But through a different lens, the statement is only half true. Failure too has many fathers. But no one wants to own up the little bastard.

It is one of its kind “on your face” depiction of the irony in the lives of famous artists. In this video, Britney depicts herself. But with a twist.

Just to prove a point, Britney shows the world through her own work, how different life can be on/off the TV sets and Page 3 Publications. The video shows this irony in the exact opposite way as its depicted in the real life of Britney. A spoiled kid in life, but a gracious lady in the media.

Guess what, the message doesnt stop there. The song, yet again, is more famous for its twisted lyrics than for the amazing content. Prooving her point, one more time.

If you are working in a company and worried about your job right now, just apply the same rule. Your company or your boss is the existing customer. Remember two things:

1. Is the work you are doing of any significance to your company’s business? You might be a highly talented customer support service staff. But what if the product line you are servicing is going to be shut down? Be smart. Use your connections. Move to a role with higher priority for the business. Do it ASAP.

2. If you are in one, good for you. Now figure out how you could do it better. Make sure you give the maximum confidence to your business/ boss about your capability and commitment to get the job done.

Know why you get paid. For sure, it will save you during the tough times.

There is so much commotion at work in a start up, we forget to let our developers know what their performance benchmarks should be to grow the business. A software developer is not just a code writing machine and do not treat him like one. He needs to be sensitive to your business.

Here’s a set of things any business stakeholder(CEO, Product Manager) must communicate to his developer and if possible track them on that. ( Note: I’m not going into the technical performance benchmarks. I’m sure there’s a lot said about that already!)

1. Customer Satisfaction – Boils down to the trio of cheap, fast, good. Unfortunately, you can offer only two at any time. But none the less, here are some key aspects to customer satisfaction that the developers need to be aware of.

• Product Delivery – Learn to set realistic product delivery deadlines and adhere to it at any cost.
• Product Quality –  Relates to technical performance. Minimal bugs during release
• Short Response Time – When the customer comes up with a bug, the response time has to be real quick.
• Handling High Priority Requests – This is a part of the job. You cannot sulk for lack of planning. They happen!

2. Usability – The benchmark is not the customer’s expectation, but your own industry. The product has to be close to state of the art in your industry. Leverage as much of open source technologies as possible. Many Freshers fail here, thanks to not coding anything usable(by others) during their college days. Some specifics:

• User Interface – The look and feel of the application. Know the basics of  how to keep it simple. Do not splash all the colors that you see in your mom’s sarees.
• Consistency – The User flow and the functionality needs to be consistent across the application. Too many variations, especially in a feature rich product, it becomes a serious issue.  It takes some amount of design effort, but has to be done if you are to impress your user with your application’s ease of use.
• Performance @ User End – What ever is under your control, such as reducing page loading time through caching etc., its got to be done. If you know 80% of your users use IE 6. Optimize your application for that.  Or come up with a more intelligent and workable business alternative.

3. Responsibility – This will be the most difficult aspect to learn. If there is any component assigned, the developer has to own the component and make sure he controls the performance of the component in all situations. He has to take every bug filed against him as an insult! This hardly happens. Not sure if there are ways to incentivize this. But if the developer doesn’t have it in him to take complete ownership its going to be hard working with him.

4. Flexibility – You can have your own specialty and be really good at it. But you cant survive in business by just being MySQL warriors or the Knights of Ajax. You gotta wear multiple hats to get the job done. This culture needs to be set right from day 1. If it doesn’t suit the developer, he better be safe in a MNC.

5. Commitment to learn, collaborate and solve – This  requires leadership from the business owner to inculcate this quality. You have to spend time in teaching and coordinating the teams and make them solve issues. Many times when fresher developers encounter tough problems, they give up.Plan your work around of tough problems, but try to post the problems to other teammates or to online forums, brainstorm and make an effort in solving the problems. Comes in handy when situations get desperate.

Be good to your development team. Make sure they are aware of the business reality. Trust me, It helps being on the same page.

1. Typically a professor or the dean leads the operations. What do they know about starting up a business?

2. Many students running these cells don’t have much clue into how to run businesses or even willing to learn that.

3. Most of the activities are the typical eye wash stuff like lectures, bplans etc. That ofcourse can be accessed all over the internet. 

Why is it happening this way? Simple. They dont have the leadership, resources and the know how to run it any different. What is the solution?

1. Firstly, the e-cells have to get people who have done business before to run the show. The professors can jump in, if they are willing to play an active role in developing any of the businesses. Not otherwise. Stay safe in the classrooms please. 

2. Get business savvy alumni to get their hands dirty with the students. Do NOT ask them to deliver lectures. I’m sure the alumni can figure out benfits of interacting with their alma mater’s students. If not, do a marketing campaign to the alumni to make them realize the benefits.

3. The e-cells should not recruit students for running events or arranging lectures. But for being a part of business activities. Identify business opportunities within their campus walls (maybe even outside of that) and go after them.

4.  Instead of preaching about venture capital, get them to bootstrap. Arrange for seed capital in the order of 50k-2 lac. Most IITs, IIMs can do that with ease. Let the e-cells not be a place for bloating the student’s resumes with entrepreneurship jargons. Get the students involved in business activities and build business leaders amongst your community.

Next time, you see a bright young college kid complaining about the lack of inspiration to do things other than his coursework, think about the root cause. Its the lack of a system. Can we build one?

Gandhigiri to me, means the following:

1. Keep clear goals and go about your business.

2. If someone screws with you, ignore him and move on.

If India retaliated with one ugly move to 100 ugly moves of the British, the British would get the entire world’s attention on that one ugly move by India and would have made India devoid of support from any other country or organization. Gandhi realized this and never retaliated. Over time, all the good deeds of gandhi started spreading virally, and without any blemish to negate the deeds, the british came under severe international pressure and gave up on india.

