The DWO presentation and its run-up was a hopeless one. We hadn’t got the report ready by the time we had our presentation, we over shot the time by whopping 20 mins (twice the stipulated time- at least, everyone overshot by similar margin).
The presentation itself wasn’t bad. We had used rhetoric language (what else do you use in a HR course?) in some of the slides, and the professor asked, ‘these are all well, tell me the mechanics?’ Everyone tried explaining, and he wasn’t happy. I tried this- ‘Sir, we’ll design systems which will elicit the desired response from our employees’, which in effect means saying nothing. But the professor seemed to be quite satisfied with the reply. Whoosh goes the logic.
There were minor quibbles after the presentation and I stayed away from it.
Economics presentation was much better. We had put in our presentation this bullet- the change of the base year is one of the reasons why our fiscal deficit shows a smaller figure than it actually is’. Prof asks how. Ramanan said something which the professor dismissed summarily. After the presentation, I asked him how it really happens. Professor says ‘It’s really hazy. Why don’t you mail me the source so that I can figure it out?’ Ah, the self-righteous souls.
Marketing presentation, well Sounak thought Shakti was in our group (he generally is) and prepared his slides. But alas we realized it only the last moment. I was given the task of saying the part impromptu. I managed it anyway.
Its Operations management course again. Well, the senile old man at least gave a Quantitative, application oriented paper last time. This time it was qualitative (lacks quality though).
We knew it was qualitative this time; we tried to mug Deming’s 14 points, 5S principles, 7 tools of TQM, few models etc. etc... I generally make all course notes in the same book. On some days, I hadn’t written the subject name on top of the notes, and yesterday, I had a tough time figuring out if the notes belong to OM or DWO (HR subject).
Questions? Features of TQM, TPM, well, the professor must be bored himself when he sat down to set the paper. So are we.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Thursday, December 15, 2005
What is it to be a HR man?
I did a mediocre BE and had no strategy in my mind on how to pursue my goals, because there weren’t any. My mom said ‘Go do MBA’ and that resulted in a paradigm shift in my life.
I applied SWOT analysis on myself and scored high on 20 of the 23 variables I considered. Then I prepared a managerial effectiveness model and was better in global awareness and communication model, but scored poorly in self management competency. I then proceeded to get a 360 degree appraisal involving all stakeholders, to get both a subjective and objective analysis of myself.
I realized that the external environment was very complex that collaboration and not competition that is necessary. Therefore I was tempted to form a cross-functional team in my CAT exam hall to pool the skill sets and form a synergistic and organic relationship for handling complexity, like the CAT paper. But in a complex environment, ethics is more important than ever. So I did a cost-benefit analysis for competition vs. collaboration by a new model that I developed in the exam hall, and found that….
Sounak: Wake up, why are you sleeping over the DWO (Designing Work organization) book?
Everyone heading for second floor!
A couple of stex (student exchange) girls have come from Paris, and do they look gorgeous! What happens when they have trouble configuring the internet? Hey, no problems- I can lend a hand. When I went there, they, my classmates, were lined up in their rooms falling over each other to help the girls. I have a question.
Why doesn’t everyone except me have any suave? IIM ka naam roshan karenge!
Monday, December 12, 2005
FIIs are cold money!
Alright, once upon a time, there was a stock market marred by scams, insider trading and low depth. The government arrested bad guys, infused transparency and it coincided with a growth story. Lo and behold! Investors swarm like bees, the market never seems to cool off and aren’t we happy!
We would have, but for the government that is more tense and skeptical than ever, thinks that a lot of money is chasing a few papers, and even thinks about putting a cap on FII investment. And what’s the purported reason? FIIs are hot! err…. hot money.
Nothing is farther from the truth. True, every investor wants a good avenue for investment and will book profits when opportunity arises. But they aren’t hot money. One, they have invested mostly in blue chips and fundamentally sound mid caps, which don’t give return in the short term. Second, most of the newer FIIs are pension funds and Japanese investors, who have a longer perspective than even our own mutual funds. Third, they control so much stake (30-40% of the free float) that if they happen to pull out at once, the biggest losers will be they themselves.
