Indian Stocks on Fire

CNN Money has an interesting stuff on the rise of Indian IT stocks titled “Searching for India's Google and Yahoo!”

Investors trying to find the next hot Internet stock aren't looking for companies based in Silicon Valley...or anywhere else in America for that matter. They're looking to India.

While many large U.S. Internet stocks struggle this year, shares of Sify (Research), a Chennai-based Internet content and networking firm, are up nearly 20 percent so far in 2006. Shares of Rediff.com (Research), a Mumbai-based portal, have surged 35 percent.

George Mihalos, an analyst with Gilford Securities, said that since India has only about 40 million Internet users among a total population of 1.1 billion people, it's easy to see why investors are excited, especially since Rediff and Sify are the only Indian Internet stocks that trade in the United States.

On reasons why Indian stocks are hot as compared to China .

"The opportunity in India is drawing parallels to the Chinese market. The Indian market is probably about five years behind China," said Mihalos. "But scarcity value is playing a role here. There are only two companies to buy

Success Secrets

If you can't rise at dawn, you might just reconsider your goal of making it as a CEO.:Fortune

Well this really put me off since I’m another late riser.

Cait Murphy talks about the secrets of being a successful Guru in “Secrets of greatness: How I work”.We have folks , ranging from jazz maestro Wynton Marsalis to jurist Richard Posner to Goldman's CEO, Hank Paulson, sharing on what they love to do.

Common denominator here, it is that for all the whizz-bang gadgetry that makes it possible to nag people in a dozen time zones in a single day, the human touch still matters.

The challenge is to continue to do it well, when the responsibilities and complexities keep increasing. One common answer is to get up early -- real early. Another answer is the creative use of technology .Technology can help people perform, after all, but it is people who inspire technology -- and each other.

My Take: Technology will continue to be a great enabler and its individual passion for innovation, excellence and creativity which will enable one to scale heights.

Six jobs that won't exist by 2016

Fast company article says that by 2016 on of the 6 jobs which will cease to exist is Indian call-center operators: “American customer service is rescued from oxymoron status as companies realize that being nice to the people with the money is the only way to win”

The other 5 are:
Gatekeepers

TV schedulers, A&R guys, Wall Street researchers, cool hunters. As punishment, now it's our turn to ram stuff down your throats. Hope you like Bon Jovi!
Bloggers

Pay someone to write snarky comments? Do you think we're getting paid for this?
Advertising creatives

Talented amateurs making ads for fun and posting them online seem to be better at your job than you are. Bonus: No more "whither the 30-second spot" whining.
Auto mechanics

As cars run on software, the grease monkey will need a makeover.
U.S. high-tech jobs

But software engineers can always get a job down at the garage.

Leadership Paradigm

In my last post I gave an overview on the study about leadership perception . In a book written by Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria which is due out next month they dwell about what are the elements of this alloy we call "leadership"?

Mayo and Nohria identified 1,000 great chief executives and company founders of the 20th century; they then surveyed 7,000 business executives, asking them to evaluate and rank the original list of 1,000. Out of this, they produced a ranking of the top 100 business leaders of all time.

All Business masters had more than their fair share of what Mayo and Nohria call "contextual intelligence." That is, they possessed an acute sensitivity to the social, political, technological, and demographic contexts that came to define their eras. And they adapted their enterprises to best respond to those forces. Their outsized success at sensing opportunities and capitalizing on them had a dual effect: Just as the times profoundly influenced these business masters, they, in turn, profoundly influenced their times.

Nohria shows that there is more than one path to becoming a great leader. In fact, there are three.

1. The Entrepreneurial Leader: C.W. Post

"At the turn of the last century, C.W. Post was an itinerant salesman who traveled through Michigan, which was the Silicon Valley of its time. It was the epicenter of more than 300 car companies, which spawned scores more companies. Entrepreneurship was in the air. Post didn't directly exploit these technologies, but he did sense a gathering of forces that created the possibility for a new business opportunity.

2. The Leader as Manager: Louis B. Neumiller

"Whereas entrepreneurs are company creators and charismatic leaders are agents of change, managers are value maximizers -- they make the most out of something that already exists. Such is the case with Louis B. Neumiller, who rose through the ranks of Caterpillar and became its chief executive in 1941.

3. The Charismatic Leader: Lee Iacocca

"Our fascination with the CEO as a celebrity leader dates back to Lee Iacocca. He captured the moment because he saw and seized on a series of secular changes that crept up almost unnoticeably.

Gladwell on Freakonomics

In an interesting post Gladwell talks about his views on Freakonomics .He says” In fact, "Freakonomics" specially singles out for ridicule the theory of broken windows, which I suggest in the Tipping Point played a big role in New York City’s recovery. So what gives? Why do I love a book so much, if it contradicts my own book? Have I renounced the theories I put forward in the Tipping Point?

The Freakonomics argument starts off very much like the argument I make in The Tipping Point. The startling decline in crime in major American cities in the mid-1990’s is a mystery. No one predicted it. Everyone thought that high crime rates were a permanent feature of urban life. And the standard arguments to explain why crime falls don’t seem to work in this case. Levitt and Dubner go through all the usual explanations for crime decreases—a booming economy, decline in the crack trade, innovative policing strategies, tougher gun laws, aging of the population—and find only two that they think really matter.

Perception about Leadership

Leadership is a complex and highly debated topic; we have many theories, concepts and views about leadership. In an effort to understand students' perceptions of leadership a study was carried out by Greenhalgh and Maxwell.They asked 1,918 freshmen enrolled in Management 100: Leadership and Communication in Groups to select or design an image that represented leadership.

In a recent report called, Images of Leadership: The Story Emerging Leaders Tell, Greenhalgh and Maxwell discuss the students' responses. First, the students selected what Greenhalgh and Maxwell called the "sort of images we might expect" -- namely, images of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela.

