Month: June 2012

This week’s links:

• Local will be the biggest opportunity: by Bill Gurley. “Over the next five years, this massive opportunity will come into focus as local businesses embrace the Internet and adopt new interactive technologies that increasingly automate the connections between their customers and themselves.”
• South East Asia Mobility Report: from Mobile Monday, by Madanmohan Rao. “Southeast Asia accounts for one tenth of the world’s population, with Indonesia’s population alone around 240 million. The region reflects a diverse mix of cultures, economies, innovation dynamics andmobile/Internet diffusion patterns.”
• Peter Diamandis Interview: from Wired. Peter is the X-Prize founder. “He soon realized that the same forces that enabled a small team of amateurs to make a lunar lander could empower cadres of bright, idealistic people to solve earthly problems.”
• The Voice of the Storyteller: from NYTimes, the last in a series on better writing. “Writing style begins with clarity: Find the right words, and decide what to leave out. Then shape your sentences. Turn a phrase, play with sound, listen for cadence. Think about tone, and select a point of view.”
• India needs drastic reforms, not cosmetic ones: by SL Rao in The Telegraph. “The needed reforms are structural and systemic, prioritizing decentralized governance, and administrative reform. “

Policy change is not going to happen   until we have political change.    India needs a new leadership.   India needs new politicians who believe in these new objectives —   good governance and development.

Policy change  needs the politicians in India to change.   And that will only happen through one way – changing people’s voting behavior.

India is a democracy at the end of the day.    We get a chance to elect our leaders every few years.  The ballot box is the way the change needs to be done.   Middle India, for the most part, doesn’t bother to go out and vote.  It’s probably about 20-25% of people in middle India who actually go and vote.   You know a long time ago, there was  an apocryphal  story in which someone asked Laloo Prasad Yadav, who stayed as  the chief minister of Bihar,one of the poorer states of India  for about 15 years, “How do you think you got   re-elected?  You kept getting re-elected  without even  doing any substantial work”.    He said,  “It is not the people who vote for me;    it is the people who don’t vote for me who have kept me in power.”

They did not vote against him, and that’s the reality again and again in India.   That needs to change.

The first one is that we need a change of policy.     We need to change the policies that got us into this current mess.   We need policies which will get us out of there. Bt for that,   we need to understand why we got into this mess.

In most cases,   we need policies which are the opposite of what are being currently followed.   The bad policies need to get replaced by good policies. Only good policies will help us grow faster, and the good policies   emanate out of the objectives of the government.

The objectives of government in India, for the most part since independence,   have been extraction and exploitation.   Development and good governance have not been the objectives, as we have seen,  except probably for a few of  the 60+ years that we have  been free.

The government needs to change from being in business to being a referee.    We have to change from controls to freedom,   from maximum government that we currently have in India to minimum government.    The government controls are stifling for entrepreneurs and big businesses. To a large extent, big businesses get by,   by paying money or through their influence.  For small businesses,  it is very hard if you want to do it honestly.

This is the reality of India that we need to understand.   This is because there is control that people have,   and that control leads to corruption.   Corruption is the symptom of the control.   The controlled economy has to go.

It’s not the people that are the problem; it is the system.   What’s missing is governance,   and what we need to do to transform India,  is to transform governance.

We’ve heard a lot about  ‘the what’ of transforming India – all  good ideas on what needs to get done.    In education,   we need to get rid of government controls. We need 100 new cities in India. In  energy, we need to look at renewables. In rural,   we need to build infrastructure and services  and not just  give handouts. We need to focus on manufacturing –  and not just agri and services.

The solutions are all there.   We have conferences like these, we have regular columns that people write, we have  Vision 2025   documents that come out.    But the real action is not happening,   as we have seen.   The prescription is there, what’s missing is the doctor.   The road map is there,   what’s missing is the driver.    The vision is there,    what’s    missing is the leadership,   and the will and vision to implement it.

We need to look beyond the platitudes that we keep hearing, and we heard some of that today morning.    The focus really   has  to shift  to  HOW.    How are we going to transform India?   And the   ‘how’ has 4 elements.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the speech I gave at Columbia University on April 14, 2012.

