Finally, we have Christmas carols from India :-)

One of my friends pointed me to this hilarious video on You Tube. It's a desi version of a very popular Christmas Carol we all have heard. You can watch it here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owK5tHjL0aE

The band which sang this has released an entire album. I bet they are all hilarious.

Here is the link to the band's website. It's called BoyMongoose and the descriptions of the various band members are especially funny. Think you know someone?
http://www.boymongoose.com/

(Accelerated) Mid-life crisis

It used to be that when you hit 40 and lost all or most of your hair, you would buy a Porsche convertible. Driving well above the speed limit with your two strands of hair blowing in the wind was the trusted antidote to your mid-life crisis.

Well times have changed haven't they? For one there is an accelerated version of everything on the market. So you don't want to spend 2 years stuck in a horses-arse neighborhood of Philadelphia-then do a 10 month MBA program with a switch to Singapore. You don't want to drink 10 jugs of beer to get drunk-then do 3 shot glasses. You don't want to wait 20 dates to get to 2nd and 3rd base with snooty women in London-move to Asia and take-up a job in banking, securitizing ass-ets. You get the point...

So there's also an accelerated mid-life crisis aka quarter-life crisis on the market. It occurs when
you've spent more time with excel and powerpoint than with you family. Except you can neither afford to buy a Porsche on your salary nor do you wish to lose your two remaining strands of hair by driving too fast.

So what do you do? You start writing a shitty blog...

93,000 miles and counting...

Yours truly has clocked 93,000 "cattle class" miles on United Mileage Plus this year. Not bad for ten months.

Too bad I don't work in an investment bank or a wildly profitable oil and gas major like some of my friends otherwise all these miles would have been in first class.

So here are my travel tips for frequent flyers (including that one insane guy who has spent 90% of his life on the Munich-KL-Munich route).

1. Get an aisle seat. This will ensure quick getaway in case the passenger in front of you lets loose one of those silent deadly farts that come out of nowhere with zero advance warning.

2. Watch the Devil Wears Prada on TV and laugh loudly. This will convince the bloke beside you with bad breath and stinky armpits that you are gay and he may ask for a seat change.

3. Drink lots of beer or other alcohol. This will soothe your brain and you will be able to sleep like a pig.

4. Bring lots of sensible reading. Nothing is worse than reading about the azure blue sea in Langkawi in the in-flight magazine for the tenth time on a 14 hour flight. Who the hell comes up with terms like azure blue anyway?

5. If your last name ain't Smith or Jackson, keep all your cavities well-lubricated as you may be subject to an-all cavity search at any time.

(Very) air-conditioned city

Walk into any shopping mall or office building in Singapore and you will find your teeth chattering due to the cold. It could be 31 C outside but indoors it's a positively frigid 15 C. This effect becomes more severe around September/October.

One of my friends (a serious conspiracy theorist) has an easy explanantion for this. He says that designer labels want to sell their Fall and Winter collections in Singapore and the low temperature is designed to encourage women to spend even more of their shopping dollars.

So now you know that nothing is sacred-even the temperature is hostage to the marketing push.

By the same token, shopping malls and offices in Helsinki should set their thermostats to 35 C in April/May.

Barbarians at the semiconductor gates

Private equity has been giving semiconductor companies a lot of attention. First there was the sale of Philips semiconductor (now called NXP) to a consortium comprising of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (KKR), Bain Capital, Silver Lake Partners, Apax and Alpinvest Partners.

Then there was the surprise Freescale Semiconductor sale to a consortium for significantly more than the price for NXP despite the similarity in the two companies’ 2005 revenues.

I tried to look for some empirical evidence for the sudden and new found interest of these very savvy investors in semiconductors.
1. Less volatility through the cycle- the industry once notoriously cyclical has seen less volatility. Indeed if you look at Capex/Sales, it has shrunk considerably as companies have begun to better manage their investments.
2. Higher Free Cash Flow due return to high EBIT margins-Better utilization (due to better capacity planning) and better Average Selling Prices are giving better margins.
3. Lower capital market valuations semiconductor companies- As companies have improved, their market multiples have compressed. The Market cap/sales ratios have severly shrunk since the early 2000sIs it any surprise that the barbarians are knocking at the gates?

Three for three

First we had the Hair-Pakistan incident and Hair being given a swift kick in the behind. Good riddance!

Next we had the Pawar-Ponting row. Where Ponting should have been given a swift kick not only on his behind but also out of India.

Now, a new scandal. Apparently English player Monty Panesar was called a "stupid Indian who can't speak English" by an Aussie spectator.

Anyone else see a pattern here?

