Reinventing the Wheel

“In business, you have to reinvent the wheel every day; once you stop doing that, you are finished” said an acquaintance of mine. Considering that he started from scratch and now owns 18 golf courses, there must be some truth to it.

Fundamentals in business schools are just generalisations of the real thing. An entrepreneur is required to learn, evolve and customise business processes, often learning important lessons on the way.

The above mentioned gentleman was a regular at my brother’s hotel. His insights into business were marvellous. I often used to share a bottle of wine with him, during which we would discuss a business opportunity and how to go about it, scribbling on a piece of paper while doing so. I would have to say that those pieces of paper have given me more insights in running a business than I have learnt in the past one year at Alliance.

We would also come up with a plan to do some cost cutting or utilise some resource more efficiently in our respective businesses. Something as trivial as getting a better deal on the disposable cups for the coffee machines or getting slot machines were discussed at length often scouring the yellow pages and doing phone calls, justified by saying “Every penny counts”.

Lessons lie in the rough, obscured by the annals of banality. Understanding it and implementing it requires skill and fortitude.

Coming Out of the Closet

A landmark judgement by the Delhi High Court striking down Section 377, which criminalises consensual sex between two individuals including same gender(for the perverts, goats are still a No No), was the cause for a bittersweet moment for me. It was actually like watching a kid growing into adolescence; you are happy for him growing up but sad because he would lose his innocence.

India is finally growing up, accepting certain facts of life to which it was in deep denial. Don t get me wrong, I believe gay sex is as unnatural as Michael Jackson’s face, both creeps the shit out of me, except for lesbianism (wink!).

This verdict has changed everything, the truth that homosexuality is no more a closet truth and the sheer number of people involved puts a new perspective to an otherwise naive and innocent India. On the other hand, I am proud of India being mature enough to take such a decision. I view this as a step towards becoming a country that values freedom and faces truth than deny it.

I just hope the fanatics, that this country is so famous for, grew half a brain and join the programme.

Adieu to MJ

MJ passed away. I mourn for him. Like all great artists, he is more remembered for his scandals than his achievements. A misunderstood soul, he always tried to come to grips with his life by outrageous acts.

In his life time he has achieved unprecedented worldwide fame and recognition, every kid in the 80’s knew who he was. I remember jumping on the bed to his tunes, the Van Halen solos that he interlaced with his high energy performances, just brilliant.

I will remember him along with the greats Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury, Jim Morrison, Cliff Burton, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Tom Fogerty and others.

I mourn for him.

Beauty

I hate painting beautiful pictures with words, because the beauty we conceive is not true, it ceases to be true when we alter life to make it so.  I revel in the intricacies of life, the innate gestures we take for granted and the ones that spawn out of innocence. So to me, a child smiling at the prospect of getting a candy has more beauty than a well toned model with features that even god didn’t have a hand in making them.

Naturally so, I was a little perplexed on the issue of later stage abortions (for the naive few, its aborting the child after 20 weeks of conception; the foetus is almost formed and is declared alive by US law).  It’s appalling, I know, killing a child because it’s not formed properly. Are the stereotypes of babies propagated by media the benchmark in deciding how yours should be? If everybody looked like that where would individualism figure in our list of priorities? Several disabled people live happy lives, sure, they may be ridiculed in society and be looked upon in pity all their lives, but does that give anybody the right to kill, who are we to decide? I am starting to sound like a fear monger selling a dystopia to the inexorable public.

Then I heard the plight of a couple, their story put a different perspective on the topic. They have been trying to conceive for years and when they finally did they were elated, painted the kids room, bought everything they could get their hands on, did everything prescribed in every pre-natal care book. Unfortunately, after 22 weeks, a scan revealed that the baby’s brain was filling up with fluids and he would be born without any brain function. They were distraught, they took as many second opinions as possible but they all concurred. So they had an abortion. Are they justified in doing so? Did they in doing so, reduce the agony that the child would have lived through and also the parents agony?

Like all debates, we can never conclude on anything, we just compromise between the two and hope that our conscience figures out what’s right.

Paying the Penance for Ignorance

As my friend is in the other room, shredding bad guys to death on ‘Death Space’, I pulled up my laptop as a means to end my boredom. The restlessness you experience when there is nothing to do is pure agony. I unequivocally realise what I need is a girlfriend.

Now you can see how bored I am.

Well, I didn’t start this blog to publish my personal life and you can thank god that I am not going to change that.

Ignorance; we come across it every day. My English teacher used to harp away “Don’t betray your ignorance” all the time. I never stopped to figure out what she meant to say. See, now that’s ignorance.

Ignorance, I believe, is intertwined with ego and stupidity because for ignorance to propagate through society the propagators should be egoistic or plain stupid or both. We would think ignorance is rare among us and we are all epitomes of fine thought. Wrong! Ignorance is the lack of knowledge or understanding. Knowledge, we have, but understanding, that is a tad bit difficult to come by.

The elections are just shoring up. So far, we Indians have put up a poor show of just over 50% turnout. So the question arises, how ignorant and nonchalant are we on who should run our country? How many of us really understand the intricacies of our democracy? Let’s hope we don’t have to pay the price for that.

