Google+

The battle for the eyeballs of social media network users is intensifying, with Google launching a demo version of 'Google+' (called Google Plus), the search engine giant's renewed attempt to take on Facebook in the social networking arena.

While designing the new service, Google has kept in mind social circles, called plus circles, and a Twitter-inspired feature that resembles real-life social interactions. It allows users to selectively share information with specific groups within defined circles, rather than sharing it with all their social connections at once. One can create as many circles as one wishes to, for whatever categories one wants, adding friends and contacts simply by clicking and dragging names onto various circles.

Google is also featuring a web conferencing option, in which up to 10 people can join in simultaneously. A feature called Sparks would provide users with web content on various topics like sports or fashion, allowing the user to subscribe to categories of interest, create custom categories, and share content with friends. Google would also release Google Plus mobile apps for Android smartphones and iPhones. This would include special features like cloud-based photo storage and group messaging. With its instant upload feature, one's photos and videos automatically upload themselves to a private album on Google+. Its 'Huddle' feature turns different conversations into a group chat.

When Google launched Gmail seven years ago, people went crazy to get an invitation from peers. Though, at that time web based email service was common. In every blog and every forum, people were requesting an invitation. Now, the same is happening with Google+. It’s natural for people to get attracted to it, as it’s open only to a select few. It’s becoming like status: Hey, I have a G+ account. Some are even selling G+ invites on eBay for $0.99,

Google+ offers a huge benefit over Facebook, where everything you say is to everybody. On Google+, it’s easier to build groups or circles of different people, say family, colleagues, alumni and such, and only share content with the group you want to share it with. Google+ is a loosely stitched-together-version of existing Google services like Picasa, blogger and some influenced by Facebook. For instance, Google+’s Stream is Facebook’s News Feed, and the +1 button is an open imitation of the Facebook Like button. And + has a great usability and much more user friendly compared to any social networking site.

I am only few hours on to it, but already started liking Google+ !

CEO Material

Just finished reading a book titled ’The Corner Office: How TOP CEOs made it and how you can too’. What this books emphasis is on fixed traits all successful CEOs possesses.

The author, Adam Bryant, reveals the keys to success in the business world, including the five essential personal traits that all high performers exhibit, qualities that the CEOs themselves value most and that separate the rising stars from their colleagues. He also demystifies the art of leadership and shows how executives at the top of their game get the most out of others.

What really surprises me is about all CEOs having some listed (Pre-defined?) qualities: is this what we call ‘CEO Material’? Some are natural qualities and some can be attained through mentoring, but the list is more or less similar for all CEOs, no matter which part of the globe they are from.

This book is an effort of author, where he sat down with more than 70 global CEOs and asking them how they do their jobs and the most important lessons they had learned as they rose through the ranks. Over the course of this book, they all shared memorable stories and eye-opening insights.

It’s a good book, which tells you so many details about leadership and how to build the most important personal qualities.

Ironically, the next book I put my hands on to is ‘The monk who sold his Ferrari (Second read now!). One book talks about attaining the name and fame, the other one talk about giving up everything and walk towards eternal bliss. Both are contradictory subjects!

But, life is all about having such contrasts…

My Autograph!

Nopes, I am not writing my autograph as yet; this is the name of a Kannada movie I watched on TV today.

It’s about a guy, looking back at his life and picking up few instances since his childhood. He takes his marriage as an instance to invite all his old friends.

The beauty of this movie is about how he picks up so obvious things like village primary school incidents, how he transforms in to a town high-school kid and then to collage and his job and colleagues. The pains, the obvious confusions one goes through, ability to sustain failures; it has been built up very nicely.

I will be dishonest if I say I was not nostalgic for few hours after watching this movie!

Business of Collaboration

The coming together of arch rivals Subhash Chandra’s Zee entertainment and Rupert Murdoch’s STAR India to create a distribution company will have lasting impact on the TV distribution landscape. The joint venture called Media Pro Enterprises, (Media Pro, a 50:50 joint venture between STAR DEN Media Services and Zee Turner) will distribute 68 channels, including both firms flagship channels and plus the regional channels.

