The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Okay, I totally agree it is a bad idea to judge a book by its cover. However, Nicolas Carr’s Big Switch ("The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google") has quite a compelling teaser on its jacket. I haven’t started reading the book though.

It says that a hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their individual power and joined newly created electrical power grids. Something like that is happening to our lives through the internet via the likes of Google, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Google and so on.

"The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the "The World Wide Computer"."

Now, doesn’t that sound very promising? Geert Lovink has a detailed post.

1. This book is about personalities, and personalities.
2. Expect no great business insight, this book is general reading.
3. Ergo, if you hate business books and like general reading, go ahead and buy a copy.
4. The book is like an extremely long event report, language will make you feel you are reading a newspaper at bedtime.
5. The Arcelor management have been characterized from the beginning as irrational, insecure, somewhat immature. The authors have started this book with a certain mindset, which cannot be termed as fully balanced. And of course, as you would expect, Mittals family members and Mittal employees have been shown as competent and temperamentally very controlled.
6. Have no illusion, this book is only about the Arcelor and Mittal Steel merger, nothing more.

When highly respected Subroto Bagchi was speaking on TV the other day, I was amused to see his title. It read as Gardener. I could relate somewhat, a business leader of his stature can only be expected to nurture what’s around. How appropriate, I thought. Cisco likewise, has a Chief Globalisation Officer. Ron McDonald, the mascot of of McDonald’s , is believed to be called as Chief Happiness Officer by McDonald’s.

Not every position in the world has such undergone such a profound thinking exercise.

At a later day, I was reminded of the old days of the Soviet Union. A person could be called Fourth Assistant Secretary to the Chief Vice Minister or something equally weird. There was no way you could perhaps understand what such titled gentleman (gentleperson?) could be doing for a career.

Can you believe, the top boss of AOL match making service is called CEO of Love! Also, that the main organiser of the highly awaited Berkshire Hathway’s annual meeting is believed to be called Director of Chaos. A CEO is believed to be calling his job title as Difference Maker. Somewhat like a telephone operator calling himself/herself as Director of First Impressions.What about the doorman at the famous hotel being called as Door Keeping Executive or even Welcome Experience Manager?.

Blame it on IPL. My reading (blogging too!) has suffered a slowdown of late. More so because I did not notice seriously appealing business reading in my last few trips to Landmark and Odyssey stores. I also felt quite irritated at the parking problems in Chennai Citi Centre and the crowds at Landmark Spencers to just drop the idea of some serious book-surfing.

However, when you cannot chase books, sometimes books themselves beckon you. I find two books on my table competing for my attention. So what am I planning to read?

Nicolas Carr, thinker and author, who kicked a storm few years with his earlier work "Does IT Matter?" His latest book is titled equally provocatively, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google".

The other option is "Cold Steel: Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion Dollar Battle for a Global Empire" by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey.

I remain quite fascinated by anything steel since I first worked at SAIL. The sheer scale of anything to do with steel making is remarkably fascinating be it the production facilities, the mines, the business of steel and so on.

What does not help is that I remain equally fascinated by the transformational capabilities of the wires (read as the information flowing via those wires). Both steel and wires are quite international in its value chain (raw material sourcing, production, technology, markets etc). And by modern growth standards, both steel and wire are considered infrastructure now. There is one stark difference though- the business of wires does not have any clear dominant player, whereas the business of steel has.In a lighter vein it could even be said that one is in the business of flats, whereas the other makes the world flat.

Am I making too many assumptions about these two books.

So perhaps I would be reading both these books in parallel till the point one completely overtakes my attention. Any thoughts?

My wife remains quite annoyed by my daughter’s addiction to Pogo channel. She remains even more annoyed by the fact that much against her rightful protestations, my daughter is joined by me in watching shows such as M.A.D and Takeshi’s Castle (Oh, have you heard the hilarious voiceover provided by the very talented Javed Jaffrey? !). And just btw, even now my TV is showing a Harry Potter movie and I am the only viewer in my house!!

If that generates your sympathies for my wife, read this. I recently noticed a Hitachi AC ad on Pogo. Now kids don’t order ACs, which means someone told Hitachi (or provided somewhat credible viewership data) that dads and mums watch the channel too!! And hey wait, they just showed a Tanishq jewelry ad. Pogo,thanks for making it easy for me to accept this reality!!!

Many times we don’t know that we already have a prepared logic to handle a situation. Like sometimes when we say, "Don’t know why but I do not have good feeling about this move" or so on. In some such situation, we have already debated the pros and cons of such a move at a subliminal level of our mind, and though the logic is not known to the upper layers of our mind, we pretty much know what to do. Such logic that we ourselves are not cognizant of the existence of such logic but it tends to guide us. In simple words, intuition in some situation could be the result of an internal evaluation of a situation without becoming aware of such a processing. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is is all about that. It is all about the existence of what programmers would like to say – existence of pre-compiled code in human mind. If you haven’t read, do grab and read this brilliant book.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

While Beijing Olympics are just round the corner, one does not see much advertising around it even now. In fact I remember seeing Lenovo ads around Olympic torch relay about six months back. Suddenly it faded out and no new advertising is noticeable , on web, TV, outdoor or print. Shall we blame it on IPL or am I expecting the Olympics based advertising too early in India? Or, is it the violent run of the Olympic torch that has made advertisers wary? Just wondering aloud.

As a matter of fact, the list of sponsors for the Olympics is really impressive. The usual big time Olympic sponsors Coke (remember the Atlanta Olympics were dubbed as Coke Olympics ) is there, along with GE, Atos Origin, Kodak , Visa, Samsung and of course, Lenovo. Plus a plethora of Chinese companies as one would expect. Where are the ads and the Olympic themed promos though?

PS: Sara, I am back!