Month: August 2001

Think about where we spend most of our time in front of a PC now. It is in the Email application, and to a lesser extent, the Web Browser. There is a shift happening from files to messages, from the desktop to the “mailtop”. The triad of email, instant messaging and short message service (SMS) on cellphones creates a new window of opportunities for enterprise applications.

For India, the significance of the Internet must lie in seeking out “disruptive technologies” and leveraging them with our software expertise to extend into other markets like us. The Rest of the World (outside of US, Europe and Japan) cannot afford expensive software. What can we do for them? As we celebrate these anniversaries, we need to keep these words of Clay Christensen (the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) in mind:

If you look at the history of most industries, the companies that at one point were widely viewed as the leaders that had unassailable competitive advantages, a decade later find themselves at the bottom of the heap, displaced by a new set of companies.

A disruptive technology is something that brings to the market a product or service that is not as good as what historically had been available, and therefore it can’t be valued or used by customers in the mainstream of the market.

Yet it takes root in a different application. It isn’t as demanding, but then these trajectories slope upward faster and intersect with the customers needs and the mainstream.

One of the things that affects the probability that an innovative venture will succeed is never to frame the fundamental challenge as a technology problem. Instead, frame it as a marketing challenge and try to find an application where customers will be absolutely delighted to have a product.

The lesson of the PC industry for India is how it disrupted and disintegrated the vertically integrated computer companies like Digital Equipment. The PC was disruptive for the computer industry in the early 1980s.

Now is the time for Indian companies to think deep into the future and innovate. As companies worldwide cut back spending in the face of the slowdown, we need to think of the “New Internet” and what discontinuities it is causing and how we can leverage them. Software is where there is an opportunity going ahead. Asia has 70% of the world’s exporters. They have to be integrated into global supply chains. They need low-cost enterprise software built around the Internet – they need the functionality but cannot pay the price: can we delight them?

If the India of tomorrow symbolises Hope, then Technology spells Excitement. As India has liberalised, software exports have zoomed creating innumerable entrepreneurs seeking to initially arbitrate labour, with a few looking to go beyond to create intellectual property. The global tech slowdown has done little to dampen spirits, even though the large pool of venture capital in India has more or less evaporated to become growth capital. Technology, built on the foundation of computing, communications and software, holds the greatest promise for India and Indians going ahead to become best-of-class internationally.

In India, the installed base of Personal Computers is a mere 5-6 million. Even though India’s growth rate now of 30-35% is good enough to make her one of the more attractive Asian markets, the adoption rate is dismal. Even in corporates, the deployment rates are low and slow. The primary issues, even after all these years, remain Cost and Localisation.

The base price of the PC has not really changed much from about Rs 30-35,000 in recent years even as the innovations have made them increasingly powerful. But powerful for what? What we need in India are lower-priced computing devices for them to become adopted by a much larger segment. Making software available in local languages is another challenge – we are still stuck with the English-language versions of Microsoft Windows for the most part.

Another issue with the PC is the cost of software. Indian corporates are realising that the cost of Rs 20,000 per computer for the Windows-Office combination is serious money. All other software products priced in dollar terms become exceedingly expensive in India. The result is a proliferation of illegal software, which will become more difficult as time comes in as software companies combat piracy. This problem of software costs can become an opportunity for India in the coming years.

Commercial Internet in India is six years old. We had an opportunity to leapfrog into the communications revolution with the Internet. But short-sighted policies for both telecom and the Internet have crimped growth. We have just over 5 million Internet users and about 4 million cellphone users. While these may look big, there are quite pathetic if India has to be a force in technology in the world. Compare with China’s 25 million Internet users and over 80 million cellphones. Bandwidth availability (even for enterprises) is still limited and intermittent. Of course, there is eternal hope for tomorrow!

The consumer Internet revolution in India may have been still-born, but that does not mean an end to the opportunities. The Internet has introduced a discontinuity. As computers get networked, the primary usage is shifting from processing to communicating. For the better part of the past two decades, the focus was on applications to create and process files and documents. Now, as the Internet has brought down the cost of information exchange, the key driver for enterprises is “real-time communications”.

India and Indians are only now discovering their potential. Its like we grafted away for the first 50 in Test-match style, and now we realise it’s a one-day match and want to make up for last time! (OK, this is last of the cricketing analogies! You know, the Lagaan hangover.)

Look around India and you will see change happening. Re-organising and re-vitalising a country is not easy. In a company, one can do it through pep talks and meetings. It is much more difficult in a country. It has to come bottom-up and that takes time. People have to start believing in themselves and that if they work hard, they will be rewarded. It is akin to what is known as the “American Dream” – the reason why many chose to stay back in the US rather than return home.

