An Inspiring Person and A Powerful Dream

I am on vacation for two weeks to my native place and I happen to visit my alumina, P.G.Halakatti College of Engineering and Technology; where I did my basic engineering.


I met Prof. V.V Katti; who had been my mentor and guide during my student days; he used to guide me, motivate me, push me and more importantly excite me with his passionate lectures in Heat Transfer, Mechanical Vibrations and more.

He is now HOD of mechanical engineering department after his PhD from IIT Mumbai.

He passionately showed the new department, labs, computer section and about his dream of building a world class teaching/research facility. What really impressed me are;

1) Vision and Mission: He has defined a vision and mission statement to mechanical department and drives everyone around this. This is such a powerful thought. Imagine running an academic institute with a corporate rigor!! Excellent thing.

2) Building Research Facility: He passionately, tirelessly explained to me about his efforts to push his fellow colleagues to think and drive themselves to build research facilities and think outside the box for innovative ideas. He is not stopping there, but leading by example by building nice heat transfer lab; where it seems he is inspired by many simple tools like stereo, used lathe machine etc. His eyes sparked when he proudly said, ‘each and every instrument of this lab is designed, manufactured and calibrated in our college’. This is such an inspiring thing!!

3) Attention to students: During the course of four hours I spent with him, he was listening to many students, solved many issues related to couple of students and motivated couple of them to give their best and gave instructions to couple of guys. What amazed me is his ever expanding time!!

4) Hard work: He juggles between his research, publishing papers, guiding his masters/doctorate students, managing the department, being busy in academics, building a world class research lab and mentoring/guiding his fellow professors. And yes, he also mentors his son, who is an engineering student by himself. This is simply an excellent stuff and made me wonder how he manages his time and still has that everlasting energy.

5) His Dream: He has such a big dream for his students; he wants to integrate industry with academics; bring in more industry focus to students. I could see a clear dream in his eyes about his students to do well in life; have successful careers and establish themselves in industry and make a little dent to universe! He says ‘I want to change the direction of thinking of this department’. Such a powerful thought, it was just great thing for me.

Personally; the time I spent was a huge learning experience, I got inspired, motivated and amazed by one individual’s dream to change the world and his efforts towards this. His simple truth of life of keep working for the fun he is getting out of it and a clear self-driving force behind him.

Thanks you sir; for motivating me (One more time after 17 years); inspiring me by sheer size of your dreams and your passion to build this institute; for being such a simple yet positive personality to guide many students and above all having a clear focus towards social causes. I will be fortunate to contribute anything towards fulfillment of your dream.

After this trip, I have one song on my iPod which is going repeatedly, ‘Give me some sunshine, give me some rain, give me another chance I want to grow once again”

Three Rule for Making a Company Truly Great

April edition of Harvard Business Review has an interesting article about three rules which makes any company great. Authors have studied many companies and identified companies who followed these rules and stood apart in the long business cycle.


I thought of these rules after I read this article and I felt this can be applied in day-to-day business operation there by gaining from it with immediate effect, or perhaps to change the culture of the company in small steps.

Rule 1: Better Before Cheaper:

Every company faces a choice: It can compete mainly by offering superior nonprice benefits such as great brand, exciting style, an excellent functionality, durability or it can meet some minimal acceptable standards along these dimensions and try to attract the customers with lower price. The long term business players typically choose the former one.

Bear in mind the before in “better before cheaper”. When the competitive landscape changes, you can lower your price and still adhere to the rule. What matters is not where your prices are lower than it used to be but that they remain higher than your competition.

For all its virtues; a nonprice position isn’t without danger. Typically a company that competes on this dimension other than price must constantly battle rivals that have figured out its formula. At least me-too-competitors might confuse customers with exactly similar looking products.

So, companies need to focus on destructive innovation and be in constant pursuit of higher margins through focusing on less-demanding market segments.

Rule 2: Revenue Before Cost:

Companies must not only create value but also capture it in the form of profits. Exceptional companies deliver superior profits by achieving higher revenue than their rivals through either higher prices or greater volume. Very rarely the cost leadership is a driver.

Just as you can lower prices while adhering to better before cheaper, you can drive out inefficiencies and lower your costs while following the revenue-before-the-cost model. But summary is don’t try to achieve a profitability advantage through cost leadership.


Rule 3: There are no other rules:

This rule underscores the uncomfortable truth that in pursuit of exceptional profitability, everything but the first two rules should be put in place.

Here is how we can implement this in to day-to-day life. Next time when we are budgeting among competitive priorities let’s ask the question, which initiatives will contribute most to enhancing the nonprice position of our product/services in question and which will allow us to sell ourselves at much higher price.

If our operational effective program is all about cutting the costs; then let’s focus on innovation of building more for less there by clearly we can attain the required service level agreement with customers while still focusing on building much higher revenue.

Profitable growth is the name of the game.

Mr. Murthy is Back

Mr. Narayan Murthy is back in to Infosys as executive chairman which is by all means an operational role. This means, Mr. Murthy will be involved in providing the strategic direction to company and will be consulted in all major decisions.


What makes it more interesting is time, where Infosys is struggling in ever changing software market.

He is coming back from his retirement and try putting company back on track.

When asked he said, he will have to study Infosys 3.0 model and them come up with course correction measures. It is largely believed that company management has not clearly articulated what exactly Infosys 3.0 is.

There are debates in media about second layer leadership and all.

What really draw my attention is Mr. Murthy’s answer for one question;

Q: How do you look at your second innings?

Answer: Tendulkar is a great hero of mine. He adapted himself even when he was 40. If he can do that, then I can do that. If I can do that I will be very happy.

Inspiration can come from any one. But look at a man who has probably achieved anything in his field wants to learn from others?

This is what I call ability to improvise, day after day after day…