Shrikant’s Blog

Some key fundas from an interview with Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix.

The next big wave in studio and Netflix profits is not downloading. It’s high-definition DVD. The hardware industry wants it to succeed because they want to sell another 100 million high definition DVD players. The studio wants it to succeed because they want customers to buy another copy of The Godfather. Yes, there’s a high-def DVD format war coming. Yes, it will get resolved. So the big economic story in the next five years is not downloading, it’s high-definition DVD. What we see in downloading is that it will be a long, slow evolution that at some point, five to 10 years from now, will get really big.

Starbucks was not customer driven, it was vision driven. Howard Schultz went to Italy, saw the experience of what a coffee bar could be, then re-created that in America, despite many, many skeptics.

Now, did he listen to customer feedback about the necessity of low-fat and non-fat milk? Sure. Has he adapted in various ways after listening to customers? Sure. But he fundamentally had a vision that he could create this wonderful third place for people to gather, and that he could start the coffee culture throughout America.

Netflix is completely Web-based, our warehouse employees never interact with the customer. So what we focus instead on is to have the Web site be the most personalized in the world. If the Starbucks secret is you get a smile with your latte, ours is that the Web site adapts to an individual’s taste, so that of the 50,000 movies available, we can figure out which 50 we ought to put on the screen that would be relevant to the individual.

read complete interview >>>>

For nearly 25 years, Ricardo Semler, CEO of Brazil-based Semco, has let his employees set their own hours, wages, even choose their own IT. The result: increased productivity, long-term loyalty and phenomenal growth. Semler’s a CEO-who- manages-least- manages-best approach. Can his radical approach work for you?

One afternoon, while touring a pump factory in Baldwinsville, N.Y., Semler collapsed on the shop floor. After resting in a doctor’s office for a few hours, he traveled on to his appointments in the Boston area. Once there, he took the advice of the Baldwinsville doctor, and checked into the Lahey Clinic for some exams. “After amortizing all of their machinery, they told me I had nothing,” Semler recalls. “But the doctor told me that if I kept going like I was, I would soon be using their brand-new cardiac wing. He walked me through it and showed me how good the hotel structure of that wing was, how much I was going to like it. I got the message.”

In the months that followed, Semler determined to balance his work and personal life more carefully, and to do the same for his employees—all while improving Semco’s fortunes. To his great relief, he discovered he didn’t have to reconcile these two goals: The more freedom he gave his staff to set their own schedules, the more versatile, productive and loyal they became, and the better Semco performed.

Nor did he stop with flextime. He did away with dedicated receptionists, org charts, even the centra office—it now resembles an airlines’ VIP lounge, with people working in different areas each day. He encouraged employees to suggest what they should be paid, to evaluate their bosses, to learn each other’s jobs, and to tolerate dissent—even when divisive. He set up a profit-sharing system and insisted that the company’s financials be published internally, so that everyone could see how the company was doing.

Semco hit some bumps and yet, despite a recession and staggering inflation in Brazil, the company grew, and, by 1993, Semler had a spirited turnaround story to tell. His first book, Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, became an international bestseller (it’s more Rocky than The Firm), and laid out his unorthodox, if strikingly commonsense approaches—no dress code, voluntary meetings, mandatory vacation time. read more —->

On the Google site please search for failure and click on ” I am feeling lucky “. Enjoy!

Brij Kishen in front of Gandhi’s Funeral Pyre

My good friend Ankush’s granduncle Brij Kishan was secretary to the great Mahatma Gandhi. During family dinner conversations, Ankush’s mother recollected that Life magazine had covered the assasination and funeral of Gandhi. The article had a photograph of her uncle, Brij Kishan next to the burning funeral pyre of Gandhi. Life quoted “The expression on his face reflected that of the stunned nation”. Ankush made a resolution to find this issue of Life and gift it to his mother and embarked on the search. Ankush started searching for this specific issue and got started with the internet and Google. He finally tracked down an old lady named Brenda in the United States, who runs a website that deals in old magazines including. Brenda was extremely excited that somebody from India had contacted her and was ready to mail it at her expense. Not trusting the India Postal system, Ankush deferred delivery to his next visit to the U.S. He was able to finally gift the magazine to his mother, for whom it was a dream come true.

We can argue at length the benefits of computers on society but the impact of internet has been really profound. It allowed Ankush to get hold of a magazine published nearly fifty years ago and in possesion of a lady thousands of miles away in another continent. I think the best benefits are those, which impact people’s lives, in this case recreated nostalgia. You may ask what is a long tail, it’s an internet marketing jargon, that allows one to reach a category of users who may be small in number and widely spread out.

More photos from same issue below

Followers next to Gandhi’s Body

Gandhi’s funeral procession. India’s should have been 1st Prime Minister Sardar Vallahbhai Patel along with should not have been Nehru

Nehru at funeral

The use of computers in education has been debated since personal computers arrived. Apple did a wonderful job by dominating the classroom with superb software. In one of the best analysis I have seen to date, Lowell Monke observes students who frequently use computers perform more poorly academically than those who use them rarely or not at all. More recent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.

