Current and Future Cricket

West Indies lost again (to England), and quite meekly at that. The match only lasted 3 1/2 days (I know, I know, those who don’t follow cricket will say – only!!) and the Windies just never got into the game. One of my English classmates just remarked right now “Bring on the Indians”. I think when India visits soon, we will be much better competition, for sure. However, I do doubt that we will be able to win. Don’t get me wrong, I will be very very happy if we did. Just that any seaming/bouncy track and we have every chance of getting out twice. While our bowling is good,  I don’t know if it’s that good.

I really wanna play cricket myself, but doesn’t look like I am in the organizer’s good books these days. So decided to go to Belfast to see India vs South Africa on 1st July; that’s gonna be great fun day.

 

Contacting Alumni in business schools and refurbished computers

A lot of my classmates find it very surprising when I tell them that I regularly try to contact relevant alumni for discussion career opportunities in their companies. The first question is always “so what do you tell them”. I have found the school alumni very helpful; I tell them I like their company and would like to have a 5 minute phone discussion about exploring opportunities. And most of these people will get back within 2 days and give me a status check. I have initiated many discussions through these, and quite a few have gone somewhere.

Why are refurbished computers a much bigger business in US while they are only now becoming big in Europe? Can’t think of any relevant reasons, but I know from a reliable source that it is true.

 

Property Agency’s Customer Service in UK

If there’s one place you don’t want to buy or rent a place from in London, it’s Kenwood Estates.

They have now had our refrigerator un-repaired for almost 4 weeks. And here’s the deal – they do not interact with us, notify us with any progress, hoping we will just forget. But when they come to show the place to someone else,  the lettings person says the clincher when I ask her about it “I do not deal with property management. Please contact Rocky at the office”. Yup, the greatest customer service ever; getting the customer roped in and bound is my duty after that our pathetic customer service is someone else’s poor job and I won’t even listen about it.

Of course, they will say there are dependencies. British Gas takes time, but being property managers of this place on behalf of owner they can of course not talk to BG, can they – just to perhaps ask when the guy would come.  That they only do when we ask them whats the status

This of course is the latest in weeks being taken for our water supply once, our door lock never been changed after a burglary, a bed that had broken tooks weeks to be repaired after promising 3 days

Oh ya, you can’t express your unhappiness too much or else they will not give you a reference for the next place. Unbelievable customer service; you pay but they are the lords of everything

 

Surrealism by Dali and Market Research by Hardie

One way to make use of a miserable London early-summer day (temperature: 5 degrees!) is to stay indoors and explore one of the museums. Did that yesterday, visited the Surrealism exhibition at V&A yesterday.

Surrealism seems to be very interesting; somewhere between contemporary and modern art, it can be best defined as fantasy bound loosely by reality. Think of the old woman-young woman whom do you see picture; that is surrealism. But so is a lot more things. And this exhibition takes you the stages of development nicely. On the exhibition home page link above is the photo of the lip sofa; a sofa in the shape of lips deliberately made as glassy as possible by Salvador Dali, the biggest name of the surrealist movement. There’s also the arm chair (chair with the back’s edges in the shape of arms), lobster home phone (old-style circular dial phone with a lobster as the talking piece) and jewelery representing lion’s face sprawling out diamonds.

What I really liked was how surrealism was commercialized in interesting ways; by patrons yes, but also by advertising agencies, fashion designers and interior decorators.

And then today, I put myself to work for the marketing research assignment by Bruce Hardie, one of our really-good marketing professors. Gosh, he has made me sceptical about everything! I mean everything, I wonder if I will ever believe a market research result again. But beyond all that, an interesting bit of info for those who didn’t know (I surely didn’t before this class): Research findings by Forrester, the famous and oft-quoted technology market research firm, is not believed by serious academics and professionals because they do not publish the methodology undertaken to collect the data. Only when you know the methodology can you identify biases (talking to a non-representative sample) and sampling errors (not taking a large enough sample size for the given confidence) in research, and if you can’t do that, how do you believe what they say. So much for my using their data in many, many presentations over the last two years! Oh well, well-learnt for my future.

