Archive for December, 2006
Airport-Security: Special Computer Examination
Changing planes in Frankfurt is a pain in the neck. You travel on the ground from one to the next as long as it takes you to fly from Frankfurt to London. Sickening. So coming to Germany with my shuttle LH 755 from Bangalore and going on to Munich unavoidably means undertaking that journey, too.
Yet, what I wanted to mention is that I got pulled out on security with my notebook. The lady at the scanner said “Spezialuntersuchung für den Computer” to her colleague who fetched my notebook whereas I had to follow into a little room. There he took a cotton pad and rubbed on on the outside and over the keyboard. I thought it would change the colour or so if there was anything wrong. Instead he pushed the pad in a huge machine which started to blow and whistle. After half a minute he said: “Alles ok”.
So I wondered what this was. He explained very politely that through this procedure could trace explosives hidden inside as it would leave even minimal traces which this machine could detect. Cool. So as much as I loath Frankurt Airport, I will not complain about any measure which keeps flying safe.
Getting interviewed by German n-tv in Bangalore
Yesterday was fun. Nadja Kriewald, chief international correspondent at n-tv, the “CNN of Germany”, came to report on Bangalore. Together with her camera collague Christian we rushed through the city the whole day. I gave various interview-takes from any thinkable angle: Sitting in the front driving through the traffic jam of the city, standing on Church Street, walking with Nadja through Brigade Road etc.
n-tv is starting off in February 2007 with a new format on foreign countries and, impressively, as India is gaining increasing recognition in Germany, the subcontinent will be featured first. Nadja and Christian had an exhausting tour behind them, visiting villages in North India and the slums of Calcutta. From what she mentioned on her intended approach, I believe that her overall concept will really the point well: That India is both boom and doom, both opportunity and misery, both incredible wealth and unimaginable poverty. Like my Indian lawyer once said: “Whatever you say about India, also exactly the opposity holds true.” And just letting these contradictions co-exist without seeking the western-typical synthesis, eventually comes closest to something like the truth for India 2006. By the same token, for a very compact read I recommend from Olaf Ihlau, former foreign correspondent for the Spiegel, his new book “Weltmacht Indien” (German language only).
In the evening they took some more camera shots on the nightlife of Bangalore in one of my favorite places “Taika” and we ended with a joint dinner. Now comes the sorting out and cutting-phase for Nadja so that the story can get broadcasted in February as planned. I will keep you updated here on my blog.
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The secret Sauce of Infosys’ Success
Before the week is entirely over, just wanted to shed light on a fully worthwhile learning EO-event in Bangalore. It happened on Thursday in the Royal Club of Leela Palace where just one meeting room away from us John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, was apparently discussing the India-strategy of the networking-conglomerate.
Our Bangalore EO-chapter could be at least equally proud of having our guest talking to us. Hema Ravichandar who was heading Infosys’ HR-department from 1992 till 2005 where the company went in an unparalleled growth from 250 to 40.000 people! By the way, Infosys has been winning consistently – with the exception of two times – in the prize of the “Best Employer in India” over the last 10 years. I don’t wonder with that extremely smart lady on board who was giving us a 90 minutes insight about what made Infosys stand apart from all the other IT companies in India which started off from a similar level, but did not remotely get that far.
Hema referred to a conversation she had recently with Nandan Nilekani, CEO and one of the co-founders of Infosys on that topic and they fundamentally carved out 5 factors which made the difference:
1. Finance-Vertical: Early identifying the massive demand in the banking and insurance-sectors for high-quality software at competitive cost and developing domain excellence therein.
2. Quality: Being one of the first getting an ISO-certificate across various departments and being obsessed with precision. The anecdote she told: If you sent a Power Point presentation to Narayana Murthy, former CEO and today’s mentor of the company, he would return it to you with mentioning the number of misspellings and comma errors that where in. I loved that part, could be somehow me … :-)
3. Education: Broadening the scope for hiring great people by internal training and by that, converting e.g. mechanical engineers into software engineers.
4. Human Resources: Formalization of the entire sector. This was obviously the part Hema tackled most during her speech. And it was amazing to see how this company has really thought of everything in order to get an edge to the competition. It is worth to mention that – similar what Azim Premji from Wipro once explained – something as “dry” as HR was a hotbed for innovation. Guess why, if you hired 15.000 new people per year but had to handle 1.2 mn applications.
5. Infrastructure: Given India’s utter failure in the public sector, Infosys understood that it had to take the company’s basic infrastructure fate into its own hand. So one could actually consider Infosys besides a great IT company equally a self-sustaining electricity plant, or an independent logistic provider for bringing and dropping its staff from the workplace back home. If you happen to visit the immaculate Infosys campus in Bangalore once in a while, you will immediate understand why.
So that seems to be in hindsight and in the nutshell a bit of the “secret sauce” of Infosys breathtaking success. A phenomenon which has put India on the global stage like never before and helped coining the term of today’s “Flat World”.
Furthermore, a statement from Hema stood out in my eyes, as it completely confirms my own professional experience: Better have a good idea executed with excellence than a fantastic idea executed “somehow ok”. So it’s really worth going that extra mile to get it really right for the delight of your customer and the entire organization.
Distorted Comparison: Seth Godin on Pilots
As a RSS subscriber of Seth Godin’s blog I came across today’s post and I couldn’t disagree more. I even feel that given Seth’s usual capacity this entry is completely sub-standard.
