Best wishes for the upcoming year

Dear ex-pats and in-grates, losers and playas, beggars and bankas, vegans and carnivores, skinny farkers and sumo wrestlers, virgins and man-whores, pepsi-drinkers and coke-drinkers, ladies and gentlemen:

Seasons greetings to you and to all the 30,000 unique visitors who come to my blog everyday. Thanks for all the support and encouragement. This may well be the final post of the year so see you all in 2007!

PS: Special thanks to Miz "Tai-Tai" P and Mr. R (you know who you are) who kept my spirits high through some trying times this year.

The Transformation

So the economy is booming, and more and more people want to go to business school. As an alumnus of one of the better known MBA programs, yours truly has been much in demand as a coach, guide, and essay-reading guinea pig. So one of the persons I was helping out with applications, asked me very seriously what was the one thing I learnt in those months that I spent cut off from the rest of civilized folks.

This got me thinking- I mean I have just paid off a loan which almost bankrupted me and half of my family. I had eaten 600 Turkish kebabs filled with mystery meat for lunch and dinner for months. (No breakfast-I was usually throwing up at that time). So what one thing was worth the loss of hair, life-long savings and a nasty stomach ulcer?

So what is that one thing? Hmmm it's not sexual skills for sure. Despite the school's rightful reputation for orgies-yours truly did not get to participate in any. No sirree, I was the gangly, nerdy guy standing in the corner, sipping my rum-and-coke while drunken batchmates hungrily licked whipped cream off each others nipples. It wasn't job skills. I have learnt more on the job than from some professors who only talked about how they had nailed their 4th wife in-between their 2nd divorce. Not social and networking skills, I'm afraid. I only got to know about 2 people really well.

So what did I learn that could possibly justify the expense of labor, time, money, hair, sexual potency? The answer ladies and gents is that I learnt to recognize crooks. You see, I was in a crazy world where you get to see some of nature's finest tax evaders, corporate swindlers and downright charlatans take shape. One giant candy store-fudge-meisters, truth-benders and CV inflators are all available. From the polished, suave, tux wearing, Porsche driving gentleman to the jersey wearing, unshaven rascal with the bhendi-bazar meets Brooklyn accent. Who would you like to watch and learn from today?

End result? After months of this, you develop crook-radar. An in-built intuition that allows you to seek and destroy those pesky cockroaches before they can infect you, your company or your family with their crooked plans.

Fee for the program- Too many euros. Loss of time in the workforce-many months. Ability to recognize crooks before they can hurt you-priceless.

Why do PE firms make out like bandits?

Too many people question the value that private equity firms bring to the table. They claim that PE firms are just a bunch of financial folks who take poorly-performing companies private, do some complicated financial mumbo-jumbo and without doing any significant changes, flip companies on the public exchanges for significant gain.

I recently saw an interview with Larry Bossidy, former CEO/Chairman of a number of Fortune 500 companies and he seemed to completely agree with this view. He even went further-saying that PE firms are full of very poor operations people!

With all due respect to him and others, they couldn't be further from the truth. PE firms may not be full of super-smart operations people but they bring politics-immune common-sense management to any company. How many of us have sat through meetings where we have wondered-now what the hell is going on here? Or been to corporate events where money flowed like water. Or seen IT and HR fiefdoms created due to politics. Or seen sales and marketing folks drink single-malts like fish on the company dime. Or seen people take 4 hour lunch breaks. Or seen expense accounts larger than your monthly salary...

So what do PE firms do? Well nothing complicated. They simply take all those decisions which companies will never take because vested interests will never let them take these common-sense decisions. Maybe they are not brilliant operations people-but maybe that's not even needed.

They spend the company's money like you would spend your own money. So they make out like bandits in the process. And last I checked, that was allowed.