A fascinating tale of an imaginative genius, Steve Jobs!

Steve Jobs, No introduction is needed for this iconic CEO of Apple computers. He revolutionized the Personal Computer Industry and the entertainment world with innovative products like Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iTunes etc… He’s a college dropout who once backpacked around India looking for spiritual enlightenment, returned a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing, and he takes only $1 a year in salary. Steve Jobs has upended five industries – computers, Hollywood, music, retailing, and wireless phones. More than anyone else, Apple’s co-founder has brought digital technology to the masses. On January 14’^Th, 2009 he announced that he’ll take a medical leave of absence until the end of June due to complex health-related issues. In this blog read the fascinating tale of this imaginative genius.

Rough Beginning

Born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. His parents were so focused on their son’s needs that they even moved to Los Altos, California, in 1968, to put Jobs in a new school because he said that he was not learning anything at his old school. He was an odd student, out of step with both classmates and teachers, with a mind that looked at science from unusual angles. He preferred to spend his time with older students rather than ones his own age, including Stephen Wozniak, an electronics genius four years older than Jobs. In 1972 Jobs attended Reed College. Dropping out after one semester, he hung around the school for about 18 months, before submitting a résumé that greatly inflated his electronics experience to Atari, a pioneer in video gaming. For part of 1974 he worked as a game designer. After saving up enough money to pay his way, he left Atari and journeyed with friends to India to search for enlightenment. He shaved his head and walked through what he saw to be appalling poverty. He soon left India believing that Thomas Edison had done more for the betterment of humanity than all the gurus in the world.

Apple’s Inception

On his return to California Jobs began to spend time at the Homebrew computer club. Steven Wozniak was one of the members of the club, who met Jobs several years earlier when they were both summer interns at Hewlett Packard. In 1975 Jobs and Wozniak became partners, and Jobs gave their enterprise the name “Apple.” They designed their simple computer in Jobs’s bedroom. Jobs and Wozniak cobbled together their combination of a circuit board, a microprocessor, a video screen, and Jobs’s most important contribution, a typewriter-style keyboard. The inventors called it the Apple I. Wozniak had the electronic circuit design skills and Jobs provided the key ideas for its functionality and physical design. Introduced in 1976, more than 600 pieces of the Apple I were sold making $774,000. The partners wanted to build something more sophisticated and easier to use. In 1977 the former Intel executive Mike Markkula, a venture capitalist, invested in Apple, becoming its chairman of the board and bringing in outsiders to help govern the company. Jobs persuaded a successful publicist, Regis McKenna, to join Apple. That year the Apple II was introduced. With a canny sales campaign created by McKenna, and Jobs’s own magnetic personality helping persuade corporate buyers, the Apple II became the first successful mass-market personal computer.

Apple’s Evolution

In December 1980 Apple had its initial public offering of stock, becoming Apple Computer. Shares opened at $22 but rose to $29, making Apple’s value $1.2 billion. In 1980 the Apple III was introduced, but the first 14,000 units were recalled because of defects. The Apple II remained the machine preferred by customers. In 1981 IBM introduced a personal computer and made its machine an open architecture. Whereas Apple made all of its machines proprietary, not allowing anyone to even license the technology. Jobs set about waging war for personal computer supremacy. In 1983, Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola, to serve as Apple’s CEO, reportedly asking, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water to children, or do you want a chance to change the world?” In 1983 the Lisa computer was introduced. It had a 32-bit microprocessor as well as an inexpensive mouse. Jobs had worked on Lisa obsessively, demanding that it be easy to use, attractive to look at, and more powerful than any other personal computer. In the process, he pushed Lisa’s costs too high; the machine was too expensive and flopped. Still, Jobs and Sculley already had put Apple to work developing a machine that would be called the Macintosh. It would use much of Lisa’s internal architecture, but it would be simpler. In 1984 the machine debuted with a spectacular television commercial during the Super Bowl, showing a gallant woman athlete defying a monolithic, oppressive government by hurling her hammer into a screen that represented, without actually saying so, IBM. The first Macintosh was small and beige, featuring the style of graphical interface that would become the world’s standard. It sold for $2,495 and was a great hit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0FtgZNOD44&NR=1

An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused deterioration in Jobs’s working relationship with Sculley, and at the end of May 1985 – following an internal power struggle and an announcement of significant layoffs – Jobs was relieved of his duties as head of the Macintosh division. He did not get any assignments and gradually found that important company documents no longer landed on his desk. He soon came to believe that he would find no purpose within Apple. He sold over $20 million of his Apple stock, spent days bicycling along the beach, feeling sad and lost, toured Paris, and journeyed on to Italy. Then Jobs thought back on his experience at Apple. Though he is not an engineer, he felt his greatest talent had been spearheading development of new products. He decided to start a new venture to address the higher education market and left Apple.