A New India is emerging around us. Drive along the roads and one sees construction everywhere. Flyovers, new residential complexes, glass-laden office buildings, multiplexes, and even better roads. Brands are in, and so are retail chains. The first glimpse of franchising is visible in the food industry: McDonalds, Domino’s and Pizza Hut are now being followed by the very Indian Barista’s, Qwiky’s Coffee, Cafi Coffee Days, Pizza Corner and Hot Breads. As Business World put it in a recent cover story on The New Food Entrepreneurs, “The new start-up guys have oodles of attitude. They also have global ambitions to match.”

That is true of much of the new generation of Indian entrepreneurs. Inspired by the likes of Narayana Murthy (Infosys), Azim Premji (Wipro), Ramalinga Raju (Satyam), Subhash Chandra (Zee), Anji Reddy (Dr Reddy’s Labs) and Naresh Goyal (Jet Airways), Indians have begun to dream again. Our forefathers too had dreams at the time of Independence. Somewhere along the line in the past half-century, India lost her way. But now, powered by her people, India is fighting back – looking to regain lost time.

The New India wants to be world-class. Jet Airways has service and punctuality standards that are among the best in the world. Cellphone service available across much of India (“from the farmers of Punjab to the fishermen of Kerala”) is as good as it gets, and more importantly, is genuinely bridging distances and connecting people. The drive along the Mumbai-Pune highway, the new petrol pumps with built-in convenience stores, the varieties and brands available in the supermarkets, the production qualities of some of our movies – everything seems to be improving.

Walk in to a Shopper’s Stop, listen to the music, look at the way it is organised, watch the way people shop, stop by the food court and watch teenagers gossip in the middle of the day – one could be forgiven for thinking one is in Singapore. The slowdown not withstanding, Indians are also making more money and travelling more. Look at the two new magazines started by the Hathway group (publishers of Outlook) in the last couple of years: Intelligent Investor and Outlook Traveller.

Yes, we still have our set of problems. Our politics is a mess, much of the growth has been limited to the top Indian cities and towns while 70% of our population is agriculture-based (good news there too: today’s headline in the Economic Times reads “Despite QRs, India exports more food items”), we still have more than our fair share of scams, our telecom infrastructure in terms of bandwidth is still woefully inadequate, our labour laws have changed little, and foreign direct investment is still a fraction compared to China.

But, perhaps for the first time, there are enough reasons to see the glass as being half-full instead of half-empty. Happy Birthday, India!

Independence Days have it in them – they make one introspective. Unlike birthdays and New Year (Jan 1) when one thinks of the self, August 15 makes you think of the broader trends and where the nation is headed. Maybe, it is also because it’s a holiday in India and many of the media also carry the introspective type of content!

India batting 54, Reforms hit wicket 10, PC retired hurt 20, Internet at the non-striker’s end on 6. That’s the story of the 4 Anniversaries. (Well, only two of them actually fall on August 15 – Indian Independence Day and the launch by VSNL of commercial Internet access. The other two events happened around this time give or take a few months.)

India at 54 is only now coming to life. Across India, despite the day-to-day problems we have always faced here, there is a new optimism that tomorrow will definitely be today, and more importantly, it is in our hands to make it happen. The Reforms train has lost steam in recent times, but Indian companies have finally figured out that if they don’t improve quality and make their operations world-class, a mix of new technology, smart customers and cheaper imports will make them irrelevant.

The PC and the Internet have both garnered about 5-6 million users in India. It has been a disappointing growth. The future holds promise as one shifts from the processing era to the communications era. The computing era has given birth to the Indian software services industry, which last year garnered USD 6.2 billion in export revenues. The domestic market needs to be brought to life if we have to build the foundation for long-term growth.

Let us first take a look at India in the last 10 years. A look at some economic indicators (from an article by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in the August 20 issue of Business World):

• GDP growth rate was 5.3% in 1990-91 and 5.2% in 2000-01 (growth has slowed in recent years after rising earlier in the decade)
• Per Capita income has risen from Rs 8,283 to Rs 21,648 in the last decade (but wealth distribution continues to be very uneven)
• Inflation (as measured by the Wholesale Price Index) has fallen from 10.3% in 1990-91 to 7.1% in 2000-01
• Fiscal decficit continues to hover around 9-11%
• Services now accounts for 47% of the economy as compared to 31% a decade ago
• Forex reserves are up from the lows of USD 1 billion in 1990-91 to a comfortable USD 43 billion now

While Inflation, Services and Forex reserves are the bright points, they do not capture the shift in Attitude. Among the younger generation, there is Hope and Optimism. In many ways, this was captured by the Vajpayee of the late 1990s who could do no wrong. For the first time, India had political leadership one could be proud of. As has happened so often in India, our leaders have flattered to deceive. Instead, there is a growing belief that one’s destiny is firmly now in one’s hands. As Indians have powered ahead on the world stage, the future of India and Indians is no longer as intertwined as it was a decade ago.

