Financial Tsunami changing landscape

So much has been written about the current financial climate and its impact that you might think what new am I going to blog about.
But there is something that intrigues me these days. Almost every day I read some retail chain, some bank, some online store closing down and filing for bankruptcy.
It reminds me of environmental disasters like floods, tsunamis, forest fires which changes the entire landscape. Old things disappear and new areas evolve. The current Financial Tsunami (as some media agencies term it) is something similar.

No longer will we see the household brand Woolworth in our local High Street where you could get a kid’s toy to an old man’s duvet. Every year we see MFI ads flooding the TV with its Christmas 50% offers on its furniture sets. No more from next Christams. No longer will we purchase music from the online discount chain Zavvi. No longer will the elite society purchase Teas and Coffees from Wittard of Chelsea. No longer the best mortgage deals will be available from Northern Rock. No longer will the highest savings rate will come from a bank in a tiny country of Iceland. The TVs will be spared from some of the worst ads where a spectacled guy dances and screams about HBOS interest and lending rates. No longer will the unique twin giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be the trusted names in secondary mortgage market. Back home, some of the most anticipated and sought after institutions on IIM campus like Lehman, Bear Sterns and many other I-Banks will now be absent. In fact there are so many more names that will suddenly disappear like LandAmerica, Circuit City, Linens N Things, Wellman, Flying J, Palms of Treasure Island, and many many more. I am even sure by the time you forget about having read this blog, there might have been many more names and I might have to do a sequel to this. Some statistics state that US bankruptcy proceedings have surged 30% in the last 12 months. In a tiny country like Serbia, experts say as much as 40,000 companies would face bankruptcy (Mind it they are talking of companies and not individuals).

This Financial Tsunami has engulfed some of the oldest and biggest brand names.
In fact had the governments not intervened on time, there could have been many more like Goldman Sachs, AIG, Citi, Bank Am, GM, Fortis, Chrysler, Ford, and the list is endless.

Slowly people will forget that such names existed and the brands will die as people’s memory is short-lived. Well as they say Change is the only constant thing in the world and today’s landscape is fast changing.

Shantaram - Not a Review

I just finished reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and couldnt resist writing about it. Please note this is not a review of the book.
All those who would have read this book would agree that this is not just a novel. To start with, I would say its like a saga, a biography, or may be a long TV Series something which I had experienced earlier with Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel or with Eric Seagal’s Doctors or even his other famous one ‘Prizes’.
While Kane & Abel, Doctors or Prizes moves fast and has a single direction in terms of its story, Shantaram moves in multiple angles, it deviates extensively from its theme. The story sometimes involves you and engrosses you totally, at other instances, it drags you quite a lot.
It’s a like a flashback story where the anchor keeps recollecting multiple things and cant contain himself of penning them down simultaneously. Its obvious that the author has so much to write that he sometimes mixes them. I feel Gregory wanted to vent out his feelings and never imagined this will turn out to be one of the international best sellers. It was supposed to be an outlet for his emotions built through his innumerable experiences and sometimes adventures.
It’s also to be kept in context that he was writing this book in jail and his first two copies were trashed by the prison authorities.
Many times during the story, you also wonder whether all that Gregory has written is truth or is some sort of his fantasy. The accounts of Afghanistan, Prabhaker’s village and Arthur Road Jail fall into this category. The moments with Karla will also fold under the same fantasy.
In fact his accounts with Karla and Khader (the two central characters of this epic drama apart from the author himself) gets frustrating to me at times. Can anyone continue to have the same emotions with these two characters inspite of all that he receives from them?