Beginner again

Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced. As it was expensive, it was not so successful but the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated. The NeXT Cube was described by Jobs as an “interpersonal” computer, which he believed was the next step after “personal” computing. Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by such things as the NeXTcube’s magnesium case. This put considerable strain on NeXT’s hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel. In the year 1995, for the first time, NEXT turned to a profit.

In 1986, Steve co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which has created eight of the most successful animated films of all time: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille. Pixar has won 20 Academy Awards and its films have grossed more than $4 billion at the worldwide box office to date. Pixar merged with The Walt Disney Company in 2006 and Steve now serves on Disney’s board of directors.

Return to Apple

By 1996 Apple’s sales were in free fall. Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned to the company he founded. He soon became Apple’s interim CEO. With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company’s technology found its way into Apple products, most notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs’s guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac in August 1998 and other new products. Since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the “interim” modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO. In 2001 Jobs began opening a chain of Apple retail stores, where customers could try out the computers.

Consumer Electronics world

In October 2001 Apple introduced iPod and launched Apple into a broader world of consumer electronics. In what may have been the most brilliant salesmanship of his career, Jobs persuaded every major record company to sell Apple the rights to market their songs on the Internet. In April 2003 Apple opened the online store iTunes, at 99 cents per song, with 65 cents going to the music companies, 25 cents to overhead and only 10 cents to Apple, iTunes seemed fated to lose money. But as Jobs pointed out, the idea was to sell iPods, which could download music from iTunes. By 2004 iPod was the world’s dominant portable music player, with iTunes owning 70 percent of the market of downloaded music.

In January 2007, Apple released another successful product iPhone. On launch weekend, 270,000 iPhones were sold in the first thirty hours. In July 2008, iPhone 3G was released and 1 million iPhone 3Gs were sold in its first 3 days.

When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, the company was struggling to survive. Today it has a more market capital than Dell, HP and Intel. Its iPod commands 70 percent of the MP3 player market. Four billion songs have been purchased from iTunes. The iPhone is reshaping the entire wireless industry. Even the underdog Mac operating system has begun to nibble into Windows’ once-unassailable dominance.

Jobs’s Management style

He speaks very honestly about his management style, often described as extremely meticulous and almost dictatorial. Some of his employees had described him as an erratic and temperamental manager. Mr. Jobs has gone against that trend, ruling with an iron hand, attending to every little product detail, and keeping employees on a roller coaster of praise and fear. He was a hands-on manager, who studied even the minutest details of his products, with the heart and eye of an artist. His insistence on high-quality, good-looking products struck a chord with many people who appreciated the beauty of Apple products, resulting in such fabulous successes as the Macintosh computer and the iPod portable music system. These successes often reshaped how consumers viewed technology and also reshaped the technology itself.

Jobs’s health concerns

In the mid of 2004, Jobs was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his pancreas and he was told that should expect to live no longer than three to six months. In July 2004, he underwent a surgery that successfully removed the tumor. In January 2009, Jobs said that he had been suffering from a hormone imbalance for several months he announced that he’ll take a medical leave of absence until the end of June due to complex health-related issues.

