Friday, November 30, 2012

From CM to PM in one jump?

Mayawati is now eyeing to become the Prime Minister. Her records show that it would be difficult to stop her

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Mayawati was never known for her courteous or suave behaviour. She always had a reputation of being an arrogant and ruthlessly ambitious politician. She recently added another chapter to her reputation by refusing to lend land for construction of a Rail Coach Factory (RCF) in Rae Bareli – the parliamentary constituency of UPA Chairperson, Sonia Gandhi – barely two days before Sonia Gandhi was supposed to lay its foundation stone. Though she returned the land to railways five days later – primarily because of a new legislation that authorises Railways to acquire any land for development purpose – she once again demonstrated she cared two hoots if she needed to prove a point. In fact, she baffled political observers in 2003, when after falling out with coalition partner, BJP, within a year of taking over as CM, she decided to dissolve the State Assembly. The BJP then propped up her bête noire, Mulayam Singh Yadav as CM. An unfazed Mayawati, bereft of trappings of an official post – campaigned hard for three years and secured a clear majority on her own in 2006. People might wonder about sagacity of her political decisions, but she is never in doubt about what she was doing and the consequences.

Her fourth innings as CM was bound to be stormy and more ruthless than ever since this is the first time her government didn’t need BJP’s crutches. She started off by ordering inquiries into decisions taken by Mulayam Singh. But that was just the beginning. As Left Front withdrew support from the UPA government at the Centre and Mulayam’s party extended support to the UPA, Mayawati seized the “opportunity of her life.” In the run up to the Vote of Confidence at the Centre, she found a host of leaders – from Left stalwarts Prakash Karat & AB Bardhan to TDP’s Chandra Babu Naidu and from Janata Dal (S) Chief, HD Deve Gowda to Rashtriya Lok Dal Chief, Ajit Singh, queuing up at her doorstep.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

WAR DOCTRINE: THE EPIC ERA

Or, how to intelligently brainwash highly skilled, educated, yet ill-educated youth to do their own people

>President Harry S Truman, announcing the news from the cruiser, USS Augusta... said the device was more than 2,000 times more powerful than the largest bomb used to date... The British Prime Minister Clement Attlee read out a statement... “By God’s mercy, Britain and American science outpaced all German efforts...”< Mark those words: “God’s mercy!” Merciful god is used appropriately to give justification to Americans and British to prove to humanity that our own humankind is not, well, ‘our own people’.

Similar justifications have continued through this millennium when stealth bombers like B-1 or B-2 [commonly known as Batwings] or the ubiquitous B-52s drop bombs from 40,000 feet on the dispensable souls of Serbia, Iraq or Afghanistan, vaporising humanity with impunity. ‘Not our kind!’ And with that justification, a human can kill a human, of course with honour and pride. The same philosophy has been used quite effectively even by terror institutions attempting to induct new ‘trainees’.

Why would a skilled and educated human [terrorists, over the years, have been mostly educated] agree to go beyond the emotion of patriotism – which, believe us, can be an extremely strong feeling – and bomb his own country or kill his own countrymen? The answer is obviously simply. Once it is proved to the trainee, through focused training material and workshops, that the country he/she considers his own is actually not so, and the countrymen he considers ‘family’ are similar pieces of rag, the clearly ill-educated trainee – who in reality doesn’t have any real grievances – is inspired by shameful religious dogmatism to plant bombs all around and take lives.

Having said that, the fact is that probably every doctrine of contemporary warfare can find its root in every word uttered by the cleverest and most manipulative God of all times, Krishna, in Bhagavad Geeta. And why do humans choose to follow God’s examples? Well, firstly, it allows easy justification to the ill-educated, who choose to kill under “God’s mercy”. Secondly, there’s this tiny little motivation that one day you might strike gold and end up with 16,008 wives!!! Actually, even a fraction of that should do, we guess...


