THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

If Dr Prahalad's previous book on BOP kicked up quite a debate, here's one that you should not forget reading - "The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value through Global Networks" must be read for the brilliance alone. Read more...

Extremely few companies in India have achieved such an astounding success as Wipro, which was founded as an edible oil company and turned to IT. In fact, people outside India would be surprised to know that Wipro makes childcare products, lighting products etc. It is now a USD 4 BN giant employing nearly hundred thousand employees. Read More..

When I run a search on the word ' innovation' in the books section at Amazon, it returned over two hundred and forty seven thousand records. Don't believe this? Try clicking here or see the imagelet below. What I am trying to highlight is that innovation is probably the most written about subject in last few years. To the point that at one point I sincerely believed the word has become cliched - till I became a believer in this word again. Dr C.K.Prahalad and M.S.Krishnan have published a recent bestseller on "The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co Created Value Through Global Networks" ( It came in a shrink wrap and hence the title of this post). Frankly, the last time I read Dr Prahalad was BOP and came back with what I can call as subterranean dissonance. With the expectation that beneath the shrink wrap would be a new idea, a new thought argument, I look forward to reading ( and subsequently joining the debate on this subject by kicking off a post) ...

Over the last few years, I have read several books around some of the great corporations of the world. Some of them have been written by people who have led those companies. Jack Welch ( Straight from the Gut ) and Carlos Ghosn ( Shift ) have written books which essentially talk about business transformation of the companies they have led, or continue to lead. I have also come across books such as those by Madan Birla (I have attended a webinar he gave in my company, not read his book titled Fedex Delivers ) who have been senior leaders of some of world's great companies.I have also come across books on a theme where the reflection of a corporation keeps coming back again and again - such as Tom Friendman's The World is Flat (Sorry, but I remain a dissenter when it comes to The World is Flat as a book.) I have almost finished reading Cold Steel by Bouquet & Byron . The books I have read in the past have traced the history of corporations over decades. This one actua...

Okay, I totally agree it is a bad idea to judge a book by its cover . However, Nicolas Carr's Big Switch ( "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google" ) has quite a compelling teaser on its jacket. I haven't started reading the book though. It says that a hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their individual power and joined newly created electrical power grids. Something like that is happening to our lives through the internet via the likes of Google, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Google and so on. " The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the "The World Wide Computer"." Now, doesn't that sound very promising? Geert Lovink has a detailed post.

It isn't my practice to comment on books while I have not finished them, I am deviating this time. I started reading Cold Steel byTim Bouquet & Byron Ousey early this week. At end of 100 pages (out of a total of 323 ) some observations: This book is about personalities, and personalities. Expect no great business insight, this book is general reading. Ergo, if you hate business books and like general reading, go ahead and buy a copy. The book is like an extremely long event report, language will make you feel you are reading a newspaper at bedtime. The Arcelor management have been characterized from the beginning as irrational, insecure, somewhat immature. The authors have started this book with a certain mindset, which cannot be termed as fully balanced. And of course, as you would expect, Mittals family members and Mittal employees have been shown as competent and temperamentally very controlled. Have no illusion, this book is only about the Arcelor and Mittal Steel merger,...

Blame it on IPL. My reading (blogging too!) has suffered a slowdown of late. More so because I did not notice seriously appealing business reading in my last few trips to Landmark and Odyssey stores. I also felt quite irritated at the parking problems in Chennai Citi Centre and the crowds at Landmark Spencers to just drop the idea of some serious book-surfing. However, when you cannot chase books, sometimes books themselves beckon you. I find two books on my table competing for my attention. So what am I planning to read? Nicolas Carr , thinker and author, who kicked a storm few years with his earlier work " Does IT Matter? " His latest book is titled equally provocatively, " The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google ".                     The other option is " Cold Steel: Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion Dollar Battle for a Global Empire" by Tim Bouquet and ...

I have read The Tipping Point   by Malcolm Gladwell and even commented about it in passing . I did like the central point of that book and though been meaning to read Blink ( Full title is Blink- The Power of Thinking without Thinking ) but then reading has been a little low of late. Finally I am resuming (with great hopes!) my reading for 2008 by borrowing Blink from my boss' personal collection (I am blessed- he's quite a bibliophile). Meanwhile, do check out SR's and prolific reader Heather's impressions of this book. I shall come back with my thoughts few days from now. Related post: Shelfari is a book lover's delight.

