Here’s some advice for drawing readers like me:

Blogger’s Guide:

* Provide unique, actionable content. To be honest, I don’t care if you’ve been blogging for five years or five minutes, if I feel I’m going to leave a site having learned something new, count me in.

* Post frequently. This doesn’t mean that you have to blog every day — a few each week will do the trick — but if multiple weeks pass between each post, readers will stop checking in.

* Maintain focus. Nothing says you have to restrict yourself to a single topic, but you’ll confuse readers if you hop randomly from subject to subject without explaining why.

* Add visual interest. You’ll notice that many bloggers include an image with each post. Follow their lead. So much of social media is visual perception.

*Get a good software like blogjet to make writing easier .

The Point: Good content is good content. Even the busiest people make time for their favorite blogs.

When I first got involved with social media, I was subscribing to anything and everything. A while back I purged and got down to a manageable amount of daily blog reading. With so much engaging content available, I’m frequently tempted to re-expand my reading list.

Reader’s guide:

My screen shot:

1.Get a good feed reader. Its a must for any blog reader.I can suggest FeedDemon or FeedReader if you are using a non broadband connection.And if you are using broadband connection then firefox bookmark or technorati or Bloglines  can do the purpose.

2.Select everything that catches your interest and remove feeds gradually and at the same time add  new feeds too.

3.Choose variety of topics. Don’t subscribe to different blogs of same topic.

A very good article from Hindu, regarding the Business anticipation and the $ currency conversion.. The new model business has to follow, an overview of the industry in 2007 and challenges ahead. Worth reading.

Thanks to Hindu and Shanthi Kannan

With the rupee appreciation and the slowdown in the U.S. economy, the Indian IT industry will have to evolve. Innovation, new delivery model and building business beyond borders will help the industry to survive and become a global leader.

Even as 2007 is readying to go into the pages of history, the year has seen some key events that have had an impact on the business community as a whole within and outside the country. Consider these:

An escalating rupee has triggered the U.S. dollar to drop from Rs. 44-45 levels to Rs. 39.

Though stock markets have had their ups and downs, 2007 has remained predominantly a bull year for them. The Sensex has moved up from 13000 to breach the 20000-mark to hover around its present level.

The year is also a witness to some mega deals such as Arecelor-Mittal, Tata-Corus and Vodafone-Hutch, to name a few.

The U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis appears to have impacted most global banks and affected stock prices all over. Indian markets, however, have had no or very low impact.

With the information technology (IT) industry growing at a galloping rate in the past decade, IT stocks have been the darling of markets.

Rupee appreciation

This year, however, most IT stocks have under-performed. With the appreciation of the rupee, most IT companies have reported profits below last year’s levels. Mega acquisitions in the news have been in non-IT space. With BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) segment contributing to a large percentage of Indian IT exports, will a slowdown in the U.S. affect India adversely? Analysts are predicting that the global IT spends will slow down in 2008. Is the party over for Indian IT industry? And, will the sheen go off in the next few years? Unmindful of these pressures, the IT majors, however, are adding headcounts like there is no tomorrow (see graphics). Global majors such as IBM today have 20 per cent of their global workforce in India. Do these developments portent some new trends?

An appreciating currency is a natural corollary of a booming economy with rising exports. The high value of the deutschemark when Germany was the trendsetter for the world economy in the 1960s and the 1970s, the high value of yen in the 1980s when Japan Inc seemed set to take over the world and dollar’s high value in the later part of 1990s when the U.S. economy brooked no competition – these were sources of immense pride for their respective countries.

The rupee has not only appreciated against the dollar (12-13 per cent), but also against the pound sterling and euro, during the last six months. FDI (foreign direct investment) inflows, foreign portfolio inflows and growing Indian economy are among the reasons for the strong rupee. The heart-burn on the rupee’s appreciation against the dollar is due to the fact that most of the country’s external trade is invoiced in dollar and any change in the dollar’s rupee value has a disproportionate effect on various stakeholders.

“The rising rupee is likely to hit Indian mid-size software services’ providers because of their thin margins. Margins are impacted to the extent of 0.5-0.6 per cent for every rupee increase against the dollar, depending on the business mix,” says Subbu D. Subramanian, Director and Senior Vice-President (Manufacturing and Automotive group), Saytam Computer Services.

“As a part of our strategy to offset the impact of the appreciation of the Indian rupee, we are increasing our employee utilisation levels, and we were able to successfully further increase our global utilisation rates from 63 per cent to 65 per cent,” says Chandrasekaran, President and Management Director, Cognizant Technology Solutions.

Mr. Chandrasekaran says, “We do not hedge. And our rupee expenditure is about 30 per cent of our total expenses. We have not hedged so far because there is an implied cost to hedging. Besides, we have several short-term levers to pull, which have the natural ability to offset the effects of rupee appreciation.” The U.S.-based competitors depend on their Indian subsidiaries to control costs, and their competitiveness will also be hit by the rupee appreciation, says Mr. Subramanian.