Looks like down unda iz turnin into ocker paradise mate?

Can poor countries afford democracy?

Some people claim that India's lack of rapid economic growth is due to our democracy.

This brings me to a critical question. Can a poor society like India's afford democracy? Is democracy a luxury of the OECD countries? For someone who lives in one of the poorest regions of India and who puts his thumbprint to vote for which ever political candidate that gives him a kg of rice, does democracy matter? Democracy does not satisfy hunger pangs or lack of clothing.

India's founding fathers had the entire developmental model wrong. They should have focused on India's basic problems and solved them before opening up the pandora of democracy. Now we are stuck with an obstructionist system where each political lobby (the leftists, the rightists and the corruptists) has to be paid off before the country can move forward an inch.

Make no mistake, India's growth is being suffocated before our eyes.

The wisdom of the layers

Say you're a 25 year old engineer and you are working on a cutting-edge idea which would be targeted at 20 somethings. So you go with your concept to your boss who makes some suggestions for changes- he's your boss after all and controls your raise. Then your boss takes your newly modified idea and goes to his boss who also makes some suggestions for changes. And so on and one till the idea reaches the desk of the CEO.

The problem is that you're 25 and know what's hot. Your boss is 32 and less in touch with what the market needs. His boss is 45 and positively over the hill.

By the time your idea reaches fruition, what started as an ipod has turned into a vinyl-record player. Now everyone hates the idea but since the CEO approves, no one dares say so.
Such is the wisdom of the layers in any organization!

The product is built and bombs on the market.

India and China part deux

Similarities
•Population: 1.3 b in China, 1.1 b in India (2005)
•Occupation: 50%-60% of the population is engaged in agriculture ~30% live in urban areas
•Political Stability: Very stable one-party system in China and stable democracy in India
•Economic Stability: Ample foreign exchange reserves with little impact of high oil prices

Differences
•GDP/capita: China’s GDP/capita at US$ 1700 is 2.2 times that of India
•Infrastructure spending: 870,000 miles of highways, USD 25 b/year on roads in China-10% of this in India
•Foreign Direct Investment: Very high-USD 61 b/year in China (2005) 10% of this in India
•Technology penetration: PC, mobile phone and internet penetration all 3-4 times higher in China than India
•Literacy: 95% total literacy in China and 68% in India

The making of a CEO

My boss passed me a HBS case study on GE. It is called GE's Talent Machine-The Making of a CEO. Written by Christopher Bartlett (yes the same guy who co-authored a lot of stuff with Sumantra Ghoshal), this talks about the rise of Jeff Immelt from 25 year old fresh Harvard MBA to 44 year old CEO of GE.

Indeed surprising that Jeff was being actively watched by GE's top management team right from the time he entered GE. All his experiences from Plastics to Appliances to Medical Systems were actively orchestrated in order to give him the much-needed trials by fire.

Looking at most of my batchmates from INSEAD, I would be surprised if their employers had any clue what to do with them beyond 6 months leave alone 20 years! Well, not entirely true-I can think of one person who is being actively "groomed" for a CEO role at a Fortune 10 corporation.

So I suspect this case study is written in the same old "I told you so", Monday morning quarter-backing, 20-20 hindsight style that most case studies are written.

Or maybe it does happen and HBS MBAs are indeed treated differently from INSEAD MBAs :-)

Corporate Fiefdoms

A few weeks ago, I attended a talk by Bob Herbold- former COO of Microsoft. Bob is the author of “The Fiefdom Syndrome” and husband of the US Ambassador to Singapore. He also recently became a senior executive in residence at INSEAD. Nice catch J. Frank!

The book and the talk dealt with how individuals, groups or divisions - out of fear - try to protect their turf and reshape their environment to gain as much control over it as is possible. How managers and employees to become fixated on their own activities, their own careers, and their own territory or turf to the detriment of those around them.

Bob is a very engaging speaker and he gave good examples from Sony (how they missed the ipod even though they invented the Walkman), Porsche (how they became the most profitable car company in the world) and Microsoft (how they had problems even closing their financials at the end of each quarter).

He also mentioned Samsung as the example of a company that is actively working to avoid the formation of fiefdoms. Now this is where the talk became interesting-because he explained the success of Samsung to their lack of insularity but other authors such as Chan Kim/Mauborgne have attributed Samsung's success to their Value Innovation Process (VIP).

I also found that some of the thoughts were strikingly similar to those of Clayton Christensen of HBS and one of the INSEAD professors-Ron Adner when Bob talked about companies failing to innovate or missing what the customers need.

In any case, a very engaging talk and a pity that the book is not yet available in Singapore.