The debate on globalisation moves forward. Move over Tom Friendman, here comes Prof Pankaj Ghemawat . To be frank, when I had read Tom Friedman's The World is Flat in 2005 at the height of its frenzy, my first thought was that it is an over hyped reporting, rather than something really based on facts and figures. It is good to hear that a scholar such as Pankaj says the same in this interview with Economic Times . Not that I am an accomplished scholar as Prof Ghemawat to be able to counter Tom Friedman's oh-so-adored theory, but simply put, it appeared to further a romantic idea of globalisation which everyone wanted to hear, rather than something based on facts. I had done a post on this subject on this blog, which incidentally, was among my first blog posts. While I have not read Prof. Ghemawat book Redefining Global Strategy yet, certainly waiting for it to appear in the shelves in India. So what if it was published in Sept 2007- the world is so flat yet.

While there are a zillion sites in the social networking genre and hundreds spring up by the week, Bibliophiles would love this social networking site called Shelfari. This is a space to find out what is being read by others on different subjects, what's really hot in terms of the latest bestsellers and to discover what others are saying on books you have read or plan to read. An absolutely delightful sight that lets you discover and discuss books with book lovers worldwide. You can also build your 'to read' list based on reviews by others, as well as join(or form) a community around a specific subject or them. Click here or the image below for my virtual bookshelf . Shelfari: My virtual book world

Sukumar has done a post on a lecture by Dan Tapscott who has authored Wikinomics ( The full title is Wikinomics- How mass collaboration changes everything ) with Anthony Williams. Actually this book has been in my to read list for almost a year and it is only now that I have been able to lay my hands on a copy - thanks to Odyssey . One of my old agonies with bookstores in India is that they don't get books till it is branded as a success in the western world. Somehow, in this respect, the world is not flat yet! Though I am just forty pages deep into it and hope to post again once I am done reading, I remain quite convinced on how IT enabled mass collaboration is changing the world as we know it- come on, we knew it even before we started reading this book - Wikinomics appears to give our own thoughts that much more backbone of reasoning to make it more believable.(In the below Video, Dan talks at Google on the thoughts that make Wikinomics). I shall be back once I am done readi...

Dr Jagdish Sheth , renowned thought leader was at Madras Management Association on 15th Oct and as a member I had the privilege of attending his talk, which I can describe as simple and mind boggling. Dr Sheth spoke on Seven Self Destructive Habits of Good Companies which is published as a book. Dr Sheth pointed out at the beginning of his presentation that a third of the companies listed in Fortune 500 in 1970 had vanished by 1983! Dr Sheth spoke about the seven habits as: Denial (of realities) Arrogance (Often success breeds this) Complacency (When companies have tasted the fruits of success and don't feel the need to better themselves) Competence Dependence (When they have something they have identified as a core skill which seem to have worked for them - the requirement for the skill may get washed out due to disruptive change, maybe technology led) Competitive myopia (Identifying your competition incorrectly and then refusing to see the truth) Volume obsession ( "Let...

Okay, I admit this upfront.Tim Harford's Undercover Economist is a must read. Read the below to see a real life problem. Mayor of Moscow :Tell me, who's in charge of the supply of bread to the city of London? British Host: No one. I should have read Tim Harford's Undercover Economist long ago. This book seeks to find, analyse and explain for a layman, economic sense (blended with copious supply of common sense) behind some of the most ordinary phenomenon from real life. Well, some have compared this to Freakonomics , but I would say my experience with TUE as much superior. Economics is a field of study which , as some great light said, predicts the past. It tends to be drab, and academic, due to which most of us do not even want to spend (waste?) our time in understanding the economic phenomenon. This would be quite different, if the teacher the Tim Harford. My favourite chaoters of this book remain "Who Pays for your coffee" ( an eye opener) and "The Cros...

In my post titled Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid - What I liked and what I didn't I wrote about my impressions on Dr CK Prahalad's work titled ' The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid '. Frankly when I read the book, I did not come out fully convinced.It all sounded very nice, but not very pursuasive. My curiousity led me to search a bit more on this debate. I came across a paper by Prof. Aneel Karnani published in California Management Review . The paper titled Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid: A Mirage comes out hard on the BOP concept as enunciated in Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by Dr Prahalad. While Dr Prahalad's work focusses on how corporations can make money selling even to the marginal wage earner, Dr Karnani questions the viability of such a proposition, even talks on issues such as affordability of this segment of consumers. He even questions the suitability of the cases used to substantiate the BOP proposition (such as Annapurna salt)....