Then there are the environmentalists, they scream murder at SUVs from their puny electric cars, knowing little that the CO2 expelled to produce the batteries and the electricity to charge them are more than the SUV does in its lifetime. The dams we create for renewable energy are done so by inundating flood plains rich in flora and fauna, probably even forcing some species to extinction. Wind turbines kill more migratory birds than humans ever did directly. Hydrogen power slated to be the future for only emitting water vapour would seem a good idea, but with increased water content in the air, it could probably change climatic patterns and bring in disastrous storms.

There are millions of examples where ignorance or a blithe unconcern in understanding the system has led to peril.

So when was the last time you did something without ignorance?

The Big Three

Ever since Henry Ford with his freakishly attuned business mind bought out the Model T, America has been the leader in automobile manufacturing and the Big Three viz. GM, Ford and Chrysler have been ruling the roost. They were the automotive equivalent of the mafia; they weeded out or gobbled up all the small players (the Tucker story would substantiate that fact). They decided what to sell and what not to, the customer just played along, ironic, considering these companies are often considered to be the epitomes of capitalism.

Then, along came the Japanese with their small and fragile contraptions, which the Americans would not even honour with the tag ‘car’. To them a car had to have a V8, had to be two football fields long and should handle like fat momma on Viagra. As a twist of fate, they sneered at the small Toyotas and Hondas to their own peril. The oil crisis rolled in the 70’s and the environment crazies came along with their flower-power shit and suddenly these cars made sense to the gobbledygook Americans and boy-oh-boy ,the Japs took real advantage of the situation.

The American markets have always been the largest but they became increasingly served by foreign car makers, notably the Japs. The Big Three has been consistently been losing market share and have become less and less profitable, they tried offsetting their losses by expanding worldwide, mostly by acquisitions and exporting to countries where people are daft enough to buy them (e.g. Saudi Arabia). But still they kept on declining; the recent recession has hammered in the last nails on their coffins.  To make matters worse, Obama has been particularly against any kind of bailout, he has literally told them to go suck a lolly instead.

Well, what went wrong?  Everything actually, they still operated the old way, the push system. They set targets and estimated requirements and then produced and made the dealers to sell them off, it was prehistoric. They have spent millions to develop complex supply chains and organisations to support this business model. Each new product took several years to develop and hundreds of millions of dollars were tied up in massive inventory and working capital throughout the system. These flaws were masked by the huge demand for Trucks and SUVs.

Then there is the labour problem, the UAW (United Auto Workers) union was and is a pain in the ass. Sergio Marchionne, Fiat CEO, was quite eloquent about his concerns about the workforce when negotiating a lifeline deal with Chrysler, being a hard man, he said unless the union decides to accept major cost cuts- no deal.

So can we envision a turnaround? Even if mildly possible, it would require some radical changes in the system. They need to embrace the pull system, as the Japs and Germans have long back done. They should learn and develop new inventory systems; they can glean from lessons from all over the world; do something radical, challenge dominant thought (e.g. Tata Nano). However, their manufacturing facilities are world class and are capable of producing quality products. It just needs to factor in the details and make changes accordingly. It’s always about the little things.

YAMAHA

For those who have a passion for bikes and are old enough to remember Tom Petty and Guns N’ Roses tunes would agree that Yamaha were the bee’s knees. The RXs and RDs were a constant cause of wet dreams.

Yamaha came into our undeserving lives in the 80’s. It came out with the RD350 badged as a Rajdoot and it was brilliant, it was like having a crazy-in-bed high maintenance girl friend. People have gone bankrupt by taking care of it but the sheer exhilaration it gave was better than anything that you could snort up your nose.

Unfortunately it didn’t sell well but Yamaha had another ace up their sleeve, the RX100, and boy-oh-boy was it good. It was a light weight one-cylinder version of the RD. It left every other manufacturer in the dust, in terms of performance. It was frugal too, not as much as the Hondas but not as vulgar as the RDs. It became the choice ride for the young and careless.

As usual the green police spoilt the fun. Environment laws came in and the RX100 died in 1995. The company came out with another bike fortunately crazier than the 100, the RX135, it went through a number of iterations before it created a legend the RX135 5speed, it had the famous seventh port technology which the RD had used and it did fly, the new age bikes like CBZ or Pulsar were no match to this mean beast.

Growing petrol prices and environment consciousness put a stop to its life. Then Yamaha went through a dry phase with a slew of run of the mill models, they were capable but none were class leading and somebody else always did it better than them. Sales dwindled, dealers closed down and everything looked rather bleak. They even tried reviving it with John Abraham, as if that’s going to make a difference.

Yamaha woke up from its slumber and started to do what it did best, excite people. It sought to a flagship strategy; it bought in the cavalry namely the R1, raised brand awareness and bought in an aspirational sub-model the R15 which took the Indian market by storm. It didn’t end there; they bought out the radical FZ16. Sales have been racking up, dealers upgrading and once again children started dreaming about Yamahas. The balance is restored.