This reminds me of a Hindi movie Dil Se. (I know I am deviating but please hear me out). In the movie, Manisha’s character continuously betrays Shahrukh’s character but he continues to blindly believe in her, trust her and love her limitlessly to the extent that in the end he dies with her.
Coming back to Shantaram, I felt a similar emotional frustration for Lin’s story with Karla and Khader. I also read somewhere that Gregory once admitted Karla and Prabhaker to be fictional characters (borne out of his imagination). That can be considered true because the way author describes Karla’s subtle beauty and pearls of wisdom, you crave for a real-life meeting with her. In fact, those Karla and Khader’s thoughts and proverbs are so superb and worth collecting that they can form a separate compilation in itself.
You also wonder with the end if there is going to be a sequel to Shantaram. So many questions are left unanswered and make you curious and craving for more. What happens to the Sri Lanka journey? What happens to Khaled? Why does he end up in jail for 6 years? When does he get caught? What happens to the mafia and gang wars post Sanjay and Chuha? Imagine this appetite to read more in the book is still alive after you have just finished almost 1000 pages of his book. Now that’s some journey and reading experience. Daily mail has aptly summed it as ‘a gigantic, jaw-dropping, grittily authentic saga’.
In the end, if the story is all true, it also surprises me of Mumbai’s (that time Bombay) criminal history. Its so easy for foreigners to overstay here, work as a professional in Bollywood (like Lisa) without any work permit credentials, get involved in serious crime without getting noticed by police department or may be they continue to ignore the fact that there are illegal immigrants from countries around the globe including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria and others. While the author takes this as an open spirit of Mumbai. In today’s context after the 26/11 blasts, it scares me totally…

Cultural Dynamics

Ever wondered about the changing dynamics of the world (and please I am not talking about the financial dynamics) … what about the culture and demographics change in the world?

Let me look for London where I have spent more than 4 years. When you are walking on the road, every third person you meet will be a non Britisher. As per official Census figures of 2005, 40% of the London population are non-British. This includes Europeans, Asians (including Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Chinese, etc), Carribbeans, Africans, Latin Americans etc. And this % is increasing every year. The same is true for any major city in the world.

Within India itself, we have started seeing an increase in foreigners coming from all quarters of the world like Japan, China, Korea, UK, Germany, US , and needless to say, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Iran and the list goes on. And these are not tourists. These are people who have taken up jobs in India for long – term and who knows they might eventually settle down here.
This changing dynamics is not just meeting people of different cultures but a bit more. The different cultures eventually marry each other and the lines start blurring.

A recent and very much in news example of Barack Obama makes it very interesting. He was born to black Kenyan father and a white American mother. His mother was of mainly English, Irish and smaller amounts of German descent. After their divorce, his mother married an Indonesian and lived in Indonesia and Hawaii before moving back to US. A global diversity in just one family…So what do we call Obama – An American, Kenyan, Indonesian?
Inserting some Glamour Quotient into this blog: Voted as the most stylish and sexiest actress by multiple magazines – Jessica Alba. Jessica’s mother is of Danish and French Canadian descent and her father is of Mexican American descent. Back home, the beautiful actress Katrina Kaif was born to an Indian Kashmiri father and a white British mother. There are enough instances like these.
Sometimes I think in another 100 years there might not be people with single nationality, culture, origin, color etc… People would have moved around, married in different cultures and the new offsprings will be a mix of so many cultures that they cant be categorized under one single banner.
So we might have an Indian-American-Iranian-Kenyan person marrying a Nigerian-British-Japanese woman. Don’t you think?

In fact it brings me to another topic that I hope to cover some other time in my blog – How do we define a person’s cultural nationality – By birth, by citizenship, by allegiance, by residence or something else?