I was reading Robert Scoble and Shel Israel 's great but slightly old(well, in tech arena, one year is fairly old) book titled Naked Conversations ( Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers) The book is such captivating read, and no, time had no effect on the relevance of the contents, which is blogging as a medium of communication. At some point NC tries raises the question on whether (corporate) blogs can be equated with Marketing. A new term conversational marketing emerges, and I feel it is quite apt. I tried hard to think of reasons on why in today's world blogs are getting adopted as a medium for individual or group communication, but not so quicky as a channel for corporate communications. The following is my hypothesis: The campaign mindset :Conventional marketers like to send cues through regular media (print, TV, outdoors, packaging) and wait for the agency to tell them if it worked. Blogs are a two way communication chann...

As I wrote in my earlier post, I read C. K. Prahalad's thoughts on Eradicating Poverty Through Profits through the lenses of the book titled "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" ( Wharton School Publishing). As is my habit, I started by reading the preface where I was pleasantly surprised to see the name of a former colleague of mine, Praveen Suthrum, who went to be Dr. Prahalad's student and contributed to this book. The central premise of this book appears to be that one need not be in the developed world to create a world class enterprise - there are companies that have created a niche in their own ways wherever they are. And while doing things differently, they have not sacrificed the profit motive - they are hugely successful, famous and respected.The book has studied some very successful and homegrown companies in South America and India and attempted to bring out what made them successful. This book is a break for Indian B-School students, who for genera...

I heard CKP at an academic event couple of years back and was stuck by a mesmerizing presentation he gave on what appeared in the bookstore later as "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". As a logical sequel, this book appeared on the shelves of a colleague a months back, and I have helpfully borrowed it, without giving my colleague the chance to say no. So next few days, I will have this highly talked about book for bedtime reading. Shall certainly write when I finish, which I am hoping will be by end of next week. Updated: Here is the post.

Greedy about the possibility of carrying an R K Laxman cartoon in my pocket, I signed up for a designer credit card offered by State Bank of India. Yes, the silliest reason I can think for signing up for a card but let me be honest. It turned out that the card was a co-branded Indian Railways credit card and came with a free membership to Frequent Flyer Traveller programme, which I never cared about since my travel with the railways can hardly be called Frequent . So I was at New Delhi station ready to board a long journey to Chennai and could not find my name in the reservation chart despite having a printout of my e-ticket. Still I went on sat of the berth showing on my ticket, took out the ticket one more time and pored over it for any date errors. Could not find any. There was a newly wed couple sitting there who were in certain need of more private space, and I was feeling very very awkward. The conductor came soon enough and I gave him my ticket with very eerie feeling. Then...

Very few people can dream big. Even fewer can pursue those dreams to reality. A visionary, a technocrat and a project manager par-excellence rolled into one is Abdul Kalam for us.President A.P.J Abdul Kalam is one such distinguished person who has proved that dreams can be chased to reality by hard work. No wonder President Kalam is such a popular president. How popular, read on. Few days before MS Subbulakshmi died, President Kalam visited her at her house in Chennai. It was evening post work hour and due to President Kalam's visit, the Police had stopped traffic. I was heading home and found myself in a jam at Kottur bridge connecting Turnbulls road with Gandhi Mandam road. We were curious why the traffic is standstill and people including myself felt frustrated. Frustrated till the policeman on duty uttered the word 'Kalam'. It was a different story that point onwards. People switched off the engines, locked their cars and stood on the road median, just to get a glimpse ...

It is perhaps a very tough task to write about a company such as Google, which somehow has become part of our daily life in many ways. I recently read David A. Vise's The Google Story after resisting it for quite a while. I had earlier read John Battelle's The Search and left brief comments on this blog, but not quite kept my word to write more about that.Battelle's book is more about the core theme of Google which is search, arguably. He focuses a lot on other 1000 lb gorillas of the net, whereas David Wise is more focused on Google and Google alone. It is perhaps, very tempting, but not an easy task to write about Google as a company. This company did not exist 10 years back, and now commands a market cap of USD 155 BN .(Snapshot taken from Google Finance ). A company such as Microsoft which has been in existence for generations now(yes, in tech world 1975 is several generations) and unquestionbly a pathbreaking pioneer and market leader has an M-cap of about USD 294 B...