Category: Business

The Big Fat Geek’s thoughts on Business and how business processes can be automated via workflows and technology.

So you fcuked up! Move on!

Prasad Ajinkya10 Comments

I would like to take a view au contraire to the recent global meltdown. With most of the companies looking at slicing off their costs by targeting their cost centers … they are doing a big mistake. What they should focus on, is how to monetize their cost centers … how to turn their cost centers into revenue centers. Instead, what do we see … job slashing … 1000 sacked! … 50000 sacked!! How is that going to help you? Yes, in the short run, your Quarterly statements might be able to absorb the hit the financial crisis has had on your revenues, but in the longer run, you have just sunk deeper into sinkhole that you are trying to rise from(pardon my french).

The entire reason why companies are seeing the financial crisis is because the finance giants were not cautious enough in making the investments on which they bet their proverbial asses, and are now reeling with the losses. So you screwed up … big time. It takes a great man to admit his mistakes, it takes an even stronger man to move on. In Hindi there is a phrase … agar yeh nahi to wohi sahi.

Organizations are there to do business, and there is business to be done. If the world says that the total amount of business has gone down … well they have to be wrong :) … or they are not just looking in the right places. So what if Lehmann Brothers closed up … what if AIG has gone for a second round of rescue … there are other firms who will step in the shoes of the fallen ones. Global business … the show … must go on. Where to look at business opportunities one might ask – see a problem, fix it … can it be simpler than that?

So lets see the world back on its feet and totter to the trot that we were used to seeing.

The joy of achieving

Prasad Ajinkya14 Comments

achievementI have a classmate from school. The fellow was brilliant. Is infact … brilliant. After school, we joined the same junior college, and he promptly started gunning for the IITs. He cracked IITJEE the first time around, he also managed to get a decent percentage with the Maharashtra board. God knows how he managed all that, I had a tough time to mug up all the studies. Engineering was a relief, and so was normal working life … MBA was a blast for me. I lost contact with him as the years gone by. The last I had heard was a brief article in the news about him starting his own company which made RSS readers for the blind. I remember thinking like a business person, how is this going to make money!?!

Recently, out of the blue, I get a call from him. For old times sake, we decide to meet. The guy is happily chatting about his business plans and all that. I naturally assumed that he finally found a way to monetize his RSS readers. After 2 hours or so, I realized that this was something else he was talking. Apparently he had closed down his company and was now working full time as a network marketing professional. For the uninitiated, that means he will sell some company’s products directly for a commission, and the people he sells them to can do the same, whereupon all the middle men in the transaction get a decent commission. Incredulously I agreed to attend one such sales pitch … I will not name this person (you know who you are!!), and I certainly wont name the company.

I have been avoiding him ever since. How can you forego your education, your training, your ambitions, your dreams … for money? Where is the joy of achieving in that … did he not feel that when he got into IIT Bombay, Comp. Sci?? Did he not feel that when he started his own company? How do you let go of that addictive feel of achieving … for the sake of money. What a waste.

Idea – Adapting or Confusing?

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments

abhishek-bachchan-and-idea You must have seen those ads – “What an Idea! Sirji!!” of Abhishek Bachhan and how having a generic phone number ensures that all problems due to differences in caste, sect, religion are removed. Novel way to target and position yourself to the masses indeed.

Come to the streets of Mumbai, there you see a different picture. Idea ads have celebrities declaring proudly, that they have an Idea Mumbai No., and that makes them a Mumbaikar. The niche is well defined and it does have an appeal to it. I consider myself a Mumbaikar, but would I go to the extent of getting an Idea Mumbai No. :-P. But it’s a good ad nonetheless.

So in one case, Idea is seen generalizing their service offering, whereas in the other, the same offering (viz., the phone number that you get) is a way of defining and segregating the masses. Interesting, wouldn’t you say? Kind of like Glocalisation.

Twitter uses

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I have posted earlier on Twitter as well, but this time, its for a more practical purpose. It is on how to use this web tool to market your site online, to get those readers/customers to your portal. Social media is a powerful thing, and using it to promote your product/service online at minimal cost is even better :-)

So here are a few ways you can use twitter to tweet your way to more hits.

