Travelling Soldier

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Last friday, neethi from marketing club managed to bring in Mr.Mehmood Khan,Global leader innovation process at Unilever to deliver a talk at MBS. Typically, most speakers do not engage audience and try to avert sensitive topics during the lectures ( atleast thats what I observed here..at MBS). But Khan was from a different league who literally hits the nail’s head and mostly on sensitive topics and some controversial ones too…!!!

After the lecture talk, we had some interesting conversations on emerging retail sector within India or other emerging countries. And if allowed, I can say we had some sort of tough questions bowled to him and he did answer them very well. His forte of answering questions revolved around "Value Chain","democracy" and "Economic reforms in India"

A quick summary of topics we covered in the post-official talk -

Microfinance, MicroRetailing, Kirana store, Rytu bazaar, Rural development, Young population, literacy, Unilever in India, HLL, and ofcourse Manchester MBA’s

tIn the end, he offered us to meet him in London..

About Mr.Khan

Mehmood Khan is Global Leader of Innovation Process Development at Unilever. For Mehmood, what has become prevalent in innovation is the issue of sustainable value creation. Unilever’s award-winning approach to this has seen Mehmood take all stakeholders into account in the product lifecycle. No longer are Unilever solely thinking about the internal players within the product lifecycle. Rather, Mehmood now considers all stakeholders who were previously not involved, such as suppliers, customers and universities in driving Unilever’s innovation process. This presentation will see Mehmood showcase the specifics behind this approach, and how it is enabling Unilever to grow as a business. Kudos to marketing club, who are way ahead of other clubs and have done second most memorable event..!! (earlier they were able to bring in TESCO’ Chief for a talk).

Yes, while Ivy’s league schools are making attempts to understand how there can be only one mistake out of 16 million deliveries of lunch boxes some of the schools do not know about this concept. While the dabbawalla(delivery guy) education is eighth grade, and many are illiterate, the dabbawallas have been given a Six Sigma performance rating of 99.999999 by consultants and a quality management system standard ISO 9001:2000 certificate.

Quotes from a chief of Dabbawalla’s

“Only the educated people have all sorts of questions about this and that. For a dabbawala, all he cares about is doing his job right and keeping the customer happy.”

“People recognize us by our Gandhi topi [hat] and our white kurta pyjama, which is our biggest brand,”

“We don’t use technology, we rely on manpower,”

“Big multinationals come to learn from us,”

Dabbawalla on Wiki

Indian Railways - Case Study of Corporate Turnaround and Recovery

State owned Railway industry, world’s largest employer, has seen profitability after long time.Couple of years ago, it was on the verge of bankruptcy. But thanks to Mr.Laloo prasad yadav, Railway minister for his turnaround strategies and to booming economy. Mr.Yadav was invited to Indian Institute of Management,Ahmedabad and other US premier league schools to share his understanding and strategies in making the railways into a healthy industry from deep perils. Recently, MBA grads from UT Austin visited him and indeed the charming minister did offer opportunities in Indian Railways with lucrative salaries.

As if the amount of attention which Mr.Yadav was not sufficient, successor of Jack welch and GE chairman Mr.Immelt said

"This is music to my ears that Rail Bhawan is now talking about unit costs, volume increment and competition. We did the same thing in 1980s to save the US Railways,"   

Financial Times Special Report

This week McKinsey has released a report on India’s Consumer market and there are very interesting forecasts and findings.

Complete report:

Audio Version :

Thought the report is quite optimistic - rising incomes, poverty reduction, middle-class growth, and greater opportunities, for individuals and businesses. But the good news is largely dependent on GDP growth in the rang of 6% - 8%. Some of the hurdles which can slow down the machine are

-Slowdown or backlash against the reform agenda -Poor macroeconomic management -Poor fiscal discipline -Lack of investment in infrastructure -Lack of investment in education

Download the complete report here

Financial Times:

Today FT published a special report on India’s Infrastructure and its relevance for the economic growth. The report is quite substantial but with few flaws in the way conclusions were drawn from the facts. FT’s conclusions might look very convincing to a novice reader but if one is careful it is quite easy to identify some of the flawed conclusions. Read the complete report here

Google has emerged as the undisputed number one employer this year, outdoing its previous record of no. 129 in 2005 to no. 2 in 2006.

