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ith a few exceptions, I have enjoyed working for all my bosses. The ones I did not enjoy working with were good people—but one cannot always have the chemistry such that sparks fly. My first boss was a man named Mahesh Chand Bahree—the then "Works Secretary" of DCM Cloth Mills. The Works Secretary's office handled godowns, transportation, insurance, procurement of coal, and for some strange reason, the comptist pool.

to let me know that in his eyes, I would remain a kid for a long time to come. It was my first big job and I did not mind his tutelage. There was nothing glamorous about the functions he led, but he always pretended that he was running a battleship and was the Commander-inChief. The people in the department were mostly unionized clerks and half-naked loaders, whose job was to move bales of cloth into a godown, identify them for payment of duty and destination, and load them on to

enjoyed himself. Secondly, he had the respect of his people. Finally, when the excise officials used to see him marking bales and standing next to the loading bay, they never messed with him, despite the fact that those were the days of the license Raj, and even a lowly government clerk used to behave like a revered lord. Mahesh Bahree taught me two things: a job is never either dull or interesting. People make it dull or interesting. A job is never stupid or strategic—it is the

All the

Presidents' Men A Memoir by Subroto Bagchi, COO, MindTree Consulting

There were about two dozen unionized data entry clerks whose job was to enter worksheets into comptometers — mechanical adding machines to verify the payment of incentives to workers. The factory was DCM's parent unit, and no longer exists. It was a dirty, noisy, largely unhealthy and generally poorly run factory. Mahesh Bahree started his life as a Spinning Master with the company. Early in life, a shuttle flew into one of his eyes, rendering him blind in that eye. As a result, he was shifted to this administrative job. As a Management Trainee, I was allocated to his department. He was a big man, with a big heart. He used to call me "Sonny Boy"— partly out of fondness, and partly

trucks to 450 places in the country. Every month, towards the last few days, the number of bales to be shipped peaked so that higher sales could be shown. Due to excise regulations, shipments had to go out within a certain time of the day. To ensure that his rag-tag army felt as if they were going to war, Mahesh Bahree would go to the loading bay, pick up a can of marking ink, and write destination markings on the bales himself. Along the way, he was always shouting out abuses, jokes, a word of cheer to his people. He spoke to them in the local dialect and would address the oldest loader—a toothless bald man whose age no one knew—as "Chacha,” often teasing him about his "lugai." In all his actions, he ensured three things: the first was that he

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man who is stupid or strategic. All was going well till one day, when the textile workers went on a strike and sat around the factory gates, stopping all movement of goods. The entire production was locked in. Huge export consignments were locked in as well. Days became weeks, and weeks became months. Running out of funds, the company moved the courts to allow it to remove the finished goods and sell them in the market. The courts gave a favorable order but the police did not want to forcibly evacuate the goods, fearing a situation in which the workers got violent. They said if there was some way in which we could enter the factory unnoticed and get the shipment ready to go, they would allow us an hour to move

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in the trucks, load them, take them out, and give safe passage till the trucks hit the Idgah Road in Delhi—barely 500 meters from the factory gate. It was felt that striking workers, on seeing the operation, would rush to the nearby worker's colony, bring in women and children and other co-workers, and thereafter, anything could happen. The single golden hour was all that the police would give us to manage the operation. They would give no protection after that, as they did not want to risk violence. Mahesh Bahree decided to take the chance, but he could not be seen anywhere near the factory as every picketing worker would recognize him. I suggested that I could go in. I told him that I could shave off my beard and go in there, dressed as a Security Officer in uniform. The law allowed full protection to plant security people. It was at once a daring and a juvenile plan. If the trick failed, I could get lynched, and anything could happen. Mahesh Bahree thought for a while and gave my plan the okay. The next day, dressed in khaki uniform, I entered DCM's oldest mill, heavily picketed by striking workers. As I briskly alighted from a security vehicle, pulled the beret over my sunglasses and moved in through the small opening of a padlocked gate, the strikers gave me contemptuous looks and went about their game of cards. Once inside, the entire stage was set. On cue, trucks escorted by the Police moved in and in less than an hour, the entire shipment was moved out before anyone could gather their wits. Mahesh Bahree's greatness was in trusting a 22-year-old Management Trainee with an operation whose success was less than certain. Even today, I wonder if I can ever match his total faith in me. He taught me to take risks. To allow people the freedom to try things out without the fear of consequences. Many years after, I came across a beautiful line from Mother Teresa. She wrote, “God does not require us to succeed. He only requires us to try.”

My experience at DCM was completed through a difficult moment of truth. Once, I had a showdown with the entire system when the head of the comptist pool, one of Mr. Bahree's trusted men, locked horns with me. He had made a disparaging statement about the management, and I demanded that he be transferred within twenty-four hours. Looking back, it was an unreasonable and immature demand. I also told my boss and his boss that I would put in my papers if the stipulated disciplinary action was not taken. I waited for twenty-four hours and put in my papers because he was not transferred. At this point, the Executive Director—a respected and feared man named Mr. B.D. Pathak—called me. He heard me out as I told him how the man had offended my self-respect, and that the issue was about defiance and insubordination. He told me to sit down and then he told me a wonderful thing. He said that when a seed is trying to sprout from under a rock, the rock's presence is all-powerful. It has the power to obstruct, even to crush, the sprouting seed. But as the seed sprouts and a tiny, fragile sapling grows from under, it softly circumvents the rock above it. One day it becomes a large tree. That day, the rock remains at its feet. We have to have the tenacity of the tree. I took my resignation back and hugged the man who had offended me with his comments and defiance. After five years at DCM, I decided to move on, and wanted to join the nascent Indian IT industry. That decision turned out to be the door to my destiny. There weren't too many companies around. Someone told me that there was a maverick company called HCL, where I could try for a job. At two-thirds the salary and a step down from my role at DCM, I joined HCL as an entry-level salesperson. There, I met a man named R.K. Gupta as my first boss. He taught me something very unusual on my very first day at work. Coming from a smokestack, feudal, textile mill to a computer company where you could call your boss's boss 2

by the first name and bum cigarettes from him was a huge culture shock for me. Dressed up to create the right impression on the first day, I entered RK's cabin to get to know him. After the very brief niceties, he asked me to sell him a computer. I cleared my throat and gave him a very sophisticated, long-winded spiel, carefully listening to my own voice all the time to make sure I was sounding impressive enough. After a couple of minutes of hearing me out, he grimaced in pain and said in Hindi: "Yaar Subroto, kuch aisi baat bol, jisko sunke Customer kursi chhodke khada ho jayega." Translated into English, it would mean something like, "Say something quickly enough that makes the customer jump out of his chair." This was my first lesson in selling. Cut to the chase. In the very first two minutes, say something that hooks the customer. In other words, it is not sophistication, it is empathy, and it is memorability. You have to say something that makes you memorable. Makes you interesting. Draws your customer into giving you her complete, undivided attention. People like Davenport, noted authority on Knowledge Management and author of the book "The Attention Economy" will tell you how short people's attention spans are. If you do not get their attention, you do not get their mindshare. The time you always have is just two minutes. Every dealmaker has to remember that the first two minutes invariably decide whether or not you will get the next two hours. I followed RK to the next company, a fledgling computer company called PSI that was always strapped for cash. We worked together and I learnt many things from him. When the imprest money would arrive at the Delhi branch Office, there were always the bills to be paid, the travel accounts to be settled, the salaries to be given out. All of these used to be in backlogs for months. RK had a simple rule. The secretary was paid first, the salesmen's travel bills were settled next, the junior-most

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engineer was given an advance against his unpaid salary, then I was paid some money and what was often left as a pittance was all he would take home. The routine remained constant for the three years we worked together in PSI. RK never complained, often running into his fourth or fifth month of going without his own salary. RK also taught me complete transparency with customers. He never bluffed his customer—he was always ready to break the bad news first. As a result, his customers always loved him even when the company could not deliver. Working at PSI was not easy. After month upon month with a cash crunch, I finally decided to move out and eventually ended up starting a company called Project 21. The company did well but could not get financing from banks at that time and after three years of hand-to-mouth

how to manage nerds from Dr. Mitta. Wipro, in the nineties, was highly respected for its indigenous R&D that designed hardware, ported Operating Systems and implemented network protocols. The R&D consisted of 80 nerds who were a life form unto themselves. They were highly competent, idiosyncratic people with contempt for lower forms of intelligence in general and business folks in particular. I was the latter variety brought in to help transform the inward-looking, domestically-focused, cost center into an international "lab-on-hire". Dr. Mitta was my boss. From him I learnt that the first step towards managing the socalled "difficult people" is listening to them. This may not sound like a big deal. It becomes a big deal because often, bosses do not know how to listen to people by first suspending all pre-

wrong end of the connector into the socket, to driving into stationary objects in the middle of a deserted road, to mixing up the flight number on the ticket jacket with the gate number from where an international flight was to take off. From Dr. Mitta, I learnt that every nerd was entitled to such two bizarre acts every year. The key was not to react to it, but instead, actually to enjoy it. In fact, once an operating manager could begin to accept and even celebrate such things, he could even keep count of unused entitlements and maintain a carry-forward log. If you knew that, managing the R&D types wasn't a big deal. I also learnt from Dr. Mitta the meaning of humility. As Chief Technology Officer of the corporation, he was the epitome of accessibility and complete egolessness. He taught me that knowledge and arrogance are

existence, I decided to return to the industry. This time, I joined Wipro. There, my most memorable manager was a man called Dr. Sridhar Mitta. Dr. Mitta was the first man Azim Premji had hired when he and his Finance Chief Ashok Narasimhan had decided to move into the computer business. Dr. Mitta was working with ECIL after obtaining his PhD from the US. He was brought in to start Wipro's R&D. I learnt

conceived notions, biases and judgment. The smallest nerd could walk in, pull up a chair in front of Dr. Mitta and tell him the most absurd technical idea or a strange personal issue. Dr. Mitta would first listen intently and completely, and then say his piece. Sometimes, the nerds would come out with very bizarre ideas or worse, do something bizarre. The range of such things is very wide—from putting the

antithetical. The littlest man on the street could walk up to him and ask the stupidest question, and Dr. Mitta would respond by going to the whiteboard on which the most complex issue would soon be reduced to a set of three block diagrams in which "open systems" would solve all of life's problems. His appearance was, and remains, so nondescript that you have to pinch yourself to believe that this is the man who laid

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the foundation for a vegetable oil company to venture into building complex computing systems. When I returned to India, my challenge was to make Wipro's R&D get a better look and feel compared to its past. In all those years, as a frugal corporation, the place had a lower-middle class, poorBrahmin feel. As I went around my job, managers from other divisions developed the feeling that I was not cost-conscious, and this was reflected in my 360-degree feedback. I was very upset and went to see Dr. Mitta about it. In his characteristic style, he heard me out. Then he told me that we live in a world in which perception is the reality. And, he told me that it takes time for perception to get built up. So the solution was to go back and do my work, but to beware of my actions and utterances. So I went back and did all of that, taking absolute care. The next year, the same feedback repeated itself from some of the same peers. This time I was devastated. I went back to Dr. Mitta and expressed my frustrations. He listened to me patiently and then told me, "While it takes time to build perceptions, it takes even longer for perceptions to change." I was dumbfounded by the Zen-like statement. Realizing how much truth was in it, I just went back to my desk and focused on doing the things correctly. In doing our work, we need to be sensitive to feedback and work to correct ourselves but we should not expect drastic changes in what people think of us. We should not lose spirit because of obstinate public opinion. Some of it has a basis in truth, and we must have the humility to accept it. Under Dr. Mitta's sagely guidance, I flourished. I rose to become the first Chief Executive of Wipro's Global R&D. Over a period of five years, the transformation was so complete, it was amazing. It had to do largely with the intrinsic quality of the people who constituted the R&D. From an inward-looking cost-center, it became a solidly profitable lab-on-hire in the corporation. The nerds had

become business people. In all this, I realized that I was beginning to feel restless—I was ready to do something larger. Dr. Mitta and Ashok Soota, who at that time was the Vice Chairman of the IT Group, asked me to articulate what I wanted to do. I remember telling them to identify an area or thing that kept Mr. Premji or Ashok awake at night. I wanted to work on that one thing. I was ready for a Mission. In December of 1996, the call came from Mr. Premji's office. He wanted a line manager to come and set up a corporate Quality initiative that would bind all of Wipro's five disparate businesses and make Wipro worldclass. I moved on from being the Chief Executive of Global R&D to set up Mission: Quality as part of Mr. Premji's Office. In the process, I came to work for and closely observe one of corporate India's most celebrated men. My first lesson from Mr. Premji took place even before that. It was in 1988. I had just joined Wipro. One day, he walked in to my half-cabin and started reviewing my work. He had obviously come with an agenda. The debtor situation had gone out of hand and he needed it to be cleaned up. He wanted me to handle the task. I told him that my hands were already full. He asked me to tell how I spent my time. I told him that I was spending 40% of my time on sales coordination, and 40% on customer relations, and that 20% of my time was going into training. He calmly replied, "Continue to give 40% to sales coordination, 40% to customer relations, and 20% to training, and give 25% to debtor management." I was puzzled with the maths. I told him, "Mr. Premji, that does not add up." He said, "No, it does. When leaders are loaded 125%, they are stretched. When they are stretched, they deliver their best". I took the additional 25% and delivered one of my most remembered assignments in Wipro. Now I was going to work directly with the man. While I joined Mr. Premji's Office as Corporate Vice President, Mission: Quality, and started getting used to 4

seeing him frequently, I took time to drop my awe of him as the Chairman of Wipro. Later I realized that managers who are required to work for very senior people cannot be in awe of their bosses if they want to be effective. However much Mr. Premji tried to bridge the gap and treat me as an equal, it was a while before I was myself in his presence. Early on in our interaction, we started off on the wrong foot with each other. Looking back, it was my immaturity that was the problem. The backdrop of it was like this. I had no previous experience of handling Quality. When I asked Mr. Premji, "Why me?”, he had replied that he wanted a line manager to handle the assignment, and not a Quality expert. He said he wanted someone with a "sense of history." For jobs that need large-scale changemanagement, you need people not just competent in what they are supposed to do, but people who have a sense of history. They understand the existential issues, the challenges, the larger purpose—this, as a key job requirement is seldom understood by people who staff up assignments needing large-scale change management. “Sense of history”— such a beautiful, powerful, uplifting thought! That uplifting thought apart, I had to produce a roadmap within days of taking charge. I was lost at sea because I needed to understand what the concept of Quality was all about before drawing up a roadmap. Every week, Mr. Premji started calling me and asking me for the roadmap. Each time, I would repeat the same story—that I would like to understand from other companies how they have done it, read books, meet consultants in the field, get a feel and then come out with a roadmap. I could not predict how much time all that would take, and he could not wait. When Mr. Premji pushed me too hard, I lost my cool one day, and told him that he could either wait for me to create the roadmap or, if he knew it himself, to give it to me, so that I could run with one. I was pleased with myself with that piece

