René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Dear Friends,

Thanks to our brave new interconnected world, but even more so thanks to your kindness, your kind birthday-wishes have been reaching me here in St. Moritz (Switzerland) during my skiing vacation. It was lovely to see the first congrats coming in even late evening yesterday my local time – which was already Feb 15th in Australia. And as the date-line was moving westwards, India came next, then Europe and now the first ones are coming in from the U.S.

It is my pleasure and privilege to express my humble thoughts that you have thought of me on my birthday, and rest assured that I will have a drink on your behalf tonight here in St. Moritz. More in detail I’ll explain in this brief video both in English and in German :-)

Hope to see you all soon again in person. Take care and warm regards,

René

2.22 PM

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Posted to English, Language Selection, Travel

After Shukla Bose’s inspiring talk at TED India in Novemer 2009, I finally managed today to follow her kind invitation to visit one of the four schools which she has set up in the last six years after the inception of Parikrma Foundation. Check out the website, it’s amazingly well executed, like everything else I have seen today at the tour of  the “Adobe Parikrma Centre For Learning”. (Here is the entire picture set.)

Given the top-notch organizational standard, one can tell that Shukla has spent a major part of her life in corporate life before she decided to do something that makes a true difference to others. Hence, the place is an amazing mix of high-quality education and dedication of its mostly volunteers as well as salaried full-time teachers. The right attitude for all involved seems of utmost importance for the organization.

“You can’t buy passion”, explains Shukla, and leads by example how focussed and loving she treats each and every of the children, ask them questions, answers the children’s questions back, encourages critical reasoning, a healthy portion of scepticism, gives them a hug and sometimes tender kiss on the cheek.

Most importantly, the children feel welcome at this place and encouraged to blossom. As normal as it sounds, it is not. These children have all one thing in common: They hail from very poor families, with an average income of Rs. 800/- (~ EUR 13) per month, and would without Parikrma at best see a school from the outside.

I really like the approach Shukla and her team are taking to their programme: Instead of describing problems and design solutions, they start from a desirable result: Enable children from an underprivileged background to attend college and work their way backwards to overcoming the roadblocks to the objective.

Besides an amazing curriculum which for example is able to teach children from ground zero English in three months, it includes most importantly the family background of the kids as well. It means integrating the parents into the process to convince them of the long term benefit of a good education (lower drop-out rates) to sending alcoholic fathers to therapies and have them afterwards build and run kitchens which feed all the children during school-hours.

After my great experience with our charity-project “Wipro Netbooks for Vatsalya” today’s visit was an eye-opener how something based on good intentions can scale into a significant changer of society like Parikrma. Shukla has in my impression done an amazing job in building a platform where new ideas and improvements are constantly absorbed, a platform which is open to the work of volunteers, some of them – which made it really sympathetic to me – guys with long hair and girls with tattoos (rather a rarity in India). These would be assigned to work in well crafted “modules”. Those can range from providing “slower” pupils a bit of teaching-tailwind within a programme of a few months to just have one educational lesson of 90 minutes on a relevant subject.

If you are interested in Parikrma, my fullest endorsement to donate or help. Here is how it works:

• Sponsoring one child per year including all expenses like books,  school-uniform, teachers’ salary to the partial rent: $500 per year
• Sponsoring a whole class where the donor will receive regular reports on the children’s progress: $15,000 per year (30 children with $500 each)
• Needless to mention, any amount of money is welcome.
• Volunteering, as described above, also with people from abroad is encouraged.

For all this, ideally visit Parikrma’s website where there is more information and even the possibility to donate online.

Thanks to Shukla and her team, keep up the amazing work and let’s keep in touch. I am sure there is something where we can work together in the future.

Happy New Year to all of you, and all the best for 2010. A quick update from my side on what has happened in the last weeks with our project “Wipro Netbooks for Vatsalya”.

