HOUSE OF THOUGHTS (HOT)

What is the cost of buying or making the goods cheaper and cheaper, day after day?!

Do you think this question is ridiculous? Think again!

When you buy a toy for your kid sibling or buy a cool t-shirt or a frozen food at a very very cheap - what is the price you (we) are paying?!

By hesitating to pay a couple of dollars or few hundred rupees more to a product we are actually paying a greater price either in the form of personal health issues or destroying our ecosystem – polluting our environment.

To know more, read about how Chinese industries operate – recent product recalls etc! There are issues with Indian industries too (textile and dye industries especially)!

It is chicken and egg case, wherein when you ask the company why they give products which are cheap (lesser quality) to customers they put it on customers and vice versa.

Soon, there may be a day, when even if we are willing to pay more to an environmental and ‘living being’ (not only human) friendly product – suppliers may not be able to provide it! Reason – very resource would have been polluted by then!

Do we want this scenario? What can we do as customers or vendors to avoid this situation?

It is said in B-schools that QUALITY as a distinguishing factor is long gone – now it is taken for granted by customers; I don’t think so! Quality & environment friendliness will capture the mind of a customer even today and definitely tomorrow!

Just a thought in H.O.T!

Can a NEWS channel be creative? Yes, example CNN-IBN. Their program SUMMER SHOW DOWN is one such example. A reality program concentrating on real issues and how civic bodies react to public’s request.

More than the result of the program, I am happy that this program would expose the inefficiency & reluctance of these bodies.

I am all praise for CNN-IBN (as of now!). Their website www.ibnlive.com is also good. Keep it up CNN-IBN!

NDTV better watch out; in the process of making your channel / network an entertainment network, do not lose ground on your core competence!

I have been paying more attention to advertisement now-a-days and it is quiet interesting! In the process I have become an ‘Adophile’ (Ad-O-Phile’)!  

This wacky idea of ‘Toothpaste for girls’ came up when I was watching Clinic Plus Shampoo ad for MEN! Before I pen down this wacky idea, I wanted to check if there had been any such product (crazy man!). Yup, there had been a product from Colgate in 1999; a toothpaste for young girls. It was branded or co-branded with Barbie – COLGATE BARBIE toothpaste! 

But apart from this product, I could not locate any product which was meant for girls. I think the days are not far – we have every segment tailored to girls from health care to skin care so why not dental care! 

It would be really interesting to see the ads for this product! Will it be in the same lines as “GUYS FALLING FOR THESE GIRLS ONCE THEY TALK….” – most of the ads are based on this theme only!  

Let me wait and watch! (There should be some reason why HLL and P & G are waiting!)

DERMI KOOL SOAP 

We have seen line extensions, brand extensions and this Dermi Kool is one such thing. I guess people want to replicate J & J’s success in their companies. I appreciate the wishful thinking but what about the results! Dermi kool powder is a popular brand in prickly heat segment and this soap has also been positioned in the same line. If they had wanted to position it as a seasonal product, then they have done an OK job!Further comments in future columns!

HONDA UNICORN 

This new advertisement is a serious waste of money for two reasons 1) the ad is very bad 2) the so called NEW UNICORN is a mere sticker job and for that the company wasting several lakhs! Instead they could have spent this money in PD!

Hero Honda Karizma - Please refer to the case of UNICORN – same sticker job and money wasted on ad!

BAJAJ Discover & Pulsar

BAJAJ bike stable is getting crowded not with bikes of different characters but with variants of same bike. I don’t know at this point of time whether it is good or bad to have this strategy. Also from the amount / kind of ads they are doing, I understand they are concentrating strongly on more profitable segment of POWER BIKES. It is quite understandable but should they have bikes clustered like this – Discover 125, 135. Pulsar 150, 180, 200 and the upcoming 220.

Will post my comments soon!

Few books have made an impact in me like this book “ A Soldeir’s Diary – KARGIL – The Inside Story” by Harinder Baweja. I first read this book in Feb 2001 and after nearly 6 years read it again – the impact is more now!

Here the author explains and narrates the amount of hardship our Indian soldiers went through. We saw in the television the reverberating sounds of our BOFORS pounding the peaks (giving cover fire for our progressing soldiers) but if you read this book, you will come to know what the actual situation was, when KARGIL started. Any war is gruesome and the initial period is even worse. As I read the book, the grim reality of the war struck me heavily.

