Brave For Free

Sitting within view of a three hundred year old pleasure palace, I was part of a lively discussion yesterday on what motivated us into coming back to India. I moved to the USA relatively late, having traveled back and forth for something like a decade before I decided to change residences in 2003, just after 9/11. When I finally did move to New York, I was already an experienced hand at American basic like driving a car and ordering at McDonalds. Most of my friends, on the other hand, had been dunked in cold straight out of college. Returning, for me, was thus somewhat different - I had not grown the same roots that people who had lived there a decade or more had. It was still a very large move nevertheless, not quite like moving back to Mumbai after a few years in Bangalore. America wasn't just another location change, it was the adoption of a different way of life that was very attractive in many ways. Coming back was therefore an event of some consequence, even if you had just l...

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The Who Question Once you've clarified why you're looking for an outsource partner and also which pieces to outsource, you're faced with the next big question – who? What should you look for in your potential outsourcing partner? The choice, I put to you, comes down to four linked characteristics. Ability The first characteristic, of course, is ability. A vendor cannot be under consideration at all if the basic ability to handle whatever you plan to outsource is not present. This is not always an easy thing to judge, especi...

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The What Question The second in the series deals with the what – choosing which parts of IT can be and should be outsourced to a partner. Of course, one must first decide how one defines "parts of IT" in the first place – and different companies have slightly different approaches. Some will do it by business unit, others by geography, reporting structures or cost head. I have found it most convenient to consider any application , function or service a s a candidate for outsourcing. Applications are software-hardware combinations,...

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The Why Question Why outsource? Given that a trillion-dollar industry has crowded a lot of people into Bangalore and made more than one driver rich, it seems a little late to ask this question. However, this isn't really about outsourcing being good or bad per se. Bloggers like us love to wallow in theoretical questions; companies usually want answers to more prosaic stuff. The question really is, why should a company be looking for an outsource partner ?   I've divided the universe into two simple flavours – Tactical and Str...

Before a death diverted my thoughts, I was planning to write about movements and leaders. I did not want to comment further on either side of the Lokpal debate, but it did get me thinking about how the drive had started in the first place, and why a man without any particular credentials can make us part of his crusade About movements, leadership and what forms them. A couple of weeks ago I came across two TED videos that seemed particularly relevant. In the first, Derek Sivers talks about how movements get started The Anna story brought this to mind. A relatively ordinary, obscure man from well outside the centre of events; he probably started by dancing to his own tune, just on his own. He probably did not start with thoughts of followers or movements. Somewhere down the line, he got his first follower – maybe Arvind Kejriwal - and eventually a movement formed. I found this rather personally interesting too. Of course, I have no intention of starting any movement that leads to fastin...

While the corruption movement rages on, a personal note of sadness intruded yesterday. At breakfast, my mother casually mentioned to me an accident where a coconut tree had fallen on someone, killing him; we dwelled briefly on the freak, tragic nature of it – trees don't usually fall on people in Mumbai, coconut trees even less so – but I didn't think very much of it then. The next morning, a large obituary notice abruptly made the matter more personal. The person in question was Ved Prakash Arya . I have known Ved, on and off, from my early IBM days; he was a customer then. We met again a decade later; him as COO of Pantaloon Retail (Future Group was still in the future) and me as a newly minted CEO of subsidiary company Futurebazaar. I can safely say that I would not have made it through my first year without help, and a key person providing the steadying hand was Ved. He was effectively my boss, but more than formal interaction Ved's off-the-cuff feedback and pointers...

I do want to think of Anna as a force of good, I really do. An honest man who is able to inspire lakhs of people to come out on the streets in protest seems just the kind of leader I want to follow. Yet I fret. And suggest bravely, for free, that many things about the Lokpal Bill campaign make me deeply uncomfortable. I've read the draft texts of both the government bill and the Jan Lokpal version , and I must say I do not find the government draft as unreasonable as is made out to be. I do not agree with some significant parts of it, but I have more differences with the Jan Lokpal than with the government version. First, I dislike the process. Anna's fast is not a protest – it is an insistence on getting his way over others. He now wants bill passed (not just presented to parliament mind you – but passed ) in a mere three weeks more; differing opinions be damned. Gandhi is known for his fasts, but he was protesting against an authority he had no way to participate in. Als...