India’s Global Powerhouses - How they are taking on the world By Nirmalya Kumar, with Pradipta Mohapatra and Suj Chandrasekhar; Harvard Business Press

According to James Lamont in his article "Passage from India" where he reviewed this new book authored by the acclaimed author, Professor Nirmalya Kumar, one particular value of the book lies in its concise case studies. Where the reader quickly gains a sense of how personality and circumstance combined to produce change and opportunity. Interviews with top executives extract a sense of business culture and vision beyond the company mission statement. A humorous appreciation of history and coincidence also helps illuminate the corporate histories that show how Indian ideas and management techniques have global application, and how Indian executives easily adapt to the wider business environment.

Professor Kumar’s insights in this book are captivating for the common reader of most busniess literature. This prowess was easily achieved by Prof. Kumar as he straddled both the academic and corporate worlds by sitting on boards of Indian companies, while enjoying a career that has taken him from the US to the UK, via Switzerland. Neither the seat in the boardroom, nor the distance of London, has blunted his wonderment.

The book is really a superb anthology of business successes in India written with a narrative which is elegant and pacy both. I finished reading the book in one shot.

The authors have used their unmatched research wisdom in analyzing the dawn of new and old Indian businesses alike. Extensive discussions on questions like "When can a company call itself "global" ? " What should be the ideal organizational culture of a truly global company?" " How is an Indian Multinational different from a "born - global" Indian multinational ? - Are all well sequenced to stimulate a distinct thought process in the mind of most readers of the book. The book also succesfully brings in sociological and political insights from the dynamic co-existence of the myriad of Indian demographies. However, a more detail oriented treatment on the life and work of some of the great contemporary Indian business leaders leading their comapnies to unforeseen global heights, could have been a welcome addition. Moreover, a few instances where promising Indian companies failed in their global expansion strategies ( Eg: - where big trans-boder M&A deals turned out to be disastrous) and the new pricing models which are emerging within the new breed of Indian outsourcing industry (Eg:- Legal Process Outsourcing & Knowledge Process Outsourcing [LPO & KPO] ) could have also been added for more depth to the scope of this excellent book.

Building a Culture of Innovation

(An Excerpt from “Marketing Innovation” by Nirmalya Kumar)

Ideo is a design firm based in Palo Alto. They hire people who don’t listen to you. They hire experts from whom one can learn. People are experts from the fields of social science and anthropology and many other diverse areas. They encourage people to go out onto the streets and meet the customer. That is where the real work gets done and not sitting down at the desk. There is a process which they follow called the Deep Dive process. The key elements of a Deep Dive process are the following:

a. Have a clear goal.
b. Articulate the constraints. For instance if one is building an alternative to a cart which is used in supermarkets then one can say that if the prototype does not ‘nest’ it is not a solution. This becomes a constraint.
c. Share expert knowledge. How would an anthropologist see it ! How would a mother with children view a cart which is used in the super market !
d. Brainstorm.
e. Narrow down the ideas to a few which are related to need areas like if its a cart in the supermarket, then the need areas could be convenience, safety, flexibility etc. Each team now concentrates on one need area and comes up with a prototype.
f. These prototypes are now looked at independently and the best features of them are combined to come up with the one prototype which is presented.
g. The key is trial and error and rapid prototyping to meet predetermined deadlines.

In Ideo the above tenets of culture are manifested. In the process they follow to come up with design ideas where there is no criticizing of ideas which takes place. Wild ideas are built upon. The whole process is not organized but focused chaos. The team judges the best and not a single individual. Enlightened trial and error succeeds over lone ranger genius. Being playful is encouraged. Don’t ask for permission. Go ahead and do it. If it infringes on someone else’s space or idea of propriety then ask for forgiveness. Be weird and be proud of it. There is no hierarchy. There is a lot of teamwork and time deadlines are respected. There needs to be an Ideo in every company.

Innovation : Rural or Urban?

true innovation thrived in India for centuries, because our resources were always less and so were the pressure of all the basic necessities, posh technology labs of western corporations having tons of money are wrongly denoted as the sole place of innovation, only invention is not innovation. Problems, poverty and necessity are the mother of all innovations and it is independent of the money spend behind it.