Necessity is the mother of all inventions

I have been in sales for past 5 years and have got the privilege of working with a variety of clients across many countries. Interestingly there is one question I face from most of my prospects -
Why has India succeeded in software sector and others haven’t? How is India producing some of the most bright and talented software engineers?
Is it because of we have many educational institutes? Is the quality of education really good? Are Indians naturally bright? Are we good in analytics and mathematics (the two most perceived requisites to be in software industry)?
Now we as Indians know that the reasons listed above might not be necessarily true. I don’t think we have the best of institutes. I don’t think we have the best of quality and coverage in education. And I definitely feel we are not the best mathematicians and analysts in the world. So what’s the real reason?
My most common response to all the above queries is fairly simple: Necessity is the mother of all inventions. India doesn’t provide any sort of social security benefits. It also doesn’t provide any assurance on employment. We have to fight for it. From school admissions to post graduation courses to final placements, everything is competition based. Even for a kid to get into a nursery school, there is a selection process (ask the parents who have to get their kids admitted to a nursery school). So from the time we are kids, the parents instil a sense of insecurity in us: Unless we study hard, we may not get into a better school or college. Unless we study hard, we may not get through the cream of institutes. Unless we do well at our respective courses, we may not get a placement.
All who try for engineering (atleast most of us) try for IITs, RECs and the other engineering institutes. Job security is prevalent only for the best of the institutes. The process goes on to higher educations as well like MBAs, MCAs and others.
Only the top 2 percent of the IIT applicants are admitted and to get into a decent department. Almost 2.7 lakh candidates appeared for CAT (Apart from IIMs, 118 B-schools also accept CAT Scores) this year (2008). IIM A alone has seen about 51,000 applicants this year. In CAT, success is awarded to only one percent of the total applicants.
With such kind of statistics and success ratio, Indians have to really try hard to get in. This competitive spirit goes a long way in Indians taking up some of the best jobs worldwide. And the success is not just restricted to software industry but extends to financial services, telecom, and other verticals as well. So that sums up my response in that single proverb I wrote earlier… necessity ….
Before I end, I will also like to highlight an increasing recent trend in India which may hamper our future prospects. Due to the booming demand in last few years (and please discount the current economic crisis), the competition has started decreasing. These days jobs are available for simple graduates (even BAs) in software companies. XII pass candidates with some add-on silly courses have started getting jobs in BPO industries. This is slowly going to decrease the competitiveness within us thus decreasing the quality of output from India. Unless we act now, we might very soon stop facing the queries with which I started this blog.

CMM Assessment - Worth it?

Almost a decade back, a craze started within IT companies to get themselves certified at CMM levels (the Capability Maturity Model) created by Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. This craze was more predominant with Indian IT companies to the extent that more than half of the world's CMM Level 5 companies are based in India. Though I don’t need to define CMM as it has got internalized within every software professional but it makes sense to see how the CMM tutorials defines it. CMM describes an evolutionary improvement path from an adhoc, immature process to a mature, disciplined process. The CMM covers practices for planning, engineering, and managing software development and maintenance. At the Optimizing Level or the CMM level5, the focus is on continuous process improvement.
Let me now summarize some of the survey results on success / failure ratio of IT projects. These have been taken from various surveys originated by the likes of KPMG, Robbins, Gioia, Center for Project Management, and many others.

• 51% of ERP implementations have been classified as unsuccessful
• 40% of the projects failed to achieve their business case within 1 year of going live
• Nearly half of the UK's largest companies suffered a failed IT project over the past three years
• Nearly half of respondents reported at least one project failure in the past year
• 77% of projects blow their budgets, with an average cost overrun of 169%

Basically there is no dearth on statistics on the net for failed projects along with their names and even vendors involved
After so many years of this certification process being heavily adopted by almost all major IT companies, we are still seeing a similar statistics on IT failures which was prevalent earlier. Most of these cos are certified at the highest level possible and have even gone ahead on trying out 6 sigma, CMMI, ISO, and many others. Shouldn’t there be a positive correlation with no of companies getting certified and success ratios of IT projects? Why haven’t we started seeing quality of code improving? At least have the internal processes improved? I am sure I don’t need to answer these based on my above statistics.
So are these certifications worth their hype or are they pure marketing gimmick? It might have started as a differentiator for these companies, but has now become just a qualifier. The SEI model was founded by the US ministry of Defense and was funded very (let me put this in BOLD) heavily and hence has received sufficient publicity. I don’t want to get into a criticism of this model as it has its own advantages. But I believe this has become just a requirement mandated by major outsourcers in selecting a vendor. This is more of a compliance factor in which to sustain in the ever competitive world, the vendors are trying hard to get themselves recognized and keep trying new models and certifications. But the spirit and the inherent purpose of creating such certifications are getting lost. And unless we look at the basic fundamentals on which these were created, they will lose its worth. In fact some of the niche and agile companies borne in today's scenario might start opting out of them.