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of bravery. He remained unruffled and said," My job is to push you till you find your own limit. When you do, you have to push back." The role of leadership is to create the stretch and push people to find their own limits. From Mr. Premji, I learnt the power of simplicity and forthrightness. His simplicity comes out in the way he writes, the way he speaks and dresses, the food he eats and the way he addresses issues. You do not ever have to wonder what he has on his mind. He speaks his mind without any fuzz factor. Adopting simplicity in thinking, communication and strategy is often the most difficult task. Sometimes, managers think that something overtly simple is not impressive. The more we dress up our thoughts and behavior, the more we become difficult for people to understand. The less the understanding, the higher the inability to follow a leader. Mr. Premji has a great sense of humor. This is a very important quality in a leader. Once, when I was driving him to a meeting in California, he had been bugging me about some issue and had me miffed. While we were driving on Highway 101, my car made a rumbling sound over a particular patch. I was familiar with the road and knew that it was normal. Responding to the sudden rumbling, Mr. Premji asked me," Subroto, do you have a flat?" I quipped, "No, I live in an apartment." He ignored the statement. Having acted smart with him, I promptly lost my way and somehow managed to get him on time for a crucial meeting at the Sun campus—I was overcome with embarrassment. He said nothing. After the meeting we drove to another meeting at Tandem Computers. When he arrived there, the President at Tandem went on and on about the great vision with which Mr. Premji was building Wipro. Mr. Premji listened for a while and then observed," Yes, we have great vision, but sometimes lose our way." I looked the other way. The greatness of leadership is in

surrounding oneself with a top performing team. The better the team, the higher becomes the idiosyncrasy of the people in it. Among the top management of Wipro was a leader whose pastime was to openly, often virulently, criticize Mr. Premji. He did that both in front of him and behind his back. Sometimes this got out of hand, but Mr. Premji used to be unruffled about it. The simple reason was that the leader consistently delivered what he committed to. One day, I was quite amazed with the man and asked Mr. Premji why he had to put up with such behavior. Mr. Premji told me that leaders must be comfortable with idiosyncratic people. Many high performers have their own quirks. Our job is to focus on what they deliver, not what their quirks are. Competence to do the job has to be far ahead of personal reverence. From him, I also learnt about how business can be conducted with the highest standards of integrity. When the average Wipro person goes home at night, he sleeps well because the system does not expect him to do anything unethical to source or execute business. In fact, he can walk out of a deal if it is contingent upon such behavior. To Mr. Premji, black is black and white is white. He does not go into grey because he says that there are many shades of grey. My final lesson from him was on my last day at Wipro. He wanted me to remain at the company. I told him,"But Mr. Premji, we are very different people, we think very differently." He replied," That is the reason we should work together." When we look for people around us, we invariably look for sameness. It is so much more comfortable for us. But progress requires intelligent friction: constructive opposition, points and healthy counterpoints. The job of leaders is to build high personal comfort with contrarians who think differently, create alternative points of view, and have the power to question the state of things. In my ten years at Wipro, I had never had the opportunity to work for 5

Ashok Soota. Anyone who has worked with Ashok will tell you that it is one of life's gifts to have him as your boss. When the time did come for me to get to work for him, he sent me off to work for Mr. Premji instead. The golden opportunity came when we co-founded MindTree and through it, I finally came to report into Ashok Soota. The relationship between Ashok and the people who have worked for him is difficult to describe. In business, you come across leaders who are more leftbrained or more right-brained. Ashok is the most balanced I have come across between the two—he represents the balance between process and empathy. While data speaks to him, he also listens to empathy. My interactions with Ashok have taken place through nearly two decades. Of this, he has written my appraisal for the last six years at MindTree. I have learnt countless lessons from him in these years, the first of which is about candor. When I came back to India in 1993, after a very successful stint in the US, lots of things had changed. The market had opened up and everyday a new multi-national was opening shop. At that time, I was blown away by a job offer from an aircraft engine company that offered me 9 times the money Wipro was paying me. I told myself that the money would be enough for me to retire at 40 — a stupid goal everyone sets when he is all of 36. So, I told Dr. Mitta that I was going. He was sad about this, and later, he asked me to see Ashok for breakfast the next morning. I went to see Ashok. I had a wellrehearsed set of answers to every which question he could ask. I also felt like a conqueror who would be remembered for long but wore a graceful politeness on my face. I waited for Ashok in his drawing room thinking of how he would open the conversation, how he would want to retain me at any cost. How he would sweet-talk me because, I was, after all, a high performer. Ashok walked in, shook hands with me and as we sat down, told

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me in a very matter of fact tone that I was getting enticed by a "stupid job". My jaws fell. Here I was—the prima donna with a potential salary cheque higher than his—and the man does not sweet-talk me into staying. He says I have landed a stupid job! Er, is he implying that I am stupid enough to have landed a stupid job? If Ashok was saying that, it had to have some truth in it! I realized that I was making a mistake. I was trying to be someone I was not cut out to be. I was an IT industry person who made a living by selling software — the world of aircraft engines involved dynamics that I had no clue about. Eventually, after some more reflection, I remained at Wipro. Leadership is about personal character. All too often, I see leaders pussyfoot on issues, seek compromises that are unnecessary and say things they do not mean. A man like Ashok needs to cultivate no followers. They will simply go with him because they know that the man demonstrates character. The man is real. Ashok Soota is an interesting leader from many different standpoints. A Mechanical Engineer from Roorkee, he started his life at Burma Shell in the sixties and quickly moved from there to become a Senior Management Trainee at DCM. From there he went to do his MBA at the Asian Institute of Management at Manila and after coming back to the Shriram Group, moved on to take over as President of Wipro's IT business when it was all of $2 million in size. He grew that to a $500 million business before co-founding MindTree with nine others. Ashok is a case study of a leader who never chose his team. At Shriram, he inherited the business and its structure. At Wipro, he inherited a top team, which was already in place. At MindTree, out of the ten of us, he was the ninth co-founder and by the time he came on board, we had progressed on many key issues. Out of the eight co-founders already onboard, Ashok did not know four of them at all. His personal conviction has been that there are only "A" type leaders or

"B" type leaders — there are no "A" teams and "B" teams. I remember clearly an occasion on which he was being feted for some personal award he had received. He went to deliver his acceptance of the award by saying that he thought his team was a "national resource". He always places high expectations on his team and minces no words in calling a spade a spade but try ever telling him that his people are average — you will have earned a permanent enemy. As a result, Ashok has always delivered extraordinary results with ordinary people. From Ashok I learnt to value diversity, and I learnt to prize people for what they can do, not what they have done. Ashok taught all of us complete egolessness. When we started MindTree, Ashok was already a national-level celebrity. People thought he would be a highmaintenance person in a start-up. To the contrary, even today, Ashok carries his own bag while traveling, and heats and eats his own food while staying in a $50 a day hotel overseas. Nobody stands up when he enters a room and people call him by his first name. The smallest person can get a reply to an email to him within twenty-four hours and he reads it with the same attention that he gives to a mail from a CIO of a Fortune 500 client. Ashok is the fairest man when it comes to dealings internally and externally. No one I have met has ever felt that he did an unfair deal if Ashok Soota was on the negotiating table. Ashok taught me to look at data whenever emotions run high. Sometimes in points of crisis, managers psych themselves into believing that the end is near. They will come and tell you why a decision has to be taken only their way. "If we do not release this ad today, we will lose to the competition", "If we do not do a salary revision now, we will not get anybody to join us", "If we do not agree to his terms, he will take us to court.” You could never get Ashok to rush into a decision by saying any of these things. From him I learnt not to make a decision if you sense that you are being put 6

under any undue pressure. Let the pressure move on and then take the decision in a fair state of mind. Nothing bad happens because you have to weigh the pros and cons your way and would rather have some more time. Insist on that extra time. That way, you take very few regrettable decisions. There is an inherent risk in taking the time, but it is our job to take that amount of risk. While Ashok epitomizes the rational, he is at the same time, a deeply intuitive person. He uses the power of intuition to look for opportunities, create alliances and sometimes, to gauge an adversary's moves. But he would never use his intuition without putting it to the touchstone test with data, and whenever he is surrounded with data, he questions it from his intuition. Adversity is another area in which I learnt something very important from Ashok. I saw him, on three different occasions, coping with powerful opponents who had the capability to create significant damage. The first time was at Wipro where one was still a part of a sizable entity. The other two times were at MindTree. In each instance, we were threatened with legal recourse. Ashok was fighting on principles. He did not care a hoot about the size of the adversary and the potential negative fall-out for his organization. He taught me that in a battle of principles, it is not the size of the adversary that matters. It is the size of the principle that matters. In the last 30 years of my work-life, I have come across many people who have left a lasting impression on me and have impacted my work as well as philosophy of life. Sometimes I wonder where I would be today, had it not been for the collective learning I got from all of the people I've worked for. I would certainly have been a different person today! Since I cannot think of myself being someone else, I must express my gratitude to these outstanding people through whom life has presented itself to me. I also hope that they enjoyed me as much as I enjoyed serving them.

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EPGP at IIM Indore Ravi Sharma, Chief Executive Officer, Birla Sun Life Distribution Company Ltd. writes his thoughts.

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t seems somewhat paradoxical to really write about EPGP. As a program participant the experience was atypical - from the unparalleled hybrid of brilliant minds to the case study method of learning.

had the mastery in teaching fresher or little experienced ones but a class that had a total experience of 300+ years of experience from various fields, was obviously a challenge. “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” Albert Everything about our course was really Einstein said, and the faculty was unprecedented. It started with the precisely doing that. challenge of attending six or seven classes a day with no break in a fortnight, The case studies prepared by the class with the surprise study group thrown at mates were latest and relevant to Indian times. Once on the campus, we got into a environment. For example the batch different subculture. prepared a set of HR case study one from each of the organizations, they came When IIM Indore decided to introduce the from. Such case studies, I bet, cannot be program for the first time, all who had available otherwise. Combining theory been actually contemplating to brush up with relevant current examples by the their existing skills and add more teeth to experienced participants meant benefit their existing career, got in (of course for whole class in terms of learning, after the grill at the test n interview). getting to know to deal with unexpected. Being a first mover is an advantage, as Where else would you find such a rich the first batch participant, I tend to believe experience linking it with the theory and more of it. Most of who joined the batch willingness to share to maximize the had worked for more than five years as a learning? manager, felt that they needed to go back to school and get their professional These group sessions were paramount to degree and enhance their knowledge. gaining clarity, particularly on cases that The batch had 52 people form different were not our forte. To me, the beauty of education streams and industries. the group was in knowing that at least one person was specializing in the field of As it was the first batch there was bound study that was your weakness. to be a lot of anxiety, besides none of us Sometimes, I can recall listening and was used to going on and off to the being utterly amazed at the depth of campus and work with our organizations insights and variance in responses simultaneously. We all had to acclimatize. regarding the same topic. This was true even for the faculty as they could not distinguish between the regular Sudden quizzes, presenting projects, on and EPGP student initially. The faculty time submissions on and off the campus

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added to challenges. All the batch mates had to keep abreast with their professional requirements, back in their organizations. As a serving manager, one can't just keep of the work.. That added more challenge to the course which other students may not have to face. “Everything depends on the quality of experience………..just as no man lives or dies to himself , so no experience lives and dies to itself.” I must say that it has been such a wonderful experience to go through the EPGP program. The course not only taught us about the world of entrepreneurship and innovation, but also made us think out of the box, balancing, prioritizing and so on. From my own point of view, the way of thinking is more important than the real knowledge we learned from. Finally, I not only expanded my knowledge in management but also learning about people, culture, openness in discussion and mostly my confidence in progress in my future career. I heartily thank the Institute and the faculty who guided me to become a better manager and a leader and wish that Organizations benefit from the finely refined management professionals.

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It's

a

Digital

Ts u n a m i . . . .’

Are Agencies Ready?

Gaston Legorburu, Senior Vice President and Chief Creative Officer, Sapient

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he online advertising industry is in a frenzy with companies shifting more and more of their advertising dollars from traditional to interactive media. The change has sparked acquisitions with ridiculous valuations, talent wars, agency consolidations and agency transformations among the service companies, media outlets and technology vendors, all of which stand to gain from this shift. What many don't realize however, is that behind this online pilgrimage rests a tsunami of work which the interactive industry and infrastructure is not prepared to handle. Let's put this into perspective. Over the past three years a company with an annual media budget of $200m increased its interactive advertising spend from 2% to 4.5%. Now with good results pouring in, they are debating whether it should represent 11-13% of their budget in 2008. For this company, this shift is not a big deal as they are just moving 5% of their budget to something that's proven and is delivering valuable results. However when you take into consideration that hundreds of thousands of other companies are undergoing this same shift, the numbers become quite staggering. The initial reaction to agencies folks is “hey, this is great news!” Not so fast, the reality is that for many, when the tidal wave hits, two things will happen. First, you may drown. Second, you may float and rise with the tide. The question you

have to ask is, “am I ready?” Today's reality is that clients want more of a digital focus and are looking to work with the big agencies to get it done. Why? First they don't want to manage multiple interactive shops on top of already managing traditional advertising agencies, PR firms and specialty players. Second, smaller shops don't have a "farm system" in place to train young talent or the management infrastructure, methodologies and systems to drive quality delivery. So the answer to who survives is the big firms right? Believe it or not, there will be a huge amount of business than these big players cannot handle, which will create great opportunities for these second tier of firms. The question is, can they handle the load? In most cases the answer is no. These companies have talented and creative minds (i.e. the one dimensional creative only folks) working but it might not matter if they don't have the manpower to handle their business. These agencies need to fair well in the talent wars while also perfecting and automating the operational aspects of online marketing. This means they will need technology skills, delivery process expertise, and global distributed delivery capabilities and experience that they simply don't have at this time.

handle this entire wave of business and the smaller firms are just too small, what gives? The answer is scalability. The smaller firms that are able to scale while simultaneously continuing to evolve and improve the level of creativity and technical skills clients demand will make the transition. Those firms which stand pat will be squashed or gobbled up by holding companies looking to “create” the illusion of scale, the latter of which is destined to happen and certain to fail. For those which make the commitment to scale and in their mind have taken the needed steps, how do they know they are ready to commit to big business opportunity? Here is a quick test, comprised of a few questions that the big business will be asking. ? “ Those are very creative ideas, but could you show me what you have actually produced?” ? “ Did you do that yourself?” ? “ How long did it take, and how much did it cost” ? “ Have you handled 20 or more of those projects per month for any one client, and can I talk to them to see if they are happy with your agency?” The question for you will be, do you have the right answers? For those that do, they will be in a great position to take market share from the remaining agencies that show the slightest hint of hesitation.