Very soon India will again prove this to the world!

But before this, one needs to understand India or any country having "India Like Conditions" (thirld world country with rapidly growing economy) has got many faces
, various sections of societies like the urban elite, the sub-urban middle class and the rural poor, along with endless variants with mix charecters of all the above three main sections. So which section is likely to innovate more? the traditionally affluent and highly educated few or the "novoeau riche" rural/sub-urban/new-migrant-to-the-city people? The answer is unknown so far. But let me remind you, for me innovation is not filing patents, it is just a way to look at old things in a new way...

Experts believe that inadequate infrastructure and that in-turn with the rural-migration problem, is linked with the lack of enterpreneurial innovation. But
lack of Infrastructure alone can not solely be held responsible for
the reason behind the rural-urban migration problem. The root of the
problem, I feel is way much deeper. Rural-urban migration of people
and resources is occurring from millennia, but has become a "problem"
only in the last century, just due to fact of a highly increased
world-population. Industrial civilization has an unified character of
its own, own identity, own culture and its own psyche. Its not
entirely correct that given all amenities of a modern city life like
air-conditioned/heated apartments / hygienic toilets/t.v, theatre and
entertainment facilities and health care amenities,to a common
urbanite from Mumbai, Rio-De-Janeiro or Beijing, would agree to
relocate of to a rural/lesser know work-life habitat, given that
his/her job/work still remains the same as before. Actually, the rural
urban problem is more of an cultural problem, which largely persists
in middle and lower-middle class families of developing economies of
Asia, Latin America and Africa. Only enlightened few people from
well-off families would understand the negatives like pollution,high
crime rates and population pressures of a city life and would migrate
to a non-urban place to live and work. This would be natural for such
people as they must have seen their previous generations who were also
born,raised and educated to work in a city for their living. The mind
set of people from non-urban areas who seeks western life styles like
fast food and credit cards needs to be first changed, if the root
cause of rural-urban migration problem is to be seriously addressed.
Basic infrastructure in rural areas in India would be much improved
within 2020, but would the mindset of an well educated and
sophisticated engineer from Bangalore change by 2020 for relocation to
a rural place for a good paying job? I am doubtful about that. The
solution for this problem might exist in reviving primary and middle
school level western educational systems to an upgraded variety of a
more holistic and spiritual vessel of imparting knowledge . Probably
a only a child can be sensitized about a contemporary global culture
of humane values.

Lastly, mass psychology and cultural preferences of common people are
more important than governmental policies and trade activities for a
"true" peaceful and sustainable development.

Happiness (as in Marriage) leads to Intellectual Capital!

Happiness leads to intellectuality or the pursuit of happiness leads to intellctual activities, thereby in a way, creating an unit of Intellectual Capitalism. The converse of this which is pursuit of Intellectual activities, on the other hand also, creates happiness, but this happiness could be existing within the concerned intellectual or otherwise it could be residing else where as well. Anyway, recently I got married and I became very happy along with getting exposed to a whole lot of new feelings, which included the feeling of being more knowledgable and being more wise. To get a person in your life is the greatest gift of your life and so knowing him or her is the greatest knowledge of your life.

Intellectual Capitalism & We as "Prosumers" of the Future Societies!

Why do we care about the Future ?

Because life around us today is hard. Each day the pace of life and the demands placed on our time continues to escalate. The news we see on TV paints a very grim picture of who we are and what we’ve become. At every turn we face new challenges - too many people, incurable diseases, famines, droughts, poverty, shortages, and new disasters waiting to happen. But the one place we can escape and feel hope for a better life is in the future. The future is a special place in our dreams. The future is filled with ideas and energy. But most importantly the future is where our children live.


How do we create visions of the future ? What are the driving forces ? What things are changing ?