A brief excerpt from the book: [Page 46]

“….what kind of fighting strength did that leave us with? One third of a company, sometimes more, was required for casualty evacuation. We had been here just over a week and had already had three nasty encounters with the enemy. Four had already fallen in an artillery attack on our langar at base camp. And now this. Stretchers slowly weaving their way down towards the Advance Dressing Station. Six dead and so many injured and we were still searching for the enemy and their location. Where were they? How many were they?

 …I listened to the conversation between the wounded and the stretcher-bearers. It is testimony to their despair and frustration:

     “I’ll die, I’ll die.
Saale, they almost roasted us alive,” groaned a voice from the stretcher. It belonged to a jawan who has suffered multiple gunshot wounds.

    “Don’t worry, we are almost there,” replied one of the stretcher-bearers, all four of them trying to quicken their step. They had been walking for one hour and it would take another three.

      “Hoya ki?” (What happened?), asked one.

     “They (enemies) were well equipped and sitting very high. How will we ever reach them?”

   “Did you see them?”

  “Nahi yaara (No my friend), you can only hear them, their weapons,” he groaned, “pata nahi (don’t know), where they are. How are they managing to stay in so much snow? How could they carry machine guns up these heights?”

  “They must have orders too. From some karnail, some jarnail” (some colonel, some general).

   “Theek hai, we are faujis. We have to fight or why are we wearing this uniform.”

   “I am willing to die in a war. But what kind of a war is this? We don’t even know who we are fighting…”

  “Why don’t they fight like men, the bastards. Why can’t they face us. I’ll kill them, I sear I’ll kill the cowards even if I have to give my own life in the process.”

   “My wife wrote to me. She thinks I am still in the Valley. It was Guddi’s third birthday. This must be the first time I forgot my daughter’s birthday. Must send a letter home.”

    “Will you tell them where you are?”

     “I don’t know. I think it is better we do. Harpal (other fauji) does not live far from my village and soon my family will find out that we are in Kargil.”

     “May be another unit will replace us. How many more casualties can we suffer?”

……so they went……

Ok, what’s the point in writing about this now, you may ask. Point is simple, what can I do or we do to make the GOVERNING bodies more proactive, not only during such situations but even during peace times and for environmental causes. Why these? Any Governing body will answer only we shout, scream or take them into task. This idea is getting further reinforced as I see the day to day happenings, only when CNN-IBN or any other news channel exposes corrupt people, do the authorities take action. Imagine if all of us can keep the authorities in check, my INDIA, our INDIA would be even better.

With the current proliferation of information (both access & broadcast), citizen journalists (CNN-IBN); I believe we can make them work for our good with greater dedication.

p.s:

1. As I read the story, I realized that there was lethargy, pathetic wrong assessment of situation, lack of information (correct information) and many more. If only, many had raised the issue or someone who had voice, raised this point…not few lives but MANY LIVES could have been saved.

2. There are plenty of lessons from management angle too. A must read for all MBAs!!!

• Last year emprical study was an option for us
• 5 or 6 students took it and worked for more than 6 months [I dint take it !]
• The studies did by students were mostly or completely in the area of ’Leadership’
• Students can choose their own topic (I think for JC’s it would be leadership or some concepts in OB again)
• For this ‘literature survey’ is to be done - this is an important & time consuming step!
• Decide on your quality of work - One of my batch mates Prethy submitted her work in IIM(I).
• After the approval, go for basic study and decide on questionnaire.
• Designing questionnaire is very important - this requires lot of study - depends on your topic too!
• Use the questionnaire as an input and play with statistical tools and find out if there is any co-relation with the entities or fields in your study
• Crusaders used normal excel to SPSS, so which tool to use depends on your interest and study.
• Then inference!

People who did emprical last year Preethy, Neha, Gayatri, Srinidhi [I remember only these guys!]

