Clayton Christensen on measuring your life

A friend of mine pointed me to an article by Clayton Christensen this morning. Christensen is best known for his work on innovation (his book "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a classic) so I was intrigued to see him writing about a "soft" topic such as guidelines for finding meaning in life. The article is available at http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1.

Christensen cites Frederick Herzberg's insight that the most powerful motivator in our lives is not money; instead it is the need to learn, contribute and to be recognized. He then shows how management principles can be applied to our personal lives: individuals need to find their purpose in life (just as companies need to find their mission and strategy), and  allocate resources (time, energy, talent, money) in line with their stated purpose. 

Christensen also talks about the importance of creating the right culture within the family (similar to creating a culture within a company). If we have a 2x2 matrix where the two dimensions depict the extent of agreement on goals and the extent of agreement on the steps towards attaining the goals, organizations/families need to use "power tools" (force, threats) when in the bottom left whereas having the right culture would enable them to operate in the top right quadrant.

When reading this article it struck me that I could not articulate a purpose statement for my life. I was reminded of the fact that I have been drifting along for quite some time now. Although I had made some half-baked plans some time ago I had not acted on any of it. 

I ended up spending quite a bit of time in office doing some web searches and reading some of the material I found; one website that was quite useful was  http://www.theonequestion.com. I have also been toying with the idea of working with a personal/life coach and found a few of them in Bangalore. I plan to follow up with them in the second week of August.

Describing strategies in 2x2 matrices

The McKinsey Quarterly mail showcased an interesting article titled "Capturing the World's Emerging Middle Class" earlier this month. One of the key takeaways is a 2x2 matrix splitting the possible strategies based on the consumer's ability to buy (high vs. low) and the nature of the consumer need (global vs. local). The full article is available at  https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Retail_Consumer_Goods/Strategy_Analysis/Capturing_the_worlds_emerging_middle_class_2639 (free registration required).

I suppose 2x2 matrices are an unavoidable part of any strategy discussion :-) I remember seeing lots of them during the Corporate Strategy course at IIMB.  While they do look obvious once we see them, coming up with our own matrices to summarize a discussion is not very easy. 

Philip Thekkekara

Philip Thekkekara (known as Thomachen) - my mother's second cousin passed away on Friday afternoon. He was around sixty years old. I went to attend his funeral this morning. 

I cannot claim to be close to Thomachen uncle - he used to come home once in a while when I was staying with my parents in Bangalore. After they moved to Kerala, I used to meet him rarely: at a lunch or dinner at someone's home or after the evening mass at the Holy Ghost Church on some Sundays. He was always warm, fun to talk to and a great raconteur. He would narrate stories from his days in college and his twenties. I still remember him talking about the a lady who he knew when in college and was the Managing Director's secretary at Motorola (where I worked). "She was a hot number", Thomachen uncle would say, with a twinkle in his eye.  Another story was about his going to US to study - he ran into kids from homes where he used to deliver milk  and became the center of attention in the college when they told their classmates that their "milkman had come to the US to study". In the eulogy, his sister said, "it was easy to have a coversation with Thomachen because he would talk more than enough for both sides". He would indeed talk non-stop but you enjoyed listening to him. She also quoted the verse from 2 Timothy 4:7 "I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith". 

In some ways Thomachen uncle was a link into old Bangalore and into a time when things were simpler, less hectic and most likely more fun. He seemed keen to preserve his style and way of life - a difficult task in the face of all the changes taking part in the city.

This is the second funeral I am attending this year; the earlier one was in January for my mother's sister. I guess that as you grow older, deaths have a deeper impact on you. When you are young most of the deaths in the family are of people from your grandparents generation; I guess we grow up considering them as "old" so it doesn't strike us as much as it does now when you find the hand of death reaching out for people who are closer to you - elder relatives who belong to your parents' generation.

Andy Grove on offshore development

There is an interesting opinion piece by Andy Grove on the negative impact of offshore development at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html  

The article caught my attention since I have always found books and articles written by Grove to be very informative and it is therefore impossible to dismiss this piece as yet another Lou Dobbs kind of tirade against offshoring . Also since I have mostly heard business leaders in the US making the case in favour of offshoring, I was intrigued to find Grove positioning himself on the other side of the fence.

In brief Grove's argument is that startups these days tend to scale up operations in countries like China and India instead of expanding operations in the USA on account of cost. This leads to a number of problems such as high levels of unemployment (as the high-value work which remains in the US does not need too many people) and a loss of ability to innovate (since the complete ecosystem no longer resides in the US; also people lose out on experiencing all stages of development which hinders their ability to innovate in the next cycle). 