The Universum IDEAL Employer(TM) Survey says Google is now the most popular place to work for MBA students, ending McKinsey & Company’s 12-year reign. Not just for management, Google also appears in the top 10 rankings across industry surveys including investment banking and healthcare.

• 5,451 MBA students participated in the MBA Edition the Survey, making it the largest survey of its kind.
• Students ranked their choice of ideal employers and answered questions about their career expectations, including their choice of office locations, salary expectations, best internships and communications preferences.
• Goldman Sachs – at number 3 on the list – managed to retain its position while Bain & Co. (4), BCG (5), Apple (6), Microsoft (7), GE (8), Nike (9) and Bank of America (10) were the other big names.
• Goldman Sachs also remained number 1 among students choosing a career in investment banking. It was followed by Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, JPMorgan IB and Merrill Lynch. Bank of America replaced Citigroup as the number 1 IDEAL employer among MBA students interested in commercial banking.
• IT companies went up overall. Google maintained its number 1 position. Apple (6) moved up from seventh position in 2006, while Microsoft (7) jumped from the 16th position.
• Procter & Gamble, Google, PepsiCo, Nike and BCG make the top 5 for students interested in consumer goods. Starbucks pushed 8 positions from 15th to 7th.
• GE is still the number 1 among students who selected engineering/manufacturing followed by Toyota, Apple, J&J and BCG. Intel, number 2 in 2006, fell 15 positions while companies like Honeywell and Boeing pushed up in the top 10.

One of the best sequels ever made, can be the expression for the new movie spiderman 3. I saw the movie on friday along with my friend and the movie was made with a best commercial formula.

But the most interesting aspect was that the character of Peter Benjamin Parker — alias Spider-Man — had aged nearly 40 years from the time he first appeared in the pages of Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962, to when he exploded on the Hollywood screen in 2001’s first blockbuster Spider-Man movie. And he certainly seemed to have aged well. But perhaps even more impressive is how he rescued the firm that created him. For Marvel Entertainment’s financial fate — and with it, that of Spider-Man and his Marvel superhero brethren — had been hanging by a thread.

In 1996, Marvel was in bankruptcy, its vast assemblage of 5,000 comic-book characters in a kind of hibernation. But new CEO Isaac Perlmutter understood the power of nostalgia among baby boomers and, under his direction, old characters were revived and reborn on the big screen through licensing deals. Thanks, to “Spidey,” as well as Wolverine and the Incredible Hulk, by 2004 Marvel’s revenues from movie licenses and merchandise accounted for more than half its $513 million in revenues and much of its $125 million in profits.

 Stock Performance in the last 10 yrs

 

Marvel’s resurrection from oblivion shows that superheroes are not the only entities with hidden powers. Businesses have them, too, in the form of underutilized or underappreciated assets — assets that can reinvigorate their core businesses.

Spidey into Musical :

Spiderman 3 was released in five languages(Telugu,Tamil,Hindi,English and BHOJPURI) throughout india. Nowadays, its very interesting to see that almost all new hollywood movies are being released in local languages throughout India. Its one way of improving the customer base by customising the global products with local tastes. And most of audience do feel the local version of the movies more funnier than usual.

And I was thinking to really entertain the global audiences, these dubbed versions can have the background scores of regional movies. In the context of spidey3, think of

• Tanhaaiye song from Dil Chahta hai for the scene when MJ leaves P.Parker
• Salman’s ‘garam chai ki’ song for the scenes when the ‘black’ spidey flirts around.
• Ofcourse, a title song during the titles and intro scenes.