This is very interesting move from media and television industry perspective. Another example of such collaboration is ESPN STAR SPORTS, a joint venture in south Asia; between ESPN and STAR Sports, who compete in all other geographies. For any media company, content generation is most important thing and which takes a lot of attention. Media companies need to have their act together in content creation. Distribution is important arm, but it can be collaborated.

Similar consolidation happened in telecom industry, where the tower and infrastructure was handled through collaboration among different companies, who compete in the general market. A JV was formed to handle all the tower business. It makes lot of sense for the companies which will help to improve the margins and thus gives lot of competitive advantages when comes to the pricing model.

Such kind of collaboration is common in services industries as well. Infosys and Wipro, who compete in outside market in almost all the accounts, do collaborate when comes to certain technologies or certain customers. It is important to have a clear line of division between two companies when comes to such kind of collaboration.

What is important here is the customer or consumer. This is very healthy sign and trend that in order to serve customers, companies are coming together and forming Joint Ventures. This helps to improve margins and the quality of services will also improve (The media distribution for example, will help in digitizing the content across both the companies, and this makes the HD content possible) the service quality.

In order to improve the margins, such business models are being generated, which would eventually redefine how the business is operated.

For me, customer gets benefited and being consumer of such services/products I am happy by end of the day.

Organic Growth of Business

Question is, being a business leader how you grow the business?

Simple answer would be to acquire new customers and there by driving your topline. More customers means, more reveue.

One of the strategies which we have adopted in our BU recently is to expand our business with carefully crafted strategy of having focus on multiple factors and reducing the risk of business continuity. We started working towards new customers, but there were certain steps taken in addition to conventional selling in order to build a stronger growth engine.

When your existing service model/business model is not resulting in to new business; the following approach should be taken to keep the growth intact.

1)Expand in to new Service Offerings/business verticals: The logical expansion in to new service lines or building new service offerings or altering existing offerings will help to fuel more growth as these new offerings will drive more business.

2)Expand in to new Geography: Taking a matured set of offerings in to a new geography and start building that business. But, challenge there would be to start it from scratch and build the business step by step. Start-with-small is the key here.

3)Redefining the business model/service model in existing market; bringing in more value to customers will result in generating more business as it obviously catches the attention.

Offcourse, its very important to understand when the existing market is getting flat and the correct time to execute this plan.

I am extremely satisfied with the execution of this strategy as it has started resulting in to more business.

Embracing Tough Times

We seem to have become afraid of sadness. There’s been so much emphasis on positive thinking and being happy, we are in danger of forgetting that an important part of being a complete person is learning to handle the tough stuff as well.

The things happening around us easily make us sad and the impact becomes noticeable.

Obviously, the positive emotions are more enjoyable and easier to live with, but it is perfectly normal to occasionally get sad because of disappointments in life. Being sad about things is one of the basic emotions as per human psychology and learning how to deal with it will teach us better lessons.

If we look back our lives, we learned biggest lessons when we faced problems or sadness. The lesson learnt in hard way or when things are going tough; is not very easy to forget. More ever a patch of sadness gives us a new layer of energy to go about new things, new definition of happiness or new height to scale.

In addition to this, a sad patch will make us understand the importance of happiness. Even our vedic scriptures said, life is all about having correct mixture of happiness and sadness & how important to face them with balanced mindset.

So, it’s ok to be sad. I feel, rather than trying to cheer up ourselves forcefully, I would rather give myself a little time, a little space and room to come out of it.

I think, life is all about continues learning, no matter which phase of life you are!

'Skyped'---Microsoft-Skype Deal: An Analysis

Skeptics are panning Microsoft's decision to acquire Skype, arguing that the price of $8.5 billion (more than 30 times earnings) is too expensive. But with Skype, Microsoft vaults itself into the world of "free products" in a significant way. How Microsoft leverages those product users going forward — and whether it can retain and grow them — will be the true test of success for the acquisition.

