Muses of Murari

This book is perfect for business section in any library or book shop. And I think there are some personal take-aways also packaged in. This book is basically about how some of the good companies became great companies. This book is output of research done by Jim Collins and his team studying 11 companies, why they became great from good and comparing directly to their competitors, pointing out aspects that made difference. The book laid down simple, insightful and down to earth facts in chapters, about how great companies are made.

I expected the book to be full of business jargon. But it did not turned out that way. It is pretty much simple in language and way the content explained. Chapters discussed, on some of the common qualities of the top management, especially of the CEO of these 11 companies, which were really differentiators, on finding the right people and then finding out what to do (I am sounding oversimplified here). Also on Stockdale paradox, core values, Hedgehog concept, discipline across the company, little effects due to technological changes and many more. All explained with real “good to great” companies examples.

Author ended the book with emphasis on meaningful work. He cites an example of a person highly qualified, MBA from top notch University in US working as a high school coach and helping school kids to achieve in sports. Meaningful life form meaningful work and deriving satisfaction in tranquility, is the message author wants to convey. Overall the book is very good read.

America is nervous about its future generation. It thinks its future generation is not equipped enough like that of India’s and China’s in the area of education to face new dynamics of 21st century. This is some kind of irony. Here, in India, there is huge hue and cry about poor educational system and the enormous public awareness of improving it slowly sprouting in, among citizens and government alike. In other hand, America is fearing our educational system!

Certainly, America worried about numbers. Think this way, the number of bright students passing out every year in India in good colleges/universities is huge. There is good possibility that this figure exceeds the entire US student population passing out in a year. Same is the case with China. With this information, no wonder, people in US, started to re-think their old beliefs that is US education system is best in the world. That’s what happening now.

Generally in India, if a school kid does not do well academically, parents get worried. They do all in the world to make their kids to study and get good grades. Even if the child has interests in sports or in arts, parents tend to discourage them. Because, here in India, we are like genetically coded to give top priority to education. If not genetics, at least economics pushes the education to the No.1 item in child’s growth. For many of the middle classes & lower classes, good education is the ticket to success. In US, it looks like, parents give more importance to sports, arts than to studies!

The thought of students losing their competitiveness to Asians, is slowly sinking in US public knowledge. Already, we heard news stories from US corporates like Microsoft fighting with US government to issue more H1B visas to foreign nationals for the lack of enough highly-skilled people in US. Now, this study might be putting US into introspective mode.

US worrying about losing its future generations’ competitive edge. In India, many educationists & thinkers worrying about quality of education! Each one has their own share of story to tell.

I haven’t read much this week due to work pressure. My google reader items piling up in hundreds every day! Here are couple of reads and videos :

• Blue ray failure? – Robert Cringley tries to reason out the lame take-off by Blue-ray.
• You want to understand how economies go boom, go bust and repeat the cycle in form of parable? Then check this old post of Paul Krugman. Man, this parable gives clues to understand what happens in very larger scale like countries economy.
• This is interesting. While we in India aspiring for better education system, US is slowly pressing panic button about their future generations’ competitiveness to the latter’s Chinese & Indian counterparts. Also check here.
• Insightful TED video – Seth Godin’s marketing ideas for the companies.
• TED Video – “Paradox of Choice” - explains why more choices leads to depression like state and unhappiness.

Today, I was consumed in a thought deeply. Not once, but multiple times. The reason is, I will be home alone for the next seven months! When I thought about it, all others thoughts simply disappeared and a dreaded silence of my place descended on me. It was scary! Next moment, I try to divert to other things to escape the empty silence. This happened for quite a number of times. More I resist & divert consciously, more the intensity of silence I experience next time.

I don’t know how this little thought going to affect me in coming days. But, I resolved to face it and overcome it. I know, one way of doing it put my full focus & energy on my goals and work towards them. This might look like a diversion. In a way it is. You avoid sucking in & convert into productive efforts. For a while it would seems like things are fine. But after some time any random event can trigger that pulls back this thought and puts back on play mode in your mind. Then you get sucked in completely and you will be lost. So diversion in this case, is just procrastinating the empty silence.

What if I live through those times of empty silences? What if I find a way to accept & not resist those empty silences? If I do accept & live through those periods, won’t the intensity & frequency of them reduce? And finally die down forever?  Internal battle won! Well, many possibilities.

Time would tell whether I went through it right or buckled in.