  1. Have an RSS Feed on your site, if it is content based, eg. Crazy Engineers, put that RSS in Twitterfeed, and push out regular updates through twitter! Similar updates can then be sent to your twitter of your blog/corporate blog as well.
  2. Once you have your twitter account setup and your tweets are flowing a-go-go, then you can have your social networking accounts like Facebook, to display the same tweet.
  3. Take care not to over do the feeds, since your followers can get bugged with you. I know a few friends who have complained of me tweeting of what songs I am listening to and all that jazz, so keep a filter on those feeds.
  4. It also helps if you are tweeting every once in a while by yourself, so you get a more human face. For eg. Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh is there on twitter, and he actively tweets about his daily routine. How cool is that, direct access to a firms CEO, can you be more customer-centric?
  5. Use twitter for simple market surveys, qualitative and quantitative as well. For eg. You can tweet, “What do you think is going to happen to the Indian economy?”, the answers would be more than enough to put forth a blog post. Later, you can tweet that post url, and there is a likely chance that people who participated in your twitisurvey would also read your post
  6. This latest in: Use twitter to resign!!

Try it out, give twitter a twhirl!!

We need more products

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

image

With the changes in the US economy, India is feeling the ripple effects pretty early on. Even before the financial giants announced to the world that they are either wrapping up or being taken over, the Indian IT sector knew that times were going to be hard. Layoffs are bound to follow. The dotcom bust 2.0 is here :-). I had earlier written about this on my previous blog. A senior management professional at TechMahindra had predicted this as early as August 2006.

If you see the graph above, the dependence of the Indian economy lies largely with the Service sector, and that dependence has been growing constantly over the past years. We had the green revolution to bolster our agricultural sector, over the past decade, we have seen the IT revolution, that has significantly bolstered our services contribution to the GDP. I know this is obvious to most of you … but did we all see it coming? And if we did see it coming, then how come none of us sat up and took action.

Would we now try to start a belated industrial revolution, giving more priority for a product-based economy instead of a service-based economy? Can we see the contribution of Indian industry to our nation’s GDP increase? Or will our aam aadmi continue giving service to the firangs, depending on derived demand to earn his daily bread.

Plagiarism

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments

iris_elements elements

Ever since we have discovered the internet, we have found this unending source of pirated software .. be it the latest games, operating systems, software, graphics packages, movies, music, what not. We simply download and use. Have we thought about how it is affecting the creator of that content? Not just financially, but rather, the thought of knowing that there exists a Prasad Ajinkya in the world who is knowingly using content/media created by that particular artiste/programmer. No, I have not thought so in the past, and certainly would not have thought about it in the future had it not happened to one of my close friends.

Today I was just browsing through Digit Magazine’s August DVD (the one that’s free). In it were different wallpapers that they had shared for everyone’s use. One of the wallpapers was this … Now take a look at IRIS-2005 flash intro, it has been painstakingly made by my classmates – Amit, Jhasketan and Sanchit. Jhasketan had drawn those figurines on a tablet, it was then imported into Photoshop, colors and effects were added, and then it was imported into flash. I saw the entire creation process right in front of me … these three guys put in days and nights on this. Try juggling that with a day full of lectures and quizzes, and it becomes a handful.

Now after 3 years, I see it being ripped-off, straight out. There are no acknowledgements mentioned, so that the thousands of Digit subscribers can unknowingly use the same wallpaper on their desktop without even saying a simple Kudos! to the three artistes.

Life is not fair. Shame on you Digit.

PS – Can you tell which is the original?

Gearing for the future

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments

Are we gambling too much on the Knowledge Industry? Manmohan Singh recently announced that the eleventh five year plan would be centered around increasing the infrastructure (read institutes) for a knowledge based industry. That translates into more IITs and more IIMs with the generic mix of IISCs and IIITs thrown in as well. Effectively graduation and post graduation are been given more focus here, aimed at churning out more skilled labour and management students for corporates to come to the nation and setup bases; cost effective and efficient.

But, is this not increasing our dependence on the IT sector? Whenever the INR rises against the USD, the Indian IT sector plummets by a few percent … its obvious, direct PAT is taking a hit here, for the entire industry. Stocks of all the big IT companies see a dip. When the Rupee saw a 17-month low, the IT sector saw a cumulative 0.86% rise, the big firms’ stock rose by as high as 2%. So whenever I want my INR goes down, my IT sector does well … meaning more business … meaning more exports … meaning more employment … meaning higher cumulative disposable incomes … meaning higher GDP … meaning economic development … meaning more imports (assumption here, but generally higher disposable incomes lead to higher imports – correct me if I am wrong) … meaning INR rises back. Would it be not great if the finance minister could use other industries for balancing the economy?