As a visionary, he saw that computers could be much more than drab productivity tools. Instead, they could help unleash human creativity and sheer enjoyment. A marketing genius, he conceived of elegant products that captured consumer’s imaginations. And as a relentless perfectionist, he came up with creations that actually delivered on their promise – raising the bar for rivals. “From the time he was a kid, he thought his products could change the world. He is one of the few people who have affected computing and consumer electronics. “If Steve Jobs leaves Apple, he leaves satisfied. Proud of his legacy, comfortable with his place in history”

Let us wish Steve Job best of luck for his early recovery. The technology world needs his guidance in this troubled economic times.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address- Inspirational Speech

Here is the transcript of Steve Jobs’s commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005. In it he talks about getting fired from Apple in 1985, life & death. This may be the best commencement speech ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&feature=related

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Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting. It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever–because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your
work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So
keep looking. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a
few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form
of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

Smile Pinki – A real world fairy tale

The made in India documentary ‘Smile Pinki’ won an Oscar in the ‘Best Short Documentary’ category at the 81st Academy Awards. This 39 minutes documentary directed by American director Megan Mylan, tells the real-world fairy tale of one young girl with a lip deformity from Dabai village of Uttar Pradesh.

Pinki Kumari is a six-year old girl, lives with a severe cleft lip in this obscure village of Uttar Pradesh. She was not allowed to attend the school and ostracized because of her deformity. The simple surgery that can cure her was a distant dream until her parents meet Pankaj, a social worker traveling village to village gathering patients for a hospital that provides free surgery to thousands each year through ‘The Smile Train’ program. The surgery was performed by plastic surgeon Dr Subodh Kumar Singh, who along with Pinki attended the Academy Award ceremony. In the 39-minute documentary, this girl undergoes corrective surgery and gets a normal childhood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CamEXQ8x72c

According to Smile train more than 4.7 million children in developing countries suffer with cleft lip. Over the past 10 years, Smile Train has provided free cleft surgery for hundreds of thousands of children who would otherwise never have received it. The organization is the world’s leading cleft charity with thousands of partners and programs in 76 of the world’s poorest countries.

http://www.smiletrain.org/site/PageServer

This Oscar will definitely create tremendous awareness about cleft lip, how it can be fixed and also brings donations for this great cause.

Hats off to ‘Smile Train’ for the fantastic work. Thanks to ‘Smile Pinki’ team and the Academy.

*****

Thanks,

Ravindra

Why are we celebrating Slumdog Millionaire’s Success?

Many congratulations to A.R. Rahman on his much deserved Oscar Awards. Undoubtedly he is one of the most talented musicians in the world. I’m so pleased that Hollywood has at last recognized his talent.

But I don’t understand why there is so much hoopla about this movie in India? I don’t think we need to celebrate its grand success at Oscars. This movie shows only negative things about India in a highly exaggerated manner. Slums, grimy public toilets, communal riots, begging syndicates, blinding and maiming kids for making more money, underworld, brothels, locals cheating foreign tourists, child labor, irresponsible call center executives, abusive cops, traffic jams etc..

One scene that irritated me most is Jamal Malik, the titular slumdog, takes an American couple on a sightseeing tour. When they return to the couple’s rented car, they find that it has been stripped bare—wheels, headlights and all. The Indian driver reacts by kicking Jamal on the face. “You wanted to see the real India. Here it is,” Jamal tells the Americans. “Well, here’s the real American,” the woman replies, pulling out a hundred-dollar bill for Jamal.

This movie projects India as Third World dirty underbelly developing nation. As Amitabh correctly pointed in his blog, a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. If this movie was made about the s**t of first world nations, it would not have got so much recognition from the western world?

Yes, there is poverty in India, there are slums and beggars. But the film’s entire narration seems like a sadistic approach with the sole aim of satisfying the western idea of India. And its winning of so many awards and nominations shows a sadistic effort to show the world – look we know that this is India, and these are the slumdogs we are hiring or outsourcing our jobs to.

The real slumdog in the movie is not the Jamal Malik character but India as a whole. This movie shows India as an accidental millionaire, which in fact to be a slumdog.

Slumdog Millionaire got global recognition just because it is a transglobal movie—funded with British and American money, shot in India by a British director, from a script by a British writer adapting a novel by a London-born Indian author.

Why are we celebrating its success without realizing that it makes a caricature out of India?

What did Mr. Lalu Prasad Yadav do to turnaround Indian railways?

Indian Railways (IR) is the world’s largest employer, providing 1.6 million jobs, one of the largest and busiest rail networks in the world, carrying 18 million passengers daily. Yet it has, so far, stayed ahead of global recession. Thanks to Mr. Lalu Prasad Yadav for a job well done. He has surprised many by emerging as one of the top performing ministers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet. He is being credited for the impossible—the turnaround of the monolithic Indian railways.

