Louis V. Gerstner Jr. ex-head of IBM corporation tells the story of the biggest turnaround in the corporate history. And while does that, he blows the wonderful opportunity to tell an insightful story. Well, he does warn you in the beginning, detailing his reluctance to write a book (very professional isn;t it :-) ).

Let us face it, Louis V. Gerstner Jr. is one of the most successful executives in the history of corporate America. He would always jump through the right hoops all his life. And  the fact that success and most successful people are boring, reflects very much in the book. Rather than writing an interesting book, Lou has prepared a drab report of IBM successes over years. Thus, a large part of book is devoted to financial performance figures!!!

He has also included various emails sent to him by employees. He does do a great job in elaborating IBM culture from an outsider's point of view.  I wonder if his long years as a management consultant had any influence in turning IBM into the biggest consulting company on this globe.
 
Gerstner also could have delineated the business processes that was the foundation of this turnaround, but he does not bother to do so. He never mentions various personalities that played any significant role in IBM during his tenure. If you really want to understand the crux of Lou's and IBMs achievements from 1995 to 2001, simply read chapter on IBM from Reengineering book by Hammer and Champy (2001 Edition).

If you are a technophiles and looking for interesting tidbits, read "Dealers of lightning" (based on Xerox's PARC Research Centre).

Kudos to Lou for being such a great leader. I wish I could say the same thing about his writing skills. For someone like me who has been in IT industry for 15 long years, it turned out to be a big let-down. If found myself jumping form chapter to chapter looking for some interesting bit of information.

This is a very good example of how movie directors fall in trap of the successes of their own formula. Madhur Bhandarkar uses senior actors from Marathi theatre, sprinkling of sex,  a couple of  side-line characters who keep audiences entertained by giving "gyan" on corporate life. This movie clearly falls to create the punch that Page 3 did. The script isvery very weak. In fact, in the second-half, the host-shot award-winning business executive Nishi (Bipasha Basu) coolly signs all the papers going to enquiry commission, without  even glancng at them once!!!

To cut a long story short..... Nishi steals secrets of new project from Parvez(CEO of Marwa Industries - a competing Business group)  To achieve  this she uses  an age-old art of seduction, followed by  a direct attack on Parvez’s masculinityby an ultra-hot model. Then she proceeds to copy all the project details using a USB drive, while Parvez continues his deep slumber caused by sexual excesses with this model. This is known as "Social Engineering" in parlance of hackers. It is possibly a first in Hindi movies!!!

Funny, each and every one of these corporate biggies takes to drinks, if things don’t go their way. Madhur Bhandarkar has mixed up hischaracters. He should know by now business success and drinking habitsdon;t go hand-in-hand. If he continued to be a detailed oriented guy as he used to be, he would have shown Pan Parag  Pan Masala somewhere  :-) (No kidding . Believe me when I say it is the most used corporatetranquilizer used.).

Thee nd is so flat .... the loyal corporate executive (Bipasa Basu) goes to jail to cover her employers and delivers a kid there. She loses her lover (Kay Kay) who is killed by his own brother-in-law  and industrialist Vinay Sehgal (Rajat Kapoor) so that he does not spill the beans about the real culprit is in pesticides contamination case to media.

More on performances - It is a good move for Bipasa Basu, who seems to have acted well (under direction of Madhur). Vinay Apte pulls of a convincing politician. Kay Kay should stop smoking, or else he is going to look like a TB patient in future.Even usual solitary Asha Bhosle song cannot save the movie. After high expectations and a couple of recommendations, the movie turned out to be  a damp squib.

I start my writing in my blog again (in a hope that it would be as popular as Scobleizer. Another wonderful year comes to an end. So everyone starts making their “Favourites” list. So here is mine, a “me-too” list of websites I have liked and use

Some of the fantabulous sites I discovered are flickr and del.icio.us (pronounced delicious) - both have been bought by my savvy employer :-) . Both, as I have discovered, are very very addictive. I was also amazed to see some old articles that I liked gaining prominence because of social bookmarking phenomenon. In this space you can try simpy and blinklist, shadows , clipmarks (the last one needs a download). Another interesting application, which falls in to category of mash-up is diggdotus. In peer news category, you can try gabbr and reddit. I like reddit better than others. I recently came across stumble upon this of course need a plug-in for your browser.

And just when wikipedia became a leading site for reference, it became mired in controversy thanks ot a practical joke about kennedy’s assassination.

Among these new crop of sites, my personal favourite is 180n a news aggregator with numerous categories. I also liked upcoming and RSS based events manager (again another takeover by Yahoo!), but I cannot use it well as the most events listed on upcoming are US-centric.

In travel segment, a twiki travel experience site will fly high if it attracts more users. Also in the segment is travelbuddy where you can write your own travelogue (and ofcourse make friends across the world. Travelbuddy really reminded me of my personal favourite mouthshut which offers a facility to publish product reviews on movies, restaurants, gadgets etc. and create a trusted circle of friends.

As a web 2.0 start page, you can configure netvibes as your home page. Don’t be surprised if it looks amazingly similar to personalized google . For RSS readers, I highly recommend Bloglines , my.yahoo (my personal homepage, for a number of years now) or Google Reader . It is apt to talk of blog related sites here so here we go………… 1) Technorati and 2) Memeorandum Its other section also tracks popular political blogs.

An off-beat example of web 2.0 is 43things. This site simply lets you publish 43 things that you would like to achieve. It also send you reminders if you are serious about quitting smoking (any takes there? ) . The last but not the least Yahoo! answers - an absolute must for nerds.

Well I already like Wordpress for its user-friendly features (which is another befitting example of web 2.0application.

After all this, if you still want to know what web 2.0″ really is, here is Tom O’rielly’s article explaining the same.

I am yet to try a lot of “web 2.0″ websites, so would let you know my experiences. Once in a while I also write reviews on movies, restaurants that I have liked. So keep reading, because I am going to be back with more......

If you want to see possibly a religious figure on google maps try.

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-16.337013,-71.959763&spn=0.110893,0.158186&...