The year is 2057 and you are standing in front of a vending machine. What form of payment will you put into it ? The future vending machines will be mobile, perhaps flying…will come to you…will know what you want.
The year is 2107. What music that we listen to today, will people still be listening to 100 years from now ? More importantly than what we will be listening to is how we will be listening to it ? Will music still come from speakers ? Will it just appear in our heads ? Will we even have music ? The ultimate music player will have the ability to assess our reaction to the music and will only serve up music that we react positively to.
The ultimate drink dispenser will have the ability to assess what kind of liquids our body needs and will only serve up a liquid that we react positively to.
The Greek mathematicians like Pythagoras and Archimedes laid the foundation so to speak of mathematics. But we do not find any Roman mathematicians. The Roman numerical system prevented people from doing higher maths.

What systems today like the Roman numerical system are preventing us from doing great things ?

It’s not just systems but also technologies that prevent us from doing great things.
The slide rule was replaced by the calculator but one was still expected to use the slide rule if you were doing your engineering. The end of the Slide rule and the beginning of the Calculator - where the intersection takes place is termed as ‘Maximum Freud’. It represents a time of major chaos and tremendous opportunity where we will spend most of the time on a couch talking to a shrink. A time of Crucial Conversations.
We would not have the Internet if Judge Hal Green had not broken the monopoly of AT & T. AT & T is the equivalent of the Roman Numerals system.
We are approaching Maximum Freud in the area of wires. We are seeing the end of Wires. The end of Home Telephone Lines. Cable Television lines. Power lines.
Just now in an MIT project wireless power is trying to be produced which will sound the death knell of power supply as we traditionally have experienced it. ‘Powercast’ attempts to draw RF signals from the air and convert them into power.
Intel is conducting WiMax trials in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune. If the whole of India is to be made WiMax then only 1300 WiMax units or towers would be needed.
In a WiMax environment one could possibly have an “always on” car which is “aware”. The car now becomes a competitor to the cell phone. The car has more real estate and therefore possibly more hyperinteractive capabilities.
The WiMax car could also become a self-navigating car which the old wouldn’t mind buying and using.

The history of Global systems is as follows :

Trade 1266
Sea Transport 1492
Metric 1670
News Service 1850
Time Zones 1884
Air Transport 1927
Stock Trading 1965
GPS 1978
Internet 1991

Which are the global systems being built now ?

- Global Search ( Google Earth, Wikipedia, ….)
- Global Info Portals
- Social Networking
- Video Archives

What global systems need to be built now ?

- Whole Earth History from thousands of different perspectives
- Global accounting standards
- Global currency
- Intellectual Property Systems
- Official Earth measurement systems

Alvin Toffler has very insightfully said that if a speed gun is pointed to various constituencies to find out the rate at which they are speeding ahead then we would possibly arrive at the following rates at which they are traveling :

Business & Indus 100 km/hr
NGO 90 km/hr
Family Life 60 km/hr
Labour Unions 30 km/hr
Government 25 km/hr
Education 10 km/hr
InterGovmntl.Orgnst. (UN etc) 5 km/hr
Political Institutns 3 km/hr
Law 1 km/hr

According to Toffler today we are experiencing the dysfunctionality of desynchronized institutions.Rick Wakeman plays the piano with 1/128th and 1/64th notes. The normal piano is not capable of playing these notes. One needs a specialized electronic piano.
In 2007 for the first time in human history, more people will live in urban areas than rural areas. Every day in the world 200,000 people migrate to cities.
Half the new buildings in the world in the next 10 years will be built in China.
We are becoming a very mobile generation. In 1950, 50 million people a year crossed national borders – last year it was 840 million.105,000 new food and drink products were launched in 2006 - 300 per day .In 2007 over, 550,000 new businesses will be launched every month.

We are living in an age of 100 mn. Products

In 2006 there were 44000 patents in the US. The average wait is 27 months.
Leading edge/Bleeding edge tech breakthroughs

i. Email - 1965
ii. Cell Phone - 1973

Technology Breakthroughs take a generation to get a foothold
There has been in US a 50% increase in the number of people living alone in the last 20 years. Globally 2005 was the first year when over 50% of women reported being single.
Liquids make up 22% of calories in the average American’s diet. 87% of consumers research products online before buying them in a store. Where Global wealth is concerned the richest 1% of adults own 40% of global assets. And of the wealthiest 10%, 25% are in the US. And of the wealthiest 1%, 37% are in the US.