U.S. sub-prime crisis

The banking sector in U.S. may be going through one of its worst challenges in the last few decades, because of sub-prime mortgages crisis. Despite the prompt supportive action from the U.S. Federal Government, there are many analysts who predict that this may culminate in a recession in the U.S. economy. However, the IT Industry in India is looking at this more as an opportunity than a threat.

From a Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) perspective, there has been no impact due to sub-prime meltdown. TCS views every crisis as an opportunity to grow and help that segment by managing costs and drive process efficiencies in the business, says Ravi Viswanathan, Vice-President (Chennai Operations), TCS.

“This can potentially have an impact in the short-term for those who have significant exposure to BFSI (banking, financial, services and insurance) segment, but in the long-term, the crisis would actually spur further outsourcing of IT services,” says J. K. Nair, Executive Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of California Software Company.

“Despite an uncertainty in the market over the economic outlook, 92 per cent of our clients do not expect their overall IT budget to decline in 2008,” says Mr. Chandrasekaran. Even if there is a reduction in the IT budget, most of the clients do not expect the same to have an impact on offshoring budgets. Other players in the industry also echo similar views. Overall, large Indian IT services’ companies are expected to gain in this scenario.

Global model

Most of the IT companies are spreading their services delivery infrastructure within India by moving into Tier-II and Tier-III cities. They are making inroads into China and setting up near shore centres in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Canada.

The reasons for spreading-out the service delivery infrastructure are not far to seek, according to Mr. Nair. Retaining or enhancing cost-competitiveness, improving customer comfort, moving closer to customer locations, leveraging a specific locally available skill-set and de-risking dependence on any single location are among the reasons.

TCS appears to have a diversified strategy of delivery. It operates out of six regions in India. The setting up of solution centres in different parts of the world is driven by the needs of the market. Today, it has over 10 per cent of its one lakh workforce sourced from the local markets. Setting up centres of execution around the globe is a part of the strategy to establish TCS as an international brand, according to Ravi Viswanathan.

TCS’ foray into new geographic locations continued according to plan with operating units set up in South Africa and Morocco in the EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) region and Mexico in the Latin American region. The Chinese operations have grown in strength. Data privacy matters and security laws of the local geographies are some of the reasons other than availability of talent in that region for setting up such centres around the globe, says he.

“Continued rupee appreciation may cause Indian IT companies to create more jobs globally than in India, given the service delivery expertise,” says Shiva Ramani, CEO, Cybernet-SlashSupport Systems.

Major IT deals

The year 2007 saw some small acquisitions in the IT space. These are targeted at new market entries acquiring new skill sets. However, there were many major business deals in the IT space during this year.

Be in total contract value (TCV) of deals, be it in takeover of large number of client employees and their development centres, be it the expansion into most near-shore centres in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific regions, and be it tapping into emerging markets like China, South America and South Africa – the top Indian IT companies, in 2007, have adopted unconventional business models to gain market share and establish a global foot-print and a global brand presence.

Take the case of the $1.2-billion deal that TCS has struck with AC Nielsen for IT and operations support. The deal is unique because it has unusual ten-year contract. The finance and HR business processes are also included as a part of the contract. And, the deal is to be executed on a new business platform built by TCS. The company also has taken over the responsibility for the Baroda development centre as part of the deal. Similarly, the Royal Philips Electronics deal of Infosys is equally unconventional. Infosys has absorbed 1,400 professionals and three shared service centres of Philips – one each in Chennai, Poland and Bangkok. This too is a long-term contract, spreading over seven years.

Another deal sewed using an innovative business model is the Rabo Bank deal by Cognizant for $21 million. Wipro’s arrangement with Credit Suisse is to set up a captive unit for Credit Suisse. And, the one-billion dollar deal struck by Tech Mahindra with British Telecom by paying up over $100 million upfront signals a new trend of large Indian IT Services and BPO companies innovating on business models.

Crystal gazing

During 2007, the industry saw global players focussing on building up their delivery capacities in India so as to remain competitive with the larger Indian players. Large Indian companies were also looking to build and strengthen domain and technology capabilities even as they were spreading the services delivery infrastructure.

Finally, the mid-size companies focussed on getting scales on a few chosen domains and technology capabilities. Assuming that the rupee strengthens further against the dollar, what will happen? Experts feel that the IT industry can offset the impact of a stronger rupee in the short term by improving productivity, currency hedging, adjusting the onshore/off shore ratio and migrating to an appropriate global service delivery model and negotiating new contracts in rupee terms.

However, the industry has to transform itself by moving up the value chain, productised IP (intellectual property)-led services, and expanding in to stable currency markets to sustain growth in a strong rupee regimen. The industry leaders do not expect any major change in 2008. However some of the long-term trends that they indicated are:

Shift from being a mere IT services outsourcing destination to home of IP-based productised services;

A major transitioning from ERP to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework;

World majors in different verticals making India as their R&D outsourcing hub and specialisation in select vertical or niche markets

The Indian IT industry, in effect, is on a path to provide superior business value to its global customers.

