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 ...

ITTIAM (I Think Therefore I Am) is one of the 'First Generation' technology product companies started in India. Mr.Srini Rajam along with some of his collegues from Texas Instruments (TI) Bangalore started this company in 2000. Recently I got a chance to read his presentation titled 'Entrepreneurship and National Pride' which he presented in BangOnIT lecture series organized by IIIT-Bangalore. I have only one word explanation for his presentation: 'PASSION'. The presentation is available at: http://www.iiitb.ac.in/BangOnIT/archives.htm

In the year 2000 I got a change to attend a series of Pre-Placement-Talks (PPT in our college ‘lingo’) by various organizations during their campus recruitment process. I used to get very excited when the HR person gives this PPT about their organization in a nice and flashy way. After some time I formed an opinion that HR people are the ‘Driving Force’ behind the organization and wanted to become a HR person and be the ‘Face’ of the company. But after a year when I entered the tech industry I got a shock of my life to know that the HR is not having that much amount of ‘high-visibility’ in the organization as I was thinking. Very recently I got a chance to read the book ‘WINNING’ by Jack Welch (ex-CEO of GE) and he has mentioned that the HR function should be given the importance of a Vice-President (VP) and HR function is next to the Chief-Financial-Officer (CFO) in the company’s priority list. This information confused me even more and the question ‘What exactly is the role of HR in ...

When it comes to investing we need to evaluate the ‘Macro’ (Top-down) and ‘Micro’ (Bottom-up) analysis of the instrument and real estate is no exception to that. One of my friends has done the macro analysis of Tamil-Nadu real estate and found that Chennai and Coimbatore are having very good potential as political, economical and industrial factors are looking very positive in these cities. Following are some of the information he has collected in the recent times. Posting here for public usage. The Coimbatore district has segments like textile, auto ancillary, hospitality, IT and polutry. The textile industry has already grown but the growth would be exponential in the coming years with the textile outsourcing boom starting. Already Coimbatore textile industry is worth 1 billion USD. It also enjoys a good hold in engineering sectors because of the trust in the infrastructure it would have a solid growth in the coming years. The future big bets are in IT and hospitality (Health due to ...

When it comes to quality nobody can deny the contributions made by Japanese. Especially in the automobile and electronic industries they literally re-wrote the meaning of ‘Competition’ by innovating ‘Low-cost-high-quality’ products and consistently demonstrating their leadership in those businesses. Today Hondas and Toyotas are the best example of ‘Build-inside-sell-outside’ concept and making General Motors (GM) and Ford Motors to struggle for their business in their own country and I always believe Indian software firms should adapt this concept and build products for global markets. When I was thinking in these lines recently came across the quality ‘Poka Yoke’ invented by Japanese. Poka Yoke is a quality management concept developed by a Matsushita manufacturing engineer named Shigeo Shingo to prevent human errors from occurring in the production line. Poka yoke (pronounced ‘poh-kah yoh-kay’) comes from two Japanese words – ‘yokeru’ which means ‘to avoid’, and ‘poka’ which means ‘i...

My 55 year old mother watches 3 mega-serials every day in TV and feels very uncomfortable if she misses a single episode of any of those three. Apart from watching, frequent discussions on these mega serials happen with neighborhood aunties. I am sure people who are reading this blog would also feel either their mom or wife or aunties are also addicted to this ‘Megaserialobia’. According to me this Megaserialobia is cultivating huge amount of ‘Negative’ and ‘Depressive’ thoughts among people. The pattern and the objective of these mega-serials are very simple: Tap people’s emotions and make a huge business out of it. The mega-serial work starts with hiring 35+ year old cine actresses who lost almost all her opportunities acting in cinemas and make a ‘Heroine’ centric story around her. Then this 35+ year old ‘So-Called-Heroine’ gets married and moves into her in-law’s place. There she faces all sorts of problems ranging from humiliation to criminal case thanks to her ‘In-laws-and-co’ a...

Title: Five point someone Author: Chetan Bhagat Price: 90 INR This book is written by Chetan Bhagat about life in IITs. Three friends (Alok, Ryan and Hari) get into IIT and start thinking in wrong direction and get into all sorts of ‘funny’ things instead of focusing on studies. Finally they somehow land up in some or the other kind of jobs and starts their real lives. I normally read the non-fiction types of books and this is one of the fiction books I have read after a long long time. But I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book because it took back to my college days, which is really the best four years in my life. Anyone who read this book would get the same experience of the movie ‘Dil-chahtha-hai’. The most important point about this book is the author has maintained the IIT ‘Lingo’ throughout the book. Every college has its own set of ‘lingo’ which is spoken only inside the college and only people who have gone through this can enjoy the ‘College-specific’ lingo. Words like ...

