The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

President Abdul Kalam is set to retire in a week’s time. Rajdeep Sardesai post on the president at one of his last official engagements is all about the magnetism of this simple looking man. There are talks about him becoming involved with various academic initiatives. Anna University in Chennai is preparing for his return to the campus, and Nitish Kumar is planning to offer him the Visitor position of the revived Nalanda University. Whatever finally happens, it is clear that Kalam is not fading away. That’s reassuring. For me, this is double happiness, since I trace my roots to Nalanda area and live in Chennai. BTW, his future website is already being readied and will go live on 25 July 2007. The site seems to be hosted by NIC. Even Google seems to be saluting him, since, the site has no content yet, but seems to be enjoying PR of 4. Interestingly, there is less talk of India’s incoming president in blogosphere, more or the outgoing one.So much for hamara President.

Related Posts:A conversation between Presidents Kalam and Musharraf which never happened &
President Abdul Kalam- random reflections of a citizen.

Updated 26 July 3:00 PM: We notice that the site host has changed to VSNL . Those looking for Dr. Kalam’s email id may note that it is apj [at] abdulkalam.com according to this page on his site. And GApps fans, yes, Dr. Kalam’s email is on GApps(Google Apps for Your Domain) too.

In response to my previous post on Conversational Marketing as discussed by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book, I received a counterpoint from my friend Rajeev John, who is a marketing professional with one of India’s truly home grown and respected consumer goods company.

“Its like the Star Wars program. Extremely relevant for 2020 but irrelevant now with internet penetration still in single digits in our India.There are still (& sadly so) a lot of marketeers who think marketing is a tool to attract SEC A + consumers only. They forget (or are simply not aware) that 75% OF POPULATION STILL LIVES IN VILLAGES. Now reaching out to them & bringing into the branded fold is the real challenge.”

John, many thanks for the reminding us of the brutal truth. I am sure that there are others who might want to side your argument, like me.

Now stepping aside this argument for a minute, let’s see that there are several companies that are selling their products or service in different parts of the globe, where net penetration is not an issue. Who would not want to read what Ratan Tata has to say, or Mittal. Or, the IT behemoths who are serve their customers worldwide. I would personally want to read what Capt Gopinath would write, if he were to start a blog.

Yes, SEC A is certainly maturing. We have seen communities being created around Sunsilk, Maggi and so on. But this, I am sure is just the start.Time is coming, very soon.

I was reading Robert Scoble and Shel Israel‘s great but slightly old(well, in tech arena, one year is fairly old) book titled Naked Conversations (Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers) The book is such captivating read, and no, time had no effect on the relevance of the contents, which is blogging as a medium of communication.
At some point NC tries raises the question on whether (corporate) blogs can be equated with Marketing. A new term conversational marketing emerges, and I feel it is quite apt. I tried hard to think of reasons on why in today’s world blogs are getting adopted as a medium for individual or group communication, but not so quicky as a channel for corporate communications. The following is my hypothesis:

BTW, Naked Conversations is a great book and a must read for marketing guys. Only a word of caution. Create your personal blog and run it for a while before you read it. But consider this as a compulsory reading material, at the very least. And do it fast, before your idea of marketing becomes a living dinosaur.

Still wondering who are Scoble and Shel Israel? No I am not telling you, go Google them!

As I wrote in my earlier post, I read C. K. Prahalad’s thoughts on Eradicating Poverty Through Profits through the lenses of the book titled “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” ( Wharton School Publishing).
As is my habit, I started by reading the preface where I was pleasantly surprised to see the name of a former colleague of mine, Praveen Suthrum, who went to be Dr. Prahalad’s student and contributed to this book.
The central premise of this book appears to be that one need not be in the developed world to create a world class enterprise – there are companies that have created a niche in their own ways wherever they are. And while doing things differently, they have not sacrificed the profit motive – they are hugely successful, famous and respected.The book has studied some very successful and homegrown companies in South America and India and attempted to bring out what made them successful.
This book is a break for Indian B-School students, who for generations have been fed on cases from the west. This covers companies such as Casa Bahia ( Brazilian Retailer ), (CEMEX Cement Manfuacturer- Mexico), quite a bit on HLL, Jaipur foot, Aravind Eye care, ITC e-Chaupal etc from a social transformation point of view.
But with due respect to CKP’s scholarship and the initiative, few words on the editing. If a book calls Sankara Nethralaya as Shankar Netralaya (page 106) , Doordarshan as Doordharshan (somewhere), starts talking about a name( Dr Pramanik) on page 177 and tells his introduction only on page 184. As the saying goes, another pair of eyes never hurt. The language inconsistency is all too apparent as one reads this. The text often appears disjointed in the central message is lost in the verbosity of dry text. Somewhere, you feel you have to hold your attention too hard to continue to follow.
The video CD that came with the book is much better though. It has short clips shot by the students themselves.