The potential here is significant. Cloud services are considered to be the future of computing. For 170 million product users, Skype provides an on-ramp to Microsoft cloud offerings and other products. It gives to Microsoft a brand-aware user base keen to communicate, in the cloud, across a richly connected social network. It provides significant opportunities to up-sell, cross-sell, advertise, or bundle paid offerings. And by integrating Skype with its free cloud offerings — such as its free version of Office software — Microsoft multiplies the linkages and the revenue potential.

At the same time, Microsoft envisions deep integration with existing pay products, such as Office and its corporate communications offering, Microsoft Lync. Clearly, the company aspires to move into the stream of demand flow toward increasingly ubiquitous face-to-face communications across all devices.

But the acquisition also presents a significant conundrum: How will Microsoft integrate and leverage Skype without destroying what has been successful thus far — the free business model and the potential of the user base? Can the company simultaneously manage a world of free users supported by advertising and premium service offerings — and a world of paying customers looking for best-in-class communications applications?

The challenge is not an easy one, as Microsoft's own experience makes clear. While it has launched free versions of its Office software to the cloud, the dependencies of these offerings on the pay product remain strong and the pay product seems to get all of the support. Meanwhile, both cloud and pay Office are under heavy assault from free product threats such as Google Docs.

Fortunately, in Skype, Microsoft is buying a company that has figured out how to make money off of free products. That's why appending Skype onto the Microsoft organization structure as a separate, autonomous division makes a lot of sense. However, while this approach promotes the free products business model, it makes tight integration with other products more difficult

Some may argue that integrating Skype with Microsoft pay products has the potential to deliver greater incremental revenue than does supporting the free business model, so Microsoft should just let that model die. But the Skype unit is approaching $1 billion in revenue with free products already and much more may be on the way. With competitors using free products to rapidly stake claim to territory in the cloud, this may be Microsoft's best chance to leap forward with a serious presence in that space.

My Impression of Singapore

Last week, I was on a business trip to Singapore and though it was not my first visit, it did impress me. Each time I visit that country (This was my Forth Visit in total) it amazes me as is it possible to build a country, so systematically within such a short period of time.

Practically speaking, Singapore doesn’t have any natural resources, doesn’t have much history, doesn’t have population nor the land to support/feed, but the country transformed itself ever since it got freedom from Britain and then from Japan.

Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minster is a visionary leader who is the architect of modern Singapore. The whole country/city was built on modern thoughts and people are said to be the main resource for them. The way in which it got transformed in to a financial hub for Asia, in to most prominent hub of transportation between East and West, in to most attractive tourist destination, in to shopping destination; is really an amazing story. This whole country was built with sheer determination and with precise planning.

Most part of the time I was in International Business Park, which is a true example of vision. The whole IBP is divided in to different clusters, like Nordic Business Centers, German Center etc, where the focus is to attract business from these areas, provide basic facilities to setup and run the business and help them grow. This was truly an amazing way of helping to create more jobs locally plus improving the business. These kinds of innovative thinkers really made what Singapore is today.

The finance and service industries, two major revenue generators of current generation, have been carefully developed. I could see a whole different Singapore after gap of around 8 years, with lot of added attractions as tourist spot. This clearly tells me that there is a constant thought process on what all is happening.

Last time in Singapore, I spent close to one year working there and got a chance to interact more with local friends and I understood then that visionary leadership was the main reason behind the success of this country. And I can only agree to that.

After all this praise and positive feelings, I couldn’t resist but wanted to contribute to Singapore GDP, so decided to shop and bought few things there-by increasing the total revenue of Singapore as country 

It’s all about profitable growth!

There is a dissonance between the quarterly results of India’s top two software companies, TCS and Infosys Technologies, and the response it evoked in stock markets. While Infosys was faulted for not living up to the expectations of the analysts and suffered a greater fall, TCS produced very good numbers but still saw its stock decline.

But the stock market’s contrariness needs to be underlined to make the point that the outlook for Indian software is positive, Indian leaders are well poised to take advantage of it and the absence of any feel-good sentiment over the sector right now and not necessarily does not appear to be based on fundamentals. In particular, while analysts have pilloried the Infosys results, its numbers over the last few quarters have consistently met guidelines.