The World Bank has declared India as the 12th richest country in the world during the year 2005 based on its GDP numbers. According to the Times of India article India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has touched 785.47 Billion dollars in the year 2005 and India is the only south Asian country in the list. This is really good news indeed. We are harnessing the results for the golden economic reforms that we have made in the year 1991. Today India is one among the hot-spot destinations as far as Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) are concerned and I am able to witness the raise of educated Indian middle class in front of my eyes. Having said that the economic growth alone cannot be called as ‘real’ growth because we are still fighting against fundamental problems like poverty, illiteracy, health-care and infrastructure in almost all parts of the country. The vibrant economy is helping me to buy a Honda City car but my poor governance is making me drive in the worst roads. So the nee...

Title: Vandharghal Vendrargal (Tamizh) – They came they conquered Author: Madhan Price: 90 INR This is one of the well written history books that I have read till now. Basically this book talks about the Mughal history and their invasion in India. Starting from Gajini (9 AD) to Bahadoor shah (Last mughal king) Muslims ruled India for close to 800 years. Author Madhan is a cartoonist and author and been writing in the ‘Anandha Vikatan’ (Famous tamizh weekly magazine) for long time. His sense of humor shows up in every chapter and it is the main reason that makes this history book more interesting. Basically the Mughals belong to Afghanistan and Gajini was one of the first people to come to India and take away huge amount of wealth. This is followed by various sultans and then Mughal kings. He has explained the jahangir-noorjahan, shajahan-mumthaj love stories wonderfully. Inspite of hardcore fighters it is really interesting to know about the ‘Romantic’ side of these mughal kings. Apart...

Some time back I wrote a blog titled ‘Ji Huzur to Whatsup dude?’ in which I wrote about various types of work cultures that is prevailing in India at the same point of time which I don’t think we will get to see in any other part of the world. Going some more deep into this topic I found some more interesting patterns emerging in the Knowledge industry as of today. The pattern says ‘Everyone wants to become a manager’. For all I know and experienced people curse their managers when they were non-managers and hated the managers to the core by telling all sorts of reasons. But still everyone wants to be come manager. But why? Before getting into the answer let us take a point from leadership as well as from history. At first the word ‘Leadership’ can be broadly classified into ‘Power Leadership’ and ‘Inspirational Leadership’. The former is best explained with the Industrial era where the manager or the leader is given some amount of power using which he will get the job done from their...

Title: Savarkar and Hidhutva Author: A.G.Noorani ISBN: 8187496282 This book is about one of the controversial leaders in Indian history, Vinayak Damodhar Savarkar who is popularly known as ‘Veer Savarkar’ and the ‘Hidhutva’ ideology which was coined by him. This book also talks about Gandhiji’s assassination and Savarkar’s involvement with that. This book is written by A.G.Noorani who is a famous columnist in ‘Frontline’ magazine. Since the book contains very serious stuff the terminologies also pretty complex to understand. In the year 1928 Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’ which according to him the perfect political ideology for governing India. This ‘Hindutva’ is totally different from ‘Hinduism’. The Hinduism is all about the religious aspects which explains the principles, philosophies which is been existing for thousands of years. This has to do with what has mentioned in Vedas, Upanishads and various Hindu holy books. But ‘Hindutva’ is all about political ideology and Savark...

A month back I wrote a blog about Small-And-Medium Businesses (SMB ) in India and the importance of technology in enabling these businesses to scale and perform better. After writing the blog I got to know that KPN travels ( https://www.kpntravels.in/ ) have launched their website and bus tickets can be booked online. For people who don’t know KPN travels, it is one of the biggest privately operated bus services covering almost all parts of southern India. I have been traveling in their buses for the past give years and I can bet that their business will grow in multiples because of their online system as most of the people travel in their buses are ‘Bangalore-techies’ for visiting their native places over the weekend. This is a perfect example for the ‘SMB + Technology’ combination which I am sure is a ‘Killer combination’ in Indian context. Also compared to other businesses, travel business in India seems to be the leader as far as adapting technology is concerned. According to ‘Digi...