Make the Best of Limited Resources. Watch how Bhuvan makes the bat and ball, and later how the pads are made. Look at the scene where Bhuvan and his team are practicing at night – the entire village is gathered around their team with mashaals to create the light. The villagers of Champaner have limited resources, but they make the best use of them. One cannot always wait for the perfect tools or for the availability of infinite resources. As entrepreneurs, we must innovate – focus on getting the work done. When one has fewer resources, the brain and body work that much harder and much more imaginatively.

Face the Challenges. When you are batting and facing a fast bowler, if you run away it is all over. You have to stand there and face the bowling to have a chance of winning. The balls being thrown are like the challenges we have to face every day: the answer is not trying to escape from them, but to stand there and let the bat (our actions) do the talking.

Take the Unexpected in Your Stride. The runout of Devaa, the “Mankading” (bowler running out the non-striker before delivering the ball) of the kid (and thus, Ismail), Russel’s kicking the ball for a boundary towards the end to keep Bhuvan away from the strike – unfortunate things will always happen. One cannot dwell or worry too much about the setbacks. One has to take them with the good and move on.

It’s about Team Spirit. However good and passionate Bhuvan was, he could not have won the match on his own. Cricket needs eleven players. It is a team game. So is business. Individual brilliance means a lot, but as Bhuvan showed, an average group filled with team spirit and playing with passion can overcome a group of talented, experienced but under-motivated individuals. Members must put the Team before Self. Take the time when Bhuvan is batting with Bhura, and he (Bhuvan) slips while going for a run. Bhura pushes Bhuvan away to the other half of the pitch, and sacrifices his own wicket because he knows that the captain is the one who can lead the way.

It’s about People. Lagaan is about how ordinary people can do extraordinary deeds. We all have it within us. Look at the Reader’s Digest “Drama In Real Life” stories. When the occasion comes, people – each one of us – can do amazing things.

The Legacy of Lagaan

Movies come and go. Ever so often, one movie comes and leaves a mark, an indelible impression – because it succeeds in bringing out something from within us. Something which has been hidden and perhaps long forgotten. Something whose existence which we didn’t even know about. As we go about our lives, we need to be reminded that each of us matters, that each of us has it within us to make a difference. Living in today’s India makes optimists out of all us (“tomorrow can only be better”). But it is we who have to create tomorrow’s India. Our ideas, our vision, our skills have to come together to build this New India. Lagaan’s Bhuvan stokes us somewhere to become part of that team.

Lead from the Front. Bhuvan is always there – encouraging, talking, making the decisions. He knows that having taken up the challenge, he has to take the fight and be there till the end. The same applies to us. If we take on a responsibility, we have to take it to completion. Bhuvan, as a true leader, also points out the mistakes of others – like when he ticks off his team members at the start of the match when they are all running after the ball and complimenting each other.

Define the Enemy. To Bhuvan and his team, the enemy was clear: the (bad) British and their oppressive laws. For Russel’s team, it was not so clear. While for Russel the enemy was clearly (and only) Bhuvan, his team members were not quite sure about the cause. To them, it was just a game. Having a clearly defined enemy works as a rallying point for the team.

Overconfidence Destroys. Look at Captain Russel. In trying to destroy Bhuvan (a personal enmity), he forgets what he is speaking and what he is offering (when he puts up the challenge). What he was trying to do was to take his anger against an individual against the entire province – and it boomeranged back at him. It made the opposition (the villagers) united, it made them discover talents they never had. One should never overestimate oneself or underestimate others.

Train and Practice. Bhuvan and his team did not just go into the match; they trained and practiced day and night. There are no short-cuts for physical and mental fitness. To be fit, one needs to work hard.

Celebrate the Small Wins. Watch the genuine joy in Bhuvan’s team when a catch is taken or a wicket falls. The small celebrations help in encouraging and motivating the team as a whole. It also helps lift everyone’s spirits. How many of us celebrate the small wins in the workplace?

