"When I am with you and my thoughts are at rest and there is nothing to say, then I will know that my search has ended." Links Anand Musicophile IIMcatwalk Satish The guy who bores you here is Sreekanth, Indian, ex-Software Engineer, management student(IIM Ahmedabad) Enthusiastic at worst, ecstatic at best. View My Guestbook Sign My Guestbook Archives 03/01/2002 - 04/01/2002 04/01/2002 - 05/01/2002 05/01/2002 - 06/01/2002 06/01/2002 - 07/01/2002 07/01/2002 - 08/01/2002 08/01/2002 - 09/01/2002 09/01/2002 - 10/01/2002 01/01/2003 - 02/01/2003 02/01/2003 - 03/01/2003 04/01/2003 - 05/01/2003 01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004 06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005 07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006 08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006 10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006 11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006 01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007 06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007 10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007 01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008 << current

Life 'n' Love                                                         Indian Social Bookmarking  Music  IIMs and CAT       Today’s BS has an interesting article in it’s Editorial page… written by Rediff CEO Ajith Balakrishnan. Interesting point of view on how phenomenally talented people of Florence like Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Galileo etc produced a lot of work of art and science but never really managed to convert it to other forms of successes like financial or industrial success… How ideas and technology become decorative rather than tools of progress… Friday, October 26, 2007 (0) comments   Hey I want to sell power, computer games & medicines too! Was reading this story on rediff about the unrelated diversifications of Indian Corporate groups. Me and my partner Samarjeet regularly discuss this... I guess, upto a point it is diversification and beyond that it sounds like pure opportunism. It's like saying hey I have the money, I can win in anything. Are the rest of the players fools then, to loose to your 5% attention on 20 different businesses? ;-) Point is, we feel business is not won because of the 20,000 employees working for you, but the top 4-5 main guys working for you and if you are doing too many things then the attention of the people who matter will be so much. So to counter it what do these ppl do? They buy people who matter. Problem with this is it is then they who run the company. Your value-add is limited. So if they are as good as you then all is fine. But if they were as good then in a capitalistic system, prey why are they not doing it themselves? There's a difference ain't it? Between the Ambanis and these top people they buy? That's the point... :-) Saturday, June 30, 2007 (1) comments   GDP growth and the caste conflict in India Two things have caught my attention recently. One is the fact that India is growing ever more faster on GDP and market terms. We achieved 9.4% GDP growth, reached $1trillion in GDP and $1 trillion in combined stock exchange market caps! Phenomenal achievement. (Also read that Amartya Sen and team of others are going to put together an index of Happiness as opposed to GDP as a measure of stage of development a country is in. I am eagerly awaiting to read more on that front.) The second portrays the other side of the reality in India. This occured when I opened up the Wall Street Journal at the Frankfurt Airport (was on my way back from San Jose after exhibiting for my company iksula at the IRCE 2007). The Top editorial was on the Gujjar violence in India. As I read it, it dawned on me that, interestingly, rarely has any community in India fought about not having enough schools or colleges nearby, leading to their children not getting the right institutions that could better their social status. Instead 60 years after Independence, we now have communities fighting to be included in a list that gives them the results of having better schools etc, straight away as a shortcut. I feel that this skewed incentive to communities needs to be corrected in some way, so that they fight for the fundamentals and not for the outcomes that come for free!!! Meanwhile loads of things happening on the personal front and in my company iksula too. However I do not like opening up too much of my personal life through a blog and so as usual I continue to write about things in the domain of my non-personal thought.. :-) Sunday, June 10, 2007 (1) comments   Private Equity: Just an arbitrage or long-lasting value? Just read this Fortune article on Private Equities. It is simply the best article I have read in a long time. And here's Basab Pradhan's very well-thought out comments on it. The key focus of the Fortune article is to mention the advantages of a PE managed firm over a public company. My feel on these advantages are as follows: 1) More of the Top Manager/CEO skin in the game (asking them to invest significant part of his net worth into the business etc) --> This I guess makes him behave like an entrepreneur rather than a manager. 2) CEO pay is not under public scrutiny and so the company can pay x times what a public company pays, but most of it as a variable pay--> There are two kinds of people up the Corporate ladder. The kind who say "bhaut chal liya yaar. Ab toda aaram ho jaaye. (I have done a lot now let me relax a bit in life)" vs the guy who is still hungry. This high-variable pay attracts the latter kind of people and this helps promote growth. 3) Freedom to take tough decisions that may rattle a quarters earnings --> For those who have read Akio Morita's "Made in Japan", he must be turning in his grave and saying "Hey guys that was my idea!" :-) So would these advantages last long or would the public companies adopt these and evolve? Is the PE industry then just another arbitrage-based industry? Well I guess, if these things were so easy to copy, then since the public companies themselves are not all made up of fools, they would have figured it out long back. The degree of freedom of apublic company is limited by the structure they are in. So logically they will continue as they are, with just incremental evolution and I guess PE guys would keep making money for a long time to come... Sunday, January 07, 2007 (0) comments   My New Years in this Millenium I just realised that the last 6-7 years have been pretty mobile for me. It was fun trying to remember where I spent each of the last 7 New Years: 2007 - Mumbai 2006 - IIM Ahmedabad 2005 - Chittorgarh, Rajasthan 2004 - Home (Kerala) 2003 - Some street in Denver 2002 - Grand Place, Brussels 2001 - Chennai 2000 - Home Good memories.. Tuesday, January 02, 2007 (0) comments