• The girls are fine, I just went to see them on December 22nd and they were – although in vast majority Hindu – very excited about upcoming Christmas. When I asked what they had learned so far with their new computers, they explained me how to start the machine, change the background colour of the desktop and equally knew who invented the micro-processor and when :-)
• The computers are all up and running, two of them keep on disconnecting the WiFi-connection. We are in touch with Wipro based on the warranty to get this fixed.
• Thanks to our network-infrastructure wizard Sumanth, Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) has committed a desktop computer to us, which will replace the current machine acting as the server. We are waiting for NSN to “de-frost” this desktop from its assets.
• Although we can see initial traction of the girls interacting with the netbooks, we have decided the replace the current teacher and from April have a DAILY 2-hours curriculum. This intention reflects adequately both the importance and the potential that lies in technology-education for children.
• Hence: If you know any reputable computer school or computer training institution in Bangalore, which would be able to provide a female teacher (against payment) on a daily bases, drop me a mail under rene.seifert [at] gmail.com

The Vatsalya Children’s Home primarily combines housing and school education for the girls whom we have been supporting in the current project. However, the institution runs in addition daily schooling for children from the surrounding slums on its compound. Shashi, the Secretary of Vatsalya, had asked me if I could support her in building a simple roof above the patio where their lessons take place. So far the kids were exposed to the burning sun, which – South India being South India – tends to be pretty hot. So I committed Rs. 15,000 (EUR 220) from our remaining funds which would allow to close the funding requirement and start with the construction work asap.

From our current financials, we therefore stand at a remaining amount of EUR 756.20 , see the overview on Google Docs. As we have the foreseeable cost of paying the teacher for the daily curriculum from April onwards, I propose to “keep the powder dry” and refrain from any new expenditure unless we get clearer visibility on this.

Wish you a phenomenal year ahead, and I will be happy to keep you updated on Vatsalya and “our girls” :-)

12.47 PM

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Posted to Bangalore, English, India, Language Selection, Orphanage, Technology

Ever been to a 5-star place which is run by a bunch of amateurs? Then welcome to Soma Kerala Palace in India. It takes 4 minutes and 32 seconds to do a full round on the perimeter of the island on which the resort is located. That might give you an idea of the size of the place which just opened less than two months ago. Check out its website, the resort looks really as beautiful as the pictures promise. It took apparently seven years to dry out the swamp, set up a solid foundation on which the existing structure with the buildings could be erected. My highest respect for this sophisticated undertaking, the aesthetics in design as well as the composition of space and architecture. Unfortunately, here my charming remarks on Somatheeram Palace come to an abrupt halt.

Just finished today a 10 Ayurveda treatment which went really well and deserves a separate post in full positive tone. Yet, for the first time, since I can think, I felt stuck in a holiday-place that I don’t like, but sort of “had to” stay because I wanted to finish a project – namely this Ayurveda treatment. Back how it all started: During out „7 Dwarfs-Tour“ two months ago we dropped our friend Maks in Somatheeram (Kovalam). I saw the place, really liked it. Moreover, Maks was so delighted about the experience that I decided to try such an Ayurveda-treatment as well. What can happen better to a company like Somatheeram in the first place to be referred through word-of-mouth? So I wrote for a booking in the same resort, but got to know from its office that it was fully booked over Christmas, yet at the same time there was a new sister-resort which would offer the same sort of treatments – Soma Kerala Palace. Well, so given the – in my perception – powerful brand of Somatheeram which was supposed to stand for a high-quality Ayurveda-experience, I gave it a go.

Arriving on December 22nd, I pretty soon started to see problems. To be balanced and fair for the thrashing which is to start in the next paragraph: The Ayurveda-clinic as a unit is well run by the Chief Physician Dr. R. Sreelatha of Somatheeram with two both phenomenal and warm-hearted therapists Bijo and Shaji. These guys have not just been massaging their arms and hands off, by now they have seen me longer naked than all the girlfriends in my lifetime together ;-) Also the yoga-teacher Varghese Thomas is a true treasure who loves what he does, teaches with great enthusiasm, explains very well and tries to compensate as much as he can the massive shortcomings of the resort. These two were the only consistent daily highlights.

Let’s get started, and I know that this is not going to be particularly nice. With my 400,000 miles of annual travelling, I have never seen a place where the gap between the effort to construct a place and the effort to run a place is as huge as the Grand Canyon. To let no doubt about the latter: Somatheeram Palace is awfully run. Management as a function of business is close to non-existent. To define some sort of benchmark for my expectation based on the Somatheeram brand and the price the resort charges (around EUR 160 per night including treatments): Provide a consistent high-quality Ayuveda experience in a relaxing environment. Unfortunately, there is neither anything consistent, nor high-quality nor relaxing.