This week’s links :

• School Choice. This is one of the significant things I discovered this week. This is a system, where government or individuals directly pay, via school vouchers, for the poor children to study in the schools of their choice. I think this system makes more sense for a country like India. It is heartening to hear certain organization actually doing it. Read more about it here. And the results of one such implementation here.
• I’ve been using more than couple of browsers. And one of them, Opera, I use it to connect to my gmail accounts using IMAP. Opera released a new feature called Opera Unite. One of the things that Opera Unite has, web server embedded in browser. And photo sharing tool. And file sharing tool too. And things like that. It is cool, except that when I tried to use it. I couldn’t access my own shared stuff on the browsers other than Opera! Here is a brilliant article on Opera Unite. Read it in your leisure.
• I usually follow Indian startup stories, rants and other things. But not religiously follow it. Here are the couple of rants by entrepreneurs on India’s realistic market share in mobile space and on poison pill of Indian startups, I heard this week.
• Watch out – Big Blue trending on cloud computing in corporate world. When I.B.M. talks, people do listen.
• Twitter success going places. How Iranians used Twitter to cover their election story and slammed down CNN on its failure to cover the story.
• Spam can pose bad boy for environment too!  Here is the article in Economist explains how.

When you live on ideas & thoughts. It inspires. It makes you believe you are special. It makes you think nothing impossible. It also generates impressive sounding solutions to the problems. It boils enthusiasm. It makes you restless. It makes you buy in exhaustion-not-for-me syndrome. It creates haze cloud on your mind. Entire world will look like full of potential opportunities. Only one need to tap it. You want the best among them. You search. You want to do all kinds of stuff that just gives you moments of thrill. Or moments of doing something new & refreshing. You want to make deep impact on others. You are the source. You are the solution. You are everything. You feel blessed. You just want to escape from your work. The thing is not your ‘cup of tea’. You want to break the entire corporate hierarchy. You want CEO to listen to your ideas and make an important decision that changes the fortune of the company. Making money is easy. You think you can earn more than the most richest person you have met. You think you make sense all the time. No second thoughts. You are convinced of your good/bad karma. Whole world looks beautiful. Full of wonderful things. Only our own selfishness stops us to enjoy it…. so on…..

And a small activity innocously disturbs you. Slowly and steadly you come to your senses. The realty pinches in. Pain finds path all over you. The whole maya of what happened recently reveals itself. The whole realisation happens in five hours. And you left with void. You desperately search what next? Either you search in over confidence mode or in desperation mode. Even calmness visit you for a while. You keep searching meaning out of it. It is the search that fills your mind all the time. Fickle mind. It needs to practice meditation…. You think some thing is needed here. Being grounded to realty. And dream. And pursue it. And to remember, whatever be the pursuit it is a long journey. In mean time, keep logging here.

This week’s bookmarks

• Chinese newspaper editorial warns on India’s moves to check on China’s intrusion in Aurnachal Pradesh, India. Interesting take and some really bold statements made. via
• This week I got introduced to the whole US-China treasuries dead lock. More I digged in, richer information I got. I think this thought experiment explained at Zero Hedge, gives basic clues to understand about this US-China tangle. [Read first half of the post. The second part was too technical for me! ]
• It looks like one of my favorite tech writer Robert X Cringley (who does intelligent deductions of how big companies work and strategies) is back in action, after he moved from PBS to his own blog. In his latest post, he reasons out Intel’s latest moves.
• Yet another critic on Microsoft, which recently launched a search engine called  Bing.com
• Nowadays, my latest reads more are into energy areas. Smart grids. Smart meters. Smart Planet. [Yes, I somehow became fan of the Smarter Planet ad of IBM]. Here are couple of links about the latest fade in town. Economist’s write-up on smart grids. And why smart grids will take off slowly.

I decided to read this book, after hearing many good reviews & praises on it. Initially, I had imagined the book would be about the self-observation. It turned out to be exactly the same. I also expected it be story like. But it is not. It is full of many short notes of self critical observations with brutal honesty.

When I read, I felt many of the observations, are very common in nature, that we experience in deepest of our consciousness. But, the observation we have/had, just loses in the chaos of thoughts and never cache in our memory. Some of the observations, I thought, we can find, with just a bit of drilling into our self with honest introspection. But, poor souls we, many of us don’t have time to stand and stare.

Most often, it is very difficult to articulate them out. But, the author of this book, Hugh Prather, did an extraordinary job to articulate his in depth observations of deepest of his thoughts, actions, intentions, feelings, reasons with utmost truthfulness. I think, not everybody can do this. Only few have gifts of this level of self-examination.