So again, it comes back to size, with the big business leads going to the big players. However, if the top firms cannot 8

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I

have always wondered whether pursuit of material gain and professional growth should gain precedence over gains for the personality, the spirit, the family and the community. I come from a typical middle class Tambram family where

Godrej as a Management Trainee at a princely stipend of Rs. 1700 per month in 1983. At that time this was considered a decent enough pay, so much so, that when my father, out of a sense of pride, took my appointment letter to show it to the proprietor of the company he worked for, the sethji promptly raised my father's

one typically took up jobs with the likes of Hindustan Lever or Johnson & Johnson or Citibank or HSBC that gave both a career and money. I somehow never hankered after money but also felt that I had reasonably enough to live the life I wanted to. Looking back I also realize that I wanted quite a simple life most of

Sometimes Wo n d e r . . .

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Krishna Gopal, VP Sales & GM Middle East, Tech Mahindra Ltd.

simplicity and frugality marry well with hard work, sincerity and excellence in academic pursuits. My parents never pushed me hard to study and do well, but study hard I did. And I did fairly well too. I started out at

own pay! I am quite certain that, that was not my father's intention, though I have to thank Godrej for this development in our lives at that time. Even in those days a Godrej job was not considered to be very hip. After an MBA

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the times…sumptuous food, decent clothes, simple house and a job where I felt wanted. Many of my colleagues sky rocketed in their careers within the first five years. Pradeep Kar became a very successful

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sometimes I Wonder

IT entrepreneur with his Microland. C.P. Tahiliani became the youngest General Manager at J&J. Vijayan Subramani was hand picked by Citicorp to be part of their international cadre of management trainees to be trained in Greece to become a currency dealer and a treasury

towards spirituality at the great risk of being tagged with the line that “folks who can't make it in their careers take up spirituality” Many of my colleagues egged me on saying I needed to get out of the well that was Godrej and out into the big great

professional eventually. And the list went on. Batch mates zipped around the world and came back with their stories. I listened to their anecdotes and wished I could get there someday too. It was around this time that I adopted and understood the phrase that I am about to state. YOU ARE ALWAYS HAPPY IN THE ABSOLUTE AND MISERABLE IN COMPARISON. But I have never been able to successfully overcome the debate of “if I don't compare how do I constantly improve and if I do compare how do I avoid being miserable”. One of the methods was to try and be anchored in something higher to avoid sinking into the depths of the mundane. And that “something” higher made me gravitate

world if I was to grow in my career. I never felt the need or the urge. May be I was risk averse or just plain lazy but I never looked out of Godrej for 10 long years. When I take a look at my class of '83 now and do a rapid review I find that the position each person holds is no longer what it was when we started out. Big egos have got flattened, life priorities have changed, people who thought success couldn't be theirs are indeed successful and so on and so forth. This brings me to another phrase that I adapted from a book title that I browsed some years back. TOUGH TIMES NEVER LAST BUT TOUGH PEOPLE DO. In one's career it's important to build one's capabilities and develop strength of

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character to be able to handle the downturns and the tough times and be humbly able to ride the crests. It's a tough ask because when the good times come its difficult to give the credit to others and to higher powers and still remain humble. And when the tough times hit you its difficult to steer clear of the negativity and the waves of pessimism and still not do anything rash. I wonder if there is a case for writing a book with the title “Good times don't last but Good people do”. I recently saw the Hindi movie “Om Shanti Om” and what stayed in my mind was the simple yet profound speech that the lead character, played by Shah Rukh Khan gave on receiving the Filmfare award. Things always work out in the end and if for some reason it has not worked out for you, believe that it is not yet The End!! I am still not 100 % certain that one should pursue career growth at all costs. I haven't seen very many successful professionals who were also good human beings. At least not till the last 4-5 years. These days I am more convinced than I ever was that being fundamentally good pays off in the long run. I see lots of evidence around to support this hypothesis to convince me to pursue this line of thought and behavior. And in case you are still not convinced, go see “Om Shanti Om” a n d g e t convinced by the King Khan himself!! :-)

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Test Your Word Power

ACROSS

DOWN

3 An membrane in the ear that vibrates to sound. 5 Resistor for regulating current. 9 Loss of willpower. 10 Clothing wear for skiing. 11 Eurasian plant with pink to purple-red spice scented usually double flowers; widely cultivated in many varieties and many colours. 13 A hidden storage pace of money or weapons 16 An unchanging intonation. 18 Feeling of deep anger or ill will. 20 Early ballroom dance precursor to fox-trot. 21 Blemish.

1 Extricate from entanglement. 2 An iron that was heated by placing it on a stove. 4 Legal right to use property belonging to someone else in a way that property is not injured. 6 Grow weak and thin or waste away physically. 7 Deficient in quality or quantity. 8 With little or no forethought or preparation. 12 Any of water soluble compound capable of turning litmus blue and reacting with an acid to form a salt and water. 14 Encourage or assent to illegally or criminally. 15 Having a desire for something or someone not present. 17 Abode of mortals in contract to heaven or hell. 19 Compelling immediate action.

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IT industry has its own H i r a n y a k a s h y a p to battle Anand Mahindra, Vice Chairman & MD, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.

Nasscom Leadership Summit has always been a place for good story-telling and provocative thoughts. This year, the spark came not from a software veteran or a BPO moghul, but a captain of an old economy industry. Anand Mahindra, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra & Mahindra drew from mythology to call for game-changing innovation from the IT industry. One of the tasks we at the Mahindra Group have set ourselves is to aspire to be recognized as the most customer-centric organization in India, and why not, in the World! In order to walk the talk, every time I'm asked to speak at a conference, I have made it a default option to ask what the audience--my customers--might expect of me. And so I found myself wondering what this conclave of IT wizards expects from a predominantly right-brained character like myself. You certainly haven't called me here to deliver a sermon on technology. And I wouldn't even risk doing that with Nandan (Nilekani) and Kiran (Karnik) sharing the dais! Of course, I might have been able to do that by getting one of my IT colleagues to write this speech, but then it would have been comprehensible to you, but incomprehensible to me! And although the title of this session is 'Building a Knowledge Economy for Growth', I believe that a) All of you out there have 12

helped build the foundations of a knowledge economy, so again, you don't need me to pontificate to you about that and b) I think there are some urgent pressures and imperatives the industry has to deal with at this point. So, I'm going to talk about something completely different: I will talk about the Trimurti. Most of the Indians in this audience will know the Trimurti – the trinity in Indian mythology of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer and Shiva the destroyer. There is a wonderful depiction of this in stone, just ten kilometers across the bay, at Elephanta. Both as a businessman, and as someone who tends to see life in visual images, the Trimurti reminds me of India's IT industry. Think of it. You people have gone through a stage, where like Brahma, you created something out of nothing. You created a new and global industry. You created a service sector that is today, a major pillar of our GDP. But most importantly, you created a perception of a new India, both in the world and in Indian hearts and minds. CK Prahalad once told me that in universities in America today, there are almost unfairly high expectations from Indian students, because there is a huge perception that all Indian students are brilliant, outstanding. You created that perception. And within India, what you created was self-belief. You showed us what Indians could do, and now the rest of India believes that Indians can do anything. Brahma created a physical landscape;

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IT industry has its own Hiranyakashyap to battle

you sowed the seeds of a new mental and psychological landscape. In that sense, you are truly the Brahmas of the age of liberalisation. But creation is only the first phase. You then have to move on to the next phase of sustaining that creation - to the realm of Vishnu the preserver. Creation is a onetime affair. Sustaining that creation is obviously a longer haul, subject to many attacks and crises. Perhaps that is why Vishnu comes not in one, but in ten incarnations. Every time there is a new danger, he changes his avatar to a form best suited to meet that danger. At various times he has come as a fish, as a tortoise, as a dwarf. But his most interesting avatar came when he had to fight the demon Hiranyakashyap. Hiranyakashyap was a bad guy, who had obtained an amazing boon from the gods. Neither man nor beast could kill him; he could not be killed by daylight or at nighttime, within his home or outside it, on the ground or in the sky. All this made him pretty invincible – he went on a rampage, and only Vishnu could tackle him. The IT industry today faces challenges every bit as complex as those Hiranyakashyap posed for Vishnu. It is hit by a macroeconomic tsunami of adverse currency changes, rapidly escalating costs in both salaries and infrastructure and inadequate talent pools below the tier 1 and 2 institutions. At the Company level, firms are beginning to feel the penalties of poor differentiation and lack of focus (trying to be all things to all people); and an over-emphasis on high volumes and price competition. Suddenly, the industry seems to have fallen off its pedestal; You are facing your very own Hiranyakashyap. It's interesting to see how Vishnu dealt with him. How do you destroy someone who can't be killed by man or beast, inside or outside, by day or night etc etc. The demon pretty much had all bases covered. So Vishnu took on the Narasimha avatar to bypass the boon. Narasimha was a hybrid creature, half man half lion, and therefore neither man

nor beast. He killed Hiranyakashyap at twilight, which is neither day nor night. He killed him in the courtyard, which is neither inside a house nor outside it. And he killed the demon by placing him across his knee and tearing him apart, thus circumventing the terms of the boon that he could not be killed either on the ground or in the sky. Now that's what I call an

innovative algorithm! So what are the lessons for the IT industry in this story? Well, the first thing Vishnu did was to reinvent himself. It was not the gentle and contemplative Vishnu who fought Hiranyakashyap – it was the fearsome Narasimha avatar. Vishnu reinvented himself to suit the circumstances. The circumstances have c h a n g e d d r a s t i c a l l y. R e i n v e n t yourselves. Do I have all the answers on the modes of re-invention? No, obviously not, otherwise I'd be out there filing patents, although I can suggest two broad approaches. First, why don't we design business models that challenge traditional industry approaches and then transform our organizations, people and processes to execute. If we simply keep knocking on the doors of clients with our traditional offshoring options, we'll meet the fate of hearing aid salespersons: our best customers won't hear the doorbell! For example, software-on-demand and open source models changed the rules of the software game. Can we not try to change the rules of the game this time around? Why didn't we invent Zoom technology or Virtualisation? Thus far, India's brand of

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innovation has been identified with the IT industry, but is it truly innovative. Is it really game changing? Ironically, you can now look to the old smokestack industries for inspiration. A few weeks ago, an Indian car company made a game-changing move. Maybe the Nano will ultimately not retail for a hundred thousand rupees. Maybe it won't have great margins, or replace as many motorcycles as it would like to, but it was a game changing move; it fired a shot that was heard around the world. Can the IT world make any such claim? There was an old saying, apparently adopted by the IT industry that the secret of success is to jump every time opportunity knocks. And how do you know when opportunity knocks? You don't, you just keep jumping! So when are we going to stop simply jumping every time a client seems to sneeze, and actually create products and IP that become their own opportunities? Let's look at new areas where India may have natural advantage. I remember C.K Prahlad telling us that we didn't realize how important it was to leverage emerging innovation ecosystems in our country. He gave us the example of how, due to a fortunate coincidence, India's IT and automotive industries were situated in roughly the same geographic clusters. So why wasn't, according to Michael Porter's competitive theories, a world beating automotive telematics industry taking shape here. Why aren't IT companies using the massive potential of India's soft power, the film and TV business to exploit technological dominance of what Telco's call the 'last mile' but is actually the 'first mile' in the brave new interactive world? Secondly, why don't we try to focus on a vertical industry (e.g., telecom) or horizontal domain (e.g., supply chain management) selecting the key dimensions of competitive differentiation – product vs. service, breadth vs. depth, speed of delivery, customer service responsiveness, fixed or outcome-based pricing, proprietary technology or intellectual property, and so on. And let's

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IT industry has its own Hiranyakashyap to battle

be prepared to make hard decisions along the way – change people who don't fit, walk away from businesses that doesn't fit. It's essential, while attempting this, however, to recognize that focus, differentiation and brand building require time and investment. Selling value or doing business differently than the norm tends to elongate sales cycles, which tends to put pressure on cash flow and we need to resist the temptation to broaden our offerings or slash prices just to win the business and keep people busy. Along with re-invention, during the course of reinventing himself, Vishnu figured out the loopholes in the boon, and regrouped his physical and mental aspects to take advantage of these loopholes. That's something the IT industry can do as well. It's often been pointed out that the Chinese word for crisis is also the Chinese word for opportunity. I love that mindset. I truly believe that the adverse rate of the dollar can be viewed as the glass half empty or the glass half full. Sure it affects margins. But it's also a chance to take advantage of the loophole and buy yourselves what you don't have, so that you can regroup your structure to meet the challenge. To me the fact that our currency is more valuable and our price earnings ratios are still higher than average, means that we can acquire the front-ends and the large IT businesses that we never thought we could before. And the bigger the better. If people are egging us on to leapfrog, then they should also cheer as you bid for companies that seem bigger fish than you. It's happening all the time today in the manufacturing sector—Tata Corus being the stellar example—and we at Mahindra, while starting from scratch, have inorganically compiled together a portfolio of acquisitions that make us the fourth largest steel forging company in the world today. This is not without historical precedent. If you look at Japan and South Korea, both of them went through a phase of

enduring the worlds' skepticism, then painstakingly building strong and competent domestic businesses, and then on the back of global liquidity support and strong price earnings ratios, compressing time by acquiring global firms and their customer credibility. In effect, by acquiring the strengths and skill sets you need, you will regroup your profile and create a new entity, which can vanquish your challenges as effectively as Vishnu vanquished Hiranyakashyap. And finally, while reinventing yourselves, you will have to bring in some of the aspects of the third element of the Trimurti – that of Shiva the destroyer. Destroy for example the premise that cost arbitrage is the w a y t o g o . Recognize that the low cost, high volume offshore outsourcing battle has already been fought and won. Often, when strategic frames g r o w r i g i d , companies, like countries, tend to keep fighting the LAST war. If you are not already on the winners list, you need to think of other ways to compete on value and differentiation, rather than price and scale. Destroy the premise that success comes only from size, and desist from comparisons with other Indian companies. There are still many IT companies in India who define success as "we want to be one of the top ten Indian IT companies". Why not, for example, "we want to be the world's #1 banking back office solutions provider"? And lastly, perhaps the time has come to destroy the notion that the world may be your oyster but India is not. There is a huge domestic market in middle class and corporate India that has not been 14

plumbed. Even selling to the bottom of the pyramid is profitable today. But it needs a creative destruction of the current mindset and a re-think on many of the assumptions we hold dear. So, in conclusion, perhaps there really isn't that much distance between avatars in the mythological sense and avatars in the technology sense. Perhaps they are both symbolic expressions of the same reality. In their different ways, they both underline the same message – that it is necessary in any situation to reinvent,

regroup and re-think our way out of whatever challenges confront us. I'd like to close with one of my favourite quotes—such a favourite, that I can't even remember where I first read it: My father thought the world would be same; My children, however, wake up EVERY day thinking the world will be different.