The (ficticious) rise of India

Of late, I am getting sick of reading about the rise of India. I have read the usual rabble from the rabble-rousers. If I was sitting in downtown Manhattan and I read all this drivel, I might have actually believed it!

Fortunately, I don't rely on secondary information to form my opinions. I do travel to Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi once a month. The only rise that is happening in India is the rising costs, rising pollution and the rising amounts of corruption. I don't see any physical infrastructure, any social programs and any improvement in the lives of the common man.

Call me a sceptic but when I hear terms like Chindia, I gag. Even Malaysia and Thailand have better infrastructure. Check out the new Suvarnabhumi airport at Bangkok for instance. After 50 years of independence, it is a shame that India doesn't even have one world-class airport. Thomas Freidman rightly called Bangalore airport- a greyhound terminus with an airstrip attached.

Sure there's probably good things happening in the private sector in India-but how does this affect the vast majority of Indians? The big business houses get richer and the offshoring bodyshops continue to scale revenues with increasing headcount. That's it.

The wise and obscenely rich captains of Indian industry would have us believe that answering telephone calls for an American bank based in Wichita Kansas is the Indian dream.

I simply refuse to accept this.

Clothes or lack thereof

South East Asia is known for a bunch of things-the exotic food and the unique culture come to mind rightaway. What it should really be known for is its skimpily dressed women.

I have lived in the US and in Europe but have never seen women walk around with so little on. Well maybe in the nude portion of the Englischer Garten in Munich I saw more skin-but that was mostly fat guys with beer bellys the size of Bavaria.

Some of the about-town wear here puts 2 piece bikinis to shame. Wonder what i would feel as a dad if my daughter was walking around town dressed in nothing or more correctly almost nothing. Maybe I think too much. Maybe I am too damn conservative but I am sure the older folks around here can't be too pleased.

Location, location, location

I was in Delhi over Diwali. While there, I made a few enquiries about buying an apartment. Ten minutes and I knew that I had been pretty much priced out of the market. Apartment rates were 7000 rupees/sq foot in Gurgaon all the way up to 27,000 rupees/sq foot in Chanakyapuri.

That means that a measly 1000 sq foot 2 bedroom apartment perched on the 23rd floor in a non-earthquake-proof building would cost me 70 lakhs minimum in Delhi. That's 150,000 US$ or 225,000 SG$ which is what something similar would cost in Singapore.

Not too shabby for a country with a 25,000 rupees per annum/capita income!

Vanity Fair

Michael Wolff has written an interesting piece in Vanity Fair about the Iraq war and the eerie parallels it has with Vietnam. He calls it Survivor-The White House edition.

In a Shakespearian twist, he claims that act two is over with Rumsfeld out of office and act three will follow when John McCain becomes VP. He claims that the entire drama is over and the only thing left is the mad scramble among the key players now to save their reputations.

Nice read, however time alone will tell if how true Michael Wolff's predictions come.

PS: So I'm reading Vanity Fair now. Yeah it's true-I'm getting old.

A lazy weekend

This weekend was very lazy. For once, I didn't have a steering committee to prepare for or a flight to pack for. Consequently, I was able to watch two of my favorite movies on HBO -Jerry Maguire and As Good as it Gets.

I remember watching Jerry Maguire for the first time at Palo Alto in 1997. I remember this so clearly because the next day I went to San Francisco by Caltrain with two friends and through the entire 45 minute journey, we kept repeating "Show me the money"!

Wow how quickly time has flown. What a movie. Cuba Gooding Jr. still cracks me up-although I think Tom Cruise still plays the same damn role in every single movie he acts in -Tom Cruise!

A Hair-raising experience

Woohoo. The past week was better that expected. First the most controversial umpire Hair was shit-canned. Talk about getting a solid kick on the rear. Thanks to some clever politicking, the Asia block was able to trimuph over the Anglo block which went to great lengths to protect him.

The second hair-raising experience was the narrow win of the democrats in the US senate and congress races. In Virginia, Allen made famous by the "Macaca" remark was defeated by Jim Webb- a minor victory for South Asians.

Two for two I would say. I won't be surprised if "Macaca-power" becomes a buzz word in US politics.

Impressions of Japan

Is a week even enough time to get to even scratch the surface of a culture so rich and complex? Absolutely not. Yet even as a newbie, you clearly see the sharp contrasts. Purple-haired gothic kids and black-suited businessmen in the metro. 50 storey office towers and little houses. Raunchy manga comics and prudish Japanese women.

And another interesting factoid I picked up while there-there are over 300 Indian restaurants in Tokyo alone- beat that Tandoori-Chicken eating London!