The IT majors are transforming themselves into true global players with India as their headquarters and mid-size players are attempting to scale up. One message which comes out loud and clear is: Those who innovate new solutions and new delivery models will survive and succeed.

Do you want to be a Brahmin of the new age??? In olden days knowledge was confined and restricted among ‘born Brahmin ‘community. But time has changed everything. If u are seriously thinking of gaining some brahmathwa , then apply following tools regularly…

1. Google:

I would like to call Google as the evolution of the new age. It’s a phenomenon. And a revolution just like French or American revolutions which changed the entire world. The invention (yes I would like to call it so) has changed the way the world behaves. It has leveraged an entire gamut of business and educational end social activities. It was amazing to think of some lines of algorithm which changed not just www but the entire world.

We are witnesses to the seed planting of revolution. As the masses look for escape clauses in their SUV leases, real life distractions keep their thoughts focused elsewhere-Google’s impact upon the world and its tech future is an obscure byline. Certainly the world is shouting “Revolution!” and few are noticing

In the future, all computing devices, whether it be the PC, mobile phone, TV, etc., will simply be terminals that “plug-in” to Google’s massive server grid and application services.” It appears the potential of Google goes beyond changing the lexicon, but may indeed change entire business models as the world switches on an ad-supported Google Net

They have started the race by the introduction of Office suit and other applications

2. Wikipedia:

The Wikipedia is having a dramatic and unexpected impact as an open source-based, community-driven method of creating and disseminating valuable knowledge and information on a global basis. How is a free and open online encyclopedia, entirely written and edited by its users, managing to outstrip conventional media in audience, breadth, and depth? What are the implications for other kinds of content, for publishing, and for information technology, especially open source-based business models in general? The controversial aspects of the Wikipedia, particularly the fact that anyone can edit any article at any time. It is believed that while the user-written model has problems, it can succeed with the right mix of community and peer review. It is not necessary for someone to be in charge. The sense of ownership can make a great impact on all businesses. EBay and and other community driven businesses are examples.

But on the business front the newly introduced Google Knol will be a threat to Wikipedia. The range of digitized books and ability to tweak its search engine will benefit Google in Warfield.

3. Blogging aka Web Logging:

The key to note here is that blogs have the ability to connect with users on a very intimate level. Here are other macro social changes that blogging has brought about in terms of the Media Space: Content is not top down anymore. Not only do news makers, the news media, and ‘the big guys’ create content. There are no barriers to entry if you have a brain, a computer, and an Internet connection. The consumers will essentially be as big creators of content as the ‘creators of content as we currently know them.

The ‘control’ in terms of who owns the share of voice in the media is changing. With blogging, Corporate Blogging too has taken precedence. Corporate blogs are giving established companies and obscure brands alike the ability to connect with their audiences on a more personal level, build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened business relationships. More importantly, these companies are enjoying tangible returns in their blogging investment in the form of increased sales, partnerships, business opportunities, press coverage and lead generation.

In a sense, the blogging revolution has also created the marketing sub category of Viral Marketing. As I said earlier – a genuine blogger writes with the enthusiasm and orientation to provide value and connect with his or her audience. The blogger shares useful and engaging content -the latest information, help, discussion topics and ideas. The way audiences respond to that content is key. When customers start commenting, posting or tracking back to a blogging community, it can have a viral effect -spreading out across the blogosphere. And trust me – the unique engagement that blogs provide essentially spreads to all corners of the World.

(Courtsey Economic Times)

BANGALORE: Wipro has launched a student blog, Campusarena which will serve as a platform for students to voice their views and opinions across diverse topics, the Bangalore-based company said in a statement.

Wipro Limited’s GM (Strategic Resourcing) Priti Rajora said, “The blog was created with the dual purpose of providing students their very own forum to interact on a wide range of topics and also with the objective of continuous dialogue with students in order to present them a human face of Wipro ”. (cudn’t conrol me laughing…They have started speaking ethics too :-)…)Senior Wipro professionals would be blogging on all the sections on Campusarena.

Then from the wipro-campusarena blog..

Another copy paste Blog… Seems it’ll be interesting to read at least, even though applying these in an IT company context is tough…

The majority of people who fail at their job will fail in the first 90 days. So take special care to make a good start. Here are areas you need to manage carefully.

1. Assume everything in the interview was wrong.

Don’t come to work with a preconception of your job description. You’ll be disappointed at best and annoying at worst.

During the interview process, a hiring manager tells you a job description that will make you want to take the job. The description is not likely to be an accurate summary of what your boss really wants you to do. After all, no one says in an interview, “You’ll have to pick up pieces when my disorganization gets our team into trouble,” or “As a newcomer, you will take the projects no one else wants, which may or may not be relevant to your interests.”