Let's begin emulating our children. Time to wake up an d m ak e t h e w o r l d different.

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Mitigating Risk

By - Chandan Pal

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C a s e

S t u d y

A B C Co r p o r at i o n Per f o r m an c e A p p r ai s al Abhishek Kumar, EPGP Participant

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r. Steven Grant, General Manager (Human Resources), ABC Corporation receives a call one fine afternoon from one of his Deputy General Manager complaining that his Annual individual incentive is less than that of one of his junior team member. This was one of the feedbacks that he was receiving from various sections of the organization. Some day back he received a formal communication from the Divisional HRD people that they are finding difficultly in promoting few good executives as the recently implemented electronic Appraisal is giving a score that is contradictory to the performance of the officers. Mr. Grant started to ponder about the effectiveness of the strategic business decision taken a couple of years back and the value addition from the new e-Performance Appraisal System.

the organization started by looking at the existing appraisal system and incentive schemes.

Legacy Appraisal System Till a couple of years back, ABC Corporation followed a system of pen and paper based Annual Performance and Appraisal. The appraisal was divided into four sections namely Performance Key Result Areas, Competency, Value and Potential. The appraiser, reviewer and countersigning officer evaluate it and finally one gets a rating of Outstanding, Good, Fair and Satisfactory. However, based on final countersigning officer (CSO) score, the percentage of Outstanding, Good, Fair and Satisfactory was fixed for each CSO. These ratings were collated for each year and at the time of promotion to a higher grade, a review of these ratings was done and the senior management committee then took a decision. The eligibility for being considered for promotion, in turn depended on the number of years in a current grade. However, the existing appraisal system lacked on few things. To begin with it was unable to measure the individual performance objectively. A lot of subjectivity was involved in the management decision to give a rating of Outstanding, Very Good etc. Often it was observed that the ratings were based on preconceived notion and impression about an executive. The second problem with existing performance appraisal was that it for not considered transparent. An executive was not aware on the way he/she has been rated by the appraiser and reviewer. An executive would guess about his probable ratings when he/she is promoted/not promoted after putting the required numbers of years at a particular grade. Another major drawback of the existing appraisal system was the need of Management Information System (MIS). Since all the appraisal process was based on pen and paper, physical handling and report generation was always a problem. Existing Incentive Scheme The incentive systems that the Corporation followed were basically Overall Productivity Incentive and Team incentive scheme. The Overall Productivity Incentive (OPI) was paid the same to all the employees whereas the Team Incentive Scheme

About ABC Corporation Started way back in 1970 as a public sector enterprise, ABC Corporation is a major player in the Oil and Gas industry in South Asia with a turnover of over 50 billion $.ABC Corporation has four Divisions namely Corporate Office, Refineries, Marketing and Pipelines. Apart from the procurement of crude, transporting and selling of finished products, the Corporation has further diversified into Exploration & Production coupled with Petrochemicals business, thereby completing the integration. The strength of executives of ABC Corporation exceeded 12,800. It had a typically pyramid structure with 9 executive layers below board level. Total Number of executives was around 12826. The remaining 22000 employees consisted of non-executives. It was becoming imperative for the corporation to reward and differentiate outstanding performers in a much better way than it had been doing in the past. This was mainly due to factors like high attrition rate, increasing expectations of the workforce and need for innovation to remain in the market. These challenges were always there for the Corporation, but the magnitude was never so severe. When it came to came to rewarding the individual performers,

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ABC Corporation - Performance Appraisal

(TIS) was paid to teams based on the achievements of targets fixed at the beginning of the year. In either scheme a percentage was computed which formed the basis of calculation on the current compensation of the executive. In both the schemes individual contribution was not rewarded.

New Appraisal System To counter the above problems a new appraisal system was introduced. This appraisal system would be in electronic form and a decision was made to discontinue the existing pen and paper system. It was introduced as a tool to measure individual performance. As Peter Drucker said “If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.” This performance management had the following salient features 1. The entire appraisal would now be done in a paperless way by using web based software. 2. The System has a provision for performance planning at the beginning of the financial year, mid-year review during October and the final performance appraisal during April-May. 3. The Performance planning consisted of defining the Key Result Areas (KRAs), the five levels of target with each KRA and defining stretch with level 3 targets. Example, KRA – Growth in the Sales of Petrochemical products with Key Performance Indicator (KPI) as Increase in Sales. The five level of targets would be as follows

Level 1 Significantly Below Expectations <120 Crores

Level 2 Below Expectations >= 120 Crores and <130 Crores

5. Each target has a built in component of stretch at the time of performance planning which is the degree of difficulty built into a target (Level 3 target as mentioned above). Its value would ranges from 0.25 to 1. Its value would depend on the five factors namely relative to previous achievements, degree of dependence on uncontrollable factors, degree of complexity, skill requirements and the need for innovations. Since those doing challenging assignments have a higher built in component of stretch, those executive are likely to gain the advantage of this while computing the overall score. At the time of approval of the performance plan approval, the stretch is also approved. 6. The appraisal would consist of Key Result Areas (KRAs), Competency, Values and Potential. Performance planning was restricted to Key Result Areas. This ratio of the various sections changed for different grades. Higher grades were given more weight age to competency, values and potential i.e. the subjective part. For non executives, given the nature of the industry, it was realized that team performance was prime. Hence initially the new electronic Appraisal was implemented for executives only. Appraisals at the end of the Appraisal year At the end of appraisal year, the appraise need to submit the performance appraisal by doing the self appraisal on the Key Result Areas using the web based interface. An appraiser would then complete the appraisal by rating an appraisee on Key

Level 3 Meets Expectations >=130 Crores and <145 Crores

Stretch corresponding to Level 3 target -> 0.90(Range from 0.25 to 1) 4. The performance plan would be approved by the Appraiser and then by Reviewer. An appraisee was entitled to a rating of 5 if he/she achieves a Level 5 target.

Level 4 Above Expectations >=145 Crores and <155 Crores

Level 5 Significantly Above Expectations >=155 Crores

Result Areas, Competency, Value and Potential. Then Reviewer would complete the same process followed by the Countersigning officer.

Appraise

Appraiser Performance Plan –

Reviewer

Performance Appraisal-Submitted by Appraisee, then approved by Appraiser, Reviewer and finally by CSO

Appraisee-then approved by Appraiser & Reviewer

Countersigning Officer

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ABC Corporation - Performance Appraisal

In each step in the hierarchy care is taken by the respective Appraiser, Reviewer and CSO to rate the officer relatively so that outstanding officers end up with a higher score. This would enable relative ranking among the executives based on the overall performance score. Changes done in the Annual Incentive Scheme The existing incentive of Overall Productivity Incentive (OPI) was un-changed. However, the amount that was distributed in Team Incentive Scheme (TIS) was split in the ratio of 70:30 between Team and Individual Component. Implementation process of the new Appraisal system The management lined up a Consultants and Software developer for the development of the system. The functional inputs were given by the Corporate Human Resources team. A massive exercise of identifying the unique roles was done. Across the organization some 500 unique roles were identified. The role consisted of Key Results Areas (KRAs) and Competencies (Both Behavioral and Functional). The Values in the Corporation were one and same for all. The Potential was mapped based on whether part of Junior management, Middle management or Upper management. Then each executive was mapped to one role to enable him to start performance planning. Across the locations for a smooth changeover Internal Change Agents were appointed for conducting workshops and making a smooth changeover. ABC Corporation had an excellent computer network across its various locations. This was primarily due to the fact that the Corporation was already running ERP and had previously invested in IT infrastructure in a big way. The master data from SAP formed the basis of the master data of this appraisal system. Daily data was transferred from SAP to the database of the appraisal system.

transparency. 4. The hierarchy of multiple reporting was reduced to three levels only which are Appraiser, Reviewer and Counter Signing Officer (CSO). Problem being faced by the Organization 1. The stretch factor in the performance planning got started to be misused. It was observed that even for easy jobs a high stretch was taken. Unfortunately, the same is even approved by the Appraiser and Reviewer. This lead to problem at the time of performance appraisal, when the executives who managed to approve a higher stretch, got away with the higher performance score on KRA even when not deserving. The example below shows how this happens(Assume a situation of only one KRA and hence weightage 100) a. Stretch 0.90 Wt. 100 Rating 5 So Score would be 0.90*1*5=4.5 b. Stretch 0.70 Wt. 100 Rating 5 So Score would be 0.70*1*5=3.5 So in this example, it can be seen that with the same rating of 5, one with a higher stretch will get a higher performance score at the time of appraisal. Often, some outstanding officers taking a reasonable stretch ended up with a lower overall score vis-à-vis average performers taking high stretch. 2. The executives delayed the performance planning. They quickly understood that the delay in the committing of the targets can make them comfortable as it can make the picture more clear with respect to the targets they are likely to achieve. 3. Some executives deliberately kept lower targets at level 5 and managed to get it approved by the Appraiser and the Reviewer. This actually helped them at the time of appraisal to get a rating of 5 on that particular KRA.

Advantages gained from the new appraisal system 1. The new appraisal system brought in the performance score for each executive. The company started by paying individual incentive based on the performance score, a practice which was happening in the organization for the first time since its inception. In future the management planned to link many more benefits and incentive based on this performance score.

4. Few executives even managed to avoid key activities in performance planning, fearing they might have difficulty in meets its target. Even if they included such activities in the performance planning, they kept a small weight age. 5. After three appraisal cycles it was statistically observed that the average stretch being taken by all executives was rising although overall there was no change in the degree of difficulty in the targets.

2. The new appraisal system enabled the culture of performance planning at the beginning of the year. Each executive was committing a target at the beginning of the year which was being agreed by his appraiser and reviewer. At the end of the appraisal year the higher management had the moral obligation to assess an executive based on the targets achieved.

Mr. Grant had no doubt about the efficacy of the e Performance management system over the legacy pen and paper based appraisal. However, he was wondering on how to overcome the difficulties mentioned in different feedbacks he received from his employees. He was contemplating on both the short term and long term strategies to be drawn so that the Appraisal system becomes a true reflector of employee performance.

3. The Key Result Area score of the performance appraisal was visible to the appraisee. Hence it brought about a culture of

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F

inancial Supermarkets

Introduction What does come to our mind, when we think of a supermarket? Immediately, we think of a place where variety of products are being traded satisfying virtually the entire household need of a person. With the advent of organised retail sector, we can see a big malls, where all types of things of need are sold under one roof. This type of market is generally termed as supermarket. In these stores one can see right from green groceries to laptops, beverages to bed being sold in one and the same shop. The main concept behind these types of retail stores is to provide all requirements at one point stop so that the people have convenience in purchasing and save their time and toil. 4

In quite the same way a financial supermarket has been devised by the banks and financial institutions to serve the financial needs of people. The concept of the financial supermarket is to provide the investors and financial service seekers with all the financial services that a person may require. In this market, the Banking companies provide the customers with banking, insurance, broking, railway and flight tickets, etc. services to the people. F o r t h e c o n s u m e r, a f i n a n c i a l supermarket can offer convenience and efficiency, since his/her money is not being continually shifted from one

Rajeev Nayan, EPGP Participant

institution to another. For the institution, an all-encompassing relationship with the consumer is more profitable than handling just one aspect of a customer's financial needs. One reason for the growth of the financial supermarket is the amendments in various financial laws providing platform for consolidation and collaboration of financial services providers like insurance, banking, broking etc. in the liberalised economic environment. Another reason is the large scale use, growth and accessibility of internet and cellular phones by the financial institutions and the consumers. The regulators like central banks (RBI in India) and various governments are facilitating the emergence of these financial supermarkets for better financial innovation and consumer satisfaction. Various service components of the financial supermarket There are various service components of a financial supermarket as described below:1) Retail Banking: - The retail banking is the deposit and lending services provided by the banks to individuals. There is variety of financial products under retail banking. The traditional banking products under the category, which include current, saving and term deposits of maturities ranging from 7 days to 10 years

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are still the most popular investment avenues by the customers. These products have maintained identity with changing times due to their convenient features, risk free returns and their trusted use since a long time. There are various credit facilities which also fall under retail banking. These are housing loans to individuals, educational loan for study within the country and abroad, loan for personal needs like travel, marriage, medical expenses and purchase of ornaments and consumer durables. Financing to retail traders, professionals including doctors, architects, engineers, chartered accountants are very effective for value addition and quality of services to the people in the society. 2) Insurance: - The banks are now providing life and general insurance services to people in various ways. Some banks like SBI have opened a subsidiary (SBI life) to provide Life insurance. Some Banks like ICICI have made joint ventures (ICICI-Prudential and ICICI-Lombard) with established overseas brands to provide life and general insurance. Some banks like Central Bank of India has made a tie-up arrangement with reputed companies like Life Insurance Corporation of India and New India Assurance Co. Ltd. to sell their life and no-life insurance products respectively from its branches.