Never Give Up. Because the Last Ball can be the winner. A small opening – as in Chess, as in Cricket, as in a battle, and as in life – is all that it takes to make the difference and turn the tide. But you have to be prepared to be able to exploit it. Look at the situation in the Lagaan match. One ball to go in the match, 5 runs to win and Bhuvan is at the non-striker’s end, with the partly handicapped Kachra facing. A seemingly lost cause. But Bhuvan did not give up. When Kachra hit the ball, he ran and took a single. As it turned out, the ball was a no-ball. That single created the opening for Bhuvan. If he had not taken that run assuming that they could not have won, the extra ball would not have made a difference. In sport, in life and in business, always be alert because you never know how and when opportunity comes.

Faith In God. The pre-match rituals and the prayer at the end of the second day are examples. When everything else seems lost, God shows the way – as long as you are on the side of the Right.

Make a Beginning. Bhuvan did not wait to start. He did not see around. He made a bat and a ball, got the kid interested and started. Many times, we brood and end up thinking too much. The only way one can test out new ideas is by jumping in, by getting started. Only when we close the door behind us will we see the doors in front start opening.

Small Victories are Important at the Start. The first time Bhuvan hits the ball, he does so in public, in full view of the entire village. He makes it seem easy, he makes them want to participate. In the film, watch the faces of the villagers after Bhuvan’s first strike. When starting any project, it is important to have small wins at the start to motivate the team.

Building the Team. This is at the heart of the film in the first half. Building the team is like recruitment. One needs to select the right people and motivate them. Just watching Bhuvan go from one to eleven offers a lot of learning. He understands the pressures and the soft points of people, and uses this knowledge to make them part of his team. Watch and listen to the song which he uses to recruit Goli, the largest land owner in the village, and Ishwar Kaka, Gauri’s father. To get Bhura, the murgiwalla, he makes him feel important as a person who can teach something (catching) to the rest of the lot. Watch also how Bhuvan talks to each of his team members. Each one is treated as special, as being different.

Allocating Roles. Bhuvan also assigns responsibilities to each of his people. Just getting the people on board is not good enough. They have to be told what the goal is. Just as the hand consists of a thumb and four fingers, a team consists of different individuals. The objective is to make them all work together like a fist, like a team.

Support the Team Members. Bhuvan backs his people to the hilt, even when they make mistakes. He is willing to give Kachra a second chance (on the second afternoon of the match) despite the skepticism of others. He knows Kachra can be a match-winner – and Kachra proves him right. It is very important in any team that the captain support his team, backing the right person at the right time for the right job.

Passion as the Differentiator. Bhuvan and his team were playing for the hopes and aspirations of a nation. Their passion, especially Bhuvan’s, made all the difference. It is in crunch times that one’s passion for the work helps in bringing out that extra strength from within. Bhuvan’s body language, his actions all speak for themselves. He is confident, not arrogant. As leaders, we all have to be careful of what we say and do, for the slightest sign of weakness can get magnified within the rest of the team.

Think of Problems as Opportunities. When Captain Russel challenges Bhuvan to a cricket match, Bhuvan accepts it because he knows that there is really no option. It is a risk, but without taking risks, there are no rewards. Given the state of his brethren (and with no looming rains), Bhuvan viewed the incrementalism of trying to reduce the “double tax” as a non-option against the possibility of a “10-100x” quality of life improvement offered by a victory in the cricket match. In our lives too, we face a lot of problems. We need to think of these as opportunities for innovation.

Dream Big and Define the Goal. Once Bhuvan accepted the challenge, his dream was three years of no tax. It may have seemed unrealistic or even improbable, but then that’s what dreams are. Dreaming is about imagining a different future. In the case of Bhuvan, he not only dreamt big but also put in place a strategy to make that a reality. Another name for Dream is Vision. To make things happen the way we want, we have to envision the future, and paint a picture in front of the others of what we want to achieve.

Put Community Before Self. The important thing about Bhuvan’s dream was that it was not for himself, it was for the community. Never in his talk or action did Bhuvan put himself or his self-interest before that of what his village needed. Bhuvan’s dream of greater good thus elicited (after some initial resistance) the support of the entire province.

Be Determined in face of Opposition. This comes across many times in the movie. Right from the start when the entire village opposes Bhuvan’s having taken up the challenge to when the rest of his team refuses to play because Bhuvan wants to take on board Kachra, who is an untouchable. On all occasions, Bhuvan knows he is right, and faces up and answers his critics with courage, winning their support in the end. We face this situation many times in our organisations. Many a time, we give up and accept what we feel is perhaps a lesser decision. It is at times like these that we need to speak up – as long as we know we are fighting for the right issue, and not against an individual.