Let me showcase the series of defaults with a few examples:

• Somebody’s ceiling is somebody else’s floor: As beautiful as the houses are, they have one major construction flaw which is a purely wooden ceiling. So if you occupy the ground floor you can understand every word spoke above you, with every step up there you feel that an elephant is trampling on you. Not so cool if the family above you decides to get up at 5.50 am.

• If Somatheeram positions itself as a serious Ayurveda place, then it is not comprehensible to me why it accepts families with hordes of kids where not even their parents are into any Ayurveda-activity whatsoever, but are just paying guests for the resort to fill up empty capacity – often just for a 1 night-stay. On several occasions days, we had some four families with I guess 15 kids in the age between 3 and 15 years. So let’s call the experience “Playground with adjacent Ayurveda”. Contrast that with e.g. the Ayurveda place Jindal in Bangalore which does not allow kids at all – for a good reason. I am really surprised that the management of Somatheeram jeopardizes the brand with such a dilution of its positioning. If you want to host plenty of kids, don’t call your place something with “Somatheeram”, but “Kumar’s Familiy Paradise” or so. Then I will surely not come for Ayurveda  and equally won’t have any reason to complain.

• Although I had diligently inquired beforehand if there was internet-connectivity, it has been a catastrophic experience. In the first few days, it did not work at all, then just with a USB-modem on the reception-computer which I could use and then not at all again. The so called “internet café” is a joke: two computers stuck in a dark room with a neon lamp which hurts in the eyes, modems, routers, printers, cables on the floor – an entire mess. Also, just for the professionalism of my beloved management: On the computer on the right side, there are plenty of Excel-files with the occupancy-list including name of all guests for all days in November. Openly accessible straight from the desktop …Over the 10 days, the internet worked just over a few hours per day or not at all with an overall uptime of some 3 %. Completely useless, but don’t think anybody cares about fixing it. Somehow this whole “internet-café” as a concept is anyway stuck in the 90s. Where is the problem – like any reasonable hotel does it nowadays – to provide WiFi-internet in each room? I would be willing to pay up to 15 EUR per day for the convenience in case it “just works”.

Sadly, very few things just work at Soma Kerala Palace which according to the saying “the fish stinks from the head” is due to a manager who is friendly by nature, tries his best, but is clearly not up to the job. He is too junior and inexperienced to run a resort of this sophistication. This reflects his selection of staff who is even less up to the job, the absence of team-wide attitude, the absence of cross-department communication, the absence of any visible training, the the absence of defined quality-standards and the absence of continuous benchmarking against those. The result: Random results which fluctuate between OK and terrible. Some more examples:

• The room-service forgot to replenish the two water bottels, no big deal. I called the house keeping under “16” and asked the gentleman on the other end of the line if he could be so kind and bring those. The not too elaborate response: “Okokok”. Unfortunately, nothing happened. Just the typical retard-answer which is a mix between “I have no clue what you want from me” and “Kiss my ass”.

• My expectation would have been that there is some integrated Ayurveda experience which streches from the doctor, to the restaurant to the yoga trainer. The fact of the matter is that these three don’t seem to be coordinating anything among them. Result e.g. with the restaurant: It took the two lovely Austrian ladies Christine and Bettina (who have been suffering equally) and me five days to kick the restaurant in some shape in order to come up with some basic (!) hospitality-organization for pre-ordering our dishes. The quality of food, in turn, fluctuates between sometimes delicious and sometimes given our Ayurvedic intentions way too fat, or let’s rather say: No clue about Ayurveda-cooking. There seems to never have taken place any training for the cooks how to prepare proper Ayurvedic food. And when the cook changes and you order the same meal, you are facing a virgin experience on your plate.If this restaurant had to economically survive not as the monopoly on an island, but somewhere in central Kochin and Bangalore, it would – after one week of its operations – entertain exactly zero guests.