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A Financial Supermarket

3) Mutual Fund: - Due to its inherent investment expertise and practices the mutual fund investments are generally considered a safe investment product with moderate return on investment. People having eagerness to earn with rising SENSEX, but who do not want to take a high risk or not having a demat account generally choose to invest in the mutual fund. The commercial banks have entered the mutual fund business taking

banks like Central Bank of India have made a tie-up arrangement with reputed companies like UTI, TATA, Franklyn Templeton, Reliance to sell their mutual business from its branches 4) Depository Participant: - The banks act as depository participant and keep dem at accounts of the constituents for their investment in equity stocks. Some banks also provide online trading in

5) Issue of IPO: - The banks facilitate to the eligible companies to come out with the Initial Public Offer to raise fund from the public. In this business, they function as lead managers, underwriters or book builders to the issue for the company. With the recent boom in share market we

various routes. Some banks like SBI and HDFC have their own subsidiaries for the mutual fund business. Banks like ICICI have made a joint venture company like ICICI-Prudential for the business. Some

equity stocks to their customers by providing them a saving account and Demat account facilitating online transfer of fund and equity stock for them. This helps the customers to participate more

have been able to see a lot IPO issues successfully launched by the banks which has helped the companies to raise share capital as well as hefty share premiums.

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actively in the stock trade. ICICI provides the facility through its subsidiary ICICIDirect.

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A Financial Supermarket

6) Mergers and acquisitions: - In the present era of globalisation and liberalisation, the merger and acquisition of the companies have become regular phenomena for inorganic growth, strategic positioning and scale of economy in operations. The banks play the role of facilitator and financer in these activities. 7) Wealth Management:: - Wealth management is classified as a type of financial planning that provides high net worth individuals with private banking, estate planning, asset management, legal resources and investment management with a goal of sustaining and growing long term wealth. HSBC Premier and Citibank's Citigold provide wealth management services. 8) Corporate Finance:-- The banks play a major role in the growth and development of the corporate sector by providing them working capital finance for purchase and processing of raw materials and term loan for purchase of equipments and machinery. The banks provide letter of credit to the corporate sector to facilitate import of equipments and raw materials. They provide pre shipment and post shipment export finance to export oriented units to facilitate manufacture and export the goods. They also facilitate collection, negotiation and discounting of trade export bills of the exporters. After the promulgation of SEZ act the banks are now playing a major role in facilitating and financing for the establishment of the industries. 9) Government business: - The banks play a major role in facilitating government businesses. It prepares and disburses the pension of defence, railways and other central and state government retirees situated at various locations across the country and ensure timely payment to them. The banks collect income tax, excise tax and other statutory dues from the people to the government and help facilitate both the people and the

government in easy compliance and telebanking etc. They provide Debit collection of the statutory dues. clearing services for collection of telephone electricity, etc. bills and credit 10) Booking of Air tickets: - The banks clearing services for payment of dividend act as agent of the various passenger warrant, Income tax refund warrants. airline services for booking of the tickets. 15) Safe deposit lockers and safety 11) Credit card services:-- We are very deposit of articles:: The banks provide much aware of the power of plastic the customers with renting out of safe money provided the banks as it has deposit lockers for safe keeping of made our life much easy facilitating ornaments and valuables keeping the key convenience in purchase of almost with them selves. The banks also keep everything, right from railway tickets to under its safe custody the fabrics, magazines to consumer durables. Debit card and smart card are 16) Dealing in foreign exchange: - The other variants that have specific features bank provides the much needed foreign to suit the requirements of the exchange for remittances to abroad for customers. medical, travel, and various other needs. The banks provide derivative services in 12) Rural development: - The banks are foreign exchange to hedge against the instrumental in providing mechanisation exchange risk of underlying foreign and production needs of the farmers so currency. the food grain and cash crop production in country is facilitated and increased. Conclusion The banks are facilitating the formation of Citibank, HSBC and some other Self Help Groups (SHG) for poverty multinational banks have emerged as a eradication in the rural and semi urban global financial supermarkets. In the same areas through mutual cooperation and way, ICICI bank, HDFC bank, SBI and synergy. Financial inclusion of each and some other banks have emerged as every person is next of the banks. They Indian financial supermarkets. Unlike the facilitate and finance artisans, cattle goods supermarket you may not even farming, poultry farming, and formation require to physically visit the financial of farmers' club in the villages. supermarkets. The services are generally available at a click or a dial away. 13) Employment generation: - The bank is able to provide credit linked employment to jobless through various schemes like PMRY, SGSY, SJSRY, DRI etc. The banks are providing venture capital to the entrepreneurs coming with new ideas for setting up of their entrepreneurial unit

So, next time when you go to a bank to open a savings account or purchase a demand draft, don't get surprised if the banker asks you for your interest in share market to open a demat account and trading, or for your travel plan to sell air ticket, or for your life insurance plans. In the same way he may make you aware 14) IT enabled services: - The banks about the benefits of investing in a mutual are providing to its customers the fund. Nowadays, the bankers are ready to information technology enabled services cater to virtually all your needs. for secured, faster and reliable transaction and easy access to their account details. They are providing to its customers anytime, anywhere banking through various services like ATMs, Internet banking, SMS banking,

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Of fice - a place t o wo r k o r … Anupam Chakraborty, EPGP Participant

I

t was late in the evening when Ms. D'costa peeped in the chamber of the Mr. Raghavan. The official duty hours were long over and except the guard perhaps all had called it a day. Mr. Raghavan was deeply engrossed in the month-end report and didn't even notice her entry. He was extremely dissatisfied with the collection reports of North region and was trying to figure out what went wrong. Care for some coffee, Raghav? Yeah Rosy, just at the right point of time… her voice and the fragrance of fire and ice was more than enough to drag Raghavan out of his half hour long uninterrupted analyses. Ms. D'costa is a noncovenanted assistant (consumer care) in the multinational that we are talking about and Raghavan is the Manager (commercial). Mrs D'Costa, a catholic and mother of a child, is fighting her divorce suit for the last seven years. She can be rated as an average in beauty, a little more than sensuous but shade less than libidinous. Her dressing and makeups were such that every passer by would be bound to give a look at least, which she coveted dearly. Contrarily, Mr. Ragahvan, a Tamil Brahmin, seems to be one of those who after coming out of an orthodox oriental family set-up is trying to bridge up with the fast moving ever changing world. He is married for the about eight years and is blessed with a girl of 4. With two mugs of coffee from the vending machine, Ms. Rosy D'Costa entered the chamber and took her sit on the table on which Raghav was working.

Rosy, behave yourself… sit on the chair please. O come on Raghav, there's no one now in this floor. But… suppose… anyone turns up? I mean… if someone sees you in my chamber this way. Are you afraid? No… but we work here… So why don't you think the same way when you take me out? Oh Rosy, not again… I am very badly stuck with this report… Don't know why the hell North has featured so badly this month. I can help you out. It is due to the conflict between the ground staffs and the senior executive there. Your man is good in processes but unable to handle people. You recall that there was a little fiasco about a month ago, wherein you had to step in to control the situation. Yes, of course, but that was a very stray incident and moreover the staffs were at fault. Even the union condemned their actions. The union people had no other alternative. It was an open and shut case. But since then the union should have been dealt with very cautiously. They are one down and want to have the scores levelled. And that is perhaps reflected in your north report. Ask your executive to be a little more collaborative with the ground staff. Are you sure Rosy? How can you be so very sure? I work on the floor Raghav and you need no rocket science to keep your eyes and ears open. Now, will you please get up

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and give me a lift back home? Francis is perhaps waiting for her mother to return. Now you are kidding. Francis never waits for you. The 11 year child is more comfortable with your mother, who never lets him feel your deficiency. Just upon uttering these Raghav realised he unknowingly had hit below the belt. Immediately, he tried to make up by asking, how about dropping at the Baskin Robbins outlet on our way back? No I don't think I have that time, was the curt reply. Raghav knew it would take a little more time to help her recover, as she was one of those who did never accept bitter truths. The above conversation might be an imaginary one, but at some point, at some place, people may find familiar resemblances. The Rosys and Raghavs are not so very Utopian. In the ever changing scenario of the business environment nowadays when people are spending (or rather forced to spend) a major part of their time in the office, it is quite unlikely that personal relationships won't grow. But, how far is this legitimate, justified or acceptable? Let us first try to analyse the reasons behind it. The need based theory of Maslow or an added motivational factor in Herzburg's Two Factor theory can give a potential reason for those who are in need but void of something in their personal life. They dearth of some personal touches perhaps lures them to set foot on a socially tabooed untrodden path. Maybe Sigmund Freud could have had better answers even.

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Office - a Place to work or...

But for some others, I would like to propose a different philosophy. Some needs are never felt until one sees the scope of fulfilment of the need. In simpler words, you feel hungry only if you see the

that explain the female counterpart's nature? In our anecdote, how did the affair between Rosy and Raghav begin? They did not fall for each other at the first sight; neither the teenage infatuation

food. Well, I do not want to describe these as latent needs because latent needs need not necessarily be felt in the office itself. Furthermore, the comfort level of a person with his/her counterpart adds fuel to the fire. It is not uncommon in various instances where managers have ended up tying knots with their secretaries but has any study been done as how many houses did fall apart in this not so business like game at office? Eventually the persons who indulge are to be hold responsible for the same and no one else. It can be understood though not justified for the persons who are devoid of family touches in their life, but what about the other group for whom only the basic instinct counts? Or is it so that spending a substantial amount of time, which is perhaps much more than that spent at home is forcing people to this adaptability? Some even go out to claim that it is due to the fact that 'men are polygamist by nature'. Well, true, history certifies that but how does

applies for them. Then? It might have been so that when they met each other, it was just another official introduction. What could have brought them in communicating terms? Work, obviously and the little snippets between the work. What could have brought them closer? Could be some exchanges beyond mere work related conversations. Raghavan might have developed a soft corner knowing Rosy's bitter personal front. Rosy might have found a receptive individual behind the frames of the office master. Whatever the case may be, the bottom-line is that two individuals have set foot on a path that is beyond official work. Now, how is this viewed by the management of the company? There can be two distinct responses. There will a group who will condemn this as an extramarital affair. There will be a small but existing group who will be indifferent as long as the work is not hampered. Well, I would like to go a step beyond. People who are condemning are doing

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so mostly because they didn't get a chance like this which they also are in 'need' of. People who are indifferent are self-content and they do not feel such need. As long as the official work and decorum is not jeopardised, it's immaterial what person is indulging into. Each and every individual has all the virtues and vices that one can ever imagine of – the proportion of the ingredients only varying. It's the beauty of the Creator that we do not get to read the minds of an individual until he or she wants us to and that to in the way that they want. The world would have been hell and there would be nothing left what we call 'society' if anyone could read anyone's mind. Sad, but true. Since generations the cognitive approach of learning is guided or channelized by our predecessors. But, at some point of time all individuals do think beyond the taboos and restrictions imposed by the society. Persons who vocalised their challenges on the basis of their own reasoning are reckoned either genius or insane in history. So, where do we land? On one hand we have to accept that a manager is unlikely to look at an employee as a work cipher. He or she will look at him or her first as a person and then as a productive unit. Hence it's important to socialise. But the million dollar question is how far? Many companies have explicitly laid down policies and dictums about this issue. Some even go up to the level of handing pink slips. On the other hand, if two employees are happy and morally boosted at the work place, companies reap dividends out of it. It's quite impossible to evade cupid's arrow when it strikes. But it's always beneficial to have a balanced head over the emotional heart. And that determines the level of mingling with colleagues at workplace. After at the end of the day, we are living beings to be bound by the guidelines of the society.

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We Shall Overcome

Dr. Sanghamitra Mukherjee, Research Scientist ,Chemgen Pharma International

I

n today's world we always look at the inventions and their effectiveness in making our life easier, smoother, smaller, cozier, faster and what not. Ever-growing demand of mankind for energy and raw materials has gradually pushed natural resources to their limits, giving rise to more and more environmental problems. We do never have time to think over the by-products that are getting created in our never ending endeavor to excel. Tragic, but that's a fact. At best, we show concern on the increasing pollution. But, there are many a things to really worry about apart from pollution. How many of us in our day to day work do care about the dangers that we are continuously creating in the form of by-products that are getting generated. To us, most of the time, it's a waste to talk about waste. In this regard, chemistry has played a contradictory role, although it represents one of the most successful and diverse

sectors of manufacturing industries. The range of chemical products is enormous, and they make invaluable contributions to our quality of life. However, these manufacturing processes also lead to millions of tons of waste. As a consequence, the role of chemistry is controversial to the society. Thus to expiate the burden of chemist a new avenue of chemistry has been opened known as green chemistry. Green Chemistry can be defined as the practice of chemical science and industry in the direction of environmental friendliness and resource sustainability. It is the cultivating of chemistry in a manner that maximizes its benefits while eliminating or at least greatly reducing its adverse impacts on environment thus taking an oath to make the world green. Presently people in the Green Chemistry circle are making an effort to pursue twelve principles of green chemistry proposed by the fathers of green

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chemistry Paul T Anastas and John C Warner, ? Prevent waste ? Maximize atom economy ? Design safer chemicals and products ? Design less hazardous chemical syntheses ? Use safer solvents and reaction conditions ? Minimize the potential for accidents. ? Increase energy efficiency ? Use catalysts, not stoichiometric reagents ? Avoid chemical derivatives ? Use renewable feedstocks ? Design chemicals and products to degrade after use ? Analyze in real time to prevent pollution Coming to the first point – it is a well known fact that prevention is always better than cure. Thus, green chemistry aims to prevent waste than to clean it up. In earlier day's waste disposal was

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We shall overcome.

convenient as it was mostly discarded into water, underground or released into air. But presently, with enforcement of environmental laws costs for waste treatment increased progressively. General Electric was compelled to spend millions of dollars to remove PCBs from Hudson River deposits that were discarded to the river as wastes from the company's manufacture of electrical equipment. DuPont is paying more than $600 million as agreement for the environmental damage they caused by the production of Teflon and Gore-Tex. The cleanup of pollutants including asbestos, dioxins, pesticide manufacture residues and mercury are costing various concerns hundreds and millions of dollars. Pre tanning process of leather industry was becoming a cause of alarm for the leather industry as the process caused a lot of pollution. Report says that tanneries in the Dhaka's Hazaribagh area discharge some 21,600 square meters of liquid wastes everyday, which includes harmful wastes, including chromium, lead, sulphur, ammonium, salt and other materials. So green chemistry approach which will help to avoid these costs will invariably cut the total cost thus the elimination of costly control measures can lower overall cost. Prevention of waste can be made possible by developing synthetic methods, which will maximize the incorporation of all materials used in the process to the final product. That is the amount of reactant used should be balanced with the amount of required product produced thus minimizing the by-product formation, this is termed as atom economy. A major goal in the chemical production and, indeed, in virtually all areas of human venture, is the reduction of risk. Risk is defined as a function of hazard time's exposure.