Some of the axioms I am quoting here :

• The key to motivation is to look at how far I have come rather than how far I have to go
• I live from one tentative conclusion to the next, thinking each one is final. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m confused
• If I work toward an end, meantime I am confined to a process
• My trouble is I analyze life instead of live it
• I can have self or I can have consistent behavior. I cannot have both
• Because the results are unpredictable, no effort of mine is doomed to failure. And even a failure will not take the form I imagine, ‘It will be interesting to see what to happens’ is a more realistic attitude toward future consequences than worry
• I don’t need a “reason” to be happy. I don’t have to consult the future to know how happy I am now
• If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing then the desire is not to write
• I don’t exist to like, but I do exist to love. Contrary to liking, love demands nothing in return.
• It is 9:58 and it is now. Tomorrow at 3:00 it will be now. On my deathbed it will still be now, learning respond to now is the only thing there is to learn.
• Calmness accompanies the whole. Fear accompanies the part. Intuition looks beyond the latest object of my concern to see the stillness of all outcomes.
• The tools of the mind can be wrongly used, but the mind possesses no wrong tools.
• I don’t feel “I want”. I feel “I lack”. I decide “I want”

I had this idea for a long time, given the pathetic primary schooling and skewed higher education in India. We need to get the government out and give some independent body full power to bring in what is needed. This is exactly Mr. Kapil Sibal, new HRD minister, echoed in his interview to CNBC TV18 -

..we need to create an authority like Sebi in the education sector, which actually deals with regulation and we need to have an independent and credit rating agency that accredits at the entry point by giving a provisional certificate and when the institution is built to give a final certificate so that the intake can take place and we need to get the government out of this and give it to an independent regulator but all this needs a lot of work and a lot of consensus across the board and I think that once we do that then anybody should be able to enter…

Transcript here.

Will this actually happen or will it be just a pipe dream. I’ve doubts because, if this scheme is implemented, many of our private colleges admission process will come under scanner and this would be a potential danger to the income for many our netas (political leaders). Recently ToI carried out an article on Medical seats scam. The article talks on medical seats sold for Rs. 12 to 40 lakhs each and medical PG courses for Rs. 2 crores. Of course, college themselves don’t’ need that much funds. Imagine, there are 200 medical seats. If for each seat, Rs. 20 lakhs collected and you have Rs. 4000 lakhs. In addition, each student pays around Rs. 10 lakhs per year. Assume there are five batches in any single year, so the figure boils to Rs. 1000 lakhs. And in total, Rs. 5000 lakhs or Rs. 50 crores (Rs. 500 million). A single college needs this much every year for operations? Obviously no. So where this money goes. It could go to netas who helped the institutions to come up and in turn expect some kind of royalty (bribe) in return every year to fund their party or own activities. Or it could be our netas themselves running these private institutions. According to one of the bloggers, what he has learned, I am quoting here:

Here’s a story that I recently heard which illustrates the engineering of scarcity in education and the resultant bribes and low quality. No names are mentioned because the people involved are powerful people in the government.

A very rich businessman who had made his massive fortune in a major city in India wanted to give back something to society by financing a world-class university in the state in which that city is. He submitted a proposal to the state government. There was no response. Months later the chief minister of the state admitted in private to the businessman that the proposal of a good university in the state was unwelcome competition to other politicians of the state who run private engineering and medical colleges.

So it looks like some of our netas’ income will be in danger, if an independent body is setup to look over things. Will our netas ever pass any law that will effect their incomes? I really doubt it. If they were so selfless, then they would have abolished qoutas, which I think not necessary in the current scenario. Regulation and reforms in Education sector, unless pursued in pure interests of the country, will remain a pipe dream.

No introduction needed for the pathetic school education across country. Especially in rural areas. In my opinion, the quality of courses in schools and in few courses, the relevance to the present context is completely out of sync. I think, the way world is functioning, in few years, students need to be trained to handle this ever increasing competitive world.  In rural schools, the infrastructure and quality teachers left to be much desired. And the quality in higher education is nowhere going upward. We have huge numbers to quote, for number of students passing out each year in different streams. Think of quality, we will remember only handful of institutions and its students.

What we need is some kind of masive reforms in education field. Of course our politicans need to be selfless to let go, their own interests in interests of nation and actually bring what is the need of the hour.

In few of the blogs I follow, some of the “Weekend readings” posts (links to interesting articles, blog posts etc.,.), the bloggers share, are really good ones. I like to post links of interesting articles I read & heard. If I don’t had time to read or did not pass though any good write-ups, I want to pick some of the interesting recommended reads of other bloggers and post here….

• Education and Corruption (in India) – blog post on corruption in Indian higher education and how it is engineered by Indian politicians. This post linked to a ToI article.
• Renaissance man of India – This speaks on forgotten Aurobindho thoughts and vision. There is an refreshing passage on Sanatana Dharma.
• Revenge of Nerd – Its quite long article on quant analyst, Paul Wilmott. This article starts with an analogy how quants, who did Ph.D.s  in math & physics, flew to Wall street and bought the world down. And it also talks on Paul, who is supposedly guru of all quants over there and his attempts to reform the whole nature of quantitavie anlaysts.