high performance Entrepreneur' , Mindtree chief gardener Subroto Bagchi has released his second book titled 'Go kiss the world' yesterday. The book release function was held in Crossword book store in Brigade road and I was present there. Subroto formally released the book by handing over the first set of copies to Sudha Murthy, Girish Karnad and VG Siddhartha (see photographs below). Followed by the release, he read some chapters for the audience followed by a Q & A session. The phrase 'Go kiss the world' was told to Subroto by his mother when she was in her deathbed. These simple yet powerful words have become the mantra for Subroto's life who has become a successful Entrepreneur, coming from a very humble background. In this book he has used his personal life as a canvas to provide some of the most imporant life lessons to budding young professionals. I have bought a copy for myself and skimmed thro' the first chap...

I was supposed to post this entry last week. As I was not well, it got delayed by a week. Hope it is not too late to write about IPL. The first edition of Indian Premier League (IPL) concluded last week with Rajastan Royals emerging as champions. The Royals played excellent cricket in each department as a team with very few super starts. Of course one cannot rule out the great leadership provided by Shane Warne to these young lads. In spite of having many of hard-hitting players like Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds, Shahid Afridi, Herschell Gibbs the Hyderabad Deccan chargers finished last in the tally. This once again proves my belief that I don't need a team with super heroes to do great things. All I require is a committed set of young players, who can perform well as a team. Ever since IPL was announced, it paved way for lot of media coverage and controversies around it. Many called it as a total money spinner with cricket given a backset and auctioning players was consi...

Check out my post on Toilets in Indian trains before reading this. Yesterday I was in Bangalore railway station to receive my parents. As I was wandering in the waiting room, found the photograph (see the pic below) of the letter written by Akil Chandra Sen. Small initiative, big difference!

This morning I was reading June edition of 'Business world' and found an interesting article titled 'Bilingual Way'. The article talks about a survey conducted by National University of Education Planning and Administration. The survey shows that 74% increase in the number of enrollments from 5.47 million students in 2003-2004 to 9.51 million in 2005-2006 -- in upper-primary sections of English medium schools across India. The article goes on saying that the results has come at the cost of regional languages like Marathi, Telugu and Kannada and suggests that its time we moved away from the 'either or' debate and lookat bilingualism as a real alternative for education. The BW article has given statistical evidence, which is in sync my previous blog post .