However, the recent trends in the results of the two major players tell two different stories. For several quarters now, TCS has been catching up on what has traditionally been the biggest feather in Infosys’ cap: high margins resulting from a pricing premium that none else could command.

TCS’ recent improved performance can be attributed to its boldness in accessing inorganic growth, charting out new geographies and being able to digest all this. On the other hand, Infosys has remained its usual conservative self and produced solidly commendable results. Both the companies are world beaters in being able to command 25 per cent net margins.

Being able to keep growing fast for well over a decade now indicates that they are not continuing to rely solely on their earlier cost advantage. They have been going up the value chain, acquiring domain knowledge (industry-specific skills) and increasingly assisting clients in reshaping their entire operations to gain newer efficiencies, which are imperative for survival in the financial crisis-induced downturn. What is important is that these firms have picked up the slack that they had developed in 2009-10 even as recovery in mature markets, where their main customers reside, has been uncertain.

Undoubtedly, the Indian leaders face a major challenge in maintaining their scorching pace of growth and high margins, and they are aware of it. Hence the generational changes that have taken place at the top. Thus, right now they seem to be measuring up to the challenges before them.

Kuch Meetha Hoo Jaaye....

Let’s explore a simple question, how any company will expand its business; answer could be like expanding in to new geographies, add new offerings/products/services. But given the global competition it looks difficult to attain the growth if you try only these.

But there are few visionary companies who create new markets and thus expand. Apple, for example created new market with MP3 player, even though there was an existing competition, iPod created a new market by itself. Similarly, Apple products like iPhone, iPad created new market segments and thus boosted the business growth.

There are other examples as well, like 3M’s Duct tape, J&J’s Bandaid, Tata Motors Nano are few such examples where a new market segment was created through innovative products.

But there is some interested phenomenon happening with Cadbury Dairy milk chocolate. Cadbury is growing business by expanding in to new target audience and thus reaching new set of consumers.

Let’s look at traditional chocolate industry market reach, its generally kids or the collage going young generation. But Cadbury is slowly changing this.

First it reached to the festival celebration time, and marketed Dairy milk as a sweet which can be exchanged during the festival like Diwali or can be gifted to brothers/sisters during Rakhi. Secondly, it started marketing dairy milk as a substitute to a sweet you can take home when you are really happy and wanted to celebrate, like salary day or when you get a job or when marriage gets settled.

Now, Cadbury has reached to your dinner table literally. It is now marketing Dairy milk as a substitute to the sweet we use on day-to-day life. It’s been projected as a normal sweet we use after dinner as dessert.

Let’s look as how it expanded the target market. When they expanded in to festival celebration, they expanded out of traditional young market in to a household mass, but still limited to some part of the year, like Diwali, Rakhi, New Year etc. When they expanded the reach to happy moments, they reached our happy moments and became part of our lives. Now, in the process of reaching our dinner table, the target market has even expanded in to possibly each and every house!

This is very smart positioning of a product, expanding the business through innovative approach. In this process, the same product is being expanded in to different market segments, creating new consumers. Compared to traditional way of creating new products, this is clearly a different way of expanding.

What’s the sweet at dinner in your house today?

Papularity and Leadership

Question is what is the probability of all successful business leaders having high score on popularity barometer?

In tough business environments like one we are in to, all the times leaders are tested against the ability to make tough decisions in the better interest of the business. Be it asking a unit head to leave or asking management to take pay cut, or it could be deciding to walkout of a deal (Remember Infosys deciding to walk out of GE business when Mr. Murthy was CEO and when it accounted for 40% of its business) leaders are being constantly under situations where they need to make tough calls.

Given kind of media attention, impact on the morality of the employees and the stock market beating for any wrong information; one has to be extra careful on the decisions taken or the communication aspect of the decision (It is told, that Infosys informed stockholders about GE deal upfront and the steps being taken, when the deal with GE episode happened)

Now having understood that the business leaders have to make tough calls, how successful business leaders are still high on popularity chart? Mr. Murthy made so many tough decisions; still we treat him as icon of software industry, Mr. JRD took some tough calls in his lifetime, he is regarded as one of business icons of modern India. There are countless such examples around us, in the past and present.