Some topics which come to my mind:

 - Pygmalion effect [ I worked on this, interesting]

- Political leadership [this was not touched last year]

Only these two come to my mind now….others can guide u even better

……check out questionpro.com n other online survey forums….exporting data from here is a problem….there are other limitations too…as the work starts all these things will show up

hmmm….please check with the guide or choose the topic in such a way that…it does not clash with your Market Research course work [I guess Term 3 or 4]. In MR you can choose any topic you want..there only the use of various tools is looked at n how you make inferences!!! Jus a thought! 

Cheers!

   1) Google strikes again, this time with its announcement about a slide show application (browser based) and acquisition of sweden based company “Marratech” - an e-meeting software company! - I am yet to see a news flash about this! .  Surprising thing is Marratech is not a browser based software firm but more off downloadable software with lot of features. Why surprising? Google has more list towards browser based product than a desktop version / downloadable fully-loaded product. So what this combo is capable off?

Let me think about it and try finding some missing links

2) Google Radio - Adsense gets into radio and its (Google’s) acquisition of DMarc is paying off!!!

                 3) Google becomes more personal again - Hurraaaay!!!! Yup, look into my personalized home page Superb right? Not only in looks but also in the search results. Based on my choice of hometown (Google Maps) search results are shown!!! More to come……

I was reading few articles in INFORMATION WEEK magazine; it was a purposeful browse about Google & its strategy. I found some interesting facts and so this article. We see & find Google to be simple & cool to use but behind the seeming simplicity is a mash-up of internally developed software, made-to-order hardware, artificial intelligence, obsession with performance, and an unorthodox approach to people management!  

Frugality is in Google’s culture – surprising? It tries & achieve maximum output out-off its servers. For this they do lot tweaking of open source code (there is another reason for them to use open source), developing their own software (Map Reduce, Big Table etc) and even working closely with chip manufacturers to increase aggregate throughput and performance per watt! (Google about CORE DUO stuff you will find more about the performance measures). This is all for us who demand speedy reply to our queries!

Tidbits :

MapReduce - a programming model to simplify processing and create large data sets;

BigTable - a system for storing and managing massive amounts of data; Sawzall, an interpreted programming language for analyzing large data sets in a distributed computing environment;

Google File System - a distributed file system for data-intensive applications;

Google Workqueue - a system that groups queries and schedules them fordistributed processing.

People in Google tweak lot of products including kernel of linux to achieve maximum output with high reliability. [They created their own web server instead of using APACHE servers]

Surprisingly they are not using their own software for one thing – FINANCE! They are using Oracle finance for this!

What’s all this to do with management? When we learn about strategy there is always a thing about

 in-house work & outsourced work. When I see what’s currently Google is doing, it is doing more of in-house (where performance is P1) than relying on third party.

Since Google works on open source (for strategically important areas) getting details about its number of users or any other resource is hard. Number of data centers & servers with Google is also a question of contention – depending on who counts it & how it is classified is said number of servers with Google varies from 2.5 lakh to 4 lakh plus and it is increasing. (I will be soon writing about Datacenters).

This is an excellent learning for me as to how to keep even physical asset hush-hush.

More on Google to follow!

Bala – A cool guy, a great dancer, a movie buff (seriously he even watches Ajith’s movie J) and a person with high energy level. 

Balaji R – He is one of the few who make me laugh, you would just enjoy his company. IT head of ADCOM. Super Singer and lot more. 
 

Neha – Oh my GOD! This girl rocks when she dances and an altruist by nature. Though she is in India she works in American Standard Time J. She seems to be innocent (but she is not!) and she has been my bakra. Will soon post a video J 

Vasu – She gave me the name VATSA. She is awesome character with very very high energy level. The decibel level in Great Lakes shoots up when she is around! Her project for Brand Management brought laurels to her..he he J  Nagi / Nagu – We both have one common thread, we SLEEP in class – whenever Professor speaks. A finance wiz and dedicated person. He is a PICASA man (reason?! J) 

Sainath – An intellectual person. He hardly laughs. Point to be noted he is not lured by girls – so he says!!! 

Balapradeep – THE GURU 

Gaurav – Amazing GUGU. He plays with numbers like anything and he is known for his mumbaikher’s language! He found a pair in junior crusaders!!! He he 

Srivathsan Raghavan – Smart guy!

Gokul - Mr Maddy

Shriram - Fun loving guy & unfortunately I have been at the receiving end most of the time - through his mimickry