The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

At recent annual festival of the company I work for, met a bunch of brilliant sketch artists. They could draw your sketch in just about 20 mins and right there. No wonder, there was a rush and after a forty minute wait, I got the chair too. Leave it here to judge you if this is indeed me, but I was mighty impressed. The reproduction here is through the lens of a phone, and therefore is not the very best.

Authors – W Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

Finally Amercians have some competition from Europe!

Chan Kim and Muaborgne are academicians at INSEAD, Europe’s best known B School.They are credited with bringing out a new classic on management, which fortunately is not blessed with the same geographical myopia as suffered by most American Authors suffer, who choose to quote only American companies as having displayed excellence. From this perspective this book is a welcome change. This is the first book in recent years from Europe on the subject of business excellence that has become mainstream(Published by Harvard Business School Press). Check out their website.
Much against the creative proclivity of not mentioning books by other authors, this book actually notes the presence of books such as Good to Great and Built to Last. Kim and Mauborgne point out that though many authors have attempted to study companies whose success appears to be durable, sevaral of these companies have faltered within five years of the publication of the books in which they have been cited!
This is an extremely focussed books which has not been burdened by author created jargons by the dozens, neither has it excessive citation of cases.

Most books on Strategy are backward looking, i.e, they tend to analyse trends in the past but generally talk about the future in highly qualified terms. In Blue Ocean Strategy that’s untreadable space of future is where Kim and Mauborgne have dared to go, and make no bones about it. In that sense, this is a very balanced book- refering to past success, and trying to make sense with the future.

The book talks about making competition irrelevant. So, is this book about being competitive alone? Or, is about positioning? Or, about defining your business? It is about a mix of all the strategic elements, without loosing the holistic picture, placed in the canvas of future. At strategy level, this book does not just say how to look at things, but how to go forward.
The book has a very lucid tone, and the tone is very optimistic. No wonder over a million copies of this book have already been sold and this book has been translated in 32 languages so far (None of them Indian, sadly)

Hats off to the authors and my recommendations as a book not to be missed. Buy it if you have to, rather than wait for it to appear in the library. You must go the book website as well.

Chances are that the page you are viewing knows your location in the world. Or Atleast the country. Is someone watching you? Well, someone somewhere always seems to see something about you, which you never intended them to see( Phrase inspired by “Wardrobe Maul-functions” at Lakme India week recently).

Have fun. Will soon write about a much raved book called “Blue Ocean Strategy” by Kim & Mauborgne. Sounds promising in the first few pages. They have obserations about companies, not people, and they too seem to have observed about others what was never thought to be visible.