When he took over as Railway Minister in 2004, the 156-year old Indian Railways was dismissed as a hopeless, loss-making organization, with too little revenue, too many problems and too many employees. IR was spending 91% of its income just on salaries and maintaining an aging organization. In 2001 the Rakesh Mohan Committee headed by former Reserve Bank of India deputy governor Rakesh Mohan, termed India Railways a “white elephant’, with a debt of Rs 61,000 crore ($12.3 billion) and even predicted fatal bankruptcy by 2015.

Now many are surprised by the successive landmarks set by the Indian Railways. In last four years, IR has turned in a cumulative cash surplus before dividend of Rs 68,778 crore ($13.9 billion). Out of this Rs 15,898 crore has been paid as dividend, Rs 39,215 crore has been invested in rail infrastructure and Rs 13,665 crore has been added to fund balances to reach Rs 20,483 cr. One of Rakesh Mohan Committee members, IIM’s Professor G. Raghuram, now has all praises for Lalu. IIM Ahmadabad, recognized Lalu’s turnaround of Indian railways, and made it a case study for its students.

What did the minister do to turnaround Indian railways?

In a nutshell,

• Refused to hike fares. Shored up earnings by carrying more passengers and freight.
• Increased the load carried by a goods wagon from 81 tonnes to 90 tonnes. This gave an additional earning of Rs 7,200 crore.
• Upgraded tickets if seats were going vacant in the upper class. So, waitlisted passengers could be allotted seats.
• Maintained passenger profile so that bogies could be taken off or added to trains according to seasonal demand.

Lalu’s Success Secrets

The explanation for his success lies in his down-to-earth attitude and rustic wisdom. Lalu puts it in his inimitable style: “My mother always told me not to handle a buffalo by its tail, but always take it by its horns. And I have used that lesson in everything in my life, including the railway ministry.”

Lalu says “I approached the ministry like a common man with no technical expertise. I was clear about one thing—I would not increase passenger or freight fares. It did not require rocket science to understand that the railways could increase its earnings by carrying more passengers and freight. The solution lay in increasing volumes and not the cost,” he says.

We can learn the following management tips from Lalu’s success.

Lalu’s Management Tips

Choose the right people!

Lalu quickly realized that he needs pointsman (A man who operates railway switches) in the ministry and choose a Bihar-cadre IAS officer, Sudhir Kumar, as his officer on special duty (OSD) and gave him a free hand to execute his ideas. A Delhi School of Economics alumnus, Kumar also holds a degree in business management. He has given a professional and workable shape to Lalu’s earthy ideas. But he credits all of it to his boss’s genius. He says Lalu, not only thinks out of the box but also takes bold decisions.

Don’t Micro Manage, Delegate your work, take calculated risks!

According to his officers, “Lalu has not taken any step that was not known in the railways. Other ministers dithered over various policy changes which could have brought additional revenue. Quite unlike them, Lalu went ahead and took those risks, but in an extremely calculated manner. He also placed complete trust in his officers, and did not at all hesitate in delegating responsibility and powers”.

If you do not milk the cow fully, it falls sick!

One of Lalu’s most controversial decisions was to increase the load carried by a goods wagon from 81 metric tonnes (MT) to 90 MT. His logic: “If you do not milk the cow fully, it falls sick.” He reasoned that wagons were being overloaded anyway—and hence subjected to risk of accidents—and the money being pocketed by corrupt officials. So why not load it officially? This one decision earned the railways an additional Rs 7,200 crore.

Think out of the box

Lalu’s decision to upgrade passenger tickets subject to availability of seats in the upper class was opposed by the board’s finance commissioner. The minister and the OSD both explained to the finance commissioner that “An empty wasn’t earning any money. If lower class tickets were upgraded, then more waitlisted passengers could be accommodated, earning additional revenue”. This system was successfully implemented after trying it out on the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani”.

