With Malice Towards None At All

Book rview :Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 12:50:06 GMT

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.

Corporate - Movie Review ( Hindi Bollywood Film Cinema)

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:47:03 GMT

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.

Web 2.0 : What is it?

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:55:21 GMT

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......

Google Finds Jesus

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 06:32:14 GMT

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&...

Another festive season

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:55:01 GMT

Come festive season and we all go shopping. Breaking from a routine today, I agreed to go to "Shoppers Stop". Losig calories byWalking through a mall is a side health benefit that you derive. We all need to be "poorer and happy", and shopping helps us do that :-) I

That takes us to an interesting article I recently read in newspaper on psychology of shopping for sexes. Owing to "hunter/gatherer" instinct men go shopping for a kill (read "bargain"). In fact, at the time of closure their heart beats go up. The study indicates women actually spend more time looking at the goods (so hard to believe!!). They also come back for more returns or refunds to the shops compared to men :-)

Of the mail forwards this week, there was one which claimed an Indian has found a flaw in Microsoft Windows File names, i.e., you cannot name any directory or file as "con" . this is not new. For technical reasons Microsoft disallows around 22 names . You can find an explanation on

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/fileio/fs/nami...

Another interesting thing that i learnt this week was "googlebombing", where disparate individuals try to game search engine like google, to push one particular web page up in its listings. Try "miserable failure" in google search and find the first entry :-)

Weblogger Adam Mathes is credited with inventing the practice in 2001, when he used it to link the phrase "talentless hack" to a friend's website. The search engine can be manipulated by a fairly small group of users. A search engine article lambasting google for the same :-)

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/3296101

As Teoma uses hilltops of expertise in the internet domain to decide page ranks, it cannot be fooled by such techniques. So I went back to Teoma, and Viola!! it has also been tricked into believing that President of Unites States of America George Bush II is really a miserable failure :-)

Try this for Google's definitive definition of failure :-)

1. Go to http://www.google.com/

2. Type in "Failure", without the quotes

3. Instead of hitting "Search" hit "I'm feeling Lucky"

4. Look at it and laugh at what comes up

Desparate Housewives

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 15:09:34 GMT

Hi,

I am writing after a looong time. Nothing major except that the weather has been changing vilently. Especially in Pune, where I spent a week, due to illness, it used to rain every afternoon as if it was tropical region.

Watched Quentin's "Reservoir Dogs" which had a quality of old movie. Almost all of it is filmed in a warehouse. I somehow did not like it, may be too much blood.

I wholeheartedly reccomend "Desparate Housewives" (if the title of this entry attracted your attention :-) I am good at that!!! ) I like it for the drama, and the editing is good, too. Every episode ends with some voiceover describing lives of the characters and every sub-plot comes to an end in 3 episodes. I am not too sure if the script-writer can keep the viewers interested with high drama all the time.

Reccomendations are meant for people from Indian sub-continent, who may be turned off by the misleading title. It is back to farm land (from nbcs dramas like friends, sinefield and frazier which focussed onlives of boig-city singles). And it is not sleazy like "Sex and the City" which (accoridng to me) practiclally had no plot. and I am not great fan of Sarah Jessica Parker.

The great India comedy show on Star one has some appeal. Most of the jokes presented are entertaining.

Entry for September 18, 2005

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:58:04 GMT

This has been an Indian Movie week ( For fulkl disclosure I do not spend money on watching Indian movies :-). It just happns that I take Mumbai Pune trips on the weekend. And thanks to Volvoi us services I get to watch these movies.

This week movies I have watchjed been Sarkar, Dus, Bunti aur Bubbly, No Entry.

Sarkar is a clearcopy of Godfather and it is partly based on the lif e os a supremo of a ombay based political party. The casting is great (I do not mean Bachhans as itr is RamGopal Varma's first), it has KAy Kay (means positive in chinese) acting as a son of supremo(read Sarkar) and his wife (heavy resembalnce to ex-chief of IMPA and the daughterin law of supremo) We all know Varma makes 3 kinds of movies 1) horror movies (kyo, bhoot, darna mana hai, vaastushastra) 2) Mafia oriented (Satya, Company, A tak Chappan Dee, Sarkar) 3) dancicals( Rangeela Nach)
I prtefer his mafia oriented ones, though they are getting rpeatative. In fact, Dee was so medioocre people even haven't heard of it after a ox-office collapse.

Dus is to a large extent copyt of "ususal suspects(this movies is a must watch") Dus has Su
Khan cousins (Read Fardeen and Zaheer) are doing well playing sidekicks to bigger leads in the moives. This is an out-and out action movie with Sanjay Khan playing patriotic intellignec office :-) Movie is average but "different" by Indian movie-making satndards. I like the way the director moved from one scene to another.

Bunty aur Bubbly has has two bachhans (one bad misguided youth who turnes to thievery and other a good cop who is after his life) Junior Bacchan is passbale. This movie rings his weaknesses to fore. Rani Mookerjee (now a vetran hindi actor) clearly hams in an attempt to be funny. She puts up a very pitiable performance. I found the movie to be long and boring.

No entry is a hilarous movie obviously inspired by success of Masti. Leave your brains out and watch this. Anil kapur has givena good performance and fardeen plays his lackey who suffers by agrreing to be part of his lies.

Entry for August 06, 2005

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 13:54:05 GMT

Bombay disappoints again. Like someone said "people of a country deserve the government that they get" How true!!!

Last week (and one before that) we all faced fury of rain, that refuses to go away.

It is sheer lack of will that is leading us to live a like cats and dogs. It is a shame that polticians continue to hoodwink the citizens of India, because we let them.

Anil Ambani of Reliance Energy comapony (REL) is proving to be a very poor businessman. As a service provider REL has failed. For a geographical area that is 1.5 times higher than BEST (neighbouring service provider that manages energy source for south), he has 3000 people as against 5000 of BEST. There are no replacements in REL for the people whoretire (how else will Anilbhai become richer? Do you have an answer??)

It took MERC regulatory body to one week to wake up and sent noticers to utility comanies.

Has-been Sharad Pawar is so shameless, he actually said "anyone blaming the government does not know what is field work. Mr. Pawar, what are you a disaster management. Why don't you just shut up and take sanyaas rather than doing disservice to the people of India.

Suddenly media that relishes coverage of day3, came to know where mithi river was. And then the blame game starts. Blame politiatian, blame Jonny Joseph (another ineffcient civil servant and comissionaer of Bombay) blame builders. Why can't media cover these problems on day-to day basis much before the situation blows into everyone's face? They are busy propagating trends on how teens are engaged in watching more porn on their mobile phone.

Indians comprise close to 25 to 40% of hi-tech organizations like Micorsoft, Intel NASA(high tech anynmore :-) etc. And yet our machinery cannot put a simple and effective disaster recovery system. Pallning is something that we have lacked in this country.

Are we so intellectually bankrupt, that it take s a bunch of movie maker and actors to file a PIL?

Wake up, People of India, wake up. Get your government to work for you.