By 2050 India, Brazil, Russia, China, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey will overtake the G8 countries in terms of GDP. Countries with the most population will create the most wealth.

In the 1970s over 30% of all college graduates lived in the US. Today that number is 14%. To transfer Mental concepts and Images, Reading is an outdated model. Vast majority of people in the future will not be literate.

Socrates who laid down the foundation for Western Philosophy did not write anything. Plato captured Socrates’s thoughts and put them down in writing.

To assume that one is intelligent because one can read may be wrong. Reading is the technical equivalent of the Roman numerals system. If one wants an interface with a format/medium to seamlessly and invisibly transfer to the brain images and ideas then reading is totally out of whack.

Between 1982 and 2002 young adults (age18-24) went from being one of the most - likely groups to read literature to one of the least likely. 35 mn Americans have difficulty with literacy. 21% of the adult population read at the lowest literacy level.

The number of books published in 2004 were 190,078 while in 2005 it was 172,000.
In 2005 approximately 11% of incoming college freshmen in the US required a remedial course and 14% required remedial writing. The need for remedial reading is the leading predictor of student dropouts. Remediation costs the US $ 3.7 bn per year.
Is reading the ultimate learning experience ? Is there something better ? Communication systems are continually changing the way people access information.

The question to ask is not where are we heading in the area of communication but what is the ultimate form of communication.

Teaching will get transformed into Learning. The future of education will impact business and every aspect of life. Teaching requires experts. As information expands exponentially one loses the ability to train experts fast enough. Teachers become a choking point.
In comparison to Myspace.com, Wikipedia.com and Youtube, the number of visitors searching for education Courses on the Net are fewer.

Information has grown exponentially but the courseware has not kept pace. This has given rise to the open education movement. The MIT open courseware initiative as well as the Wikiversity division of Wikipedia are examples of this.

The distance between the functional literate and the super functional literate is growing. For example people knowing the basics of the computer and those who are able to write complex software code.

The touchpoints for interfacing with society are changing. In the industrial era ‘things’ were important. Therefore one walked in shoes and sat in chairs and slept in beds. The tangible and functional were important. Today in the Information and Knowledge era ‘experience’ becomes important. The ‘mind connects’ are changing rapidly.
The question ‘What’s the most important thing one should be learning today?’ brings into focus the chasm which exists between what the authorities believe is the right thing to teach and what the student feels is important to learn.The Learning system will gradually become hyper individualistic. One is no longer keeping up with the neighbours.
Removing the classroom constraints is similar to removing the shelf space from the market store. The big gap today is a lack of specially architected rapid courseware architecture for learning.

The 12 dimensions of Future courseware architecture are the following :
· Create an international standard learning unit.
· 60 minutes long learning experience.
· Modality agnostic experience unit. For example, spend time with dolphins and see how and what one has learnt from this experience. Validate how much learning has taken place.
· Confidence based learning. Testing how confident you are when answering. Not only is one 100% correct but 100% confident that one is correct.
· Smart profiler. This tells you what you are most interested in.
· Multi dimensional tagging engine. High percentage of what is taught in classes today is theoretical. Every aspect of society has its own version of truth. There is religious truth and scientific truth and legal truth. Any governing truth authority will become political. So individual groups can create their own central truth authority and place tags of approval or disapproval for whatever is learnt.
· Personal recommendation engine. This will recommend areas based on one’s profiler, mood, what one has learnt in the past etc.
· Certification inputs
· New achievement standards
· Official record keeping system
· Participative wealth pricing.
· Global distribution system.