• Then there are serious attitude problems on Somatheeram Palace: One night, we had a heavy thunderstorm so that the floor of our lovely yoga pavilion had become wet. The awesome yoga teacher was around already at 6.30 am, one hour before the class, and kindly asked the guy at the reception if he could have someone dry the floor. This guy, however, decided to sit on his ass and basically think: “What is this yoga guy giving me instructions, me the bog honcho at my desk” and not doing anything about. It was not till I came at 7.30 am and started to shout at him that things would start moving. The biggest problem: I can’t imagine anything which I want to do less than shout at people in general, not to mention during a holiday which was supposed to be entirely aimed at relaxation.

• The bunch of families mentioned above had populated the swimming pool and left a battlefield of garbage, empty cups and used towels behind them. Bettina went to the pool the next day in the afternoon at 4 pm (!) and realized that nothing of it had been cleaned. As she understandably refused to sit in the midst of trash, she kicked the manager’s butt. What happened next is hyper-typical of the management style: All of a sudden three hectic creatures came running to the spot with panic in their eyes for impromptu-cleaning. No systematic approach to nothing. No processes at all. Instead, the management is improvising its way through the day all the time.

• Check out this picture, it’s so telling about all I wrote so far and serves as an epitome for all the consistent neglect. This is the lovely water lily pond right in front of the reception (background).What do we see in the right bottom corner? An empty water bottle swimming quietly on the surface, each and every member of the staff passing by several times from the early morning and even after half a day, the crap hadn’t been removed. It eventually did when I told the manager to his surprise that there was an empty bottle floating in front of his nose. Basically, Soma Kerala Palace is littered with trash in bits and pieces all over the place. The staff is, by contrast, quite helpful in creating it: I couldn’t believe my eyes what the waiter opened the plastic seal of the water bottle, just to drop it right on the lawn.

• The same manager, constantly both apologetic and stressed by nature, really had the audacity to reply to one of the Austrian ladies as an excuse for all the shortcomings: “I have so much to do, I can’t do everything.” Clear proof his overstraining to the job. No wonder he has too much to do as he is sitting 80 % of the time in the reception, checking guests in and our and just doing operational stuff like answering phone calls (which he does well by the way). Effect: Zero exercise of any leadership which would deserve the notion of “running an operation”.

Although there are more examples I could tell, they are getting equally annoying to recount as they are annoying to read. In the essence, it always comes back to the same three issues: no customer-centricity, terrible management and as a result lack of quality. As a guest of Somatheeram I constantly had this feeling of disbelief: “Come on, guys, this is not true! Get a grip on yourself and just do your work properly.”

We heard several times the once more apologetic argument “sorry, we just opened two months ago”, but you can stretch this argument only so far to a finite extent. The preparation for a hospitality-business is NOT finished by building some nice houses on an island, ship a bunch of untrained amateurs in who pretend to run it and have your first guests be you guinea pigs. I would be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if I saw the remote attempt to improve things beyond the ad-hoc problem fixing in any systematic manner. As things are going on, guests will hear the excuse “sorry, we just opened 3 years ago” in 2012.

If I was the owner of Soma Kerala Palace, I would be extremely worried about the state of my resort. Especially given the time, cost and effort to build Soma Kerala Palace in the first place. It feels like you intend to cook the best dinner in the world, buy the best ingredients, hire the best cooks, prepare everything according to the most delicious recipes. But at serving each and every course, one meter away from the table, the waiter stumbles and spills it all on the carpet. If I was the owner of Somatheeram Palace, I would emergency-parachute my best and most senior people in to take over, put professional practises in place, exchange key-people and kick a lot of asses for the next weeks to come.

But me being me, this is neither my task nor my responsibility. Me being me got enough from Soma Kerala Palace and will for sure never come close to anything where it reads “Somatheeram”. And if asked for advise, I would actively discourage my friends to go there.

3.42 AM

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Posted to English, India, Language Selection, Travel

In fact it’s already one year ago, but were were asked by the founder to keep a low profile in terms of communication in order not to attract unnecessarily competition. When I say “we”, I mean the fine group of entrepreneurs and executives from MumbaiAngels which I had joined one and a half years ago.

