Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast

Copy Paste from the mail!!!! An interesting management article from Dr.YLR Moorthi.


Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!


Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?


Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the
above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not
cameras but cell phones.


Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone
cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera
outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sony’s and Canons are
taking note.


Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is
HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that
play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by
selling music albums (that run for hours).


Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service
provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor
is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have
identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia
and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from
truth.


Nokia confessed that they all but missed the Smartphone bus. They admit
that Apple's I phone and Google's Android can make life difficult in
future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If
these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is
not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?


The "Mahabharata" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is
tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a
palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big
battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my
competitor?"


Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says
"What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get
the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from
the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into
their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as
a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony
think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak
defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as
"digital."


In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between
going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films
and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in
both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for
tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it
from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet
is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to
bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's
competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.


In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India?
Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are
better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and
others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence
services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT
executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use
videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad
scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in
2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They
were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think
that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I
would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no.
Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable
besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the
prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to
one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds
of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then
telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As
it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!


India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly
different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The
filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans
who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket
or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed
into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was
reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor.
On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners
requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang
on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is
likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with
IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are
called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films
out of the market.


Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When
did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain
pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above
is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the
typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came
the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys
like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are
nowhere to be seen.


One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them
up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a
monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day
to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you
up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker.
They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do
we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of
clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch
companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your
competitor is hiding!


On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing
machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a
Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon
Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary!
The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal
called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums
it up rather neatly.


—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management
Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and
a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore.

I signed up for PPP (Pay Per Post), A stride towards fund raising

“You as a person are identified with the kind of Decisions you make”. You may associate this dialogue with a popular SpiderMan series, but then the sentence carries a million dollar sense. As an aspiring Entrepreneur I finally decided to go for Payperpost program that pays you for blogging. The site is a market leader in its domain and has a robust system in place.

The Type of blogger I am...

I am a blogger and not Internet marketer. My posts are not the best SEO articles. I do want to earn , but then I want to make money by blogging not just blog for making money. Making life easier for my readers remains at the top of my priorities.

Why did I decide to go with Payperpost as my Income Source?

I did monetize my blog before with advertisements, but that has restricted scope. Something most impressive about Payperpost is the multiple streams of Income that you can benefit from.

To name a few:

1. Get paid to post.

2. Affiliate Income

3. Get paid to get your article reviewed

4. Increase your income by increasing your visibility by networking with experienced fellow bloggers

5. Get the advantage of using well researched blog improvement tips and a lot more.

That “lot more” tag comes because I am a new blogger at PPP and it will take me some time to
find out about all the opportunities available.

How did I stumble upon it?

I firmly believe that if you want to blog more, you should read more and thus that makes me a blog hopper. It was just another day when I came across a blog which said you can make money blogging with PPP. The idea fired a series of queries in my mind, which I fired back at Google and after considerable amount of research I found the standings of the site.

At the end of the day what matters is your credibility and ability to create a buzz in the Blogosphere. This will come only when you associate yourself with market leaders and that is what I am precisely aiming at!!!

The Unknown Director

The books of psychology bear it as a fact that at any moment nearly 2000 forces act on us and that the most dominant of them determine our course of action for that day. The forces can be categorized as Physical forces, mental forces, emotional forces and spiritual forces. These forces can be further classified as professional forces, relational forces i.e. the forces exerted by relations, financial forces and so on. How I define life is a combination of these forces. But then what hurts most here is the fact that our life is controlled by something external to us. The concept is quite simple, those who break out of these forces to follow the force internal to them wins. The world out there is extremely competitive, but then when you take the road less travelled, you don’t find many competitors. This competition wanes into a group of elite few trying to carve out their own destiny. I may be sounding quite philosophical, but then that’s the reality.

Keeping the achievers aside for some time, let us talk about our lives. Few may not concede with me. Lets take an example, every morning when you wake up, you have a dominant professional force acting on you. Thus you quickly dress up and make it to office on time. But what about your weekends? Can you figure out what you are going to do this weekend. Why? What went wrong rather say missing? It’s your most hated professional force, and thus you have a severely directionless day. Is this all we are worth? At this point I strongly recommend that we pause for a while and ponder, which direction are we taking our life in?
The motive of this post is to sow a seed of thought can incite you to view your life from a different perspective, a different view and with refined aspirations. Even if this post helps one person to redirect life in a more meaningful direction, I’ll consider my purpose served.

Switching a Job as a form of self employment

So the buzz is about, "Attrition". Now my perspective on it may be quite different and premature (as you may think) according to you. But then I am going to put forward my priorities that I’ll look into before actually changing the job. Go ahead and find them out, who knows, it may help!!!

So getting right on the topic, switching job can be a form of self employment. Where in, you are actually able to rate yourself in the market of your specializations. Moreover, you may have an opportunity to choose between couple of offers (This is the factor which I feel is a notch above being just an employee, it’s near to getting self employed).Ok, but before actually jumping into a totally new environment, following issues may crop up: (that's strictly what I feel, no impositions)

1. In case you are changing for job satisfaction .Then there is no point in changing. You are not going to get it anywhere. Because the nature of job will essentially remain same and if you are not enjoying your present job, then you probably won’t enjoy new job too! A suggestion in this case is to actually reflect upon yourself to find out what is it that you are looking for!!!