 

Art investment conference

London Business School today hosted its first Art Investment Conference ; Walid, a dear class-mate and a great guy has been raising the awareness as his personal mission over the last year and the crowd attending today was testament of his hard work.

Due to an important class presentation,  I could not attend it but we really are talking about a big crowd for an inaugural event.

Makes me think, how many of the attendees really love the art and how many want to use it for the snob value?

I have started understanding and appreciating art a little bit since shifting to London but a few days ago was my first encounter with Indian art. Professor Nirmalya Kumar gave a short talk on Jamini Roy paintings at the pre-conference dinner of India Business Forum.  Jamini Roy is considered the father of Indian modern art, and some of his mother-son  pieces in bright shades (Nirmalya owns a few that he had brought over) were riveting.

Makes me wonder, how come so few Indians, even of the”educated” ones, know anything about Indian art?

 

India Business Forum: what a day

India Business Forum 2007 was a class event.  The theme was Indian Infrastructure and speakers like Shanta Devrajan (Chief Economist, World Bank, South Asia), Mr Rajiv Lall (CEO, IDFC),  Praful Patel (Union Minister, Civil Aviation, Government of India) gave impressive keynote speeches while 3 panels discussed numerous issues. The panelists credentials were as impressive as the keynote speakers: The IOC Chairman, The Reliance Energy CTS CEO, Chairman of the SKIl Infrastructure, CEO of the Economist, Director of Morgan Stanley, Head of the JSW Jindal Group and so many many more

I was helping out in handling the media side of things, and we already have had many press mentions in The Economic Times, Deccan Herald along with the storeis being picked up by Rediff and Zee News. (thanks so much Mr. H.S. Rao at PTI and Ms. Sujata at Reuters) The TV coverage should follow in the next few days as CNBC TV18, CNN-IBN, NDTV and BBC were all covering the event and taking interviews.

A few interesting nuggets from the day:

• Shanta Devrajan  started the day in great fashion, by stressing an oft-forgotten theme: India’s infrastructure deficit can be significantly reduced through reforms that will help existing assets. In other words, don’t just keep thinking and talking of new infrastructure all the time; tremendous value can come out of current infrastructure. The case study of Andhra Pradesh spending more on power subsidies than on the entire state health budget every year for the last 5 years was a true eye-opener!!! Make your power infrastructure more robust and value generating by eliminating subsidies, the farmers dont want them; they would rather pay for power that reaches them than free power which is unreliable, stolen by middlemen etc. I was mesmerized by this point of incredibly useless subsidies that continue because it will be non-popular politics.
• Rajiv Lall spoke really well I heard but unfortunately could not attend his speech. He did talk a bit on the under utilized branch network of Public sector banks, that should help debt penetration in future
• The financing panel had very interesting views on how the Public sector banks are still not asset heavy as required, and there is huge shortage of quality PPP project sponsors like GMR etc. The technical details of how longer-term debt will help infra projects a lot but not given by Indian banks because of their asset-liability mismatch
• Praful Patel mentioned that the multiplicity of agencies needs to be simplified to make Tier II and III airports a success. He also said that our carbon footprint is not comparable to the developed world but we are still employing the best environmental practices for all new projects.
• The High commissioner of India to UK ended the day with witty comments about our choice of venue (royal college of obstetricians and gynecologists). He made many interesting remarks, the best being on grievance management; that India must manage the growing tensions that will come up with high-speed development, between regions, classes, industries.

 

Talk by Tim Davie, the Director of Marketing at BBC

Tim (http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/biographies/biogs/executives/timdavie.shtml) is a good speaker; his presentation  slides were very picture-heavy and that makes for a good discussion-style talk. It was during the QnA however, that Tim showed why he is considered one of UK’s top marketeer, answering with  style,  substance,  clarity and insight.

