Month: December 2011

Weekend Reading

This week’s links:

  • Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not? by Mark Suster. “There is a healthy tension between profits & growth. To grow faster businesses need resources in today’s financial period to fund growth that may not come for 6 months to a year.”
  • Telecom Predictions for 2012: from Strand Consult. ” We believe the number of employees working for mobile operators around the world will decrease by between 5 and up to 20% in most countries.”
  • Solar Energy: Bright future in India (NYT), but business challenges globally (WSJ).
  • India’s Year of Drama and Stasis: by Sadanand Dhume in WSJ. “The middle class and investors are frustrated with India’s corrupt and inept politicians.”
  • The C in Congress: by Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “Perhaps the Congress is in love with the “C” in its name. Corruption was not enough. It had to become corrupt, casteist, communal and cynical. India’s tragedy is that there is no national level challenger to this party that is diminishing us all.”

Best of 2011: Politics

Best of 2011: Digital India

Following a tradition from 2008, 2009 and 2010, in this last week of the year, I am giving links to what I think where some of my better posts. I have categorised them into five topics: Digital India, Entrepreneurship, Politics, Personal and General.

Digital India

Blog Past: CSI Panel on Affordable Computing

I was on a CSI panel last November. Here is one of the points I made:

We need to set up computing infrastructure at key data collection and dissemination points.

Schools, Hospitals, Agricultural extension counters and Panchayats are the places where computing infrastructure needs to be set up. In schools, thin clients or network computers with content delivered from a local server can assist the teacher in ensuring the children get better education by making up for the lack of quality teaching staff across the country. In health and agriculture, connected computers can provide information access at the point where it is ended. Computers at panchayats can play a key role in ensuring availability of eGovernance services for citizens, as well as financial transparency on how money is being spent.

Weekend Reading

This week’s links:

  • Marc Andressen 2012 Predictions: from cnet. “Most of the people in the world still don’t have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone…. If you’ve got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any domain or category and serve you as a customer no matter where you are in the world in just gigantic numbers–in terms of billions of people.
  • 10 Tech Predictions for 2012: from WSJ. Amit Agarwal’s “top 10 predictions for the consumer technology scene in India next year.”
  • Biggest Questions of 2012: from Forbes India.
  • India not shining any more: by Ashok Malik in YaleGlobal. “India’s reversal on FDI in retail trade exposes weak governance that paralyzes global success.”
  • Sidney Awards by David Brooks: for the best magazine essays. Part 1 and Part 2.

Transforming India: Voting for Leaders

I have said this many times but it helps to repeat it: Leadership matters. No nation, no organisation has been built without strong leadership. In Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and China’s Deng Xiaoping, we have two examples of leaders in the Asian region who transformed their countries. In India, Vajpayee did many things right during the 1998-2004 period when he was in power. No leader is without his faults, and one can always criticise what they did. But the fact remains that they led from the front, took the hard decisions, and put their nations on a positive path of progress.

In India, we have seen first-hand what weak, split, unaccountable leadership can do in the past few years. We have to start thinking harder about the leadership issue going ahead. Instead of saying “I will vote for Party X in the Lok Sabha elections because I have always done so in the past”, we need to start looking at the leader and then decide the party we want to vote for. In other words, 2014 needs to become much more ‘Presidential’ (as in the US context) in India. That is what can create the wave and take India a step towards better governance.

For this to happen, it does not require 100% of the voting population to change their minds. If just 10% of us come together through a formation like United Voters of India, we can change the course of this country and play our role in Transforming India.

Transforming India: Right Leadership Matters

We tend to underestimate the importance of transformative leadership in politics and government in India simply because we haven’t seen much of it in our lifetimes. Mediocrity has ruled the roost, and we have all tried to build lives that don’t intersect with the government. But when decisions made (or not made) come to hurt us, if we are not going to step back and think about the leadership issue, then we have no right to complain about our future fate.

Thomas Friedman, writing in Sunday’s New York Times, called for leaders with the know-how and willingness to govern from the bottom up.

“As power shifts to individuals,” argues Dov Seidman, “leadership itself must shift with it — from coercive or motivational leadership that uses sticks or carrots to extract performance and allegiance out of people to inspirational leadership that inspires commitment and innovation and hope in people.”

The role of the leader now is to get the best of what is coming up from below and then meld it with a vision from above. Are you listening, Mr. Putin?

This kind of leadership is especially critical today, adds Seidman, “when people are creating a lot of ‘freedom from’ things — freedom from oppression or whatever system is in their way — but have not yet scaled the values and built the institutional frameworks that enable ‘freedom to’ — freedom to build a career, a business or a meaningful life.”

So, what does that mean in the Indian context?

Continued tomorrow.