Gray Smoke

I saw this great talk on Delusion of Positive Thinking Proponents. In the corporate world, everyone is expected to rally around the leader and buy in to the leader's vision.. This is supposed to make the person/company successful. Even though most successful solutions come from the ground where they get executed, the leader often pushes not just their vision but also their solution. No one can voice dissent against this solution however impractical it may be. Early in my career, I thought my dissenting note was not heard because I was a junior engineer. However, over the years I have realized that the leader's deafness to a dissenting voice is because leaders needs to keep justifying that their worth. They surround themselves with many YES-men who are willing to accommodate every whim and fancy of the boss. These people do not take ownership when things fail, as they were only following the boss' orders. Instead, they end up getting rewarded for their efforts, even ...

When researching for the Indian market, I have been trying to find out how many urban household are there and the income level. On 13th September a very interesting article by Indicus Analytics was published in the Mint newspaper. Using data from that, we can see that there are 7 Million households above the income of Rs. 5L rupees out of which 2.1 Million households are there in the 5 Metros alone. Population Cities Notable city Households (M) Total Population (M) Households with > Rs 5L Income Metro >5 M  5 Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore 12.1 49.2 17.9% Mini-Metro > 3 M 5 Hyderabad, Ahmadabad, Pune, Coimbatore, Chandigarh 3.8 15.9 18.6% Tier I > 1 Million 33 Allahabad, Jodhpur, Vishakapatam 10.5 48.2 13.8% Tier II Between 0.6-1M 28 Bhuvaneshwar, Thiruvanantapuram, Ranc...

Customer satisfaction is one the most abused terms in management. Almost every CEO wants their company to be rated high on this. However very few are willing to invest in making sure this happens. For his you need to make sure your operations, your product and even your sales is focussed towards it. It starts with sales not over committing and selling what is available. The product itself must be designed to meet the customers explicit and implicit needs and finally the operation must make sure that these product/service delivered to the customer is as expected. Breakup down in any one of the steps will hurt the satisfaction.

An amazing article by Joe Nocera that demystify how VaR mislead everyone to take more risk. RISK Mismanagement - What Led to the Financial Meltdown - NYTimes.com I am a great fan of Nicholas Taleb. I am not an expert on Statistics or Modeling but I find it appalling how data can be misrepresented for vested interests. One of the most interesting aspects was that VaR gave a 99% risk prediction for the next day. 99% may sound reassuring but the remaining 1% percent failure means 3.5 days in a year. I first encountered 99% folly when I saw my Internet SLA had 99% up time. It means that 3.5 days in a year, I could not do business. The cost of calculating the confidence level or delivering the service is an exponential curve. 95% may cost $1 Million, 99% will cost $10 Million, 99.9% will cost $100 Million. As 95% is not reassuring, it makes sense to get 99% assurance by spending the marginal cost but not worth spending money to get 99.9% assurance. In 99% we do not build any backups and ...

Finally an amazing article by Joe Nocera that demystify how VaR mislead everyone to take more risk. RISK Mismanagement - What Led to the Financial Meltdown - NYTimes.com I am a great fan of Nicholas Taleb. I am not an expert on Statistics or Modeling but I find it appalling how data can be misrepresented for vested interests. One of the most interesting aspects was that VaR gave a 99% risk prediction for the next day. 99% may sound reassuring but the remaining 1% percent failure means 3.5 days in a year. I first encountered 99% folly when I saw my Internet SLA had 99% uptime. It means that 3.5 days in a year, I could not do business. The cost of calculating the confidence level or delivering the service is an exponential curve. 95% may cost $1 Million, 99% will cost $10 Million, 99.9% will cost $100 Million. As 95% is not reassuring, it makes sense to get 99% assurance by spending the marginal cost but not worth spending money to get 99.9% assurance. In 99% we do not build any back...

I was reading an article on NYT about cap on executive pay and in recent past I have been having similar discussion with my friends. I think the executive pays were becoming obscene and at times I do not find a logical reasoning to such high salaries other than will not find the right talent. I know of a lot of bright guys who work in government rather than private sector because they can make a larger difference. I know of bright folks who work with social sector rather than government/private sector because of the change they bring about to bottom of the pyramid. Similarly I think there will be a lot of right minds who will want to work in industries rather than financial services because the impact they make. After all it is the mercenaries who want to make money in short term, who have ruined the manufacturing base in US. Do you really want a person who is after short term money to run your company ? Why not hire a consultant for that period to just fix the specific issue ? The ...