Also, during your initial meeting, you probably asked your perspective boss about his management style. The answer he gave was really the management style he thinks she *should* be using.

People do not generally say what they want. (This is so true that focus groups have to be run in a way that consumers are not asked directly what they want because they say the wrong thing.) So watch your boss, read nonverbal cues, and understand what is motivating him. Once you really truly understand your boss you will be able to constantly adjust what you’re doing in order to meet his or her needs.

2. Get your goals in writing. And meet them.

Find out what your boss wants you to accomplish in the first 90 days. You need to know how you will be judged during this crucial time. Initiating this discussion shows that you are goal oriented and you want to be part of your boss’s agenda. Ask for detailed descriptions and quantified expectations and get them in writing. Even if your boss does not create an official document, do it yourself, in an email – an informal summary of the conversation, but in your mind, treat this as a formal agreement.

Of courses, you must meet these goals, but forget about the phrase “hit the ground running�? because you’ll slip and fall. If you are running have no time to double check where they’re going, and there’s no time to make sure you are moving similarly to everyone else. Pace yourself for the first few months so you have a chance to learn how the company operates.

3. Manage your image.

Here are questions you’ll hear every day for your first three months: Where were you before this company? How did you get into this business? Where are you from? These are general, fishing-for-information questions. It is an opportunity for you to package yourself to your coworkers.

So get your spiel ready. Only a few people interviewed you; most people in the company know very little about you. Have a short, snappy answer for general, tell-me-about-yourself questions. People are going to make judgments that stick, based on this seemingly casual conversation. So prepare in advance.

Everyone will make a snap judgment about you – this is how people operate. Even good people. We can’t help it. If you’re lucky, they’ll ask you a question. But most people will just take a look. So you have no ramp-up time when it comes to image. You have to look right on the first day. Dress like the other people at your level in the company. Set up your desk to present a crisp, organized image from day one. This means not barren but nothing cutesy.

Your desk and clothes are an expression of your competence, not your personality. Express your true personality at home, with your friends who are not evaluating you during the next 90 days.

People should perceive you as a listener. Ask questions, observe carefully, and meet as many people as you can. Instead of spouting off about how great you are, which only serves to show people that you are insecure, try listening to people, which makes them feel important, and consequently they will like you more. And in those first 90 days, who likes you is what will matter the most.

Have you ever thought that the ability to socialize and maintain relationship with others can take you to higher ladders both in life and career??? If your answer is NO then it’s the time to start thinking about it. In US they r grouped under people with disabilities and have a separate training stream for them.This is a must read for people like us who are part of the increasingly antisocial stay-at-home-and-surf-the-web generation have invented a new way to connect to people: online social networking ..Read on…

Stop thinking you’ll get by on your high I.Q.

