Sudha Murty's Discovery of the Indian Spirit

The current post is about a book that I am currently reading. Few books have excited me like this one, excitement enough for me to recommend the book to others - this post is an instrument to that end.

The Old Man & His God by Sudha Murthy is the book I am currently reading. The most striking thing of this book is its simplicity. Simplicity of language aside, I think it is the simplicity with which the free human spirit has been captured and presented that has caught my imagination.

Sudha Murthy is well known for the work of the Infosys Foundation that she runs. In the course of her work with the needy mostly in rural India, she encounters some really fascinating dimensions of the human spirit. The Old Man & His God is a collection of the author's encounters with the complexities of human nature - some rare virtues, some common misgivings and some strange anomalies. There are also accounts of her interaciton with her students, friends and associates - encompassing a complete spectrum of the Indian society.

Not that all the accounts described are truly astonishing. Some of them are pretty commonplace except that we normally don't tend to capture those defining insights from the happenings around us.

True to the caption Discovering the Spirit of India, this book does discover the spirit of the Indian society and takes the reader through an enriching journey - one that matures him to an elevated pedestal from where understanding human psyche becomes more easy and enjoyable.

Eight Business Technology trends to watch : McKinsey Report

Business model innovation is as important as Technology innovation in surging ahead of competition. A recent McKinsey study identifies EIGHT Business Technology trends that can potentially transform Businesses. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity:

Managing relationships

• Distributing Co-creation: Decentralizing innovation. Eg: Like LINUX was developed. Such models to extend to the creation of physical goods as well.
• Using consumers as innovators: Eg: Like the knowledge resource Wikipedia. This model to extend to industries as diverse as Fashion and Apparel. Internet, Web 2.0 technologies to play the enablers.
• Tapping into a world of talent: Integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders. Opens up many contracting options for managers of corporate functions. New talent deployment models to emerge.
• Extracting more value from interactions: More efficient tacit interactions. Smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions—that will be difficult for their rivals to replicate.

Managing capital and assets

• Expanding the frontiers of automation: Interlink “islands of automation” and give managers and customers the ability to do new things.
• Unbundling production from delivery: Disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components. Raise utilization rate of capital and therefore RoIC. Offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to be competitive.

Leveraging information in new ways

• Putting more science into management: Getting into the skin of customers. Eg: Google's internal market for ideas. Intel's 'prediction market'. Amazon's CRM abilities.The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall.
• Making businesses from information: 'Information is wealth'. Exploit imperfections in the market forces. Eg: Real Estate market.