First, we all appreciate the fact that why this tough decision was made. They all were made in better interest of the business. Secondly what makes a big difference is the approach as how a tough call was executed (I have seen several wrongly executed decisions in the past, which impacted more negatively). Third is all successful leaders handled the person in question or situation with so much of delicacy that the impact was minimized. Empathy makes a big difference.

As it is rightly said, CEOs don’t run the popularity show but make tough calls all the times. But what appears to make a big difference between a successful leader and ordinary is the approach to the situation or person in question.

That’s about leadership!

Two different nations and different people

This weekend I drove to Wagha border and the whole experience of driving to Indian border was thrilling. The site of other side of the border prompted many questions.

Every common Indians, to large extent, don’t like Pakistan as country. And I know through couple of my Pakistani friend’s that Pakistani media and Pakistani people hate India and Indians. Quite strange but true! While I was in US, I had long chat sessions with my Pakistani friend and had understood many perspectives about India.
Seems Bolloywood is a great hit though.

We might say, we were same country about 60 odd years back and we had similar culture before that. But so many changes have happened in the last half-century. I was actually told that unlike in the past, today’s generation in Pakistan is growing up without having Hindu neighborhood.

These are the thoughts that came to my mind when I was cheering for India and looking across the border and trying to think what might be going through a common Pakistani’s mind standing across the border.

I concluded, we are two different people, belonging to two different nations!!

World Cup Cricket, Indian Team, India and Business Lessons...

First of all, congratulations to all of us, to every proud Indian to be part of this dream achievement of winning the world cup. It was a great emotion. After all, Cricket is our national passion and we all take very pride and emotional when comes to Cricket. And after all its world cup!

However, though I didn’t follow the entire set of matches, I thought there are set of business lessons.

1) Having a Dream, a Vision: Indian team had a vision or a dream to win a world cup. And team started preparing towards that. Look at the recent records of India before world cup, they have been constantly raising the bar of performance.

2) Having a bigger picture: No doubt, Indian team did face some setbacks during the journey, they lost to SA, almost managed a tie with England, didn’t win with comfort while playing with minor teams, however, team had a bigger vision, they could let these things to and regroup to accomplish a bigger task. And peak when it is required.

3) Leading from the front: Dhoni led it from the front, be it promoting himself in batting order or marshaling his forces and keeping his cool during tension times. It’s a great leadership lesson, keeping a cool head when things start going wrong and focus on end result. I personally picked few things from Dhoni’s leadership skills. It is pretty impressive.

4) Having Strategy in Place: It appeared that Indian team had a strategy in place, for every team and for every opponent. Every business leader should have a strategy in place to execute.

5) Admit Mistakes Openly. Dhoni few times admitted the mistakes he or team made. This is a leadership lesson, if things are going wrong, leader should accept the mistake and make sure it is not repeated again.

6) Celebrate Victory: Celebrate every win and success!!

7) Have Mentor: Its important to have mentor in life, as Indian team had Garry as coach, who can tell you when to change the gears and can analyze you.

8) Mental Stability: Indian team seems to have lot of mental strength, which builds the confidence and to say never die when things are going bad. Leader should have this mental stability to face the worst and take action.

It might appear that since India won world cup all of a sudden all looks very positive. But again, this is what corporate life is all about, keep wining….

The Social Network: The Movie

Good to back, yes I am back from business trip. It feels great when you come back to India.

While returning back I saw the movie, The Social Network on the plane, the story of Face Book and Mark Zuckerberg. Though its an old movie, I got a chance to see it now.
What I liked is the energy of the character and the reflection of the fact that how true business minded Mark is. Heard so many stories about his business focus. Movie has successfully captures the birth and evolution of Facebook and how differently Mark wanted to build it.

It also captures the struggle of Facebook founders to differentiate it amidst cluttered social networking market place. This is I really like. Any business needs to have a differentiated offerings and clearly articulated value proposition to the customers. And I think most part of the movie is based on this struggle as how they wanted to build this value prop.