Give Examples to Enhance Understanding. Even though Bhuvan didn’t know the difference at that time, he simplified the challenge of learning cricket by portraying it as something similar to gilli-danda. By doing this, he made the impossible seem achievable, he made the mountain seem climbable. Analogies have that effect and can be powerful in helping tame the seemingly difficult. As managers and leaders, we too have the task of motivating the troops to take up challenges in the marketplace. Vision needs to be translated into a series of tasks that the team can understand, thus building a path through the fog.

Don’t Laugh. While it is not often that movies offer more than entertainment, ever so often there comes a film which can make a deep impact and teach us a few things. This week’s Tech Talk takes a different path as I share what I learnt from the movie. It is about Bhuvan and his team, who, against all odds, fight for pride, land and country – and win. It is how one single person with a passion can make a difference. It is about the triumph of human spirit, the Indian spirit.

As a movie, Lagaan (you can read the review here) is something we can all be proud of, made to perfection by Aamir Khan (producer) and Ashutosh Gowariker (director). It is different in many respects from the regular stuff churned out by our film industry. It is a period film. It was shot in one schedule in Bhuj last year over 4 months. It is long, very long – 3 hours, 40 minutes. It has British actors who mostly speak English. It has little romance and no fights. It even has a song in Hindi and English. Lagaan as a movie is innovation personified. The movie’s heart – the hour-plus cricket match – was not even disclosed in the pre-release publicity.

Lagaan is set in the village of Champaner (somewhere in Central India) in the late 19th century. Yet, it does not seem too far removed from us in the 21st century.

Each of us has someone we know in some Indian village. Many of us still pay a visit to our native place every once in a while. It is about the unchanged reality of India – the wait for the rains every year. It is also about the only sport which matters in India and which each of us has grown up with – cricket.

Above all, Lagaan is about people. Ordinary, average people, who are going about their lives – like each of us. Who, when the moment demands, do extraordinary deeds. It is about the power of a Team – the muthi (“closed fist”). As a team, they were fighting for the future of tens of thousands of their countrymen against a heartless enemy (the British). They had few resources, and little knowledge of the game of cricket. What they did not lack was fighting and team spirit, and the will to win. They were not playing a game; they were fighting a war.

The India of today, too, faces a lot of challenges. If we can learn from Bhuvan and his bunch of motley cricketers, the New India that is being built can be a different place, one which occupies pride of place in the world economy, one which is respected and feared but not ignored, one in which the community and nation come before self, one which Bhuvan’s XI would have been proud of.

By no means is innovation in the world (or even on the Internet) done. This is a continuing process. Even now, there are many challenges in the world of computing which are there to be solved. Consider the User Interface, for example. The WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pulldowns) has been around for a long time. Not to say that its not effective: 150 million PCs are still sold every year! Will there be alternatives? You bet! Take a look at Scopeware (http://www.scopeware.com), a very different way of organizing information. Think of the people who may not be able to read or write, but can see pictures and talk. How can they interact with computers, just like the rest of us?

Instant Messaging is another area which is only now beginning to get a lot of attention from the enterprise viewpoint. There are tens of millions of users, with non-interoperable systems. Almost exactly how email was a decade or so ago. While AOL and ICQ have focused on enhancing the user experience for text-based messaging, Microsoft with its new Windows Messenger (integrated into Windows XP) is adding multimedia and document sharing capabilities. The notion of presence is another angle which can add value to newer IM systems.

The best ideas emerge out of problems that people face. Even as most will accept the status quo, someone among them refuses to accept that there is no alternative and thinks about a better way of doing it. Thus is an innovator born. Look at Google. There is little to distinguish the front-end (user interface) from any other search engine. But what went in at the back-end is an incredible amount of maths and computer science theory to create a very different experience for the user when a word or phrase is typed into the text box.

Two sources of inspiration for innovation are Games and Children. Video games have always tended to push the envelope in terms of creating fantasy worlds with graphics, intelligence and realism. Children and Teenagers tend to adapt to new technology faster as they have few pre-conceived notions. This young generation is now at the vanguard of the “Always-on” world. As ubiquitous computing take shape, new infrastructure, new software and new business models will be needed.

One also needs to think of the world outside US, Western Europe and Japan. This is a world which has only a limited exposure to the latest in computing and communications. It is hungry to make up for lost time. It may not be able to buy but it can rent. What it lacks in margin is more than made up in volume. It wants solutions – not the ones imported from the developed world, but solutions developed for the needs of its people and enterprises.

As companies today focus more on short-term survival, the need for Innovation is the greatest. It is perhaps the single most important factor to differentiate successes from failures. Innovation is just another name for Inspiration, Imagination, Opportunity and Entrepreneurship. Innovation is about Redefining Tomorrow.