Lets ponder over a few interesting points that he stressed on:

• Doesnt matter what role you are in, you gotta love content if you want to be good in the media business
• the strategic question “what business am I really in”, as per the media value chain, is the question every senior management is asking themselves – and the answers are not easy.
• Quality becomes even more important for this wide choice and easy control  world; 6/10 just wont do, you need 9/10
• BBC  has always delivered great-quality content suitable for the long-tail; so mobile is a synergetic channel
• The test for the under20 generation is “do I want to share this media piece”
• Cross-media measurements are becoming crucial to have
• BBC’s business model is “great quality content” + “trusted guide”; backbone-d by the best unbiased News worldwide

I can see that I am not being able to capture the ethos of a good session in bullets here; more to come in a day or two on this

 

London emits 40% less CO2 per person emitting than the national average: FT

Dear old FT Magazine, as usual some very interesting articles this week.

One of them (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5b3df528-02aa-11dc-a023-000b5df10621.html) by Tim Harford discusses carbon footprints of different regions in the UK.

Read it, it’s damn interesting and very short; but here’s a summary set of statements if you dont want to click on the link to read it:

1. “London’s Mayor’s office informs me that London emits 40 per cent less carbon dioxide a person than the national average”

2. “The Office for National Statistics reports that Londoners produce much less household waste than anywhere else in the UK. From the same source I learn that London’s households are the most likely to have no cars”

3. “London, like other big, dense cities, is good for the planet. That fact seems to surprise people. After all, cities are polluted places. But we need to make a fair comparison. There are 7,600 times more people in London than in Ashton Hayes, but if you took 7,600 villages like Ashton Hayes and tried to cram all of them inside the M25 you’d have a struggle. The first step, I suppose, would be to build a few thousand skyscrapers and fill them with gardens and garden sheds.”

4. “But it is worth remembering that Londoners – like the citizens of New York, Tokyo and many other dense cities around the world – have found a way of life that combines green living with wealth and economic dynamism. It turns people into unconscious, even unwilling, environmentalists.”

Here’s my questions, if anyone wants to have a discussion on this:

1. How believable is this? Specifically, did this author take into account all form of commercial footprint of London? I mean 40% less than national average with manufacturing already dying here seems steep. I understand the population in London is many times anywhere else but still.

2. If this is truly the case, what does that say about “oh the purity of the countryside; I just want a break out there” school of thought

3. If this is truly the case, how should the whole PoA for lowering global carbon footprint be changed (if at all)?  Should the criteria for carbon emission reduction differ for cities and villages in UK?

4. If this is not the case, then is there a fundamental flaw in carbon footprint estimations being followed?

not being critical, just want to learn more on this topic

 

Random Dinner with the Irish – great fun

Instead of going to McDonalds for the Fillet-o-Fish I felt like, I was lazy and stopped at the Spanish place next to home. San Miguel’s Restaurant & Tapas Bar is quite a cool place, with live music and well-known for its ambience and food.

So I come in, sit at a table with my Economist for keeping me company, and this 40-something lady says “are you alone, join us if you want”; and so started an hour of great conversation. It was two Irish friends, a guy and a girl, having their brandy having just finished their dinner.
We talked about literally everything: how Ireland and India have similar cultures because of being family-oriented (and the flags are similar, I reminded them!), how the Irish cricket team now is finally known in Ireland, how emails make our life event-driven now (and how Blackberry email responses can honestly wait till you get to work), student loans in UK. I mean everything

And it ended with the lady dancing to the live music and finding a partner with another restaurant 60-odd year old guest, who then later talked about his 3 ex-wives!!

Sometimes random encounters can be great fun

 

The innocence of childhood

This happened 2 days ago. I was standing at the Southbound platform of the Northern line (denoted black on the London tube map) at Kings Cross. A mother walked down the stairs with her 4-5 year old son, looked at the journey map and told him “Oh this is the southbound platform, we need to go to the other platform son. It’s still the black train I promise you, just the other side”

Ahh the joy of childhood