Jamaica - The Fastest Nation

Jamaica’s population of slightly less than 3million stands 1/5th of Mumbai population. Still this tiny island nation from the Caribbean has caught the attention of the entire globe by their stellar performance in this year’s Beijing Olympics.

By the time I am writing this, they have won 4 Golds and 3 Silvers (No bronze – either 1st or 2nd or move out of the business) and rank 13 in the medal tally. (India is ranked 42 with 2 medals)
But this blog is not a comparison of their performance with India. (I am sure there are enough nations above India like Mongolia, Estonia, Azerbaizan, Kazakhastan, Belarus and my favourite Zimbabwe which I would love to do the comparison with, but lets leave that for a later date).

What intrigued me to write this was: All the medals the Jamaican team won were in one game - Athletics and that too in the main races (100/200/400m)
For people whose curiosity can only be satisfied by facts and statistics:

• Gold Usain Bolt Men's 100 m
• Gold Usain Bolt Men's 200 m
• Gold Shelly-Ann Fraser Women's 100 m
• Gold Melaine Walker Women's 400 m hurdles
• Silver Sherone Simpson Women's 100 m
• Silver Kerron Stewart Women's 100 m
• Silver Shericka Williams Women's 400 m
  

Looks like a clean sweep right?

Not just that, out of the 4 golds, 3 were won by breaking records. (Usain Bolt who turned 22 today and nicknamed by the media quite rightfully “Lightning Bolt” is the first man to break both world records at one Olympics after Carl Lewis. But his lightning performance shadowed another Olympic record breaker Jamaican Melanie Walker in the 400 m hurdles.)
Equally interesting is to note their dominance on both men and women version of the races!

Now the experts for the next few months will keep debating as to what they eat and drink, where and how they train, where they work out, etc and etc but the bottomline is the end results. They didn’t participate in many games and hence by focusing on their core strengths, the Jamaicans stand so tall in the games. Simple: Focus, Focus and Win!
All I can say is they might be way behind in many other aspects but these performances have made them “The Fastest Nation” in the world.
Hats off to the Island Nation and now the Fastest Nation - Jamaica

Knock off the Zeroes

Technically speaking, this is not a blog, but an update on my previous blog (or keeping up with today’s terminology, it’s a sequel)

My last blog was on Zimbabwe people coping up with the practical issues of currency and inflation and how people can conveniently become billionares. The reason for me writing this sequel is to inform my readers that I have let them down. All the people who moved to Zimbabwe (based on my healthy advice); well your entire wealth has been wiped out by one simple decision.

Looks like Mr. Mugabe has paid heed to the bank’s problems of continuously printing higher denomination notes / system failures and bingo, he has a simple answer… knock off the Zeroes. Ten billion Zimbabwean dollars will be equated to one Zimbabwean dollar from today i.e. August 1. By knocking off the ten zeroes, (which was anyways worthless and couldn’t buy anything substantial), the problems of ever increasing zeroes has been solved. Well, isn’t it smart… what a solution… Just reset the counter when it reaches the limit and start again.

Not just that, to tackle the inflation problem, the government has decided to fix the prices of all goods (and I always thought the prices are governed by demand and supply)

The other problems are still existing including the paper on which the currency is printed which the supplier has stopped supplying to the Government. But I am sure they will get a solution for that as well.

Way to Go!...