A few weeks back, we got the green light that communication was free. So I wanted to post a few lines on the company, the founder and why I thought it was a good idea to invest. Reverse Logistics India (RLC) operates in a space which at the first glance does not appear as sexy as promising to build the next Facebook. But I have learned well from my entrepreneurial experience that such businesses can bear an amazing business potential in combination with very healthy margins and – unlike Facebook – really make money :-)

So what does RLC do? To provide a simple example: An Indian consumer buys a new mobile phone with one of the big retailers, after a few weeks well within the warranty-period the things breaks. What now? So far in India, for retailers unlike in the U.S. or Europe, the legal obligation to manage the scenario is just in the making and therefore the priority of installing a proper process rather low, whereby plenty of customers have been left behind dissatisfied. Or, the retailers did not know how design the process at all.

This is where RLC as the outsourced solution comes into place: Organizing this entire process end to end with both satisfying the customer and recouping value in mind. Concretely, the company would on behalf of the retailer handle the customer from communication, picking up the broken item from his home, delivering it to RLC’s delivery centre to finally inspecting it. The inspection can yield that the item has to be disposed of (within the legal framework of “e-waste” in India) or, if it can be repaired, resell it. Just a simple example with plenty of variations and different use-cases.

RLC, based out of Delhi, runs by now two additional operating centres out of Mumbai and Bangalore. I met the founder Hintendra Chaturvedi last year January in Delhi and was impressed by his vision how to occupy this under-served market in a big picture, yet at the same time keep a razor-sharp focus on getting traction in this extremely “execution-heavy” industry. Interestingly, Hitendra is one of these famous cases of “reverse brain drain”: He had been living in the U.S. for two decades or so, before he took an executive position to run the OEM-division of Microsoft India. There, he realized that this huge sphere of “reverse logistics” he had see in the U.S. did not exist on the subcontinent and decided to set-up his own company. Here, on LiveMint is a nicely written portrait about him along with a sound depiction of the reverse logistics-landscape in India.

We from MumbaiAngels were convinced both about the concept and the founder so that we decided to give it a go by providing the necessary seed-funding. Good to know that a year down the line, RLC has been building traction with several marquee-customers and Hitendra is step by step executing on his vision.

Came across this data-rich article on CNN Money which points at an increase of coupon distribution and usage in the United States. Interestingly, the surge is being explained with the economic crisis where savvy consumers are looking for a deal wherever they can get one.

Overall, the volume of aggregated coupon savings amounts to $600 millions more in the first 9 months of 2009 compared to the same period the year before, or in percent, a 30 % up. The merchants from their end seem to have understood luring new customers to their shops by increasing the distribution of such coupons by 41 %. More often than not, the economics of a such a voucher don’t pay off in the first place with zero or even a negative margin. However, if relationship building is done right, the customer lifetime value will allow for profitable amortization.

Not surprising, more and more of the coupon business is moving online, with Redplum being such a major aggregator. The convenience-factor for both the merchant and the customer is as unmatched as in all the other areas the internet has disrupted. In Germany, there are equally services springing up in the coupon space like www.paperball.de/gutscheine. The idea is simply explained: Present an overview of coupons of current vouchers, explain their benefit and guide the customer over to the merchant. Another example for such a service is blogmeier.de with “blog” meaning “blog” also in German language by now, whilst “Meier” being a very popular last name (like “Smith” in English :-)

My impression is that coupons are here to stay and that we will see more of them, especially at the crossroad of mobile, location awareness and your social network.

Even after a week of TED India, I feel the inspiration of this unique event still hasn’t left its grip on me. On the weekend, there came via e-mail the request from the TED-team to rate the event, it took me some 10 minutes in all various categories and questions, but the last one was certainly the most important. Besides all the dissecting of single aspects of the event, the holistic question was “How would you rate your overall TED India experience?” On the given scale I gave it the best marks with “off the charts”. This applied for the venue, the Infosys Campus in Mysore, as well.

(All pictures of the event, here on my Flickr-set.)

What makes this event so fundamentally unique is the mix of phenomenal speakers in a broad array of disciplines combined with an extremely open discussion culture with the attendees, around 1,000. In terms of the latter: The norm is to just sit down e.g. at lunch or before a session and start a conversation with the people left and right of you. Every time, I felt it was interesting what they had to say, moreover the conversation was characterized by mutual curiosity. The topics started mostly with “what do you do” (without the sales-pitch to it) or “where do you come from”. A phenomenal review of the event which speaks from my heart here at GodInChief from my dear friend Vishal Gondal.