Looks like Microsoft is making real moves to compete with Google. After google’s double click acquisition, microsoft and yahoo had to make new strategies to guard their forte and to get a share within online advertising. Though Yahoo acquired Right media advertising to boost its online advt. presence, it might not be sufficient to beat google.

Microsoft has asked Yahoo to enter formal negotiations for an acquisition that could be worth $50 billion. After this news, yahoo shares were up 18% and market cap is about $45 bn.

However,any Microsoft/Yahoo merger would probably attract the attention of anti-trust regulators.

The merger speculation comes shortly after the exit of Christopher Payne, who led Microsoft’s efforts to compete with Google and Yahoo in internet search.

The most challenging term of MBS MBA ended in March, and what a way to start a new term. The first week of april was a break (not really). It was a week where we had to form teams and plan our pitch for Project 2 projects. This is the first instance where we actually start feeling the difference between a MBS MBA and other mbas. Client with real issues offer project under various categories(interdisciplinary, marketing etc.,) and we have to bid to win the projects against our own classmates.

First term, was all about primary stuff required to be known and second term was all about managerial stuff ,international perspective, searching internships, working with more than 5 teams on different parts of the course. This (third) term is mostly applying the basics and principles learnt in the first two terms in successfully completing the project 2 , MIBS (PMOPMO  - its true PMO exponetial PMO) and about learning different models involved in business research.

Dr. Laszlo Czaban is teaching us MIBS for this term and everyone in the class enjoys his lectures because he speaks about various organisational aspects at length. Whether it is about SME’s in russia or different business systems in south east asia.

This term we have incoming exchange students from different schools and also a new stream of MBS MBA students who are bred in korea for the first two terms (with similar courses) have joined us.

After talking to incoming exchange students,  it is quite sure that PMO and MIBS are two courses which stand out in the diploma stage. The cases in these cases were handpicked by faculty and cases are quite resourceful to gain knowledge about different industries, sectors and economies.

One more thing, MBS has a legacy of conducting vital topics lectures every year. This is not particularly targetted to MBA students but to the whole school,  in general. Some of the very eminent business personalities share their ideas and opinions during these lectures. This month British Airways Chief executive,  Willie Walsh spoke at length on The Future of Flying. This lecture was quite a fascinating one coz he started off by addressing the imminent doubts within audience i.e., low price trans-atlantic airlines. He shared industry insights, personal experiences and his conversation with Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair (rival airlines).

Thinking big is the Indian way this decade, given it strong economic run . Whether the nation can succeed in high fashion as it has in

global outsourcing, manufacturing and software development will be one of the more interesting business stories to watch in the year ahead.

New York, Milan, Paris, and London — few would deny these cities are home to the most innovative fashion designers on the planet. Well, how about New Delhi and Mumbai? If the country’s ambitious fashion design community realizes its vision, the country known best for silk saris could someday be a big exporter of high-end clothing labels in the same category as Prada or Gucci.

India’s fashion jewellery is already quite famous in the western economies, but the clothing industry has yet to see the success. That’s the dream anyway — and it’s going to be a stretch. India does have a long and venerable history as a major textile producer. The image of Mahatma Gandhi and his wooden spinning wheel is known around the world. And today the production of cotton, jute, silk, wool, and other fabrics employs about 35 million Indians and represents about one-third of the country’s exports.

It’s a highly fragmented industry, but it more than holds its own against rival Chinese textile companies. Yet when it comes to finished garments, particularly high-end ones, India has a long way to go. The nation’s clothing factories do about $5 billion a year in exports but these are largely lower-end products for big Western retailers such as the Gap and Banana Republic chains. Indian designer-wear generates only $40 million or so in sales in a global market segment worth some $35 billion.

SLIDE SHOW from businessweek

Living in Exponential Times:

1 of every 8 couples married in the USA last year met online

There are 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month

There are about 540,000 words in the english language about 5 times as many as during Shakespeare’s time

More than 3000 books are published daily(how many trees are being cut for this ???)

