Month: February 2009

I wrote this series in September 2004. It begins with how I “limited my own maneuverability by not creating an option.” The columns are about how we can increase the options for ourselves with some forward thinking and smarter decision-making.

As you read this series, think back about your own life – and the options you have (or have not) created at different points of time. In as much that we would like to look to the future rather than the past, sometimes doing a “What-If” analysis can help throw up some interesting learnings, provided we open ourselves to it. It is always hard accepting that we have made mistakes or could have done things differently. But if we are prepared to go down that route and trace back to the roots of some of the decisions that we have made, we will find that we are better prepared to face the future and be smarter about making decisions by creating options.

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One of the common factors [in reducing options] is what I’d like to think of as “blind spots.” Think of them as mind blocks – where we let personal biases interfere with decision-making. The second factor is when we lock ourselves in too early to a certain path in order to optimise some other parameter, realising only too late that we didn’t really need to do it.

This week’s links:

• Scott McNealy on People: In Forbes. “ I tended to manage by clear delegation. People got to be in charge of things. My decision-making process was not to make the decision but to decide who got to decide…If you hire really, really great people, they’re going to know more about the problem they’re dealing with than you will.”
• The Economics of Giving it Away: by Chris Anderson (in WSJ). “Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.”
• 100 Free iPhone Apps: Admittedly, this will be useful for only a few of us, but still its fascinating to see the diversity of things that can do on the mobile.
• Facebook and Digital Goods Revenues: Jeremy Liew has a 3-part series on what it can do to increase revenue from digital goods, addressing Means, Opportunity and Motive.
• India’s Coming Elections: A view from The Economist. “India is girding itself for a spring election. What sort of government will emerge is anyone’s guess.”

Elections are a good time to look back and look ahead. It has been that both the last two governments have completed their terms. So, India 1999 is what we can remember, as also India 2004. And now we are at India 2009. Looking ahead, what do we want India 2014 to be like? Five years is a long time for change to happen.

As a tech entrepreneur, for me, one of the disappointments of the past 5 (perhaps, even 10) years has been the slow penetration of the wireline Internet and broadband in our lives. That’s one thing I’d like to see change in the next five years. On the flip side, the amazing growth in mobiles has been a great success story – even though we keep playing with the telecom policy every so often. But what we have seen so far is only the voice revolution. The data revolution (powered by 3G, 4G and broadband) is yet to arrive in India.

Three questions for you to think and answer:

• What do you think is the biggest change from India 2004 to India 2009?
• What has been the biggest disappointment of the past five years?
• What is the Big Change you’d like to see from India 2009 to India 2014?

Continuing the note Atanu Dey and I had written from yesterday:

3. Urbanization. Urbanization is both a cause and a consequence of economic development. No country has developed without being also largely urban. India’s economic future depends on India’s success at urbanizing its immense rural population. Therefore in the matter of rural development, there is a distinction between the development of rural areas as opposed to the development of rural people. The former is neither necessary nor sufficient for development; the latter is indispensible and can be achieved most effectively by urbanizing them. This requires the development of liveable cities that would absorb hundreds of millions of people who would be engaged in non-agricultural sectors.

4. Transportation. India is a large country with a large population. For the economy to prosper, people and goods have to be efficiently moved fast over large distances. India is approximately ten times as densely populated as the US. It therefore cannot afford the solution that works for the US for transporting people, namely, air travel. What India needs is a land-based system and more specifically a rail-based transportation system for both goods and people. The technology exists for super-efficient, super-fast rail systems. India has to seriously invest in that and replace the century-old current railway system. Further, within cities, India needs to have efficient public transit system and not rely on automobiles.

Note that each of the four elements has dependencies with the others. For instance, the creation of the human capital (education) requires urbanization, which in turn depends on the availability of energy and a good transportation system.

Atanu Dey and I put together this note recently.

India’s economic growth and development poses challenges that are clear but fortunately are solvable. The hard part is not in the figuring out the solutions but in the implementation, and more specifically in the prioritizing and sequencing of the implementation. The elements that require immediate and sustained effort relate to “infrastructural elements” which are few in number but form the absolutely necessary foundation upon which any functioning economy is based. These elements are interrelated in complex ways and if present simultaneously, they enable that emergent multi-dimensional phenomenon we call development. The elements are:

1. Education. Physical capital-both natural and man-made-combined with human capital produces wealth in all its form, from agricultural to manufactures to services. The quality and quantity of educated people strictly determine the economic prosperity of an economy. India needs a radically different education system as the current one is dysfunctional and largely irrelevant in the modern context. Fortunately, this radical re-engineering is possible through the use of powerful tools presented by the revolution in information and communications technologies. To achieve this, institutional reform of the type that encourages private sector participation in education is necessary.

2. Energy. Any economic activity, like all processes in the universe, depends on energy. Today’s developed nations achieved their level of prosperity on cheap fossil fuels, an opportunity not available to India’s billion plus people. Fortunately, India is large enough to be able to leapfrog the fossil fuel stage and invest in renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Becoming a world leader in the development and use of these energy sources requires a national will that can be articulated by visionary leadership.

(This will be continued tomorrow.)

This is a book for young readers. A slim 92-page book by Dr. Mani Bhaumik and priced at Rs 199 in India, it “explores the mysteries on our universe.” I have been reading sections of it to Abhishek (after cars and snakes, his next interest is now planets). There are many photos (62) which bring out the beauty of our universe. If you have a young one (or would yourself like to know more), this one is for you.

Space has always been a fascinating subject. I rememberbeing enchanted by the space shuttleflights when I was growing up, even listening to live commentary on BBC and VOA of the take-offs and landings. In the past 25+ years, many mysteries have been resolved — and new ones opened up. That is the beauty of ths subject – and something which is especially intriguiging to youngsters.

The other book that I read to Abhishek is “The Planets” by Gail Gibbons. We’ve bought 3 books by Gail Gibbons (it started with the Snakes book). There is a nice style to the books with the easy writing and superbly drawn illustrations.

Thanks very much to everyone who contributed suggestions in response to my previous post. Here is the presentation I made at the conference:

With the Indian elections less than three months away, here is a look at what I wrote before the previous general election five years ago (in March 2004). The following is an excerpt from the section on Governance:

Every elected representative should be mandated to keep an updated website which provides continued coverage of the activities being done. It should be possible to map promises and action. A discussion area in every constituency website should provide a forum for the local citizens to air their comments and problems. The Internet can thus work as a two-way information bridge between the government and the citizens. This will create for more meaningful and responsible governance.

At a bigger level, citizens should also be invited to air their comments on policy. Occasionally, different government departments do put up discussion papers for comments. In most cases, it is hard to find out about these unless one closely tracks the websites. This is where wikis, weblogs and RSS can make a big difference: wikis can provide a forum for discussion, weblogs can provide information on the updates for each of the government departments, and RSS can ensure that these updates are available for syndication to interested citizens. By standardizing how each government department disseminates information, it will become easier for citizens to find out what is happening and then be able to contribute back in their fields of expertise. If India needs to leap forward, it needs to harness the collective intelligence of its people – a publish-subscribe framework ensures just that.

Every government department should also be asked to publish its statement of accounts online, with a capability to drill down into the numbers. Supporting vouchers should be scanned and available electronically for examination. Let our accountants then go through these and point out discrepancies if any. This is one way to ensure that funds get used for what they are supposed to be. No single entity may be able to go through all of the details, but as a community few errors will escape the group. This idea borrows from open-source software: by publishing the source and using the eyes of the developers community, there are few bugs which are left unattended to in the software.