Facebook’s success is double edged sword, having its own controversies, but we need to look at this as a great business success of our times. Bringing the social life to internet was some path breaking idea and Facebook makes brings up successfully.

BTW, I am merely 3 weeks old with Facebook, but I have already started liking it and is very active!!

Time, Life & philosophical weekend

It will be perhaps a philosophical flavored post!

There is an incident in Mahabharata, when Pandavas escaped from the fire incident, they went underground and has to go home-after-home in search of food. It is termed as even kings have to bow down to the power of time and follow what comes on the way.

How true!!

Many times we start thinking that we are in full control of life and start assuming everything in our way. We tend to forget the fact that there is a super control which is governing everything, our way of living and things happening in our life. That is what is called as ‘state-of-ignorance’, being ignorant of everything.

Then life starts teaching you, it gives every lesson with such a shock that we can’t forget the lesson associated with that. This is life. When you start thinking you are in full control of your life, there comes a big turn, a shock, a lesson, an incident, which ultimately shapes the future.

But, funny part is, the same life which gives you a shock, gives you a strong mind to face it, love and support from near and dear ones, which ultimately helps you to come out of woods and start feeling ‘life is all about those green shots where you say life is beautiful’

Life is full of such bright and dark shades, which makes it an interesting journey. Otherwise probably we don’t understand the importance of what all we have got in life.

Best suggestion, in such cases I got was, have patience and move on!

Social Networking and You!

Couples of interesting things happened with me last couple of week’s related to social networking.

First, I gave a presentation in our LUTT (Lets Talk Technology) session [This is the forum across the company where the technical presentations will be made regarding emerging trends]. It was quite an interesting one in terms of talking about social networking media without talking about any application in particular.

The broad agenda of the session was to introduce social media, concept of web 2.0, how it is transforming the work we do. How it is transforming our day-to-day browsing habits. The important factor is as how social media is changing the game of marketing.

Second thing was, I actually created my Facebook account, I am active on Orkut and Linkedin, but wanted to follow the leader and get started on Facebook. Surprisingly, it seems everyone is already in there and been effectively using to express themselves!!

I have intention of using this account as a marketing tool. But, I do understand it takes a bit of effort and time to make it more professional. But, I am amazed to understand the potential social media has in bringing up a change in our lives.

Social Networking and you and you can’t miss this!!

Faulty model or part of strategy or just a stick on bad performance?

Couple of week’s back, Wipro scrapped the joint CEO model for it’s IT business and appointed a new CEO to run the business. There are several stories fly around as why this was done now.

Many analysts say the management structure was faulty, as the model can work at best as a stop-gap arrangement. Industry watchers believe it was Wipro’s performance over the last four to five quarters that prompted the rejig at the top, after a three-year experiment with the dual CEO structure. Its believed that Wipro did not take an aggressive enough market-facing approach during the downturn, there in the growth after the downturn was not as big as other Indian companies. It failed to encash the growth in Financial segment.

While Premji mentioned the company’s performance vis-à-vis some of its peers, the real threat to Wipro comes from Nasdaq-listed Cognizant, which is a few steps behind. While a section of analysts feels that Cognizant will overtake Wipro in terms of revenue growth in the fourth quarter of this fiscal, there are indications that it would have already done so in the October-December quarter.

Many also point out that Wipro’s business model just did not allow it to make the best of the recovery. The banking, financial & insurance sector accounted for 50-55 per cent of Cognizant’s revenues and in excess of 35 per cent at Infosys and TCS. “So, they have got the advantage of extremely high turbocharged growth, which has happened in the financial services sector — an advantage we did not get,” Premji has noted.

The failure of the dual CEO model, if you want to call this as failure at all, is not attributed to individual capability. It’s more about lack of communication. You have two people and will work in different ways. Dual CEO also means a lengthy decision-making process and contradictory viewpoints. It also means a lack of nimbleness in an organization.

