Management and Strategy

Hope my tomorrow is better than today. Hope that my children will have better life than me. Hope that I can enjoy this planet everyday of my life. Hope there is peace around me. Hope I can achieve everything I want to based on my hard work.

Decision in this election is only one, "Do you want to look in future or do you want to be bogged down by past". Yes McCain is the past, he still looks at world from filter of cold war. You need good judgement and temperament to be leader of this world.

You have to hear this speech even if you are a republican…

Today I read about Photosynth on marketwatch. It is another great innovation from Microsoft after pptPlex. You should check it out. It is simple to use and provides a different experience. I created 2 synths in less than 3 minutes.

Marine Lines in Mumbai

Mumbai Area: Near Gateway and Elphinstone college

Presentations use to be so monotonous. They start from slide 1 and end with last slide. I have always hated this flow. I like my presentations to be dynamic. I like to change the flow based on my audience. I always struggled with current Powerpoint options to achieve this. I have tried many things like remembering slide numbers to jump to various sections in my presentations or creating links or buttons to jump between slides. All these options just don’t work. But recently Microsoft Office team released a new add-in for Powerpoint called pptPlex.

pptPlex is innovation at its best. pptPlex now allows you to make your presentations dynamic without spending more than 3-5 minutes per presentation. Basically you just define your sections and the add-in does the rest.. I am in love with this tool I will highly recommend you check this out especially if you give presentations you have to take a peek. Following are few good videos to get you started. You can download the add-in at http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/Default.aspx

Following are couple of videos by C.K. Prahalad on New age of Innovation. Read good stuff.

The new landscape of business Management expert C. K. Prahalad discusses the new landscape of innovation, in which companies must learn to co-create with their consumers, making use of a global ecosystem of resources.

Part 1:

Part 2: 

Great article to read around Cloud computing. I believe Cloud computing will be huge for next few years. Every application will start moving towards cloud. It has already taken of with offering from Google and Amazon. It just makes sense to let big companies take care of all the infrastructure.

But there are challenges too and the article by Stacey Higginbotham just highlights these challenges. The 10 reason provided in article that will hold cloud computing back for enterprise customers are.

1. It’s not secure.
2. It can’t be logged
3. It’s not platform agnostic
4. Reliability is still an issue.
5. Portability isn’t seamless
6. It’s not environmentally sustainable.
7. Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers.
8. The need for speed still reigns at some firms.
9. Large companies already have an internal cloud
10. Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans.

I may not agree with all of the above but there is merit to challenging the cloud.

Read More at: 10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud - GigaOM

Today while flying back from Dallas I picked up this book. I wanted to read something that I could finish in couple of hours and was valuable in business terms. This book turned out to be a real good one. There is some fluff in it but some content is real great. George has really done a great job of keeping it in around 100 pages and highlighting the key future strategies.

According to George the 5 key strategies to look forward to are

1. Supply Chain Gymnastics : Our infrastructure on west coast is crumbling and in future importing things from overseas through sea route may not be feasible. How can you react as business to this?
2. Sidestepping Economies of Scale: Bigger may not be always better. George talks about disposable factories. It is not a new concept, it is very common concept in project oriented industries where you setup small manufacturing operation on project site. 
3. Dynamic pricing: Ability to provide unique price to individual buyer. I have heard about this in past but George brought it home with a great example. Example he gave was of toll charges which change based on traffic patterns using RFID. It is being tested in Washington state.
4. Embracing complexity: Other way of putting this is increasing and accepting configurability of products. Every individual should be able to uniquely design the product he desires. Great example of this is MINI.
5. Infinite Bandwidth: Leveraging high speed Internet bandwidth to change business processes or even define new business models.

It is a good book and will highly recommend it to everyone. Enjoy

Great article on Innovation at Tata Motors. Nano is the cheapest car available at roughly 2500$. I think it is engineering miracle. I think it is a must read article… 

Too often, when they think of innovation, they focus on product innovation using breakthrough technologies; often, specifically, on patents. Tata Motors has filed for 34 patents associated with the design of the Nano, which contrasts with the roughly 280 patents awarded to General Motors (GM) every year. Admittedly that figure tallies all of GM’s research efforts, but if innovation is measured only in terms of patents, no wonder the Nano is not of much interest to Western executives. Measuring progress solely by patent creation misses a key dimension of innovation: Some of the most valuable innovations take existing, patented components and remix them in ways that more effectively serve the needs of large numbers of customers.

Learning from Tata’s Nano

Great stuff… So you ready to write some new Apps for iPhone??? 

iFund™

KPCB’s iFund™ is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund™ is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment.

KPCB - iFund™ Initiative

Another amazing slide show from Business week. This time is is about Cities at center of design. Enjoy..,.

Cities at the Center of Design

Business Innovation & Design - BusinessWeek

Read a very good article around importance of adopting open innovation in current economy… You should read it… Enjoy

A Ripe Time for Open Innovation

Recessions present a good opportunity to collaborate with others on finding, developing, and marketing new ideas

by Jeneanne Rae

A Ripe Time for Open Innovation