The Participative Wealth model as applied to the Courseware can be broken down in the following manner :

35% - Courseware creator
30% - Courseware Builder
3% - Smart Profiler and so on

The Future of Education will be :
· Hyper individualistic
· Self-paced
· Modality diverse
· Organically generated.
· More personal contribution involved.
· Language agnostic

In an age when students will be 10 times more smarter than today teachers will become coaches. Learning will become lifelong. And libraries will become working laboratories.
Gatekeepers are chokepoints of society. Editor is an example of this kind of choke point. People in this empowered age are trying to find ways to circumvent them. We are moving to a ‘no gatekeeper lifestyle’ where the market will decide. More democratic and fair.
Ebay. 75000 people living off online auction. Google Adsense – 8% of those who own a blog have carved out a living. Youtube and Revver have a video revenue sharing model. Craiglist which is the best known Classified site has a zero cost of ad space. In Second Life people buy and sell virtual real estate. One woman has sold 8000 islands in Second Life for varying amounts of money. But the interesting part is she charges $ 300 per month for their upkeep.
The average time a person will spend in a job in 2007 in USA will be 4 years. In 2010 this will come down to 3.5 years. 7% of those who are fired from their jobs are predicted to start their own businesses. We will soon see the growth of the ‘Empire of One’ where one person is running the whole business with everything being outsourced. ‘Cuff Daddy’ is a company started by a person who wanted to start something which did not take up too much space. He sells cuff links online. ‘Monkey Toes’ is another company where ordinary plain sneakers are bought and characters are painted on them and sold. Around 100,000 pairs are sold per month.45mn people are doing all or part of their jobs from home.
There have been 550000 new business launches in 2007 per month. Everybody has got something on the side. We have moved from a product based economy to an experienced based economy. Reputations are based on experiences not on what one owns. Baby boomers are shedding their belongings. For example coffee can be seen at 3 levels viz. at the Commodity level one buys coffee and makes it at home. At the Product level one orders coffee at the restaurant. At the experience level say in a Starbucks outlet, coffee is just the by-product of an overall experience created by Starbucks.
How does one create the ultimate experience ?
Gradually one is combining the buying moment with the marketing moment with the fulfillment moment.

There will be Fractal transactions. Before one would send goods to the vendor via a middleman whom one would call a wholesale dealer. If one removes the middleman then one gets an automated distribution system of an author sending the manuscript to the publisher online and the book getting sold online through Amazon.com. This is a Fractal transaction insofar as each entity in the value chain automatically gets some payment.
Our accounting systems are not yet in place to do fractal micropayments. For instance ‘Universal Commerce’ could be a brand name which has a button say ‘UC’ on every device. Say the device is a hair dryer. Then every time the dryer is used one would have to press the Universal Commerce button and that would register how much one would have to pay depending on how long one would use the dryer in that session. The payment immediately gets recorded. In this way one would pay the bare minimum for the dryer or even get it free because one would be paying for its service and experience. Every device thus gets converted into a payment device. This principle can be applied to a camera. A camera could be bought for free but the moment you click, it would start charging you. This in a way would encourage the manufacturers to make cameras more durable and with a lot of features. There could be a free store where one could pick up anything for free but one would have to pay as one uses. This will reduce the risk of fraud because the amounts paid on use are very small.

While attempting to control the future one needs to see a combination of high certainty events combined with low certainty events. There are different types of predictable futures :
Planned Futures.
Reoccurring Futures
Cyclical Futures
Natural Futures
Survival Futures
Evolutionary Futures
Systemic Futures.
Attractionary Futures

An Attractor is an event in the future that we are somehow drawn towards. Examples of attractors are Humanoid Robots, Putting a person on Mars, cure for Cancer or a Flying Car. We are drawn towards these Attractors like a force of nature. Our efforts and focus determine how fast it will happen.

There are 8 types of Attractors :

Inventions
Cures
Discoveries
Firsts
Challenges
Systems
Solutions
Standards

In every industry one will have Attractors. To make the Attractor a reality will require milestones. What will it take to accomplish these milestones ? For instance creating a solution for living in space. If a prize is announced then this not only starts a buzz but also a global conversation and makes it happen faster.

The history of Attractors is given below :
1919 : Orteig Prize - $ 25000 - Charles Lindbergh
1959 : Kremer Prize - $ 95000 – Paul MacCready
1980 : Fredkin Prize - $ 100,000 – IBM’s Deep Blue
1995 : Feynman Grand Prize - $ 250,000 – No winner
1996 : Ansari X Prize - $ 10 mn – Paul Allen, Burt Rutan won in 2004
2003 : Methuselah Mouse Prize - $ 3.4 mn - No winner
2003 : DARPA Grand Challenge - $2 mn.–Stanford Team won in 2005.
2005 : America’s Space Prize - $ 50 mn. – No Winner

Most of us are very good at competing. But in the technology world there are no finishing lines. We haven’t yet finished inventing the ultimate small particle for storage. So there are no standards at present. We are still making transitions.