In the case of Wipro, many feel perhaps this was a stop-gap arrangement for Rishad Premji to make his mark on the business. He is very involved in all the important decisions, but Wipro denies this and says there is nothing like it and board made the decision about this shift.

Whatever is the reason behind the change, it has surprised many people, both internal to Wipro and at outside industry.

(data was taken by different souces….)

Need of Domain Experts

Indian IT industry in general is more technology driven and we don’t find more domain or technology experts. Recently we were trying to build domain competency in logistics field, but finding one domain expert was almost impossible.

There is a social and monitory pressure at the junior and middle levels to take up more people management roles as they are attractive in monitory and designation roles. Also, people manager is perceived as more powerful role.

However, leadership is not just about leading people, business and organizations. More and more companies, especially in technology space, are creating positions for domain experts. I have seen few of my friends choose to be domain experts over people managers and are doing good.

So, we are fast getting in to a situation where both technical and people management is considered equally important for running an operation of an IT company. In the recent past, Indian IT industry has really moved up in the value chain and created space for providing domain/technical expertise as business offering. This provides opportunities for domain and technology experts.

So, its ok to say I don’t want to manage people!

An air of confidence: How Indigo’s ambition is soaring

Couple of weeks back IndiGo airlines, which is a budget carrier in Indian skies, moved to European stock market when it announced the biggest deal in aviation history. Topping up an earlier plan to buy 100 planes with another 180 in a decade from 2015, IndiGo has demonstrated a shopping bag of $15.6 billion to buy Airbus aircrafts that would power its ambition to become an international player.

Barely five years after it started off as a humble budget carrier that people hardly noticed, IndiGo has emerged as a serious challenger to deep pocketed Kingfisher and Jet airlines. Indigo reported a profit of RS 550 crore last year, while most of the Indian airlines reported losses.

IndiGo’s success story starts from the concrete business plan its founders, Rahul Bhatia and Rakesh Gangwal, had and they built a very good initial team. Their first CEO, Bruce Ashby built the right systems, processes and competitive cost structure. They have been concentrating on what the customer wants, on-time departures, clean aircraft and good and clean flying experience, they stick to this plan and didn’t try anything else. The airline has impressive 80.6% ontime performance.

IndiGo’s 180 aircraft deal with Airbus has shifted the word’s focus on India. The historic order is a very strong comment on India’s overall economic growth, the growth potential of countries aviation sector and confidence of IndiGo’s business plan, its ability to execute such a large order and to raise the funds for it. This order for industry leading fuel efficient aircraft will allow IndiGo to continue to offer low fares.

Airlines have come and gone ever since the skies were opened up nearly two decades ago. While East West Airlines and ModiLuft had glamorous starts; Jet seemed to be only one going steadily forward until Kingfisher arrived. As it happened, the budget airline that fired the country’s imagination, Air Deccan has bitten off more than it could chew and ended up with Kingfisher Airlines, while Jet gobbled Sahara.

IndiGo, on the contrast, has behaved more like the tortoise in the race with hare. From day one, it has behaved as nothing but a no-frills airline and focused more on making the roads in the industry.

It appears that, IndiGo has clear business plan and strategy to expand itself as International carrier as it is completing 5 years of flying, which is required to get international flaying license. Clear message is, if you have a differentiator, you can win even though you are late entry in to the game.

Auction of IPL Players

Last week’s auction of IPL players reminds me of the fact that, if you have money you can walk out with any player you want. And infact there were some players which were not taken by anyone, which talks about the uncertainty.

This reminded me the NFL draft pick of American Football League (Its true with NBA or MLB to that matter) The difference there is, the week team gets to choose the first draft, in turn the strongest college player. When that auction happens, only the data about players statistics related to games are being displayed and his footage is shown so that teams can made decisions.

Salary will not be discussed there and that is up to the player and team management to sit down and decide on the salary, keeping the salary cap in mind. This allows the team to define the bonus structure and in turn keeps player on the toes to perform.

In my opinion, that is a correct way of putting the college players in to professional world. Imagine if we have similar thing where we induct Ranaji players in to mainstream?

That’s why I like American sports and I feel it is more professional!