My son’s I.Q. is in the top .05% of all preschoolers, but he attended preschool in a special education classroom. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism typified by a distinctly high I.Q. and a notable lack of emotional intelligence. Asperger’s is thought to be genetic, and it is surging among kids in places like Silicon Valley, that attract math and tech geniuses who often have sub-par social skills. We know one boy with Asperger’s who taught himself to read books when he was two years old. Scientists surmise that learning to read books so fast consumes the part of his brain that should be learning to read social cues. My son’s special education classroom was full of kids like that one – who used to pass through the education system labeled eccentric geniuses, only to graduate having never learned social skills and consequently falter in adulthood. Today, educators take a child’s lack of social skills seriously. Parents should also. For educators, any nonverbal learning disability (like not being able to tell if someone cares about what you are talking about) is treated as significantly as a verbal learning disability (like not being able to speak.) Yet I am stunned by how many parents brush aside recommendations from educators to get help for their children by saying to themselves, “My child is so smart.” Smart is not an endgame. Even in a toddler. To understand why, look to the workplace. After where you go to school, social skills are the most important factor in whether you succeed or fail. I link to this research all the time, but frankly, if you need research to understand that the people who are best at office politics succeed at the office, then you are missing basic social cues already. But here’s more evidence: Nine out of ten business schools consider communication and interpersonal skills “highly underrated as a differentiating factor for students,” according to CareerJournal. And Jeff Puzas at PRTM echos a cacophony of workplace voices when he says, “Most of what I do every day as a management consultant has to do with interpersonal skills, not my I.Q.” And when you think about someone finding his way to success in the real world, consider the Wall St. Journal’s list of the traits that recruiters look for in business school candidates: Communication and interpersonal skills Original and visionary thinking Leadership potential Ability to work well within a team Analytical and problem-solving skills Notice that most of these skills are independent of intelligence. Smart is even less of an endgame for adults than children-and the standard for ability to work well with others is only getting higher, not lower: Generation Y is more team-oriented than prior generations. So, it’s time for us to stop making excuses for poor social skills and start taking the problem as seriously as educators do. It’s painful for both children and adults who cannot navigate social settings. Kids sit on the sidelines on the playground; adults can’t maintain close relationships. It’s a limited life and it’s limited in the area where people have an inherent need to thrive. I sense that people are going to argue with me here, but please consider that all the positive psychology research points to the fact that work does not make people happy. Relationships do. But we see the history of people with Asperger’s – Einstein, Mozart, John Forbes Nash – they did amazing work but could not maintain stable, intimate relationships. Parents: Stop pretending that your child’s I.Q. matters more than their social skills. Get treatment for your child as soon as a professional recommends it. Respect that the risk of not being able to transition to the work world is significant, and so is the risk of waiting to see if your child will fail despite being brilliant. Human beings learn social skills best at a very young age, when their brain is still forming. So celebrate that the government provides free training for children lacking social skills by using it. Start studying the playground. Respect what often seems insignificant to parents with small children-diagnoses of speech delay or disorder, and diagnoses of sensory integration, for example. Those issues threaten future development of social skills. As an adult, one of the hardest parts of having low emotional intelligence is that you don’t realize it. People who are missing the cues have no idea they are missing them. So the most unable often have the least understanding of where they fall in the spectrum. I’m going to tell you something harsh: If your career is stuck, it’s probably because of poor social skills. People who don’t know what they want to do with themselves but have good social skills don’t feel stuck, they feel unsure. People who are lacking social skills feel like they have nowhere to go. Lost people feel possibilities. Stuck people do not feel possibilities. Ask yourself which you are. And if you feel suck, stop looking outside yourself to solve the problem. You need to change how you interact with people. Another idea for how to figure out where you fall in the social skills spectrum is to take a self-diagnostic test. Here is one at Wired magazine about Aperger’s, and here is one about emotional intelligence. Or give a test to the people you work with – a 360-degree review will tell you in no uncertain terms if you are being held back because people don’t like you. Hold it. Did you just say, “If people don’t like me maybe it’s their fault!” Forget it. People with good social skills can get along with just about everyone. So help your kids to form intimate relationships with peers, and help yourself, too. In fact, as an adult you can learn how to compensate for lack of social skills by watching how schools are teaching the kids to do it. Pay attention. Because when it comes to our job – no matter what our job is – it’s the relationships that make us happy, not the work. That’s why I.Q. doesn’t matter.

Came across this wonderful speech last month. It was a true motivator and a rare piece of enlightenment. I would like to share this with u.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Jim Collins is by far the best know teacher of enduring great companies – how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies. When I read about the Level 5 leadership model that he has evolved, I was impressed with the deep reality in it. Not many ‘non-management’ folks would have read about him or his works. Below I have presented a report by Jim Collins. It is worth a read and find out that we can indeed become Level 5 leaders, as he unfolds in his reports.

The Misguided Mix-Up of Celebrity and Leadership
Conference Board Annual Report, Annual Feature Essay by Jim Collins

Virtually everything our modern culture believes about the type of leadership required to transform our institutions is wrong. It is also dangerous. There is perhaps no more corrosive trend to the health of our organizations than the rise of the celebrity CEO, the rock-star leader whose deepest ambition is first and foremost self-centric.

In 1996, my research team and I began to wrestle with a simple question: Can a good company become a great company and, if so, how? If we could find organizations that had made the leap from good to great and isolate the factors that distinguished these examples from carefully selected comparison companies that failed to make the leap (or if they did, failed to sustain it), we would shed light on the key variables that separate great from good. We embarked on a five-year study to answer this one deceptively simple question, examining merely good performers that had somehow transformed themselves to achieve truly great results. (We defined “great results” as cumulative stock returns at least 3.0 times better than the general stock market over fifteen years, a performance superior to most widely admired companies. For perspective, General Electric from 1985 to 2000 beat the market only 2.8 to 1.)

We uncovered a number of key requirements and underlying variables for turning a good company into a great one. But perhaps the most intriguing-and certainly the most surprising-is the type of leadership that turns good into great.

Consider Darwin E. Smith. In 1971, this seemingly ordinary man became chief executive of Kimberly-Clark. He inherited a company that for one hundred years had been merely good, never great. A mediocre player in the middling paper industry, Kimberly-Clark returns to investors had fallen 36 percent behind the general stock market over the twenty years prior to Darwin Smith’s ascension to CEO. Over the next twenty years, Smith led a stunning turnabout, generating returns to investors that beat the general stock market by over four times, easily outperforming such companies as Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and Coca-Cola.

Have you ever heard of Darwin Smith? Despite being one of the greatest CEOs of the twentieth century, he remains largely unknown. A shy and reserved man, Smith shunned any attempt to shine the spotlight on him, preferring instead to direct attention to the company and its people. He showed none of the swagger that characterizes many of today’s high-profile CEOs, and he never viewed himself as a great hero. Early in Smith’s tenure as CEO, a director pulled Smith aside to remind him that he lacked some of the qualifications for the position (he had been corporate counsel and had never run a major division). Smith, a man who never entirely erased his own self-doubts, later summed up his tenure by saying simply, “I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.”