Educational computing is neither a revolution nor a passing fad, but a Faustian bargain. Children gain unprecedented power to control their external world, but at the cost of internal growth. During the two decades that Monke taught young people with and about digital technology, he came to realize that the power of computers can lead children into deadened, alienated, and manipulative relationships with the world, that children’s increasingly pervasive use of computers jeopardizes their ability to belong fully to human and biological communities—ultimately jeopardizing the communities themselves.

The connected computer has amplified our youths ability to virtually ” go anywhere, at any time” it has eroded their sense of belonging anywhere.

Internal moral and ethical development must preced the acquisition of power – political, economic, or technical – if it is to be employed responsibly.

At the heart of a child’s relationship with technology is a paradox—that the more external power children have at their disposal, the more difficult it will be for them to develop the inner capacities to use that power wisely. Once educators, parents, and policymakers understand this phenomenon, perhaps education will begin to emphasize the development of human beings living in community, and not just technical virtuosity. I am convinced that this will necessarily involve unplugging the learning environment long enough to encourage children to discover who they are and what kind of world they must live in. That, in turn, will allow them to participate more wisely in using external tools to shape, and at times leave unshaped, the world in which we all must live. read full article >>>

Article below talks about Craig Mundie, CTO Microsoft, giving a very factual evaluation of the software engineers, India is producing and the local software eco-system that exists. India’s techie pride is very quantative in nature and not qualitative. The CEOs of companies who produce local software products and internet businesses who service the Indian market will agree with him. Indian media without any critical anaylsis is used to reporting jobs coming to India. For eg: ” Nokia to open development center with 2000 developers ” thats what sold I guess. It did not matter for a moment what these 2000 will do, no analysis on revenue per head or awarded patents per developer. This boosted the ego of many Indians who were outside the industry. Exceptions do exist but for a mere 1-2% of all employed are developing genuine Intellectual Property.

We should thank Craig Mundie for inducing a sense of reality and puncturing the techie pride balloon filled with gas.

Microsoft punctures India`s techie pride (via Business Standard)

India does not produce enough computer engineers and those it does are good at theory but not very well equipped to handle the practical aspects, according to Microsoft Corporation’s Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie, who is on a visit to the country.

“India produces a lot of engineers. But the production of computer science engineers is low, pro rata. Computer engineers are more into theory and less in managing businesses, building businesses or writing source codes, the key to software development,” Mundie told Business Standard today.

Microsoft has a large number of Indian software engineers on its rolls in India as well as abroad. Out of the 2,000 people working for Microsoft in India, a sizeable proportion comprises software engineers. India produced 401,791 engineers in 2003-04, of which 35 per cent were computer engineers. The number increased to 464,743 in 2004-05, of which 31 per cent were computer engineers.

According to Mundie, the problem with the engineers can be attributed to policy issues. Universities in India, he said, did not get proper funding for research and were not directed towards software development. “The lack of trained staff is addressed by firms through internal arrangements for proper training,” he said.

Besides, he said, India did not have enough software companies nor were enough companies developing India-specific applications.

“There are so few Indian software companies developing local software. That is a negative reinforcement, because there is no local software and no new applications,” he said.

(via Indian Express) Sudheendra Kulkarni talks about lessons in the divinity in work from a woman stonebreaker. Even in corporates good managers always try to connect the relevance of each individual’s work to the bigger objective of the team or the company.

In reference to a lecture on citizenship by Swami Ranganathananda. ‘‘No work is big or small, our attitude makes it so. If you do a clerk’s work with a clerk’s mind, both the work and the worker remain small. But if you do the same work with the mindset of a citizen, both become great. Similarly, a teacher working in a remote corner of India, thinking of himself as a low-paid employee, reduces himself to an inconsequential individual. But if he develops the attitude of a citizen, he uplifts himself to the status of a nation-builder and invests his work with great significance and meaning. You are free to make your work and yourself small; you are also free to make both big. It all depends on your attitude, on your philosophy of work. We have to achieve an intrinsic bigness in ourselves, and impart that bigness to all the functions that we perform.’’

The second is from Bipin Chandra Pal, one of the least recognised among the leaders of our freedom struggle. His book Nationality and Empire: A Running Study of Some Current Indian Problems, though published in 1916, is highly contemporaneous. Pointing to certain weaknesses in the nationalist movement, he wrote, ‘‘Most of us are nationalists more in the European sense of the term than after our own true social philosophy. Jagad hitaya, Shri Krishnaya — for the good of the world and dedicated to the Lord — this has been the consecration of all our works, sacramental and social. This is how the rich among us always consecrate every public work they construct, be it a temple or a tank; and it shows the universal reference of all our social duty. Our modern nationalist ideal has not yet reached this lofty spiritual level. The idealism of the Indian nationalism rarely rises above the lower European plane of it, where it concerns itself almost uniformly with the carnal conflicts of political and economic competitions.’’