Contrast this with our retail investors. Even when the sensex was rising, the market breadth remained largely negative. Why? Our retail investors try to ride the tide called penny caps which rise in a boom and end up losing a fortune. The government expends a lot of energy trying to track money and insider trading and even putting a cap on FII flows, to protect the investors from the fallout. But should the government try to protect the investors from the stupidity they themselves are responsible?
The only panacea for the market from overheating is to divest the PSUs to infuse quality paper in the market, and give the foreign investors to participate more in the debt market. Give them a chance to stay when the Feds hike rates.
Discouraging FII from participating in the growth story called India, while exhorting them for 150 billion dollars investment is one step forward, two backwards.
We would have, but for the government that is more tense and skeptical than ever, thinks that a lot of money is chasing a few papers, and even thinks about putting a cap on FII investment. And what’s the purported reason? FIIs are hot! err…. hot money.
Nothing is farther from the truth. True, every investor wants a good avenue for investment and will book profits when opportunity arises. But they aren’t hot money. One, they have invested mostly in blue chips and fundamentally sound mid caps, which don’t give return in the short term. Second, most of the newer FIIs are pension funds and Japanese investors, who have a longer perspective than even our own mutual funds. Third, they control so much stake (30-40% of the free float) that if they happen to pull out at once, the biggest losers will be they themselves.
Contrast this with our retail investors. Even when the sensex was rising, the market breadth remained largely negative. Why? Our retail investors try to ride the tide called penny caps which rise in a boom and end up losing a fortune. The government expends a lot of energy trying to track money and insider trading and even putting a cap on FII flows, to protect the investors from the fallout. But should the government try to protect the investors from the stupidity they themselves are responsible?
The only panacea for the market from overheating is to divest the PSUs to infuse quality paper in the market, and give the foreign investors to participate more in the debt market. Give them a chance to stay when the Feds hike rates.
Discouraging FII from participating in the growth story called India, while exhorting them for 150 billion dollars investment is one step forward, two backwards.
Incredible Rajnikant!
You got to read this
I love him for what he is.
http://people.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/1328104.cms
I love him for what he is.
http://people.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/1328104.cms
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Don't let Economics override Technology
Middle path may be good for spiritual sake (heard of Raja-rishi model?), but when it comes to regulatory policies, it is not just frivolous but dangerous too. One such policy now is the government decision to have a combo of entry fee-revenue share model for 3G spectrum allocation. The rationale seems to be having an entry fee small enough for encouraging competition but high enough to avoid small inefficient players throwing their hats.
The underlying premise for entry fee is this- spectrum is scarce resource, so the government should give a strong dis-incentive for inefficient usage. So far so good, but something seems amiss- economics seems to have overridden technology.
Technology is fast making spectrum a scarce to an increasingly abundant resource. You may think that radio signals kind of bump into each other, so the electromagnetic spectrum has limits. Actually, it’s not the transmission that poses problems (though signals get weakened with distance), but the receivers aren’t sophisticated enough to differentiate one signal from other. This problem is getting fixed.
Wide band spectrum and spread spectrum (used in CDMA) is just one way of circumventing it- instead of confining the signal to a narrow band, spread the signal over broadband so that it mimics a guassian random signal, and have sophisticated error correcting receivers to decode them.
One of the emerging technologies is mesh networks. In this, the signal is passed through a network of receivers which receives the signal and passes them to adjacent receiver, giving the counter-intuitive result that the channel capacity increases with the number of receivers.
One more technology involves having cognitive ‘smart ‘radios having super-computing chips to receive the signals, which dramatically increases the signal capacity, as it decodes spectrally-close signals.
These and more are evolving, which will make the existing technologies obsolete. An entry fee may bring small fortune for the government, but decreases the Indian companies’ ability to adopt newer technologies when they arise. Revenue share model, where companies pay as they use would have been more appropriate.
Long live the middle path!
The underlying premise for entry fee is this- spectrum is scarce resource, so the government should give a strong dis-incentive for inefficient usage. So far so good, but something seems amiss- economics seems to have overridden technology.