It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes(1.5 x 1018) if unique new information will be generated worldwide this year and its more than in the previous 5,000 years.

Third generation fibre optics pushes 10 trillion bits persecond. 47 million laptops were shipped worldwide last year

—SHIFT HAPPENS —-

Journalism Category

PUBLIC SERVICE  The Wall Street Journal
 
BREAKING NEWS REPORTING  The Staff of The Oregonian, Portland
 
INVESTIGATIVE  REPORTING  Brett Blackledge of The Birmingham (Ala.) News
 
EXPLANATORY REPORTING  Kenneth R. Weiss, Usha Lee McFarling and Rick Loomis of the Los Angeles Times
 
LOCAL REPORTING  Debbie Cenziper of The Miami Herald
 
NATIONAL REPORTING  Charlie Savage

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING  The Wall Street Journal Staff
 
FEATURE WRITING  Andrea Elliott of The New York Times
 
COMMENTARY  Cynthia Tucker of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 
CRITICISM  Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly
 
EDITORIAL WRITING  Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub and Heidi Evans of the New York Daily News
 
EDITORIAL CARTOONING  Walt Handelsman of Newsday, Long Island, NY
 
BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY  Oded Balilty of the Associated Press
 
FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY  Renee C. Byer of The Sacramento Bee

Check the complete list here

Why did it take Google to realise that its specialised product search Froogle is not well known or almost near to failure. Froogle was never a cool name and sometimes for the first time listeners might think it as something related to frog. Anyways, Google changes its Froogle to Google Products ,search for stuff to buy.

And now paypal is (re)considering its strategy after observing google’s checkout service. It teamed up with Yahoo and could both could benefit a lot from small business owners. Remember paypal is subsidiary of ebay.

Google reported revenues of $3.66 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2007, an increase of 63% compared to the first quarter of 2006 and an increase of 14% compared to the fourth quarter of 2006. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. In the first quarter of 2007, TAC totaled $1.13 billion, or 31% of advertising revenues

Google buys out the grand daddy of online advertising,DoubleClick- which is known for placing display advertising on multiple websites,a business that google is just getting started in. In last term of MBA,I worked on Google’s business strategy focusing on advertising business and concluded how google should make moves for it survival and dominance. Acquiring other advertising firms was one of the recommendations.

This acquisition will help Google to compete with Yahoo,AOL,Microsoft more fiercely. Microsoft was also in the race to buy DoubleClick but I think they couldnt make the best deal for DoubleClick. Google has offered $3.1 billion,a mere 2% of its 145 billion market cap,to Doubleclick. This amount is almost double to what it paid to acquire Youtube.

Google is becoming like an operating system for placing banner ads and is a major step in reaching the strategic objectives of Google i.e., transforming itself (search engine) into advertising powerhouse. Doubleclick notonly bring great advertising software but brings in relationships with Webpublishers,advertisers and ad agencies.

“This merger is really a part of a global growth strategy for Google,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a conference call. Mr. Schmidt said that being able to kick-start Google’s display advertising business and marry it with search advertising was the most compelling reason for the purchase. Keeping Microsoft away from Doubleclick and advertising business will be worth more billions than what google is offering doubleclikc and other ad startups.

A highflying stock in the late 1990s, DoubleClick was an early pioneer in online advertising and was one of the few online ad companies to survive the burst of the dot-com bubble. In 2005, it was taken private by two private equity firms, Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity, in a deal valued at $1.1 billion.

Since then, the company has sold two data and e-mail advertising businesses and acquired Klipmart, which specializes in online video. DoubleClick generated about $300 million in revenue and $50 million in earnings before interest, depreciation and taxes last year, mostly from providing ads on Web sites.