Grove suggests that the government should provide incentives to encourage companies to scale up in the US (for e.g. by taxing products of offshored labour), thereby creating jobs in the US and also protecting the ability to innovate in the future.

While I understand the arguments made by Grove, I am not convinced that the solution is that easy. For e.g. 

- Companies mostly offshore work on account of costs and availability of talent. These two factors can be addressed to some extent by having a liberal immigration system (e.g. lots of H1-B visas) thereby ensuring that all the requisite talent can be found in the US. The ready availability of talent would also reduce salaries, thereby reducing costs. However the reduced salaries may make careers in the technology industry (in the US) unattractive, thereby pushing people (American residents and new immigrants) away. Also given that the cost of living in the US will always be higher, people in industries such as the technology industry which are more integrated and prone to offshoring will be at a disadvantage when compared to their neighbours in other industries (where salaries do not face the downward pressure to the same extent). And then there are the social issues that would arise from having a sudden increase in the number of temporary workers and immigrants. 

- Addressing costs (other than manpower) is a harder problem; while the costs of doing business in the US are likely to be higher than in many other parts of the world (for e.g. higher rents), these are offset at this time as it is easier to do business in the US as compared to other countries (i.e. easier to set up a business, get VC funding, file for patents etc). But what happens when other countries catch up with or outscore the US on these parameters - will the offshoring tax be increased to compensate? 

- While other countries can come close to providing a similar environment as in the US, the costs of doing business in these countries will also go up over time; salaries will increase, costs of accommodation and office space (especially in some pockets such as Bangalore and Shanghai) will also rise. A colleague in the US once told me that he keeps wishing that my salary and those of my colleagues in India increase rapidly so that the temptation for his bosses to reduce costs by offshoring comes down :-)

- I guess this boils down to the classical question on the competitive advantages that the US (or any other country) can sustain. Should the US focus on those areas, instead of attempting to compete with China on electronics assembly or with India on low value services?

- What if each country wants to create jobs, expand the ecosystem and have the ability to innovate? For e.g. would it be fair and efficient if India or China were to insist on local development for all equipment they buy from Cisco or Nokia? Should such countries be pressurizing companies to move the high value roles within the country so that they too can aim to build the complete eco-system? Governments do try to influence companies even today to invest more in a country if they want to do business there. A senior manager visiting from the US once told us that in meetings with government officials in India and China the former would push the company to set up manufacturing plants whereas the latter would ask for software development centres. 

- Senior personnel in multinational technology firms in India often complain that the high-value work is not coming to India as fast as they would like - hope to write more on this in a later post.

- How obliged should a multi-national company be towards creating jobs in each country that it operates in? I was thinking that one way to measure fair distribution would be that over time, their expenses on employees in each country (i.e. whatever they spend on salaries and other benefits in each country, adjusted for cost of living) should be in proportion to their revenues (or profits?) in each country. In other words, if a  company makes USD 1 billion in China and USD 3 billion in Germany, their expenditure on employees in the two countries should be in the 1:3 ratio. Or more generally, should what a company spends in each country (on employees, in sourcing input materials etc) be proportionate to its revenues from the country? Would this be a fair measure? If yes, how do the big multi-national firms perform on this metric?

FIFA World Cup 2010

Mint had a list of the greatest World Cup goals in their "Business of Life" section. This list is available at http://www.livemint.com/2010/05/26195435/The-cup-of-joy.html.

My personal favourites are the Carlos Alberto and Maradona goals.

I think the 1986 World Cup (which Maradona's goal was a part of) is the one I watched with the most interest. The quarter final between Brazil and France was one of the best matches I have ever seen. My other memories of that World Cup were of the Belgium - Soviet Union match (which I thought Soviet Union should have won) and the finals (where Argentina managed to hold on despite a late rally from Germany).

I didn't really keep track of the 1982 world cup (we didn't have a TV at home and anyway it was all black & white Doordarshan everywhere in India at that time). I later watched the movie on the 1982 world cup (Goal!) and really liked it - especially the part about how Brazil couldn't play defence even though all they needed was a draw against Italy.

What I remember most of the 1990 world cup was the heroics of Argentina's substitute goalkeeper Goycochea (their first choice got injured in one of the initial matches) and how he got them through a number of penalty shoot-outs. It was almost as if Argentina was playing for a draw and hoping that they would win via the shoot-out.

I don't remember much about the 1994 world cup, except that the finals were very boring. The 1998 world cup was better - the finals between Brazil and France was a good game. I was in US at that time and didn't get to watch most of the games as they were held during US office hours; also all the matches weren't telecast on the TV channels available at the service apartment I was in.