Technology is fast making spectrum a scarce to an increasingly abundant resource. You may think that radio signals kind of bump into each other, so the electromagnetic spectrum has limits. Actually, it’s not the transmission that poses problems (though signals get weakened with distance), but the receivers aren’t sophisticated enough to differentiate one signal from other. This problem is getting fixed.
Wide band spectrum and spread spectrum (used in CDMA) is just one way of circumventing it- instead of confining the signal to a narrow band, spread the signal over broadband so that it mimics a guassian random signal, and have sophisticated error correcting receivers to decode them.
One of the emerging technologies is mesh networks. In this, the signal is passed through a network of receivers which receives the signal and passes them to adjacent receiver, giving the counter-intuitive result that the channel capacity increases with the number of receivers.
One more technology involves having cognitive ‘smart ‘radios having super-computing chips to receive the signals, which dramatically increases the signal capacity, as it decodes spectrally-close signals.
These and more are evolving, which will make the existing technologies obsolete. An entry fee may bring small fortune for the government, but decreases the Indian companies’ ability to adopt newer technologies when they arise. Revenue share model, where companies pay as they use would have been more appropriate.
Long live the middle path!
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Nothing ails Indian industry like conflict of interest
So there are reforms, competition and end of monopoly of PSUs in the Indian industry. Or is it?
A double standard, euphemistically called the conflict of interest still permeates in different forms. Take the case of telecom industry. TRAI, the regulator has been kept out of important decision like the interconnectivity issues in mobile phones with the minister vesting the powers with DoT, the biggest telecom provider. TRAI has been fighting this in Supreme Court for quite sometime now. While there was quite some heartburn in industry quarters over TRAI’s arbitrary handling of WLL issue, an arbitrary regulator is, dare I say it?- better than an arbitrary politician.
In oil, the government tried to inject Director General of Hydrocarbons, the head of upstream regulator into the board of ONGC, the state major. It was only after ONGC supreme Subir Raha threatened to resign did the government dropped the decision.
In banking, the regulator RBI holds a majority stake in SBI, the biggest Indian bank. Is this why foreign banks are prohibited to open more than their allotted number of branches? I don’t know, but it’s a food for thought.
There are innumerable instances like these, but the bottomline is- till there is a conflict of interest in the legislating body (government) also controlling the industry (via PSUs), it will permeate through the system. After all, the government owning a majority stake in PSUs puts the ministries in a fix- while the official position is reforms; they are responsible for the profits of state owned enterprises as well.
While the government has every right to protect the interests as a promoter, the correct approach is appointing more independent directors to manage the companies efficiently- not stifling the growth of industry by arbitrary decisions.
A double standard, euphemistically called the conflict of interest still permeates in different forms. Take the case of telecom industry. TRAI, the regulator has been kept out of important decision like the interconnectivity issues in mobile phones with the minister vesting the powers with DoT, the biggest telecom provider. TRAI has been fighting this in Supreme Court for quite sometime now. While there was quite some heartburn in industry quarters over TRAI’s arbitrary handling of WLL issue, an arbitrary regulator is, dare I say it?- better than an arbitrary politician.
In oil, the government tried to inject Director General of Hydrocarbons, the head of upstream regulator into the board of ONGC, the state major. It was only after ONGC supreme Subir Raha threatened to resign did the government dropped the decision.
In banking, the regulator RBI holds a majority stake in SBI, the biggest Indian bank. Is this why foreign banks are prohibited to open more than their allotted number of branches? I don’t know, but it’s a food for thought.
There are innumerable instances like these, but the bottomline is- till there is a conflict of interest in the legislating body (government) also controlling the industry (via PSUs), it will permeate through the system. After all, the government owning a majority stake in PSUs puts the ministries in a fix- while the official position is reforms; they are responsible for the profits of state owned enterprises as well.
While the government has every right to protect the interests as a promoter, the correct approach is appointing more independent directors to manage the companies efficiently- not stifling the growth of industry by arbitrary decisions.
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