If you are a start up, understand that any irresponsible action of yours like failing on a commitment, mistreating people etc.  could potentially be taken out of context and spread.It could really cripple you and your credibility in ways you couldn’t even imagine. Even if it was in retaliation to the other party doing something bad, you can never regain trust by quoting the other party’s provocation in defense of your actions.

Think before you do any tit for tat retaliation. If required, do it the legal way.  Succeed, the Gandhian way.

Most Filmstars, at least in the south, come from a poor background. They understand the issues the majority of our country faces. They know what is going wrong and the smart ones probably have an idea about where the root cause is.

In contrast, many of our elite educated class are totally cut off from the problems. They dont know what issues majority of the nation faces like lack of electricity, non existent primary education, social inferiority complex, unhealthy diet, filthy livelihoods. For them their major issues are lack of good pubs in the neighborhood, Cracking the IIT JEE or CAT, cricket team’s poor performance in world cup, poor quality of journalism in 24X7 news channel and such.

Best way forward, let the people who understand the problems lead. They ofcourse can get the IIT and Harvard grads to solve the problems. They need not know all the solutions. Do not ridicule them, even if they turn out to be film stars.

Written on February 05, 2007

I’ve seen, heard and read enough about brand IIT and its various avatars! Its really cool to corporatize an educational institution. But unfortunately, too much onus has been laid on the brand without any significant thought about the product! From an insider perspective this is what I feel about the reckless debates doing rounds in the society about Brand IIT!

Since we have started using corporate jargon to describe IIT, let’s take a well known corporate – Mercedes for the sake of a comparison . Every one of us admires Merc as a brand and we look at it as premium stuff. The Brand got built as a result of world class products produced consistently over a period of time, with due respect to their marketing campaigns that complimented the products to grow its brand to this level.

IITs in a similar fashion, produced amazing guys like Muthuraman (MD, Tata Steel), Rajat Gupta (ex CEO, Mckinsey), Raguram rajan (Chief Economist, IMF) and tons of such people with raw talent and hardworking capabilities in the 70s and 80s who quickly learnt the ropes of the business world and made it big. At the same time, these guys did a wonderful brand promotion campaign for their alma mater and the Brand IIT is flying Sky high!

Everything till now is very nice and rosy. But here starts all the trouble, and this is where the comparison of a corporate with an educational institution starts to die.

Merc, even after establishing its brand, still produces cars with cutting edge technology and the basic premium offerings it had from ages! It does not stop producing Steering wheels stating that it has been doing it for ages! A past successful product does not have any effect on the working of the current or future product. The Merc car does not react to the qualities of the predecessor. Every new car again begins with the construction of a hull, tightening of bolts, fixing of wheels and so on!

But the Products from IITs are not inanimate four wheelers. They react to the brand being built around them. In a way, they realize what their real worth is in the global market, and the companies are willing to pay a premium for acquiring them.They forget, even now you have to start off from the nuts and bolts to the tuning of the engine. Yes, it is all done in the previous products. but since there is so much of talk about the finish, the product development process takes a beating and neither the finish nor the brand hardly matters.

At the end of the day, the product does evolve and gets its bearings right, but not before taking the driver for a rough ride.

How many of you reading this have compared the Chennai Auto walas with their counterparts in other cities?

For traveling 10 kms in Chennai you end up paying around RS. 150 and for the same 10 kms in Bangalore, you pay around RS.75.So, are the guys in Chennai involved in day light robbery? Not really.

When you look at the cost of the auto, its pretty much the same in both the cities.The roads in Bangalore too are as good or bad as the ones in Chennai. And, in both the places, the demand for Autos is pretty much high.So what is the black sheep here? Its the Fuel!

Chennai Autos run on petrol, that costs around RS.50 a liter and gives you a mileage of around 20 km.Where as the Bangalore Autos run on bio gas(Really!) and they give you a mileage of around 20 Km for a liter of bio gas which costs RS.27!!!That’s almost half the cost of the Fuel in Chennai!! No wonder that the auto rides in Bangalore are half the cost.

But, there are certain issues with bio gas in Bangalore.There are only 6-8 Petrol bunks supplying biogas for 1.5 lac autos! And the right sort of engine oil is not being provided.These issues have to be weeded out before the system gets inefficient.

Biogas is something that should be looked at for other metros as well.The public transportation system for the upper middle class needs a revamp so that these chaps can spend on better things to save us from recession.

P.S: The Auto Permit cost varies across cities too. Its about 80,000 in Chennai and some places, it is as low as 10,000. Adding further to the variation in the price.

Let’s start with a real life account of a HR chap.

“In one of the BPO organizations i worked for, the CEO gave stiff targets to all employees.HR was given a ridiculously high target for recruitment per week and the finance department an equally high profit target. Finance tried to keep the expense low by salary cost, which was a major expense head. This resulted in HR not getting quality people, creating a delay in recruitment which they covered up by compromising on the quality and recruiting mediocre candidates, in turn creating a huge quality issue in operations. The end result was that the client pulled out, the CEO was upset and a blame game started”

Motive mismatch doesn’t stop with corporations. Even as an individual, we have different motives and we need to achieve various goals at the same time. One way to solve this is to prioritize and be decisive. Some look at it as an opportunity cost situation and pick the best possible decision that fits best for the time being. But the process through which all this occurs is about reconciliation between different motives, thoughts and actions.

To reconcile between the various options, we must have a clear goal or Vision, and the decision must be the one which will benefit the vision the maximum in the time horizon you are looking at it. It’s tough. But possible.