My most vivid memories of the 2002 world cup were of Ronaldinho, especially his goal against England; the finals between Germany and Brazil did not live up to expectations. I was supporting Portugal at the 2006 games but wanted France to win once they got to the finals against Italy; it was sad to see Zidane's career ending the way it did - sent off with a red card.

Google TV

One of the more interesting events last week (at least it was "last week" when I first started writing this post..) was the Google I/O conference and the announcement of Google TV. While there have been some efforts towards integrating the Internet into the TV viewing experience (for e.g. Apple TV, integration of the Yahoo widget engine into TVs), Google's initiative seems to have the potential to have a far more significant impact on the TV market. There is a good post on Google TV at http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/05/while-apple-slept-on-their-hobby-google.html

I wonder how long it would be before this integrated experience will be available in India. In the mobile industry, I do not think that consumers in India are at a big disadvantage compared to their counterparts in the US. Operators in India may not have rolled out advanced services comparable to operators elsewhere (for e.g. the mobile TV / video solutions pushed by various operators in the US); however users possessing the latest handsets can enjoy the device-only features (e.g. a cool new user interface) and the features created by integrating with services on the Internet (e.g. integration with Facebook, a Twitter app etc). Also given the absence of operator-subsidized devices, users do not need to overcome the temptation of getting a operator recommended device available at a lower price (with a contract).

The situation in the television industry is different as set-top boxes are given by the service provider (cable or DTH). Therefore I cannot purchase Google TV enabled box and start using this service until it is offered to me by my service provider. I could probably create a setup that allowed me access to Google TV (e.g. have two set-top boxes , one of which would have Google TV) but this would be a poor imitation of the real thing.

Another question to consider is whether DTH operators (such as Tata Sky, Airtel or Reliance Big TV) or cable operators (like Hathaway) are more likely to offer Google TV enabled boxes? While the DTH camp seems more technically capable and organized, they also seem to have more to lose than the cable operators. This is because video content on the internet may reduce subscriptions to premium channels: while this is a big thing for DTH providers, cable TV (at least in Bangalore) is available at a fixed price that includes all channels (however this may change once Conditional Access System (CAS) is implemented).

Availability of Quality Talent

Aakar Patel writes a column titled “Reply To All” in the Mint newspaper on alternate Saturdays; these are available online at http://www.livemint.com/Articles/Authors.aspx?author=Aakar%20Patel&type=wa. His writing on 29th October on “Why educated Indians are only half-literate” had a number of interesting points on the available talent pool in India for the IT industry and the English media business; reading this column brought to mind a number of related points that I had wondered about in the past. I will cover some of them in this post and hope to do the rest fairly soon.

The article talks about the poor language skills of a majority of the reporters in the english media. I think that apart from language, there is also an issue of content; I suspect that many of the reporters and anchors are (to misappropriate a phrase from NDTV) incapable of “going beyond the headlines”. In the aftermath of the 26/11 attack on Bombay, a regular feature of the 9 o'clock news on NDTV was to have the anchor talk to someone from Pakistan. The anchor would try to get the guest to agree on some point or the other; if the guest (often a print journalist or a member of the Paksitan establishment) chose to be non-cooperative, the anchor was often at a loss since (s)he was no match for the intellectual and debating skills of the guest. Also I don't know whether it was because I was more impressionable and less cynical at that time, but I do think that the participants in some of the current affairs discussions I've watched on Doordarshan in the eighties and early nineties were more knowledgable than the rent-a-quote types that show up on the private news channels.

I suppose this focus on english language skills could be criticized as being “elitist”. But then, if the person's primary task is to communicate a story in english, is it wrong to expect/demand above-average proficiency in the language?

In any case, I don't think the problem in the media business is because of the lack language skills alone; if that were the case then what explains the state of the Hindi news channels? It is not that the Hindi channels or the channels in other local languages offer more substance than their English counterparts.

Is it that the tabloid approach of all the news channels simply reflects what we the audience want? Is this the obvious outcome of our fascination with sound-bites, executive summaries and information in 140 character tweets?

The article mentions that “in India quality thins out very quickly” in connection with the availability of talent for the media industry. This scarcity of quality holds true in a number of other areas as well; for e.g. in education, there is a significant chasm between the top-tier and the next. I guess the increased participation of the private sector in education has meant that there are more good quality schools and colleges now than say twenty years ago; at the same time the private sector has contributed more than its fair share of mediocre institutions. Also while some of the new private schools are comparable to the “colonial institutions” mentioned in the article, these are often very expensive.