Risk = f {hazard - exposure} It shows that risk can be reduced by a reduction of hazard or by reduction of

exposure, and various combinations of both. There are various physical means to protect one from exposure but here also prevention of hazards are more welcomed than to reduce the exposure so designing safer chemicals and products,using safer solvents and reaction conditions will in turn minimize risk and minimize the potential for accidents. Another very important factor is the utilization of energy resources during process of synthesis. Energy consumption poses economic and environmental costs in almost all industrial manufacturing. Thus use of catalyst is emphasized over using stoichiometric reagents. As it is well known that a catalyst provides an alternative reaction route by lowering the activation energy. The lower the activation energy, the faster will be the reaction rate. Thus in presence of catalyst both time and energy consumption is reduced. On the other hand, earth's resources are depleting day by day. Most of the raw materials used in the manufacturing process are presently at dearth. So it is high time to learn the utilization of renewable feedstock. Biomass, which includes all living and non-living organic material together with crops, animal, agricultural and forestry waste, is a renewable feedstock which is abundant, chemically rich and presently underutilized. Moreover, the majority of biomass comes from green plants, which represents a carbon neutral resource because it does not add to atmospheric carbon-di-oxide but recycles it. Utilization of biomass reduces fossil carbon released to the atmosphere, and provides additional social and economic benefits to the environment. The competition of the cultivation of food and of feedstock for industrial use can be met by a global program of reforestation of areas wasted in historical time by human activities. Most products obtainable from renewable raw materials may at present not be able to compete with the products

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of the petrochemical industry, but slowly the scenario will change as oil becomes scarcer day by day and oil prices inevitably rise. In the long run, renewable resources have to replace fossil raw materials. At present we find quite a few numbers of applications of green chemistry in many manufacturing process. Huge resources are used to popularize the concept of green chemistry. A very well known example is set by world renowned chemical industries like Bayer, Dow, BASF and many more and the innovations are also effective in our own country as we find that the leather industries of the country got saved by the use of microbial enzyme technology as an alternative to that of the conventional chemicals used in tanning process. We also witness emphasis of green fuel technology which certainly comes from bioethanol as a gasoline replacement and most of the bio-fuel manufacturing is made possible from inedible vegetable oils and other waste products. We find extensive uses of different ranges of catalyst in different industry. There are innumerable numbers of catalyst used in industry like zeolites for catalytic cracking of hydrocarbon, solid acid catalysts in oil refining process, which makes the process less corrosive and harmful. Similarly there are numerous applications of biocatalyst in food and pharmaceutical industries. Green Chemistry is a revolutionary science that seeks to merge sustainability with innovation to create harmless products for a secured future. The encouragement of environmentally sound and sustainable use of renewable natural resources is one of the tenable aims of green chemistry.

Reference 1. Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice. Paul T. Anastas and John C. Warner, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

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The

RISE

of Executive MBA in India!

Deepak Chauhan, EPGP Participant

IIMs and ISB require GMAT score as one of the requirements for getting admission

Why MBA now? This is a typical question which is asked to almost all aspirants to EX PG courses across the world including India. I believe every aspirant is well versed to answer such questions.

But the question still remains to be answered, why there's a spurt in such courses, offered by leading B-Schools in India. For us, who want to learn new skills to move to next level and to increase market value, an IIM degree was a must. I have observed the market scenario changing rapidly in last few years. It has become imperative for the working managers to change to this market needs drastically; lest they have a chance of being left out. This factor becomes more crucial for those in middle management positions. It's no secret that in India and elsewhere, transition from lower level to middle level is smooth, but growing beyond this gets tougher at every step. The transformation from a Manager to a Leader takes place from this middle level onwards. This is what many participants I met felt. Says Mrinal Srivastava, an IIT Kanpur alumni and a admit at ISB, having learnt so much after spending considerable time in the Industry, I felt its time to revalidate my learning and equip myself with necessary skills so that my transformation to higher level becomes smooth and fast. Similar sentiments were echoed by an EXPGP participant at IIM Indore; he felt that this program helps him in honing his abilities to identify and seize opportunities, foster professional relationships across major industries and

Let's see chronologically when the executive MBA has really made its mark in India. Last few years have seen phenomenal growth in executive MBA courses being offered by leading B-Schools in India. This trend of accelerated MBA targeting individuals with substantial work experience actually started by the arrival of Indian School of Business at Hyderabad, in India in the year 2001. In autumn of 2001, IIM Indore launched its EXPGP program, the US version of ExMBA in India, wherein working executives go to a B-School at regular intervals and then go back at their workplace and implement what they have learnt. Since then there is no looking back. IIM Ahmedabd launched its version of PGPX in 2005; followed by IIM Calcutta in 2006 IIM Lucknow joined the bandwagon in 2007 by launching its own version of EXMBA titled IPMX. The courses offered have different flavours but one thing that is common to all courses is that, they all target individuals with substantial work experience, ranging from 2 plus years at ISB, 5 plus years at IIM Indore to 7 plus years at IIM Ahmedabad. There is also an effort on the part of institutes to give these courses international flavour - all of the

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The Rise of executive MBA in India

compete globally, may be even change his line of profession from IT to finance or consulting. The reasons are various but ultimate goal is the same. To learn, revalidate, equip and get ready to face the rigors of rapidly changing market dynamics, act as an agent of change and be a winner! Moreover, the accelerated MBA format not only makes one more competitive in the business world, but also gives one the confidence that comes from possessing a broad business background having excelled in a diverse team environment at work.

write GMAT, do a MBA from abroad after 4-5 years of work experience. These courses have opened another window for such individuals. I have met some, who even after clocking 700+ in GMAT have chosen to do EPGP from IIM Indore foregoing the lure of international universities. For those who have contemplated coming back to India after MBA from foreign universities, this is a golden chance.

The other factor that propelled the growth is the rapidly growing Indian economy. The Indian economy has been growing at a consistent staggering rate of over 8 % per annum for the last five years. This has fuelled the demand for change managers. Managers who can act as instrument of change and lead by example. This demand has not only being generated by Indian companies but by many Multi National Corporations who are flocking to India in hordes and setting up their operations for various reasons. In spite of all the hoopla of India having the largest trained manpower in the world, its no secret that quality of the workforce is a big question mark. Talk to any HR personnel and he can talk hours on how they are unable to find the right kind of talent in India. This reflects that there is growing market for management trainings, especially world class trainings and who else is equipped to train such people than the top B-Schools in India. Although the IIMs churn out excellent graduates but they are mostly freshers and there is time gap between where they are required and what there skill levels are at the time of graduation. This gap has fueled the demand for PGPEX courses, wherein good managers go to the B school get trained in the world class facility and come back to work in about a year. Needless to the say, the managers who get admission to such courses have great potential to be world-class and have demonstrated their talent at work place and that's the reason why they get chosen through a stringent admission process.

The rise of middle class in India also contributes to popularity of such courses. There are many in jobs who just wanted to do different and did not know how to do it. These courses also help such individuals and give them a chance of choosing their desired profession, which was not possible earlier in India. For example these courses also help in bringing out the cocooned entrepreneur sleeping within an individual and help him chase his dream. There may be many more reasons, but one thing is for sure, the demand for such courses is growing exponentially. I am sure that other IIM's and other institutes in India are also eager to jump into fray and design their own version of EXPGP courses to cater to this growing market of executives looking to go back to school!

Another reason is that there is a class of Indians who always thought globally. I have many in my graduation class; bright people who did not wanted to write CAT but what wanted to

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comprehending what data speaks!

Making Better Decisions Faster The primary goal of business intelligence is to help people make decisions that improve a company's performance and promote its competitive advantage in the marketplace. In short, business intelligence empowers organizations to make better decisions faster. In the best of all worlds, managers, from the lowest lead supervisor to the CEO, make decisions by considering their experiences, their understanding of the business, their business plan, and information. Often the experiences, understandings, and strategies that go into decision making are pretty static; that is, they change very slowly. The information, however, is

Navneet Gupta, Senior Consultant, HP

always new, which means it is often changing rapidly and in a big way. It is often difficult to get a handle on these changes and understand their significance. Making better decisions means improving any or all parts of the process; this also results in fewer poor decisions and more superior ones. Better decisions result in better achievement of corporate objectives, such as improving shareholder value. Business intelligence aids better decision making by analyzing whether actions are, in fact, resulting in progress toward company objectives. Deciding what is a better decision for an organization is best accomplished with a clearly stated set of objectives and a plan for achieving them. This relationship between a company's overall plan and business intelligence is not a one-way street, with business intelligence simply receiving the plan and using it as the scale for measuring the quality of decisions. Business intelligence has a major role in creating those strategies and plans. It is about making better decisions faster, and the most strategic decisions are the ones where business intelligence is the most indispensable. While having perfect information to support every decision is an unobtainable goal, there is no doubt that making consistently better decisions sooner will provide a competitive advantage. Converting Data into Information To make better decisions faster, business executives and managers need relevant and useful facts at their fingertips. But there is often a large gap between the information that decision makers require and the mountains of data that businesses

E

ven though we live in the Information Age, where everincreasing masses of data are at our disposal, we often struggle to understand what the data means. While advancements in the power of available technologies are never ending, we need to recognize that technology alone cannot solve a business problem. To drive the business forward, companies need people at the helm who can make effective decisions. Business intelligence is the key to bringing together information, people, and technology to successfully manage a company or organization. Perhaps by explaining what business intelligence has to offer a company, we can help you impact your business just as Lisa did. The term business intelligence, also known as BI, is relatively new. The term is used by different pundits and software vendors to characterize a broad range of technologies, software platforms, specific applications, and processes. Since business intelligence is a multifaceted concept, we will examine it from three different perspectives:

? Making better decisions faster ? Converting data into information ? Using a rational approach to management

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Comprehending What Data Speaks

collect every day. We call this the analysis gap. To bridge this analysis gap, organizations make significant investments in the development of BI systems to convert raw data into useful information. The most effective BI systems access huge volumes of data (measured in gigabytes and even terabytes) and deliver relevant subsets instantly to decision makers in a form to which these people can easily relate While technology is a significant part of this process, often the hardest aspect of business intelligence is being able to define what information is useful and relevant to a decision. BI solutions at the enterprise level are charged with collecting and reporting a company's most important metrics, sometimes called key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs guide businesses in making decisions that affect particular business units as well as the company at large.

and tactical to its business? These operational details can affect strategic shifts such as realignment of profit goals; investment in skills or technology; consideration of mergers, acquisitions or partnering; repositioning of the company; or targeting of a key segment.

Determining who needs access and essential criteria and processes The goals of your BI system are to help you maintain a competitive edge, allowing you to respond in a timely manner to competitive opportunities or threats. Your BI system should help monitor the vital statistics of the enterprise in a real-time environment and to mobilize team response as appropriate. Determining who needs access, what criteria will govern that access and what processes will be used to manage access will influence networking, processing and analysis costs.

Using a Rational Approach to Management Calculating the costs Several factors affect the cost of implementing a BI system, such as how much information is gathered and analyzed and how often the information will be refreshed. In addition, analysis can become expensive, and the time spent modeling can be lengthy. Cost decisions will influence the system design—the choice of servers, storage and software,

Business intelligence can be described as an approach to management, an organizational state of mind, a management philosophy—in short, the BI attitude. People and organizations adopt the BI attitude because of a belief that a fact-based, rational approach to making decisions, to the extent this is possible, is basically a good thing. The BI attitude is characterized as follows: ? Seeking objective measurable quantitative facts (data) about the business ? Using organized methods and technologies to analyze the facts ? Inventing and sharing models that explain the cause and effect relationships between operational actions and the effects these have on reaching the goals of the business ? Experimenting with alternate approaches and monitoring feedback on results ? Understanding that people are not always rational

Building the necessary skills and systems After determining your options and the cost of installing or updating an enterprise BI system, you need to decide what kind of system to build. Can the current system deliver sufficient results by upgrading some of the components? Will partial upgrades be feasible in the future? Do you want the best-in-theindustry components? What is the cost of installing new systems versus performing upgrades of the current system? Does the return on investment (ROI) incorporate postinstallation or post-migration maintenance and upgrade costs?

The BI attitude of fact-based and analysis-based decision making is influencing corporate cultures everywhere, principally because we are living in a world that is becoming increasingly rich in information; the technology is available, it is getting cheaper and easier, and it is working. Experience, gut feelings, and lightning bolts of intuition—all of these will continue as an important basis for making decisions, but more and more they are being supported by the foundation of information that business intelligence delivers. In fact, gut feelings and lightning bolts work better because they are inspired by the hard facts of business intelligence. Armed with the facts, you have excellent backup when you need to sell and promote your ideas.

Summary Business intelligence is best understood from several perspectives: making better decisions faster, converting data into information, and using a rational approach to management. The analysis of business information leads to insights—many small ones, and hopefully a few big ones. These insights suggest ways to improve the business; when acted on, these insights are then measured to see what is working. These measurements provide more data for analysis, starting the cycle anew. We call this progression—analysis to insight to action to measurement—the BI cycle. The enablers of the BI cycle are technology, people, and organizational culture. To achieve and maintain excellent business intelligence, these enablers require investment. Superior business intelligence is a competitive advantage that can have a huge impact on the success of an organization.