The 22yr old founder of facebook.com could be sitting on a potential gold mine that could be make him the next Silicon Valley’s whiz kid to strike to rich or he could become one more poster boy(like the founder of friendster) for missed opportunities if he waits too long to cash-in.Facebook Inc., is expected to generate revenue of more than $100million this year.He thinks there is more stuff in facebook that can be unlocked in future. Deep-pocketed companies are now angling for a piece of the web 2.0 action - a quest that has yielded couple of big jackpots.News corp paid about $580mn in 2005 for Myspace and Google paid about $1.5bn last year for video sharing pioneer Youtube. Facebook is still a niche site with an experience specifically targetting college students. One would be amazed to know the amount of time people who should probably be studying are spending over facebook making fun of the fact that they are spending too much time on Facebook(this is same with orkut).

Facebook Infomercial Parody

This is a skit from Penn Masala group(worlds first & premier hindi a cappella group).

Myspace vs. Facebook Blog Wars Funny Parody

Today is the last day of the break after the winter term. From tomorrow spring term would be starting off. At MBS,Winter term is considered as the most tiring and tough term for many reasons. Though we had mounting pressures from acads and internship-search,we do had parties and other events..!
Class 2008 president,muditha(see the pic in earlier post) was chosen in a democratic fashion. Even we had few mishaps in conducting elections,one of us tried to hijack the elections to prove a valid point that no election process is ideal. It was the first time MBA class has initiated election process by involving every student in the class. Last year,election of the president was more sort of voluntary process and was administration-driven process.
PMO classes,taught by Richard Phillips and Laszlo Czaban has been most interesting course.We had the opportunity to understand various management concept and organisational strategies.But the learning process was very rigourous demanding high levels of reading i.e., about 55 cases collected from various industries and markets. And in the spring term,we have an extension to this course MIBS(Managing internationally across business systems).
In the internship search process, we had our own share of crests and troughs. Past suggests that most of the studnets will get placed in the spring term. Along with these, we had team projects in every course(MIS,Ops. Mgmt,Strategy). In the strategy, apart from the text book and standard taught in every school,Gary davies taught  us about "Corporate Reputation",concept which is gaining momentum due to recent changes in industries particularly in terms of CSR,Carbon emissions etc.,

MBA Ball Party

MBA Ball 2007

Right at the end of course work and before revision week we had Latin Party,conducted by friends from southamerican friends. MBA Ball,an event which is almost a farewell event to the 2007 class and the time where Pete Naude was awarded teaching excellence award.

LATIN PARTY

Latin Party

"Again and again some people in the crowd wake up. And they demand room for bold gestures. The future speaks ruthlessly through them." - Anonymous

 

And of course there are always large masses of people and other major forces which try to bring down the morale and energy of achievers. There are many naysayers who oftern discourage bold attempts. Perseverance is the key and it is major force which helps one to be focussed on the goal. If the makers of "Seinfeld" and "Friends" had accepted the initial reviews and feedback then the entertainment industry would have missed two most entertaining sitcoms of last decade.

 

“..you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

 

Steve Jobs,CEO of Apple is one person who belongs to this league. He has delivered one of the most inspiring talks to the students in the year 2006 at stanford univ. One can easily sense blend of philosophy and humbleness in his talk. His experience and life reemphasises the fact that the best lessons a person can learn is through shocks and after hitting the rock bottom.

 

Though the talk is more than 2 years old,the essence of the message is clear and loud. Steve Jobs’ intentions are very evident in his company’s promotion campaigns and product launches(check earlier post of iPhone). He makes sure that his products defies the exisiting theories within the industry segment and always bend the rules of the market and still gets away with it.

 

"Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

 

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

COMPLETE TALK IN VIDEO FORMAT

iPhone’s first advertisement is up and running like in movies…check out

Part 1:

Part 2:

Great minds think alike.. Colbert tells to ‘papa bear’ that he not only read the book but he is living it.

Njoy

part 1:

Part2

Colbert tries to act as a mediator in the celebrity fights of trump(s),angelina jolie vs.madonna and the unspoken Amitab and Shahrukh khan…must watch…