Lord of the Links

The story of Siddharth GJ, affected by cerebral palsy, now working with ABN Amro. He is a Masters in Economics. A very bright student.

Sometimes, the greatest fighters can be found in the most obscure of ways.

Point to note is that most Indian companies are not yet sensitive to the needs of the disabled. They refuse to judge them by their merit. Time when Indian companies started growing up !

Look our for quite a few IPOs in the textile sector. The first on the block seems to be the Chaturvedis' owned Provogue. Gokaldas Expords, Bangalore's largest employer, also seems to be interested in raising funds from the market.

Well, this speech was given by Narayana Murthy to people who work and work and work and work and (phew!). I didnt want to put this up on my blog, and so I thought this would be the best place for it, even though it is not strictly a link. [I originally found it here]
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I know people who work 12 hours a day, six days a week, or more. Some people do so because of a work emergency where the long hours are only temporary.Other people I know have put in these hours for years. I don't know if they are working all these hours, but I do know they are in the office this long. Others put in long office hours because they are addicted to the workplace. Whatever the reason for putting in overtime, working long hours over the long term is harmful to the person and to the organization. There are things managers can do to change this for everyone's benefit.

Being in the office long hours, over long periods of time, makes way for potential errors. My colleagues who are in the office long hours frequently make mistakes caused by fatigue. Correcting these mistakes requires their time as well as the time and energy of others. I have seen people work Tuesday through Friday to correct mistakes made after 5 PM on Monday.

Another problem is that people who are in the office for long hours are not pleasant company. They often complain about other people (who aren't working as hard); they are irritable, or cranky, or even angry. Other people avoid them. Such behaviour poses problems, where work goes much better when people work together instead of avoiding one another.

As Managers, there are things we can do to help people leave the office. First and foremost is to set the example and go home ourselves. I work With a manager who chides people for working long hours. His words quickly lose their meaning when he sends these chiding group e-mails with a time-stamp of 2 AM, Sunday.

Second is to encourage people to put some balance in their lives. For instance, here is a guideline I find helpful:

1. Wake up, eat a good breakfast, and go to work.
2. Work hard and smart for eight or nine hours.
3. Go home.
4. Read the comics, watch a funny movie, dig the dirt, play with your kids etc..
5. Eat well and sleep well.

This is called recreating. Doing steps 1, 3, 4, and 5 enable step 2.

Working regular hours and recreating daily are simple concepts. They are hard for some of us because that requires personal change. They are possible since we all have the power to choose to do them.

In considering the issue of overtime, I am reminded of my eldest son. When he was a
toddler, If people were visiting the apartment, he would not fall asleep no matter how long the visit, and no matter what time of day it was.!

He would fight off sleep until the visitors left. It was as if he was afraid that he would miss something. Once our visitors' left, he would go to sleep. By this time, however, he was over tired and would scream through half the night with nightmares. He, my wife, and I, all paid the price for his fear of missing out. Perhaps some people put in such long hours because they don't want to miss anything when they leave the office. The trouble with this is that events will never stop happening. That is life !

Things happen 24 hours a day.
Allowing for little rest is not ultimately practical. So, take a nap.
Things will happen while you're asleep, but you will have the energy to catch up when you wake.

Hence "LOVE YOUR JOB AND FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR COMPANY"

- Narayana Murthy

Anand Virmani, the Director of Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, in a paper points predicts that the world will become tri polar by the middle of the century, with India, China and the US being the three superpowers.

China is developing a new good student programme which awards student with outstanding abilities in all of academics, morals, sports, society, school and family. The earlier "three-good student" program only focussed on the first three and came under a lot of flak.

The incidence of fake websites is on the rise in China. As many as 223 were reported this year as against a single incident in the previous years.

Hacking and related internet fraud result in a lost of more than $32b for the world economy.

Not the Ram Gopal Verma flick. Quite the opposite. The inmates are targeting a turnover of Rs. 1.15 crores.

The US is allowing American Defence Contractors to bid for India's aircraft needs. At the same time, it sells the very same planes to Pakistan.

As we say in Hindi: When there is a fight between two cats, the vulpine monkey takes the bread.

Resarch by Oxfam finds that there are three to four times women as men who have died due to the killer tsunami. Activists have called for greater care while dealing with female survivors, who are already bearing the brunt of rapes, and forced marriages in the relief camps.

This is an article by the red herring magazine about Rajendra Pawar, the NIIT business model and future directions. Needless to say, NIIT is perhaps India's only successful e-learning centre, what with the fall of Aptech, Brainwave and so many others.

The Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which started out of Gujarat, is now spreading its wings. It has a presence in 7 cities now, with a strength of 7 lac poor women. Its primary work is training of these women, many of who are breadwinners in their families, and helping them set up small businesses. In Delhi, it is helping almost 8000 old clothes' sellers organize their work.

Analysts feel that GM has to seriously pare down itself, and its eight competing divisions to remain competitive.

The new management at Toys R' Us plans to take the company private, and then leverage the huge real estate of the company to deliver better results. It remains to be seen how successful it will be.

The new CEO of Bertelsmann, Gunter Thielen, believes that organic growth is far better since mergers and acquisitions tend to get caught up in regulatory hassles. Larry Ellison would, of course, tend to disagree.

The Saudi Prince is one of largest investors in the world, with investements in Citibank, Four Seasons Hotel, Procter and Gamble, News Corp. and many other blue chip companies. He is currently ranked 5th in teh Forbes List. Alwaleed was here in India to discuss possible investements in the hospitality industry.

Manas Chakravarty writes what it takes to be a billionaire ...

High time the human race learnt that greed leads to destruction.