Challenges: Identifying mission-critical information and enterprise success factors What data is vital to the health of the enterprise and is strategic 31

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ho would have thought that one day Mukesh Ambani, Preity Zinta and Shahrukh Khan will be opponents and compete in a cricket field. Yes, the talk here too revolves around the over hyped (is it?), over priced (or is their true value?) and over burdened (I shall explain this in due course) Indian Premier League. The brainchild of the BCCI and possibly the turning point that modern day cricket so much required. Let me take you through a short story on sports the world over. It is a known fact that cricket is not a global sport rather it is more like a niche

sport (using some management jargon considering the audience of this article). The truly global sports are football aka soccer, track events, motorsports and maybe hockey and basketball can scrape into the list at the bottom. Let us look at how the 20/20 format for cricket could provide that vital boost and act as a catalyst in launching the sport of cricket globally. To begin with none of the sports mentioned above last for longer than 3 hours at a time. Cricket however went from being a 6 day sport to a 1 day sport, now how many people are interested in

following a sport that is a day long when they don't know the rules, they cant figure out the players and they don't identify with any of the teams playing. 20/20 however will see the game reduced to a short 3 hours, one that can be watched by fans over a few drinks at the bar. Another important dimension brought in by the IPL is the private ownership of teams, till date cricket was played between national teams with players restricted to that nation. However whether it is the EPL for football, NBA for basketball, F1 for motorsports all have teams that are privately owned and a free

C for Cricket, C for Commerce & C for ….. Pranav Aggarwal, PGP Participant

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C for Cricket C for Commerce C for...

'trade' of talent is allowed. What reigns supreme is talent, and the money one has to source it. With the IPL , cricket may soon get its own share of trades with players being bought in multi million dollar deals. Just as an Indian cheers with all his heart and soul for a Manchester United or a Ferrari, we may well see Australians cheering a Mumbai side or an American cheering for the Kolkatta team. What this also does is provide entertainment value. Shahrukh Khan already has a video for his side the Kolkatta Knight riders. Teams have been launched at impressive glitzy ceremonies in their respective cities and promoters have spared no tactic in the book to attract publicity. Reams of press space has gone into every leg of the IPL right from the sale of broadcast rights to auctioning of teams to bidding for players. Going back to the point I mentioned earlier on the IPL being over burdened. I say it is over burdened with the pressure to do as expected, to generate the interest, to ensure spends from fans, spends on tickets to watch matches live, spends to buy memorabilia and a million more things which they might come up with. I cannot ignore and not mention the ICL (Indian Cricket League) which is floated by the Essel group. A major competitor to the IPL, their 2nd season is on its way to completion on the 7th of April. However it has failed to generate the interest one would have thought it to generate. Most of its matches begin at 7 pm coinciding with the prime time on television. The ICL contest last year in its inaugural season was won by the Chennai Superstars and they are in the final 4 this year too. It is a tough job for the BCCI and the promoters of the IPL teams to ensure that they spin the cycle so as to make their venture profitable. After all it is only the money that makes the world go around. At business schools we are taught to analyze business opportunities on various parameters. It would be

interesting to see some of management's fundamental tools applied to the IPL. Let's look at the investments first. The BCCI received almost $725 Million from the sale of the 8 city franchisees. This was a good 80% over the reserve price of $50 Mn for each team. Television rights sold for $918 Million and a $ 100 Million commitment for promoting the league. The BCCI has raised more than $1.5 Billion over the entire process and more is to come once the tournament progresses. I personally feel that the cricketing industry is now worth a lot more than it ever was, whats important to see is how corporate bigwigs like United Breweries, Reliance and India Cements will make money out of this and explain the investment to shareholders. Would a Reliance shareholder see the company invest $ 100 Million (just the franchise price) in expansion, or in a new venture like a Twenty20 cricket franchise? Another fundamental analysis we business graduates always do is customer analysis. Who is the customer here? Who is the entertainer here? Is Shahrukh Khan's new music video for his team the only entertainment we can expect from the IPL? The customer after all is the man on the street, the man who takes a sick leave to watch the finals of the tri series in Australia, the man who clings on to life in the local trains of Mumbai but doesn't miss plugging his earphones for commentary on the match. The IPL has already disappointed many, to begin with there are just 8 city teams so all of India is not represented. What is a cricket fanatic from Indore to do? Cheer for the Mumbai Indians cause he loves Sachin or the Chennai Super Kings cause he cant forget M S Dhoni and his World Cup winning captaincy for India. At the same time with matches restricted to 8 cities a majority of Indians do not have access to watch the matches live, when its international cricket there is a whole days cricket and one gets to see all of the Indian team plus a foreign side

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performing. Here one may see a max of 5-7 players that too for just 3 hours. The other customers for the league are the advertisers and sponsors. Without the advertisers shelling out money the entire proposition may fail, and the only draw for these customers will be the man on the street described above. Most advertisers are using a 'wait and watch' approach for now The next hurdle before the IPL is retention of talent, what if the icon players like Sachin, Gangluy, Dravid and Kumble retire from active cricket and don't play in the tournament 2 years from now, worst still the foreign players being unable to play in the future due to clashes with international series cannot be ruled out. The entire premise of the IPL is based on top international players performing for franchise teams on Indian soil. It is heard that the BCCI is in talks with associations to hold exhibition matches at the Lord's and Oval in England. England too is in advanced stages of announcing its own variant of domestic IPL style contests. Another question mark lies with the quality of games one will see as part of the IPL. 'A' Rated international batsmen facing India's domestic players and vice versa may lead to lop sided contests with little entertainment value for the viewer. The whole world waits with bated breath, some as fans, some as promoters, some as investors; the only ones to laugh all the way to the banks are the BCCI and the players. They just realized that they are worth a lot more and the IPL has used the oldest trick in the book by luring top national and international players with big money for a small portion of their time. Interesting it is bound to be and well…. The last C stands for CONFUSION!!! The state of mind I am in after trying to unjumble the IPL

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f what good is Twittering or Microblogging? A few months ago even I did not understand. Much the same way as I did not "get" the concept of blogging six years ago (I'm a slow learner, you see ;-)

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tweets on your cell phone. So imagine that you are doing an informal salary survey for accounting professionals, and you tweet your question to your followers if any of them know how much accountants are making, you can receive real time data.

What is Twitter, you ask? Twitter is the tool that helps make this possible and people are using it differently from what it was started for. In a very simple form, it asks you to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. People can choose to follow your updates, if they choose to become your "followers”.

That's not all, tweeter tracking is another killer feature for you to track specific phrases and have them delivered to your phone/IM. One of the driving philosophies behind Twitter has always been to get away from the computer, get out there and do something, and tell your friends about it in real-time. That's why Twitter

The New Age of Blogging Gautam Ghosh, Senior Consultant, Tvarita Consulting Then like Technorati for blogs, there's a specific search engine for Twitter called Terraminds. I am such a Twitter newbie that I discovered it recently. I searched for HR and Human Resources and found lots of people to follow.

works over IM and text messaging—you can bring your phone almost anywhere to interact and share. So imagine you are hiring Strategy Consultants, you can set up a track for "Strategy Consultant" and whenever anyone publicly mentions that phrase in their Tweet, you get an update and can contact the person directly. Adding an @ before the username

The biggest advantage of twitter is that it enables you to get away from the computer as you can choose to receive the

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The New Age of Blogging, Twittering or Microblogging and HR

of a person on Tweeter makes the person see it as a reply. Since Twitter has opened up their API - a programming interface that enables developers to create new services on top of it - all sorts of new inventions are springing up. Lots of applications are being built around it. My personal favourite is Twitterfox, a Firefox extension that enables me to twitter without going to the website. Then for the bloggers amongst you, there's Twitterfeed that enables you to send a link to your blog posts to your twitter followers. The 6 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers are : 1. Research Tool One of the things that I've come to enjoy about Twitter the most is the way that it can be used when you're researching a post. Stuck for inspiration? Twitter and idea and see what others add to it. Need an example for a point you're making? Twitter it and you might get some good ones. Got a question that you're stuck on? Ask it to your followers to see what they think. Need to test a hypothesis? Do a straw poll on your followers. The beauty of Twitter is that it's quick, is used by a wide variety of types of people and because of the 140 character limit to messages it keeps interactions concise, manageable and productive (usually). 2.Reinforce (and expand) Your Personal Brand Whether it be social networking, blogging, bookmarking, real life interactions etc - all of these 'straws' when added together can go a long way to building your own brand. Twitter can be used to expand your brand or to show a different side of you.

3. Promote Content Twitter can potentially promote content and drive traffic. 4. Extend Audience - Find NEW Readers One challenge that bloggers who've been around for a while in their niche can face is that they reach a saturation point. They sometimes feel like everyone who will hear about them has already heard about them and they can see a plateau in their stats. This often happens 6-12 months into a blog. My encouragement to this type of blogger is to think about where potential

6. Previews Twitter allows me to create a private post on my blog that I reveal only to Twitter followers and to then post a draft there of a post I'm working on to get feedback on before publishing it publicly. This would be an interesting exercise and explore the idea of a more communal writing of a post. The latest is that Twitter is being used by recruiters too. All this springs from a deceptively simple idea and tool. And that is what never ceases to amaze me about the internet: create a platform, make it open, and people will do things with it that you never could have imagined. Considering that Twitter was cofounded by Evan Williams, who also cofounded the company that created Blogger and popularised personal publishing, I should have seen it coming. I just forgot that, on the web, big things often come in small packages.

Anyway, if you are on twitter, or have decided to convert to a Twitterer (or is it Tweeter?) you can find me at - http://twitter.com/gautamghosh. readers might be gathering that they're yet to tap into. I've found that this has happened for me with Twitter. 5. Networking Another obvious benefit of Twitter is the ability that it gives you to network on a different level with other bloggers, readers and 'others'. I've lost count of the direct messages and group conversations that I've had with people that I'd never have 'met' any other way. Already this has opened up some fascinating opportunities to work together on promoting each other's content, sharing advice etc. It's also opened up 3-4 opportunities for me to find new guest bloggers for my blogs.

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Gautam Ghosh is a Senior Consultant at Tvarita Consulting, based out of Hyderabad, India. Prior to joining Tvarita he had his own HR consulting practice through which he helped organizations in the areas of Organization and Strategic HR and Learning and Development consulting. His experience in the corporate world was as a HR Manager at Deloitte & Touche, and in organizations like Dell, Hewlett Packard and Satyam Computer Services. He is an alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur, specialisation in Human Resource Management.

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ome of the reasons why companies invest in IT, or rather why investors invest in companies who have more IT budgets? The answer is, maximizing profits and return on investments. EAI does give a one-time or short-term solution to the problem of centralization but it fails or requires another millions of dollar investment to serve another problem and that too, for a short term. To help an organization in making a strategic rather redundant investment, go with Service enabled architecture. What does it mean? Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design paradigm comprised of design principles that shape solution logic into

business problem. For example, Accounting System (A) takes care of the timesheet and invoicing the resources effort and Human Resource System (B) takes care of maintaining the resources information. At the end of the year, I want to develop an Appraisal System which could talk to the System A and System B to calculate the incentives to be awarded without any modification to be done to either System A or B. SOA focuses on providing the standardized interface to every business solution (independent of technology) and thus can be leveraged in realizing an alltogether different business problem.

governed independently. Inc r eas ed Vendor Di v er s i fi c ati on Options : SOA design confirms the abstraction of implementation details (vendor specific) from the consumers by positioning services as standardized endpoints. This provides an organization with the constant option of quick to adapt with the best options available in the market and in a cost effective manner. For example, today Company A Order Support System is implemented in SAP that does not provide the feature of automatic procurement order generation after reaching a configurable level. Due to absence of this feature, business would like to go with another ERP system, which

Service Oriented Architecture

New Paradigm Neeraj Jain, Sr. Consultant, Oracle Corporation services with distinct design characteristics that support the realization of strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing. Some of the strategic benefits are as under, Intrinsic Interoperability : One of the key benefits of SOA is to establish native interoperability by standardizing the interfaces and the interaction of the IT systems implemented across the organization/s. In today's competitive world, every organization is looking for best-of-breed IT solutions to realize the

Increased Confederation : SOA aims to increase the federated perspective of an organization through the standardized (platform & technology independent) and composable services (for example, combining services implemented on different specifications). Within the context of SOA, each service establishes standardized endpoints or official point of contact and hence realizes the enterprise solutions in a consistent manner. The advantage is the unification of the disparate environment to solve a business problem while continuing to be

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is huge investment. SOA provides the flexibility to just replace the inventory module or even less to make for the absent feature. Increased Business and Technology Domain Alignment : Designing SOA a system is not only about abstraction but it also promotes accurate encapsulation of business logic by closely aligning the business people and technology gurus. Business Process Modeling (BPM) tools are business-centric and focuses on capturing the business needs and

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SOA - New Paradigm

designed to be used by business domain analysts. This allows the in-depth participation of the business analysts in the overall design of the system, rather just a source-of-truth. The artifacts generated in capturing the business needs could be easily translated into physical design of the system.

Increased ROI: SOA fosters the creation of agnostic solution logic - a collection of reusable and multipurpose services. By implementing SOA solution, an organization becomes more agile as it will be able to compose new solutions from existing logic and reduces the amount of time spent on maintenance. The segregation of a complex business problem into smaller independent logical units helps incorporating the enhancements in a very cost effective manner. The monitoring aspect of SOA helps in identifying the bottlenecks and

widens the scope of improvement. prominent increase in responsiveness Money, Money, Money! and cost-effectiveness. Increased Organizational Agility : The agnostic nature of the services gives the flexibility of repeatedly orchestrating them into different configurations. As a result, the time and effort to fulfill new or changed business requirements is significantly

reduced. The time and money required to develop new business lines or to enhance existing business is exponentially reduced once the core services are inhouse. Reduced IT Burden: Consistently applying service-orientation results in an organization with reduced redundancy; reduced operational cost and development team; reduced overhead associated with governance and evolution. An IT infrastructure, inline with SOA benefits an organization through 37

As many technologies in past, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the most recent buzzword in the IT world. From past couple of years, I have been working on SOA tools and concepts. I have been trying to figure out why companies (vendors and clients) are making such huge investments in this initiative? What is the niche that is attracting them? On my way, I figured out that SOA has the potential to revolutionize the relevance of IT in business decisions and thus, make a direct and tangible impact on the Share Holder's wealth. Now what is SOA for a layman? SOA is an architectural style for implementing and using the business process as services. The services are functional building blocks accessible over standard protocols that are independent from the platforms and programming language. Strategic Benefits of SOA The biggest challenge of every organization is to centralize the information, stored in a heterogeneous/distributed environment. In business terms, how to make systems talk with each other running on different platforms, implemented in different technologies and serving different needs? An obvious solution to the problem is EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), a high-ticket and tedious way. EAI, as the name suggest integrates the applications but does it cater to all the needs, does it help in realizing your vision to grow and faster and most importantly, is it a need or a solution?