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Divinities we could do without

RBI's moves with respect to bonds for oil companies are only a temporary solution to the problem

To err is human, to persist in error is divine. When the government should be bringing in a dose of realism to oil prices vis-à-vis international trends and moving towards mass transportation, it chooses to continue to perpetrate the lopsided trend of protecting both consumers and oil companies through the self destructive policy of issuing bonds. What a divine state of affairs indeed! So divine, that even our apex bank can't keep out of it now! In an unprecedented move, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had opened a window to buy oil bonds in order to compensate for the cash requirement of the cash-starved, loss making Indian oil companies. Oil companies could sell the oil bonds issued to them and buy foreign exchange from the RBI, which was much lower than the existing market price of the dollar. The government had promised to issue bonds worth Rs.245 billion by June 2008 to help the companies who needed around $300 million daily to fulfill their daily requirement of oil. In fact the RBI also bought bonds from IOCL, BPCL and HPCL and gave them cash of $4.5 billion.

But now, the window has been closed and the oil companies are forced to buy foreign exchange (mainly dollars) from the open market. By squeezing the flow of dollars in the market, they are creating a situation where the demand for dollars is continuously rising and the value of rupee is falling.

Such a situation is particularly critical for the Indian capital market since it is already facing capital outflows and a falling rupee. In the first place, the issuance of oil bonds is nothing more than a stop gap solution. For companies, which are making losses to the tune of Rs.6.5 billion on a daily basis, such bonds were nothing more than a false reprieve.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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Monday, November 26, 2012

But will the two wheeler giants give up easy?!

The middle-class customer never had it so good when it comes to four-wheeled toys... But will the two wheeler giants give up easy?!

Hero Honda for instance, expanded 18% between April-July 2008-09 and sold 1,149,753 two-wheelers and is confident of the two-wheeler segment. “Interesting developments, but there is no competition from small cars.

This is because the cost of ownership of bikes is less than that of a car, which includes fuel cost, insurance cost, maintenance cost etc.,” explains Anil Dua, SVP, Hero Honda to B&E. TVS on the other hand is betting big on its progressive two-wheeler product range. “Our focus remains on two-wheelers even if Bajaj and the others are launching low-cost cars,” opines Venu Srinivasan, Chairman, TVS Motor on questions concerning threat from small cars. Like them, there are a number of players in the market for whom two wheels remain the mainstay despite the hoopla.

It is interesting to note that while many new patrons have been added to the car segment, many more are making their way into the motorbike segment! Last year, the two-wheeler segment alone recorded a growth of 38% with at least 700,000 two-wheelers being sold every year. According to Yezdi Nagporewalla, of KPMG, “In volumes the motorbike segment is 7 million units strong and the competition from Tata’s Nano and others will at best be around 1 million units.” Interestingly, even though both the sides (two-wheelers & ultra-cheap cars) have their own take on the possible outcome of the battle, neither has the consumer figured-out for sure. Maybe that’s why they say, ‘Consumer is King’!


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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Friday, November 23, 2012

How to hit the bulls eye

C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan present DART – Dialogue, Access, Risk and Transparency Benefits

Through the four years of concerted effort, C.K. Prahalad, distinguished University Professor of Strategy, Ross school of Business, University of Michigan, named ‘The world’s most influential management thinker’ in 2007 by the Times of London & M.S. Krishnan, Hallman fellow and Professor of Business Information & Technology, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan have prescribed the agenda for senior managers to successfully compete on the battlefields and on the various fronts during the following centuries. They have to re-invent their processes and cultures to sustain innovative solutions. The new culture of innovation is a strategic plan for achieving transformation to meet the needs of the customers of the future.

The New Age Of Innovation builds on the Future Of Competition and The Fortune At The Bottom Of The Pyramid, presenting a unique perspective on the essence of innovation. It focuses on the nature and strategy in the new competitive context and builds the hidden links between business processes and analytics, innovational business models, and day-to-day operations.

The authors discuss various strategies for building teams that are capable of providing high-quality, low-cost solutions rapidly, & treating all involved individuals as unique. They discuss how to improve flexibility in all customer-facing and back-end processes, measure individual behaviour, and systems to co-create value with customers. The authours offer us the DART model which is an acronym for the building blocks of co-creation– Dialogue, Access, Risk and transperancy.

They’ve used examples to describe N=1, which they define as getting the customer to decide what he wants and access to resources from multiple sources. For this, various on-ground examples have been furnished like iGoogle, which is about co-creation of value and personalisation of experience where Google provides the platform to individual consumers; The Ponds Institute measures skin conditions and seeks customers’ view about how they want to look and feel; at Starbucks, a customer can decide whether to pick up his coffee and run, or stay and read the newspaper.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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