PS: I wonder when will B-Schools in India wake up and start taking up such ambitious and tough projects and be known for this rather than the average salary surveys alone.Salaries go up because industry and the economy are doing well, not because the B-Schools inject any special gene in their students. The silent message from this book is – Good Morning Indian B-Schools.

…and now one hears it is going to be Kepler Wessels. He played cricket for Australia and South Africa and was quite a name. That begs the question – Can he play ball with the BCCI?!

Subroto Bagchi was at Madras Management Association Forum yesterday and gave a captivating talk on High Performance Entrepreneurship. I would have expected a usual stuff on Entrepreneurship laced with lofty terms such as passion, idea etc only if I hadn’t been following his a-spade-is-a-spade columns in magazines. Perhaps others too had, since it was a housefull. And Subroto did not disappoint them at all. With true elan, he began by asking the audience what is the foremost quality needed in an entrepreneur. Lots of hands went up, and audience provided predictable answers such as passion, idea, marketable IP such as an invention. Subrato dismissed these at once and stated that that one quality was the love for money!

He ran a thirty minute film that featured three modern day entrepreneurs of very diverse type – V G Siddartha of Cafe Coffee Day, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon and Capt G R Gopinath of Deccan Aviation. The background and the triggers for these three to take to the journey of entrepreneurship are very different. Siddhartha is from a family of coffee estate owners and wanted to go beyond the family vocation rather than continue to trade in a commodity. Kiran went to Australia in the 70s to train as a brew master and when she came back, no company would offer her a position as a brew master – it was considered a man’s job in those days.She started Biocon from a garage (Yes, it is not just HP that started this way!) and found an Irish customer, did lot of things right, and today Biocon and Kiran are what they are. Capt Gopinath, contrary to my previously held impression, is not a pilot himself. Infact, he is from the Army’s Aviation Corps but he is not a pilot. His turning point was when one of his (newly retired services) pilot friends informed him that he got a job with a courier company. Recalled Capt Gopinath in the film, “I was at Phoenix airport waiting for a helicopter to pick me up and while waiting there, I calculated that this airport handles about 1000 flights a day. This is the number more than all the airports in India put together”. He had to do something.Simplify he decided, and created Deccan Aviation.Interestingly, it turned out while watching the film, prior to plunging into Aviation business, Capt Gopinath had taken to bio-farming as a career and was quite successful in that too.

Subroto Bagchi traced the steps of entrepreneurship with the help of more than a few slides, and it would be a great ready reckoner to anyone who reads them. He cautioned potential entrepreneurs against common problems and emphasized the need to define the values of the organization at the very outset.He also impressed the importance of a written business plan and pointed out that most entrepreneurs, shy away from having a documented business plan. He interspersed his talk with several anecdotes and we got an example of the personality that he is.”When Mr. Premji would come to my office, he would ask me if I was available to meet him at a specific time. Not that I could say no, but I would make the pretense of checking my calendar and then tell him yes we could meet. It was such a convenient arrangement”. (Azim Premji was Subrato’s boss at Wipro).

A very memorable evening. Next time you hear Mr Bagchi is in your city, find out where he is speaking, drop everything and run. Promise, you won’t regret. For the records, Subroto has authored a book on this subject called High-performance Entrepreneur. Thank you Mr. Bagchi for the truly wonderful session.

(PS: And if you are from MMA / Mindtree and have the copy Mr Bagchi’s slides, please mail them to me!)