Do what makes sense

Another decision which met some resistance from the board members was the doing away with the detailed examination of a train at its final destination even after a short run. It was decided that a passenger train would only be examined after every 3,500 km, and a freight train after every 4,500 km. A railway official explains “Laluji saw no logic in the earlier practice. A train from Jammu to Kanyakumari was examined after 3,000 km, on completion of its journey and another train from Jammu to Amritsar, for example, had to be examined after 250 km. Each train examination takes 16 hours. Lalu’s idea was to save time and have the wagons free to run for a longer time”.

Information is wealth if used properly

Lalu and his officers have introduced simple but effective techniques. For example, they introduced the passenger profiling system, enabling the railways to increase or decrease the number of coaches in a train according to demand. So a service to Jaipur may need fewer coaches during summers when traffic is low. However, these coaches can be added to a Dehradun-bound train where there is a rush in these months. Says Lalu: “This was a simple decision to take but nobody was really doing it since it required some changes in the railways computerized reservation system. All the data was available, it only had to be generated and used properly.”

Lalu’s ambition

Mr. Lalu Prasad Yadav many times expressed a strong ambition to become the country’s Prime Minister. In his recent interview to NDTV, when asked by newsmen whether he will again become the Railway Minister after the forthcoming elections, Yadav said, “what will happen, where will I go, what God has destined and what is written on the forehead, anything can happen. “
“But, one day I will become the Prime Minister of the country. I have no ‘maara-maari’ present or future.”

Lets us hope Lalu will become Prime Minister of India in the near future and turns around every sector to make India a super power.

With Great Optimism,
Ravindra

Is The American Dream Fading?

Indians have been obsessed with the U.S. for many decades. Whether it was for career opportunities or for education or lifestyle, the U.S. was always the favorable destination for many Indians.

The global financial crisis which is originated from the United States sub-prime mortgage bubble has spread across the world very rapidly. Millions of workers across the world have already lost their jobs. The USA which is the world’s biggest economy, taking up about 30 per cent of global GDP, is now also the world’s biggest debtor country. The US economy has lost 3.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, with nearly half of those jobs shed in the past three months. Unemployment rate in the USA rose to 7.6% in January, the highest level since 1992.

As there are thousands of Americans looking for jobs, senate approved strict restrictions on hiring of H-1B workers by financial services firms that receive federal bailout funds. This could hit the prospects of many skilled Indian workers. Some pundits are warning that this recession could last up to three years.

Has the great American dream ended for Indians?

The U.S. Senate approved restrictions on the hiring of H-1B workers by financial services firms that receive federal bailout funds, but it didn’t bar the hiring of foreign workers as reported in Indian media. Currently the prospects for Indian workers may be grimmer but once the recession ends American companies will again start hiring foreign workers. The outsourcing companies may have temporarily affected. But this recession will eventually lead more companies to outsource many jobs to low cost countries like India. So there are still good prospects for outsourcing industry.

The global policy response to the credit crunch seems to be moving in the right direction to end the recession. At the same time political uncertainty in the USA is over and world leaders have clarified their stimulus plans. American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan approved by senate is expected to save or create over 3 million jobs while investing in priorities like health care, energy, and education that will jump start economic growth.

Good news for Indian youth!

I’m sure there will be fewer takers for the courses like Computer Engineering, MCA and MBA in coming years. Many graduates will prefer jobs in govt. sector than private sector. Many young Indians may consider this as end of the great American dream. But the truth is there will be huge demand for foreign workforce in the USA in coming years.

Reports indicate that U.S. businesses face a shortage of millions of workers in the next 10 years due to the baby-boomer* generation approaching retirement. Generation X** is only about half the size of the Baby Boom generation which leaves a smaller pool to draw from. Industries such as oil and gas, manufacturing, the federal government and health care are especially feel the strain. IBM, which has older workers than many technology companies, is going to face severe shortage.
So there will be huge demand for foreign workers in the USA in coming years. As India produces millions of engineers every year, many companies in the USA will eventually turn to India in the next decade to fill those positions. Current cap on H-1B visas may significantly be increased in the next 10 years to cope with increasing demand.

Advice to young graduates!

Young Indian graduates who are currently feeling the pinch of recession should consider going for another degree (M.tech, MBA, Ph.D etc..). You might be worried about the initial costs of your education, but your small investment now can pay huge dividends in the long run. Even if you ultimately choose a career for which you do not need an additional degree, having your degree can give you a leg up when competing for jobs.