Yet despite his shy and self-effacing nature, Smith was anything but weak. When it came time to make the big decisions required to make the company great, he made them. Early in his tenure, he unflinchingly decided to sell all the traditional paper mills, which accounted for the majority of Kimberly-Clark’s business-sell even the namesake mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin-and throw all the money into the consumer business, investing in brands like Huggies and Kleenex. It was a huge and painful step. Coming home from work during this particularly difficult period, a wearied Smith said to his wife, “It’s really tough. But if you have a cancer in your arm, then you’ve got to have the guts to cut off your arm.”

Wall Street derided him, the business media called the move stupid, and the analysts wrote merciless commentary. After all, how on earth could such a mediocre paper company take on the giants of the consumer business? But in the end, Smith’s stoic resolve paid off. Kimberly-Clark became the number one paper-based consumer products company in the world, eventually beating Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories and owning outright its previous main competitor, Scott Paper. I think we can safely say that Darwin Smith did indeed become qualified for the job.

Level 5 leadership: The antithesis of egocentric celebrity

If you want to grasp the essence of the type of leader who turns good into great, just keep in mind Darwin Smith. It turns out that every good-to-great company in our study had a leader from the Darwin Smith school of management at the helm during the pivotal years.

We eventually came to call these remarkable people “Level 5 leaders.” The term “Level 5″ refers to a five-level hierarchy. Level 1 relates to individual capability, Level 2 to team skills, Level 3 to managerial competence, and Level 4 to leadership as traditionally conceived. Level 5 leaders possess the skills of levels 1 to 4 but also have an “extra dimension”: a paradoxical blend of personal humility (“I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job”) and professional will (“sell the mills”). They are somewhat self-effacing individuals who deflect adulation, yet who have an almost stoic resolve to do absolutely whatever it takes to make the company great, channeling their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious-but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution and its greatness, not for themselves.

David Maxwell, the good-to-great CEO at Fannie Mae in the 1980s and early 1990s, was another such leader. He took over a bureaucratic, quasi-governmental entity losing $1 million every single business day and turned it into one of the smartest, best-run financial institutions in the world, earning $4 million every business day. Fannie Mae cumulative stock returns beat the general stock market by nearly four times under Maxwell, and he set the stage for the next generation to continue the momentum, eventually outperforming the market by over seven times.

When his nearly $20 million retirement package became a point of controversy in Congress (Fannie Mae is subject to congressional oversight due to its government charter), Maxwell became concerned that the controversy might damage the company’s future. So he instructed his successor to not pay him the remaining third of his package and to donate it instead to the Fannie Mae foundation for low-income housing.

Like all Level 5 leaders, Maxwell wanted to see the company become even more successful in the next generation than in his own. Preferring to be clock builders rather than time tellers, Level 5 leaders are comfortable with the idea that their companies will tick on without them, reaching even greater heights due to the foundations they laid down. The fact that most people will not know that the roots of that success trace back to them is not an overriding concern. As one Level 5 leader put it, “I want to look out from my porch at one of the great companies of the world and be able to say, ‘I used to work there.’”

It is not surprising, then, that some of the greatest CEOs of the last forty years-those few extraordinary executives who led companies from good to great using our tough benchmarks-are relatively unknown. In addition to Darwin Smith and David Maxwell, they include such obscure figures as George Cain, Alan Wurtzel, Colman Mockler, Lyle Everingham, Fred Allen, Joe Cullman, Carl Reichardt and Charles Walgreen III. These and other leaders in our study quietly went about building greatness step by step, without much fanfare or hoopla, while generating results that are extraordinary by any standard. If you had had an opportunity to invest in each of the good-to-great companies at the point of upward inflection created by these leaders and held your investments to 2000, your total returns would have exceeded those of a comparable investment in a mutual fund of the general stock market by well over eight times. Yet despite these remarkable results, almost no one has ever remarked about these leaders. The media paid scant attention, and you’ll find very few articles ever written about them.

In contrast, the comparison leaders in our study-people like Al Dunlap of Scott Paper (the comparison company to Kimberly-Clark) ), Lee Iacocca of Chrysler (a company that failed to make a sustained shift from good to great) and Stanley Gault of Rubbermaid (a company that imploded after Gault departed)-garnered vastly more attention. Some of the comparison CEOs became wealthy celebrities-covers of magazines, bestselling autobiographies, massive compensation packages-despite the fact that their long-term results failed to measure up to the quiet, unknown Level 5s. In over two-thirds of the comparison companies, we noted the presence of a gargantuan personal ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company. These leaders were ambitious for themselves, and they succeeded admirably on this score, but they failed utterly in the task of creating an enduring great company.