2. If money is the issue, then wait a minute. Simply running behind higher pay packet doesn’t help. Why? See... when you join at a higher pay than the people working in that organization (and of course your current pay), then it’s highly unlikely that you'll get raises in the same frequency, as the employees working in the organization from before. So at some point of time things level off. Worse even is you may get a news from your former colleagues that they have crossed your present pay continuing in the organization you left couple of years back.

3. The new environment may not necessarily be friendly. You may be taken as an outsider and avoided or (in case you are lucky) you may be welcomed as a new comer, and people will be anxious to help you (yawns!!!).

So before jumping keep following points in mind:

1. Jump only when you know you'll get a band or a role change in new organization. (Like if currently you are SE, in the new org. you'll be PL, etc)

2. Know your field. You may not be in the hottest field. Today Business intelligence is hot, Testing field is hot. Development has slowed down a bit. So in case you are going into a "Hotter" field, change is recommended. Other way round, in case you are in a hot field now, but you aren't sure of what you are going to work on at your new organization, Do Not Jump!!! 3. Pay package should be considerably higher than your current one.

4. The Organization you are going for should be close to your home (I mean your Native place where your parents live, that does save some bucks).

5. Suppose you are working in Pune, and you get job in Mumbai based company at say 20% more salary. Then the moral of the story remains same. Mumbai is distinctly costlier than Pune. (There are many more such examples).


Thus, what I recommend is, before jumping first plot out your priorities, and then rate them according to importance you attach to them. That done you may go ahead and rate your current job and the job you propose to join, against these points. The one that wins will of course be your choice.

But at the end of the day, do what your instincts say!!!(Sorry for confusing you here...)

Note: An extract from this blog was rated 4 out 5 and featured as "Best Response"
at Ammas.com Advisors website

MEntrepreneurship- Becoming Entrepreneur Mentally

The first step:

Are you divided on how to steer your future … You have plans that aren't materializing? Or for that matter you aren't working on it? Hey you started working on it and suddenly midway you dropped the idea (That's cool :-)). You aren't happy with you are today or you aren't sure what you are going to be a couple of years down the line and feel that you are simply driven by flow of time, just like another dead fish flowing along the stream of river…
Chill dude you are in same band as me. But then if you say yes to all the questions above, then wait a minute, I am better placed than you are, cause I have plans and I am working on it.(To add to it , I haven't dropped the idea as of yet). Ok, my plans are a different issue at all. Let's talk about what your plans are!!! I know that's a tough question to answer, but believe me it's not all that tough.
Now let me help you do some planning. All you need to do is answer my few questions to yourself and then what you'll have at the end will be a right kind of plan.
So your first question is: Are you happy and content with the kind of lifestyle you have? Are you sure that you are well prepared to take you problems by horns every time they come (I mean something like mid life crisis, child upbringing, ageing parents, etc). If your answer is yes, then let me congratulate you for being the luckiest person on earth and I would advise you not to read further. If you say 'No', then keep reading…
Now, you said you aren't happy. So what is it that's ailing you? Just give it a thought… Vivekananda once said that "Whatever you are today is a result of what you did 5 years back". So that means you had at some point of time decided to be, what you are today! So what are you unhappy with??? It means that you were double minded when you took a decision 5 years back. Correct? No, I am wrong when I say that, because you never knew how life is going to be once you reach your destination. In nutshell your present is the result of the decision you took in past and unfortunately that decision was taken in ignorance and without thorough knowledge of facts. So now take a deep breath, and try to recall a person whom you admire most. Found him? Take my word, the lifestyle of the person, his profession (if no profession exactly, then at least the income from it) and his image is your dream. But once again, before making this dream your GOAL, do a thorough research on the kind of problems that person is facing, in case you are ready to take it, you are well on your way.

Articles to follow:
2. Convert your dreams to goal
3. MEntrepreneurship

Chase it hard-THE 'E' of Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneur is a fighter who braves all odds!

The first one being coming out of comfort zone !!! You may be a settled employee enjoying a fat fixed pay per month. But is it all that you want? Working below someone all your life and not being recognized for your efforts. Shed it buddy!!!
Next you need to decide what you actually want out of your life? is it only money? Or a lifestyle where you are recognized by millions. Ofcourse that kind of lifestyle doesn't come easy.
Having fixed a goal at an abstract level you need to fix a feasible goal rather a goal that can be achieved. The chracterstics of smart goal setting is:
1. It must be measureble
2. It should be specific. No beating about bush. It could be a mansion that you want to buy in a fix time span or the revenue of your company.
3. Watch out i mentioned a fixed time span above. Thats a must!
4. After setting a goal ask yourself Will be able to achieve it. Does your planning have contingency plans to reach your goal even when things dont turn out as u planned it?
5. No COMPROMISE!!!! Dont adjust for anything less than what you have actually aimed for. You should keep competing with your expectation every time !!!
Suggested reading:
1.Harvard bussiness review on Entrepreneurship
2. It happened in India. By Kishore biyani