After the dialectically usual respect in the initial part about the importance of pilots, he sums up their job with:
They have to follow a myriad of procedures. They must be calm and focused and consistent, and yes, boring.
The he ultimately comes to compare their role to that of an employee in a “normal” company and concludes with respect to suitable hiring strategies:
We don’t need pilots. We need instigators and navigators, rabble rousers and innovators. People who can’t follow a checklist to save their life, but invent the future every day.
Yawn. I don’t believe I am biased because I am a pilot myself, at least a little-little one for leisure flying single-engine Cessnas. So I don’t feel offended for the pilots and I don’t intend to defend the pilots in the first place. However, drawing this comparison to a corporation is just simplictic.
Yesterday in Bangalore, I attended a learning event with Hema Ravichandar who was heading HR for Infosys during its growth from 250 people to 40,000 from 1992 to 2005. (I hope to find the time to cover more on this eye-opener in the next days here.) Her clear message: Better have average ideas have executed with excellence than excellent ideas have executed in an average way. Absolutely. I have seen a lot of very bright people, almost geniuses, in my professional life. And I have equally seen many of them struggling, because they were relying too much on their unquestioned brains, at the same time often falling into extended holes of entire absence from discipline.
Another famous saying goes: 20 % of success is inpiration and 80 % transpiration. Certainly, we need creative people climbing over walls or even just run though them. Let’s call them disruptive innovators. But at the same time we need smart people who are able to develop things with critical reasoning along the way, yet display a steadfast and reliable “get things done” attitude.
Seth, ever done the entry test for professional pilots? I did in 1992 for Lufthansa, and I recall these two days in Hamburg one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had. Covering various tests in maths, science, English, listening, assessing, multitasking, vigilance – always and constantly under maximum time pressure.
My take on all this for HR in a “normal” corporation: We certainly don’t require only clones of one breed of people in an organization, but for three quarters of them the skillset of the pilot for me rather serves as an ideal role model.
Google to launch Radio Ads
Google CEO Eric Schmidt made it pretty clear where he saw the next big leap for Google during his appearance at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco four weeks ago: “There is so much ineffiency in ‘old media’ which we as Google can improve by employing our technological edge”.
Exactly this has now started to happe in a beta test on radio ads. It did not come by surprise as Google had bought dMarc Broadcasting in early 2006 for $102 million. After doing the necessary especially on integtration from the technology side, the search giant is obviously ready to shake up the $20 billion radio advertisement market in the U.S.
The clue: Upsell the existing AdWords clients into the highly leveraged radio syndication network that Google owns by now through a simplified web interface. That is indeed a huge shift which would not all of a sudden replace the radio salesman trying to sell you stones for gold, but at least a starting point to bring more awareness of performance metrics to the marketplace. Needless to mention to take fat out of the system with the result of lower prices. Actually, in the beginning Google intends to serve 700 radio stations in 200 metropolitan cities.
The lever that Google is certainly looking at beyond just upselling the existing customer base: Acquiring new customer initually interested in the lower price and higher transparency of the radio sales which then can be cross-sold to the flagship of AdWords. With click-fraud being a constant menace that Google is aware of, embarking on a medium which is not pay-per-click but per-per-audience, this strategy is certainly part mitigating a systemic risk which affects so far 90 percent of the company’s revenue base.
To Pee is to Be
This article is a must read. To stay in the framework: I almost made myself wet from laughing. It deals with the common phenomenon of every Indian wall being effectively a public toilet. At least for the male gender. I remember the best expression from a surprised Canadian lady travelling fist time through India describing: “Uhh, everwhere there are men going on the bathroom!” That would be the polite way of expressing the fact that you see pricks pissing against walls throughout the country.
I always had the plan to take a camera and make pictures. Pictures which I would collect and publish in a colourful book with the title: “Men going on the Bathroom”. I have to do it. It will be a bestseller :-)
Fair Play: German Style
A good friend sent this to me today and I thought I should share it on my blog. Even for non-German speakers, it should be self explanatory.
The catch is that this kind of unintended humour is indeed “typical German”. And the argumentation would go like this: “We encourage fairness both on the soccer field as well as on the Autobahn. At the same time we actively create awareness that we will make sure that fairness is being monitored and imposed. Therefore it is only “gerecht” (=just) that we have a speed trap right at the spot where we are creating this awareness.” Only for the records: “Gerecht” (=just) is a very important word when conversing among normal Germans. Using it as often as possible will make any visitor feel well accepted of having learnt the most important aspect of German society in the 21st century …
Amsterdam-Weekend: Great City with great Atmosphere
Just wanted to drop a sign of life after an impressive weekend in Amsterdam meeting my good old friend the Mrs. Hippopotamus, her husband, the Mr. Hippopotamus and the baby, thus the Baby-Hippopotamus. This is how I call Nina, she in turn calls me “The Pig”, and she is allowed to do so es-pecially as she is the best cook of Asian Food at least outside of whole Asia. Thanks for the great invitation.
Amsterdam as a city has great flair, the channels in a length of altogether 100 km provide a very special atmosphere. Here passing by with the boat at the Anne Frank-House, where I went into the exhibition the day before.
The weather was, as one can see, well, Europe in late autumn, but nevertheless a great experience which calls for repetition. Bangalore in return has greeted me with its chilled December with temperatures “only” at around 28 centigrade. Off to lunch to Ebony on M.G. Road with a few friends …
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