For instance during the last night at the party, I spoke to a PhD in biology who has been running a field study in South India how to reconcile the two apparently contradicting systems of wildlife conservation and that of agriculture for the neighbouring farmers. (There seems to be one …)

Plenty of such exciting conversations on how to lift the life of the underprivileged, especially through grass-root-projects which create some self-sustaining momentum. Those can have an approach of “one person at a time” to scalable models. A brief update at this point on our own charity “Wipro Netbooks for Vatsalya”: We are optimizing tiny little bits and pieces. Being an anal German we bought some buttons from felt which we installed below the table-legs to stop them rock, got some pillows for the chairs so that the very little girls would not have to have their arms at the level of their ears to reach the keyboard.

In fact, it was Petra who who took care of it during her and her husband’s Jürgen visit to Bangalore in the last weeks. Jürgen with his IT-network expertise installed a new, more robust WiFi-router which is better suited to serve 12 concurrent connections. Last, but not least: This month, the computer training started with an experienced female teacher twice a week.

Also, I would not like to withhold the official “thanking letter” from Shashi in the name of the institution.

What TED’s inspiration taught me or at least recalled to keep in consideration: If you do business for profit, there is always some higher calling beyond the P&L. Go out, find this mission and inspire your employees, your customers and all your other stakeholders with it. Your following will be manifold.

When you are doing well, there is ample of space of doing good. Go and understand what is what you do best in your organization. Find a way to apply a tiny portion of time and resources from it. Find a way to transfer this abilily in order to enable those who need this little kick-start before they can get lifted on their own.

That’s something I have just embodied in a recent business plan. In one year down the line I will have to be measured by my actions resulting from the easy part called words.

It’s been some 6 hours that I arrived at Infosys’ Campus in Mysore, the venue for the TED India conference. The campus is out of this world, when going through the gate “you are leaving the Indian sector” and it appears as neat as Disney World – although the Infosysians roaming around are way smarter ;-)

Obviously, I am no conference newbie. But every event has its own culture and my experience has been to look and watch in the first place, keep a bit of a low profile to understand the dos and don’ts and then fully immersing into the action. So far my first impression has been fantastic. You just start a conversation with anybody on where they come from, what they do or what interests them. What is a good thing – and I hate anything else – that the conversations are genuinely personal and nobody tries to “sell” himself, lest any product or service.

I guess one little anecdote illustrates my point quite well: When I took the bus back from the opening party to the campus, there was a slim Indian gentleman sitting there. I asked politely if the chair was vacant, he confirmed politely and we introduced each other by name: “Rama – René”. He made an extremely humble, maybe even slightly shy impression to me, and we started to talk in a real curious two-way conversation. After 3 minutes or so it turned out that this gentleman was Vilayanur Ramachandran, one of the leading neuroscientists of the world. He told me about his studies of the human brain with his approach to learn from deviant behaviour in a systematic way about the brain function and arrive to general conclusions for the ‘normal’ case. Rama held a talk today in the pre-conference programme; and here he is in a TED-talk of 2007.

We came then to some older studies of his where he looked at the function of humour which he explained in an amazing way of cultural evolution. But then we didn’t stay too long too theoretical and started to exchange hilarious jokes. One of them which the Professor told me is the sort of jokes I usually tell and I had to promise not spread it by giving “credit” to him. Promised.

As I mentioned Twitter, Rama said that he was registered, but didn’t understand if he had to admit people who follow him, what was public and what not. This was of course my little moment of glory where I could share my experience with the microblogging service and explain all open points. So my initial take: TED is predominantly about good, mutual conversations where a pinch of humour doesn’t do any harm either.

An amazing first evening, and I am really really looking forward to tomorrow, with Day 1 of the conference program. By the way, the entire Day 1 will be broadcast live online.

7.04 PM

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Posted to English, Globalization, India, Language Selection, Technology, Travel, Veritas, Whatsoever

OMG, Dirk, “The Schornsteiniger”, did it again. He produced another episode of “Howard Seifendale” from our footage material in Goa. Here, Seifendale makes the case about “Die Arme und die Würde von die Reiche” :-)

If you happen to find this funny, feel free to join Howard Seifendale’s Fanpage on Facebook, too.

6.17 AM

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Posted to German, Language Selection, Travel