Looking for Level 5 leaders

The implications are obvious. Boards of directors and executives planning for succession would do well to search for the type of leadership- Level 5 leadership-correlated with the best and most enduring results. To do otherwise is to sacrifice long-term effectiveness for short-term expedience, which is tantamount to an act of irresponsibility on behalf of a company’s constituents, including its shareholders. To be clear, Level 5 leadership is not the only requirement for taking a company from good to great and for sustaining greatness once it is attained, but it does appear to be essential.

So, how should we go about identifying Level 5 leaders?

The key step is to stop looking for outsized personalities and egocentric celebrities, and instead to scrutinize for results. Look inside for some part of the organization where extraordinary results have been produced but where there is no person standing forth to take excessive credit for those results. Look there and you will likely find a Level 5 leader. And if you feel you must look to the outside (which the good-to-great companies almost never did), then look for people who show the following traits.

Two sides of the Level 5 leader

On the one hand… Creates-and is a clear catalyst in creating-superb results. Yet on the other hand… Demonstrates a compelling modesty, shunning public adulation and never boastful.

On the one hand… Demonstrates an unwavering resolve to do whatever must be done to produce the best long-term results, no matter how difficult. Yet on the other hand… Acts with quiet, calm determination and relies principally on inspired standards-not an inspiring personality-to motivate.

On the one hand… Sets the standard of building an enduring great organization and will settle for nothing less. Yet on the other hand… Channels ambition into the organization and its work, not the self, setting up successors for even greater success in the next generation.

On the one hand… Looks in the mirror, not out the window, to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, external factors, or bad luck. Yet on the other hand… Looks out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the company-to other people, external factors, and good luck.

I used to think of these leaders as rare birds, almost freaks of nature. But then a funny thing happened after a seminar where I shared the Level 5 finding and bemoaned the lack of Level 5 leaders. After the session, a number of people stopped by to give examples of Level 5 leaders they’d observed or worked with. Then again, at another seminar, the same thing happened. Then again, at a third seminar-and a pattern began to emerge.

It turns out that many people have experienced Level 5 leadership somewhere in their development-a Level 5 sports coach, a Level 5 platoon commander, a Level 5 boss, a Level 5 entrepreneur, a Level 5 CEO. There is a common refrain: “I couldn‘t understand or put my finger on what made him so effective, but now I understand: he was a Level 5.” People began to clip articles and send e-mails with examples of people they think of as Level 5 leaders, past or present: Orin Smith of Starbucks Coffee, Joe Torre of the New York Yankees, Kristine McDivitt of Patagonia, John Whitehead of Goldman Sachs, Frances Hesselbein of The Drucker Foundation, Jack Brennan of Vanguard, John Morgridge of Cisco Systems, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and so on. My list of Level 5 leaders began to grow exponentially.

Then it dawned on me: Our problem is not a shortage of Level 5 leaders. They exist all around us. Like the drawing of two faces that transforms itself into a vase, depending on how you look at the picture, Level 5 leadership jumps out at us as soon as we change how we look at the world and alter our assumptions about how it best works.

No, our problem lies in the fact that our culture has fallen in love with the idea of the celebrity CEO. Charismatic egotists who swoop in to save companies grace the covers of major magazines because they are much more interesting to read and write about than people like Darwin Smith and David Maxwell. This fuels the mistaken belief held by many directors that a high-profile, larger-than-life leader is required to make a company great. We keep putting people into positions of power who lack the inclination to become Level 5 leaders, and that is one key reason why so few companies ever make a sustained and verifiable shift from good to great.

The fact that our culture has evolved away from Level 5 leadership, however, does not mean that the culture is right or that we should accept it. After all, our culture in the 1990s also embraced the idea of irrational exuberance and infused people with the idea that they could-indeed should-get rich quick by creating companies that were Built to Flip rather than Built to Last. The culture was neither right nor healthy, and we would have done better to reject that culture and hold to fundamental tenets of creation and value that we knew in our guts to be eternally true. The same holds for our current misguided confusion of celebrity and leadership; it is neither right nor healthy. If we allow the celebrity rock-star model of leadership to triumph, we will see the decline of corporations and institutions of all types. The twentieth century was a century of greatness, but we face the very real prospect that the next century will see very few enduring great institutions. If good is the enemy of great-and I believe it is-the current trends in leadership give the decided edge to the enemy.

Yet I remain optimistic. For one thing, I sense an increasing societal unease with the emergence of celebrity leaders who care more about themselves than they do about the institutions for which they are responsible. Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions-whether in the corporate or social sectors-to advance their own interests. For another, we now have hard empirical evidence that shows such leaders to be negatively correlated with sustained great results, and this evidence should bolster courageous boards of directors. Finally, and perhaps most important, I am absolutely convinced that the seed of Level 5 leadership is widely dispersed throughout society. It can be identified. It can be cultivated. It can be developed. Given encouragement and the right tools, it can flourish. And if it does, so will our institutions.

Again let me tell you about the things i know about Google…

I think world is all about evolutions.. We have seen or heard of d majority of them.. May it be industrialistaion or mass production technologies technologies have changed the world.

