Which is better, lot of attention or no attention?

Tata acquires Corus for a whopping price, so India has arrived! Indian media goes gaga, British papers cannot stop talking about BRICs and so on.

In the middle of madness, I wonder if we are missing a point. How do we know we have arrived? By generating attention? Till 1960s, we lived at the mercy of the Western donors for food. Aid used to generate a lot of media attention (We were proud we got aid!) But after Indo-Pak war in 1965, when Nixon administration stopped food aid, we were forced to modernize our agricultural systems and within a decade, went from being a food importer to exporter. Food aid no longer hogged attention.

As we grew, we cut down all aid which came with caveats. When tsunami struck in 2004, we were an international donor country in spite of losing almost 100000 people and billions of dollars of wealth. When we turned down aid from the west, it generated a lot of media attention. Now barely anyone thinks about foreign aid for rescue.

When Vajpayee signed an epic Nuclear cooperation agreement with Bush (precursor to the current Nuclear deal), some media critics said he is turning India a junior partner to US. We were junior beggars when we were getting aid. Now junior partner seems like a stigma -Signs of change.

A couple of years back, I used to see a M&A deals with deal size of less than a $100 million being splashed in headlines of all national dailies. There was only one Indian MNC, the Aditya Birla Group. Now, anything less $500 mn is relegated to middle pages. Amtek Auto, a nobody till an year back, has presence in a dozen countries today.

Ah, Tata Corus! But in a few years, those kinds of deals would be so frequent no one would care. That’s the time would we have truly arrived. That time beckons.

A little sunshine?

Last couple of weeks has been great. I won a “National” level contest (at least on paper… in final stage all teams were from my institute only because teams from other institutes couldn’t make it), got a shortlist for one more, my grades shot up last time, Gravitas 2007 is a blockbuster success with articles from President of India and top industry honchos, got (rather stole :)) airtime in Zee Business about Budget 2007. At this rate, I’m beginning to feel that the paper I sent to World business dialogue at Cologne, Germany on Changing Societies might get selected (Please god, STRETCH MY LUCK!!!!) I’m so exited I can’t feel the ground. A little sunshine in otherwise mundane life?

Service manufacturing or Manufacturing services?

Ford is remembered for his production genius. But he was actually a marketing genius. He figured out that if he can make Model T cheap, he can sell millions of cars to American public and make a lot of money. His production is the result of his marketing acumen, not the other way round. Thus born the assembly line that Charley Chaplin makes fun of, in the movie of same name.

Overtime, the production system is being perfected to such an extent that any job can be broken into separate parts and studied, what Taylor did in scientific management. This led to phenomenal productivity although it assumed worker is also a machine (alternative was Hawthorne studies which said happy worker is productive worker)

But services were a different ball game. How can you increase the productivity of a knowledge worker? But that is exactly what the BPO companies are doing. They have deskilled every aspect of the work, creating standards for tasks like answering the customer call to creating research reports, Financial statements etc. in the process driving down costs for big companies. The companies like Asian paints have the practice of checking the workers’ lunch boxes before they leave after work for expensive parts, while BPO companies have eliminated paper, banned mobiles during work and scan employee mails and implemented a thousand other policing strategies to protect equally expensive data.

Not just BPO, even SAP, which was once considered the domain of consultants have been deskilled to such an extent that office boys do the entry now. Standards have been created for every application, be it mining data or preparing chef’s special soup. Due to this, services are slowly acquiring the flavor of assembly line manufacturing, creating a similar productivity revolution.

If service is becoming manufacturing, what is manufacturing becoming? In olden days, modern factories (GM tried unsuccessfully to build an automated factory at a whopping $50 billion) were a sign of triumph. Not anymore. The less the company produces the better. GM is now an assembly line with all functions from design to manufacturing of complex parts being outsourced to Chindia. What is it left with? After sales service, of course. The companies are discovering that a lot of money can be made with maintenance and service contracts.

So, with the line becoming thin, what is the end? Infosys BPO CEO reckons people especially in developed countries who had been long doing what was once complex jobs may suddenly find jobless unless they learn newer things, or work in India!

Have you tried Yahoo! Answers yet?

It is a wikipedia type service only that people answer your questions, not just share knowledge on general topics. I had a very specific question about Art, and was fed up googling and thought why not give it a try. An Art consultant with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree answered the question in less than two hours!! (wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Fine_Arts)

With Google spreading its wings everywhere and gobbling every bright idea that emanates anywhere (youtube being the latest), I thought it’s only a matter of time for Yahoo! (I’m a fan of yahoo. I think the new yahoo beta is an ultimate mail interface) to get gobbled up. But no, time and again they have proved they can come up with a few aces and beat Google at its own innovation game (Google answers is a failure). Way to go!