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Searching the God Particle Physics & the LHC Manpreet Singh, Principal Architect in a Product Development Company It is said that the observer effects the reality. Experiments done to find the fundamental unit of light result in finding the photons, changing the conditions of experiment result in waves. The property is referred to as wave-particle duality. Though light has been defined with this dichotomy there are considerable chunks of missing information prohibiting from defining the fundamental forces of this universe. Einstein said “God doesn't play dice” – there are deterministic laws for everything, Stephen Hawking contradicts saying “God does play dice and sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen”. The quest to understand these laws of universe is still ongoing.

Particle physics basics Particle physics has put forward the “Standard Model” which describes elementary particles and the fundamental forces (the mechanism by which the elementary particles interact with each other) of the universe. According to Standard Model all matter is made up of quarks and leptons. There are fundamentally six quarks and six leptons grouped into three families, each having two quarks and two related leptons. Richard Feynman suggested that forces occur when two particles exchange a boson or gauge particle. Bosons are the force carriers. There are four known bosons Gluons, W & Z, Photon and Graviton (which has not yet been found). The four fundamental forces - Gravitation, Weak force, Strong force and the

Electromagnetic force, are the result of LHC (Large Hadron Collider). It is these bosons. currently under construction and would start working from mid June 2008. LHC Electromagnetism defines how particles would help in confirming the predictions interact with photons. about the elusive Higgs boson and The strong force binds the elements of thereby provide the missing links in the atomic nuclei together “Standard Model” of particle physics. The weak force governs radioactivity and hydrogen fusion (as in the energy from Particle accelerators are devices that use sun). electric fields to push electrically charged Gravitation is the result of messenger particles to high speeds and contains particle called Graviton. them. There is one very important difference between Electromagnetism and Weak force: photons have no mass – they travel at speed of light and operate over infinite distance, while W and Z are heavy particles. For mathematical reasons, the masses of W and Z raise inconsistencies in the Standard Model. To address this, physicists postulate that there must be at least one other particle - the Higgs boson or the God particle. The mass of particles is assumed to come from what is called a Higgs mechanism. It postulates that all of space is filled with a quantum fluid (having countless Higgs bosons) called the Higgs field, which prevents certain forces from propagating over large distances. Disturbances in this field as particles move through it cause objects to have mass. Higgs boson may also define why gravitation is a weak as compared to other forces. Higgs bosons have not yet been seen and are assumed to occur at very high energy levels not yet produced in the laboratory.

Accelerators can charge only a few types of particles as the particles need to exhibit properties like charge (since the beam has to be electromagnetically manipulated) and that they need to be stable. LHC charges Hadrons, which are made up of quarks. The common examples of hadrons are protons and neutrons. The size of the accelerator relates to the maximum energy that can be obtained. Also when a beam collides with a stationary target, the energy produced is square root of the energy of the particle hitting the target (E = Sqrt(Ebeam)). Whereas when the two beams collide the energy produced is the sum of the energies of the two beams (E = Ebeam1 + Ebeam2).

The large aspect of LHC comes from its circumference of 26.6 km. It is built underground at depth varying between 175m and 50m. LHC would have an internal vacuum at pressure of 10-13 atm. The Large Hadron Collider It has about 9300 magnets (dipoles, quadrupoles, octupoles etc), which would (LHC) help in controlling the particles trajectory. On the border of France and Switzerland To optimize the performance of magnets is the CERN's laboratory having the liquid Helium would be used to keep the world's largest particle accelerator called

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temperatures low. LCH uses cavities to keep protons bunched together for maximum luminosity at collision points and to maximize the collisions. Cavities would also provide radio frequency power to beam for accelerating to top energy. There would eight cavities per beam in the LHC. Movement of particles in LHC would be maintained using the electromagnetic devices. Dipole magnets would keep the particles in circular orbit, quadrupole magnets focus the beam, and accelerating cavities acting as electromagnetic resonators would accelerate particles and keep them at a constant energy by compensating for energy loss also called synchrotron radiation (The loss in the energy when particles move through the curved path is emitted as radiation called synchrotron radiation.) LHC would accelerate two beams of

particles of same kind, either protons are lead ions. Protons are chosen as they are stable particles - around 2000 times massive than electrons and have much less energy loss per turn through synchrotron radiation. The beams would be transmitted in opposite directions. In LHC protons would move 0.999997828 times the speed of light at injection and 0.999999991 times the speed of light at top energy completing the circular orbit at about 11245 times every second. Each beam would consist of nearly 3000 bunches of particles and each bunch would contain 100 billion particles. Each proton beam flying would have an energy of 7TeV (1 TeV = 1012 electronVolt ), and as explained earlier, the energy produced by collision would be 14 TeV. Lead ions have many protons, the collision of lead ion beams would produce collision energy of 1150TeV, 39

would be highest ever produced in the lab. The energy concentration in the LHC would be comparable to the energy density just after the Big Bang. Such high energy could create black holes, but they would be very short lived to decay into radiation. Particles colliding at such high speeds would annihilate into bursts of energy that materialize as showers of new particles recorded by waiting detectors. There are 6 detectors in LHC – ATLAS, ALICE, CMS, LHCb, LHCf, TOTEM, each playing a specific role to identify the secondary particles produced during collision, measure their positions, their charges and energy. With about 600 million collisions per second there would be lot of data generated which needs to be recorded and analyzed. Every eight-hour run of

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Searching the God particle

the LHC will produce around 10 terabytes of data. LHC could produce around 10 petabytes of useful data each year. To process all the data a worldwide grid is been created – called the LHC Computing Grid. It would support high speed data transfer amongst participating nodes. Currently the fastest speed of transmission record is at 9.08 Gigabits per second (IP v6

protocol). LHC grid would need such transmission speeds to transfer data to participating systems in the grid. At the cost of about 4.7 billion Euros, main objective of LHC is to find the Higgs boson, which would be a major step in search of Grand Unification Theory which seeks to unify fundamental forces. Besides, it may also help in finding new dimensions (currently there are four dimension - three spatial and one of time) believed to be very

small & curled up. LHC would take us to the new frontiers of particle physics which would lead to technical advancements unforeseen today.

Test Your Word Power - Answers 1.Unsnarl/Extricate from entanglement. 2.Flatiron/ An iron that was heated by placing it on a stove. 3.Eardrum/An membrane in the ear that vibrates to sound. 4.Usufruct/Legal right to use property belonging to someone else in a way that property is not injured. 5.Rheostat/Resistor for regulating current. 6.Emaciate/Grow weak and thin or waste away physically. 7.Meagre/Deficient in quality or quantity. 8.Impromptu/With little or no forethought or preparation. 9.Abulia/Loss of willpower. 10.Skiwear/ Clothing wear for skiing. 11.Carnation/Eurasian plant with pink to purple-red spice scented usually double flowers; widely cultivated in many varieties and many colours. 12.Base/ Any of water soluble compound capable of turning litmus blue and reacting with an acid to form a salt and water. 13.Cache/A hidden storage space of money or weapons. 14.Connive/Encourage or assent to illegally or criminally. 15.Yenning/Having a desire for something or someone not present. 16.Monotone/An unchanging intonation. 17.Earth/Abode of mortals in contract to heaven or hell. 18.Rancour/Feeling of deep anger or ill will. 19.Urgent/ Compelling immediate action. 20.Onestep/Early ballroom dance precursor to fox-trot.

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ModelingIdea Sonal Sareen, Business Consultant in a Product Development Company Abstract Earlier organizations use to take feedback from customers and analyze them to find out any useful value from it. Today organizations have realized that the employees are good source of Ideas and improvement suggestions. The organizations have started framing up structure for collecting ideas, collating ideas and analyze them. But there is a

slight gap at point of identifying the valuable ideas. Here in this article I have tried to develop a Model to value the idea and help management identify the valuable ideas and compare them.

What is Idea management? Every company has Ideas sparking everyday in head of every employee. These ideas can help company in

reducing cost, increasing productivity, reducing turn around time and contributes to the organizations goals in numerous ways. Each company is working hard to trap these ideas and align with product life cycle. There are various idea management tools available in market which capture the ideas, collate them, compare them, prioritize them and help in decision making.

Valuation engine I D E A S

x x xxx x x xx x x x

High Value Ideas

Leads to

SSS

Low Value Ideas

Saves

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Modeling Idea

Not every idea is a good idea and many good ideas may not have value to the company. The companies take very much precaution while drafting the idea management system, but still could not identify it in early stages.

Why Valuation? There is a big gap at point of capturing the ideas. The ideas are not valued and it's not possible to determine which Idea is good or has higher dollar value or quick

implementation. So it is very important to understand financial possibilities of the idea and help management to take decision on how which idea to be persuade first. Also it provides a base for evaluating and comparing the ideas across organization on similar KPIs (Key Performance Indicator). Here I have developed a model that will help in calculating the value of idea at inception, help management to predict the financial possibilities of idea and take

the effective decision.

Wh at i s principle?

the

v al u at i o n

Value of an idea is the present value of all the future cash flows (expected) deriving to the owners of the idea discounted at a rate of return (expected) commensurate with the riskiness of the future cash flows.

Idea

Idea

Financial Scale

• High Value • Low Volume

Strategic

• Slow implementation

IDEA

• Medium Value

Operational • Low Value

Tactical

• High Volume

• Medium Volume

• Easy/Quick Implementation

• Medium time Implementation

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Modeling Idea

A little about classification… It's always wise to classify the target (divide and rule); here I have aligned the ideas according to organizations structure and leadership. The ideas can be operational – day to day activity, tactical – about management of operations and strategic – about managing overall organization. Generally the operational ideas are high in volume but carry low values thus are ignored because of absence of proper valuation system. While, the strategic ideas consume lots of resource; they are good but of low value to organization.

Th e Mo d el (IVaM – Id ea Valuation Model) Unlike valuation of any tangible asset,

valuation of ideas is a bit more complex. In valuation of an asset whether tangible or non tangible the usage, worth and anticipation is available. Here we are assuming something in thought process, making scenarios and analyzing feasibility and simultaneously trying to predict the returns. I have developed a Model that helps in valuation of idea. I call this IVaM The model starts with:- Taking up an idea, - Contribution breakdown, - Forecasting & projections, - Simulating base value, - Creating various scenarios, -Risk exposure adjustment & discounting.

Discovering IVaM – modules in

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detail: Contribution Breakdown Every idea is taken up by the management only if it adds value to the organizations goals. Through contribution breakdown module we try to bucket the idea in various value classes and align with organization goals. The main goals of the organization can be classified as follow:More revenue Increased sale Increased production Increased Quality Less Cost Reduce waste Increase productivity Reduce turnaround time

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Modeling Idea

Apart from above classification this module also supports classification idea into operational, tactical and strategic i d e a . I t b e c o m e s e a s y f o r th e management to link the idea to organization goals through this and predict judgmental valuation of the idea. Moreover, might be interested to pursue it from here itself without further valuation through model. The classification and categorization above is done studying the generic organization. Each organization can themselves go ahead and create there own buckets and use advance statistical classification techniques like CART, etc. and come up more meaningful classification for them.

Projections & sensitivity analysis

associated with idea. The model takes inputs from projections and sensitivity analysis module and calculates the value. This section is deterministic and calculates the dollar saved throughout time series and consolidates it.

Stochastic Model This section of model helps predicting any impact of Idea which is indirect or requires probabilistic modeling. It uses Monte Carlo simulation to predict increase in sale, improved quality value, etc. After that it uses the dollar multiple assigned to each category and multiplies to generate the indirect value. The above two value sum up to provide us the base value of an idea. Valuation engine pushes this calculation to the next

Next after classification of the ideas the model projects the value flow for the idea. This activity involves forecasting value chain analysis and value flow and predict some funds flow. It takes the idea and utilization and finally rewards. It then does the time series analysis for a given life of idea and calculates the value across useful life of idea, alike any loan or mortgage product.

Valuation Engine As discussed above, valuation of Idea is unique as we not always have sufficient information to analysis like we have with other intangible assets say goodwill. Thus the model has two sections of valuation methodology one, expert judgmental based on asset prediction and second based on probabilistic stochastic model.

Asset Led Valuation This section deals with direct value generation of idea. It evaluates the value in form of Dollar, Time saving, resource saving or productivity increase directly

time series and present value of the idea is calculated.

Scenario Creation Using the risk adjusted value of idea, we determine the scenarios. We develop three scenarios - best case, most likely and worst case scenarios. The scenarios predict notional value inflow and financial indicators of impact of Idea on organization. It will help management to manage Ideas as portfolio of assets as they manage other assets of the company.

Dashboard The Reporting Dashboard can be customized to fit individual management KPI study and preferences. But ideally the idea value in dollars is a good input for taking decisions. The Management can prefer to develop a dashboard showing impact on individual goals as well. Time series and discounted value flow can be of good use to some decision makers. So, the reporting is not an issue anything from start of model to end, the dashboard can illustrate any KPI as discussed and evaluated through this Model.

Summary module for risk assessment and discounting.

Risk Exposure Management & Discounting Once we have base value for an idea, we can use Risk exposure management. This module helps in calculating VaR Value at Risk for the idea. Risk and mitigation analysis is conducted; we adjust the base value of idea to come with risk adjusted value of Idea. This risk adjusted value is than discounted for the

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Through use of IVaM the organizations can gain a lot through ideas. They can predict the value of idea at an early stage, a common dollar value of idea for comparing ideas across the organization. As it uses mathematical and some statistical tools to evaluate the value of an idea it has higher confidence level and accuracy. It can be an excellent tool for management to manage the ideas just like portfolio of an asset. It also helps identifying the best value ideas to invest resources into and pace ahead of competition.

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