Many pundits say “In times of crisis there also is great opportunity for the bold and the brave”. “It ultimately forces us to do things better and smarter”. So look for opportunities. Keep your dreams alive.
*****

With great optimism.
Ravindra

*People born between (and including) 1946 and 1964. After American soldiers returned home from World War II in1946, the United States experienced an explosion of births (hence the name baby boom) that continued for the next 18 years, when the birth rate began to drop. In the 1990s, approximately 76 million people in the United States were born in the baby boom years, representing approximately 29% of the country’s population.
**Generation X is the generation next in line behind the Baby Boom. It’s only about half the size of the Baby Boom generation.

Go Green, Save the Planet!

In this blog I’m jotting down a few thoughts about one of the dangerous threats the modern world is facing.

In the 21′st century the world is facing two threats which are equally dangerous and are caused by irresponsible behavior of human beings. One is Terrorism and the other one is Global Warming which is considered more serious problem than terrorism. Ironically both of these problems have aggravated with the support or by the actions of developed countries.

Here in this blog i will talk more about what we can do to tackle Global warming than discussing the causes for it.

If we don’t take the Global Warming threat seriously, the future generations are going to face enormous threat. The expected long range effects of recent climate change may already be observed. Rising sea levels, glacier retreat, Arctic shrinkage and altered patterns of agriculture are cited as direct consequences of human activities. Predictions for secondary and regional effects include extreme Weather events, an expansion of tropical diseases, changes in the timing of seasonal patterns in ecosystems and drastic economic impact.

The following video clip from the documentary ‘Inconvenient truth by Al Gore’ shows the possible serious effects of Global Warming.

Future generations are depending on us to do whatever we can to turn things around.

OK, what can we do as individuals to reduce our environmental impact and save future generations?

Here are a few simple things we can do today to help reduce our environmental impact, save money, and leave a better earth for future generations.

• Install compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).
• Set your thermostat a few degrees lower in the winter and a few degrees higher in the summer to save on heating and cooling costs.
• Wash clothes in cold water whenever possible. As much as 85 percent of the energy used to machine-wash clothes goes to heating the water.
• Take shorter showers to reduce water use. This will lower our water and heating bills too.
• Install a low-flow showerhead. They don’t cost much, and the water and energy savings can quickly pay back our investment.
• Plant trees in your area.
• Walk or bike to work. This saves on gas and parking costs while improving your health and reducing your risk of obesity.
• Consider telecommuting if you live far from your work. Or move closer. Even if this means paying more rent, it could save you money in the long term.
• Do car pooling. You can save gas and also save time by using HOV lanes.
• Have as many meatless meals as possible. Meat costs a lot at the store-and it’s even more expensive when you consider the related environmental and health costs.
• Buy locally raised and organic meat, eggs, and dairy whenever you can. Purchasing from local farmers saves money and keeps money in the local economy.
• Use a water filter to purify tap water instead of buying bottled water. Not only is bottled water expensive, but it generates large amounts of container waste.
• Bring a reusable water bottle, preferably aluminum rather than plastic, with you when traveling or at work.
• Borrow from libraries instead of buying personal books and movies. This saves money, not to mention the ink and paper that goes into printing new books.
• Share power tools and other appliances. Get to know your neighbors while cutting down on the number of things cluttering your closet or garage.
• Wear clothes that don’t need to be dry-cleaned. This saves money and cuts down on toxic chemical use.
• Invest in high-quality, long-lasting products. You might pay more now, but you’ll be happy when you don’t have to replace items as frequently (and this means less waste!).
• Reduce e-Waste. Keep your cell phones, computers, and other electronics as long as possible.
• Donate or recycle them responsibly when the time comes. E-waste contains mercury and other toxics and is a growing environmental problem.
• Use Paperless statements (online statements) and go green wherever possible. Many banks, financial institutions and insurance companies give you the option to enroll for paperless billing which saves money for both the consumers and companies and also saves the planet.
• Last but not least, educate kids about the effects of Global Warming and create the required awareness among public especially kids so that future generations produce less waste.

Let us hope everyone contributes for the cause and save future generations from Global Warming.

Act now, WE CAN live well and leave better earth for future generations.

Please feel free to share some more tips we can follow to go green.