I would like to start with a story. A couple of months ago I was asked by the Gujarat government to take a look at the technology at the Checkposts that they have. They were trying to automate even further the checkposts, and wanted to see what recommendations I could make from a technology stand point.

So I visited  a checkpost on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border.  A checkpost is at an inter-state boundary,  so vehicles which cross into a state have to pay appropriate taxes.   The Gujarat side of the checkpost, at Shamraji, collects about 30,000 dollars (Rs 15 lakhs) a day from vehicles passing through.   A kilometre   down the same road  is the Rajasthan checkpost.   They collect 6,000 dollars (Rs 3 lakhs) from the same set of vehicles.

The Gujarat side,   is completely automated and what the government was looking to do,   was to fix a couple of places  where  there  could be potential leakages, and hence pretty much eliminate any room for bribes or leakages.  You drive down to the Rajasthan border,  you  have  one person standing there,  no automation and in front of us the person was basically taking bribes from truck owners to let them go through.

Rajasthan’s story is pretty much what you see replicated across the rest of India.   The same checkpost story,   the same thing  happens  even at the Gujarat- Maharashtra border.

I have given two speeches in recent times – one was at Columbia University in New York on Transforming India, and the other one was at an education conference in Delhi. On both occasions, I carried a small recorder with me so that I could record my speech. I then put up the audio (with a little bit of editing) on the blog. I also thought it would be a good idea to put the transcripts of the speeches. Reading is much easier than listening, though both have their own benefits.

I got the transcription done professionally by a freelancer. I then read through the transcript and made some minor edits. One tends to be a bit looser in speaking and that doesn’t read so well!

Since I will be travelling on vacation for the next couple weeks and won’t have much time to do writing, I thought it would be a good idea to put up both the transcripts of both the speeches in short parts. I will be back with some fresh writing once I am back.

This is what I wrote a year ago:

This week’s links:

• Periodic Table of Social Media: via Business Insider. “I’s still confusing, cluttered and ever-changing, but the periodic table provides at least some hope of creating a strategy to navigating the big social media networks.”
• Minding your digital business: A McKinsey global survey. “Executives expect that new digital technologies will transform their businesses, but many admit their companies are far from prepared in developing capabilities and meeting challenges.”
• On Freedom: by Atanu Dey. “India is a classic case of a people who have collectively, at least in the last couple of centuries, never really valued freedom. What will it take to awaken them to the great wonders of being a free people?”
• Disrupting journalism education: by Jeff Jarvis. “Journalism education should be even more disrupted and disruptive than journalism, the industry.”
• How the inventor’s mind works: A quote by Henry Poincare (1908). “To create is to choose the right combinations.”

Here are a few starting thoughts on how to create a multi-horizon personal plan:

• Start by writing your obituary
• Based on that, decide on 2-3 key things you’d like to get down in the next 1-2-3 years
• Get out of the comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important mental decision that needs to be made.  It is much easier to make today like yesterday, and tomorrow like today. Determining one has to change is sometimes harder than the process of change itself.
• Start allocating some time today for these activities. One of them could be to focus on health. That would mean a 30-minute spend daily on either walking, gym or yoga. The benefits of these will accrue in the future, but the work needs to start today.
• Try and meet with people outside the regular set that you would otherwise meet. Attend conferences or talks that are not directly related to the immediate future. Read books which are different. All of this is about changing the current context to something that spurs a different line of thinking.
• Do a review every few months to see how you are doing, and course correct as needed.
• Above all, think like an entrepreneur and as a CEO of a startup. Don’t worry about failure. Focus on the journey.

This same thinking of working across multiple time horizons can also be applied to our personal lives. In most cases, we tend to take things as they come. But with a little planning, we can also make things fall in line the way we would like them to.

For this, one needs to spend time thinking about the future and what one would like to accomplish. As I have said before, a good way to think about this is to write one’s obituary and then work backwards. This is never an easy exercise, because we mistakenly believe that there are many variables we do not control.

In fact, if there is personal clarity about the future roadmap, we can start working towards them, and then we will find a new richness to interactions because we are not thinking just of the here and now. We will find that there are opportunities where previously we would have seen them as not useful conversations.

Crafting a person multi-horizon plan can add a new dimension to life, especially for those in their late 30s and early 40s, where half their work life still lies ahead.