While the study confirmed that male and female students agree on many word choices, Greenhalgh and Maxwell discovered some subtle, although important, differences between the sexes. Among their key findings:

Female students show sensitivity to gender when selecting adjectives and nouns.

The verbs used by males and females to talk about leadership action are largely transformational rather than transactional. Transformational verbs such as lead, make, follow, inspire, achieve, believe and become are more prevalent in the students' essays than transactional verbs such as take, order and give.

According to Greenhalgh, transformational leadership reflects "leadership with the capacity to direct others to undertake new tasks, as opposed to transactional leadership, which we tend to associate with top-down hierarchies. Transformational leadership is more of a pull; transactional leadership is more of a push."

Startegy for Success

Strategy is the key to success for any business venture. Organizations work out different strategic models before making important decisions.

What is it that drives successful strategy?
How are organizations going to scale up to the big picture?
How are organizations going to cater up to the challenge of coming up with different strategies for developed and developing market.

Ram Charan gives insight about “Sharpening Your Business Acumen” to answer these challenges ahead.

A company’s strategic choices are made today, without the benefit of knowing the future. Leaders have to be comfortable making decisions with unknown factors; survival depends on those choices producing viable outcomes whatever may happen.

The ability to construct and act upon the mental model of the big picture requires plenty of practice. The essence of the skill is to find patterns from among a wide variety of trends and to posit the missing ingredients that could catalyze convergence. Many great leaders began to practice this exercise when they were younger, in less complex contexts, and over the years they have developed the requisite skills and judgment.

Trends that may at first seem disparate are not unrelated; they must be considered in combination. Executives must learn to fill in the gaps and to iterate this mental process until a complete picture comes into focus. And the way to do that is not only to consider the direct effects of change on an industry and a company, but also to rethink the changes through the lenses of other industries and other players.

To download the complete article click here

Your Startegy for Negotiations

Deepak Malhotra’s views on Negotiations: “Concessions are often necessary in negotiation," says the HBS professor . "But they often go unappreciated and unreciprocated." Here he explains four strategies for building good will and reciprocity.

1.Label your concessions:

Your concessions will be more powerful when your counterpart views your initial demands as serious and reasonable.
Second, emphasize the benefits to the other side.
Third, don't give up on your original demands too hastily. If the other side considers your first offer to be frivolous, your willingness to move away from it will not be seen as concessionary behavior. By contrast, your concessions will be more powerful when your counterpart views your initial demands as serious and reasonable.

2. Demand and define reciprocity

Labeling your concessions helps trigger an obligation to reciprocate, but sometimes your counterpart will be slow to act on that obligation. To increase the likelihood that you get something in return for your concession, try to explicitly—but diplomatically—demand reciprocity.

3. Make contingent concessions

One hallmark of a good working relationship is that parties don't nickel-and-dime each other for concessions. Rather, each side learns about the interests and concerns of the other and makes good-faith efforts toward achieving joint gains.

4. Make concessions in installments

When trust is low or when you're engaged in a one-shot negotiation, consider making contingent concessions.

HR Strategy without Disruption

Kaplan, Robert S., and David P. Norton. talk about "How to Implement a New Strategy Without Disrupting Your Organization." In Harvard Business Review 84, no. 3 (March 2006).

“Throughout most of modern business history, corporations have attempted to unlock value by matching their structures to their strategies: centralization by function, decentralization by product category or geographic region, matrix organizations that attempt both at once, virtual organizations networked organizations, velcro organizations.

But none of these approaches has worked very well. Restructuring churn is expensive, and new structures often create new organizational problems that are as troublesome as the ones they try to solve.

It takes time for employees to adapt to them, they create legacy systems that refuse to die, and a great deal of tacit knowledge gets lost in the process. Given the costs and difficulties involved in finding structural ways to unlock value, it's fair to raise the question: Is structural change the right tool for the job?

The answer is usually "No," Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton contend. It's far less disruptive to choose an organizational design that works without major conflicts and then design a customized strategic system to align that structure to the strategy. A management system based on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) framework is the best way to align strategy and structure, the authors suggest.

Managers can use the tools of the framework to drive their unit's performance: strategy maps to define and communicate the company's value proposition and the BSC to implement and monitor the strategy.

In this article, the originators of the BSC describe how two hugely different organizations—DuPont and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—used corporate scorecards and strategy maps organized around strategic themes to realize the enormous value that their portfolios of assets, people, and skills represented. As a result, they did not have to endure a painful series of changes that simply replaced one rigid structure with another.

Trends in HR Outsourcing

HR outsourcing has been growing at a fast pace in the last few years, more and more companies today have outsourced HR Processes to vendors .It’s a challenge as well as an opportunity for Hr folks to stamp the role of Hr in business today.

Pamela Babcock talks about the aspects of HRO in SHRM article.

HR professionals looking to purchase outsourced services may be able to gain both lower costs and improved service at the same time, as they capitalize on providers’ efforts to offer competitive pricing and as providers expand their skills and processes through mergers and acquisitions.

The total value of all HRO contracts in 2005 was nearly $6 billion—up from $2 billion in 2004, according to the TPI Index, a quarterly report on global outsourcing. And Martorelli predicts that the market for multiple-process HRO will continue to increase by 15 percent to 20 percent annually for the next few years.

The factors which have led to the increase in in Demand for HRO are: Marginalized perceptions of human resources, increasing globalization and the fact that existing vendors have a captive audience with organizations they already support.

Technology: Another key factor is rising information technology (IT) costs. HR executives facing the prospect of high costs to install, support, upgrade or consolidate Enterprise Resource Planning software often opt instead to outsource.

Click here to read more.