If we look at just the circumnavigation of the Globe the following are the milestones :

1519 - Magellan - 3 years
1764 - John Byron – 2 years
1924 - US Air Service – 175 days
1929 - Hugo Eckener – 21 days
1931 - Wiley Post - 8 days, 16 hours
1933 - Wiley Post – 7 days, 19 hours
1949 - USAF B-50 Lucky Lady II – 94 hours
1961 - Yuri Gagarin – 1 hour, 48 minutes
1969 - Apollo 10 – 24,790 mph – Thomas Stafford, John Young, Gene Cernan.

Where do we go from here ? What is the future of transportation ? Will there be a new and different standard ?

Suppose there were an Archaelogist who 50 years from now were to dig up remains which would give him disks. He would probably look at them and try to figure out whether they were Windows 95 or 97 or 2000 and so on and finally come to the conclusion that they are possibly of no use. Whereas if he found a paper he would probably keep it. Paper is a more stable technology. New technologies are not that stable. In future we will have electronic paper.

Our computers need to be of a different shape say a spherical computer instead of a flat screen computer. Within 10 years we will be talking to our computers. Dr. William Crossman is of the view that within 50 years we will be a verbal society. Voice – in, Voice-out. Computers will have a package of personalities which will be on offer depending on our need and mood.

We are also experiencing a transition from being consumers to becoming producers (Prosumers). Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine has said “When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer”. People are no longer satisfied with just receiving information, they want to help create it.

The value of Proximity is key to our lives. We choose where to live based on our proximity to our assets viz. Income earning streams, Schools, Friends etc. We will in the future live in a hyper local future. Hyper as in linked and local as in location. It’s a new kind of city where one is never out of touch and never out of options. We will be Hyper local, Hyper aware, Hyper sensitive, and Hyper Interactive. We will build ‘Hyper ware’. There will be different software like Bodyware, Roomware, Buildingware, Cityware, Nationware, Globalware. We will have hyperlocal journalism focusing on building communities. We will develop a Museum of future inventions. What still needs to be done in the future. In the Future of food we will have underground farming which will increase food thousand fold. Freedom and Control are the 2 things that drive human beings. We can never have total freedom nor total control. Ultimately it is desire that drives the economy. The most famous non-religious person may not after all be Einstein or Bill Gates, or Newton or Faraday. He or she may not have been born yet. And we do not yet know what accomplishment will make that person famous.

The Last days of Intellectual Capitalism....

Everything is going to change now! And the "changebringer" is going to be "doable knowhow", Yes, I am using this phrase instead of using the cliched word "technology" just because to point out that technology as we know it today might itself change in a big way!. Future technologies might not be something which we would use daily for our common needs but instead can cater to meet only our entertainment/pleasure requirements. Gone are the days when easily distinguishable seminal inventions like the the automobile, petroleum, telephone or the airplane created new capitalists like Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Graham Bell, who started shaping the industrial history of almost the entire 20th Century by creating knowledge which they got legally protected in their proprietary intellectual properties. Moreover, they also succeeded in keeping large sections of common people away from gaining access to those proprietary knowledege. This lineage of intellectual capitalism continued from Standard Oil Corporation to Microsoft Corporation. But, lately things have started changing. And this changing process is here to stay. For example look at Google, Linux and Wikipedia. They all started as small endeavours by their respective creators but slowly moved on to become huge business successes based on their high user centredness. The way Google targets internet users to introduce its new web based software services, clearly shows its reluctance in traditional ways of proprietary software usage. Linux, the open source opearting system which is threatening all major corporations who develop and market software products with protected source code, also
relies on user/developer contribution for its functional growth. Lastly, what Wikipedia is doing is providing user created/edited content back to the users themselves. Therefore, the shift from protectionism to a more liberalized way conducting intellctual businesses is clearly evident.