“

“We were profitable almost from the start” said Barksdale. “netscape was not a dot-com.We did not particpate in dot-com bubble.We started the dot-com bubble”.

And what a bubble it was…………………………………..

And thus was the bubble born. Overinvesment is not necessarily a bad thing-provided that it is eventually corrected.”….

……………….. SENTENCES FROM  ‘THE WORLD IS FLAT’  by Thomas.L.Friedman

The REAL DEAL is this – GOOGLE – is the TULIP BULB of the “Naughty Noughties.” They are good at what they do without a doubt, as Tulips were in 17th Century Holland, beautiful flowers. Market Capitalization, however, is a different thing. Pray tell, anyone, where GOOGLE is THAT SUPERIOR to other search engines? 

Google kids are very smart and creative, but they all like to price their products at zero, in the theory that this will help them gain market share faster. (Crafty little fuckers, right? In fact they’re just following the Schwartz Theorem, devised by Jonathan Schwartz of Sun, which holds that market share grows in inverse proportion to price, with a zero-dollar price point translating to 100% market share.

The thing is they hav realized the dangers thats awaiting and they have started diversifying their business(thanks to the over IQ graduates and mathematics Phds they r hiring,an army of high-IQ oversexed teenagers with severe ADHD running wild in a Montessori pre-school of a campus.). 

The product portfolio is below

Now you they want to own the radio airwaves for cell phones and the hard drives where people store their data, and the software that runs their phones, and their word processors and spreadsheets and photo software and email and social networks and every book and magazine and newspaper that was ever printed.

Wonderful rite??

But i read somewhere that its overpriced.. and its jus a bubble like the friedman was told .But this much product portfolio ,great brains to work for, and an atmosphere where innovation is valued like gold.This company is going to grow and prove.

But compare the market capitalisation and and stock prices. Its contradictory.So investors expect a lot from this cow.. rite??

Rank   Company            Market Cap (Bil)   

1      Exxon Mobil                $505  

2      General Electric          $415               

3      Microsoft                   $333 

4      AT&T                        $251  

5      Google                           $217               

6      Procter & Gamble        $215   

7      Bank of America         $213   

8      Citigroup                   $209      

The web was over priced and a bubble ..it was always..but time will prove google’s future.

And last but not least innovations were the engines the lead all the great companies. And if one other idiot comes wit better

technology and idea, who can forbid him??(provided google didnt hire him or killed his start-up by so called  beautiful word 

“acquistion”)

I used to get wondered how these social networking sites  make money.. and recently, read an article on the revenue generating strategies.. Actually how much contribution these advertisements can make in a ‘purchasing decision’? ..So its not only about advertising, and is incorporated with people’s buying priorities and perception about brands.. Also companies can target the real customer based on his interests and culture. My it be amazon or Bay, the core of their business lies in google analytics.. Hav u ever noticed wat happens when u signing into and signing out from a google affiliated web site??? If u notice the status bar of the browser u can see that each and every action is monitored by google’s high tech algorithm to categorize u into any of the groups and tabulating ur interests by keywords used.. they can even optimize ur future google searches by your interests.. Wonderful rite???

I dont think advertisements can get them huge amount of money.. As according to classic theories its just putting or reminding the customer about the option available to him.. So google search and social networking business involves market research ,product survey and plotting people interests even without u they knowing that they participate in these surveys.. Again wonderful rite???

But i happened to come across some hard to believe facts and figures about one of the prominent social networking site orkut.. They r

1. Orkut Buyukkokten( the creator of Orkut) gets $12 when a person registers to this web site.
2. He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
3. He gets $8 when your friend’s friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as a friend in the resulting chain.
4. He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
5. He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
6. He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
7. He gets $2 when you become somebody’s fan.
8. He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
9. He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
10. He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
11. He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend’s scrap-book & $0.5 every time you view your friend’s friend-list.
12. Many Global Financial Consultants think this person might become the richest-person in the world by the end of 2009.
13. Finally, this is the best fact. This person has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 assistants to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps a day.

I think this is nothing but foolishness.. No company will be ready to spend this much dollars for one customer jus to monitor his purchasing interests..Also from where this much amount of money is supposed to come ??? 

A typical orkut profile contain on an average 100 friends(i knw its conservative analysis) and at least 1000 scraps and 25 fans,10 photos,2 logins and logout per day per user 3 visits to frnd’s scrap book or friend’s list and a total of 67 million users( as of Aug 2007)….

So applying simple mathematics…in same order as the above statements..

so total revenue R=67×10^7(12+10×100+1000X9+10×200+25×3.5+4×1+3×0.5)

OOHH.. will tell u a simple logic the bracketed term indicates revenue per user..

So it amounts to $12,105=INR12105×39=INR472095

Do u worth that much money???does your purchasing interests cost this much money???

Again R=$(8.11×10^12)>Google’s revenue…

Jus think is it possible???It exceeds total revenue made by google…