Direct Flight Envy

Jet Airways, one of my favourite airlines is heavily promoting a direct flight from New York (Newark airport) to Mumbai. A friend who lives in Chicago and travels to India often was quite pleased with American Airlines’ direct flight to Delhi. American Airlines flies directly from Chicago to New Delhi. Flying time each way is between 15 and 16 hours. Compared to the 25 hours that I am used to on Cathay from SFO, even with a good connection in HongKong, that is travel nirvana.

I did some research on ClearTrip on the subject. There are nine direct flights between the US and India. All of them are from the New York area and Chicago to either Delhi or Mumbai. Either city in India works for me to land in. But there are no direct flights out of San Francisco. Bummer.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AhacLyA6cF2-dHg0TXFnd0FmM1c0M1pOd2g0Ml9VVnc&hl=en&single=true&gid=0&range=a1%3Af6&output=html&widget=true

Why aren’t there direct flights out of San Francisco. Distance obviously isn’t the problem. New York to Bombay is 12, 500 km. San Francisco to Delhi is 12,360 km. So the distance that a plane can travel without refueling is obviously is not the problem.

The distances are as the crow flies and were computed here.

It can’t be a problem of no-fly zones either. That is to say, the shortest route involves flying over countries that won’t allow you to, so you have to alter the flight path to an extent where it becomes too long. The San Francisco to Mumbai shortest path essentially flies over Russia and China.

So then it must be about the San Francisco Bay Area market. Will they be able to fill seats on a direct flight to India from SFO? I find it hard to believe that Chicago can be a bigger destination than San Francisco. There’s a large Indian population in both metro areas, but the Bay Area has to be bigger by a wide margin. More businesses in the Bay Area – all the tech companies – do business in India than out of Chicago. Tech companies are both interested in the Indian market as well as India as an outsourcing/backoffice destination.

I hope some airline will stand up and admit that they have tarried too long on San Francisco and quickly inaugurate a direct flight to India. Someone was about to do it before the recession, so it isn’t entirely inconceivable.

Failure 2 Communicate

We’ll be going to see a very interesting play this weekend in San Francisco called Failure 2 Communicate. The play is written by Valerie Fachman and directed by Scott Baker. Valerie describes the play

Based on my work experience in Chicago, this play immerses the audience in a maelstrom where autistic teens are forced into high school classes with gang bangers, while the teachers try to channel this chaos into an education.

Good friend Nandini Minocha is in the play as well.

The play is also trying to raise a modest amount of money to cover costs and such. If Autism or supporting the arts is something you consider a worthy cause, I hope you will be generous.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-10-24

  • Agree or not with this, the American political system cannot produce such decisive action on divisive issues. http://nyti.ms/9w2S9H #
  • Japan's NTT Data to buy Keane for $ 1.23B http://reut.rs/cohsht #
  • NYT reports on recent research trends on Persistent Poverty. Translates well to India http://nyti.ms/cfe26Q #
  • Morality is older than humanity. we do not need God to explain morality. But we can't excise religion from society http://nyti.ms/cZ0xPL #
  • Amazon beats expectations. In spite of running huge losses on my A-Prime account. Wife has a box at doorstep every day http://reut.rs/8WXwqC #
  • Wehn yuo cnnaot raed, noe hruendd ftory ccrhaetars mean noinhtg. Hlep ptoorme goalbl latceriy: http://t.co/mbm2Jh4 #
  • "if the exam is based on rote learning, coaching classes will concentrate on that." JEE didn't used to be like that http://bit.ly/bJExSI #

Open Toolbox – Blogging etc.

tools that I use since my move to the Mac. At that time there were some requests to write about blogging tools. Since I know many of my readers have their own blog, or at least often think about starting one, this post will be about blogging tools.

I use WordPress hosted on Siteground. This is different from the wordpress.com website. If you are starting out, I would strongly recommend going with wordpress.com or a similar service. When I got my son Naren started out with his blog I opted for the free version of wordpress.com. When I started blogging in 2005, I opted for typepad’s similar service.

But I soon started hitting roadblocks. It wouldn’t let me do this or that. Completely understandable for a multi-tenant SaaS business model, but it didn’t work for me. So I moved my blog and all its content to a self-installed, self-managed WordPress implementation. At that time WordPress wasn’t as evolved as it is today and on a day to day basis I had to muck around with filezilla a lot. I don’t miss that at all.

I am on WordPress 3.x now. I can’t recommend WordPress enough. It manages to be feature rich, extensible and rock solid at the same time. I have also run my company website on WordPress where it played a combined blog-cum-CMS role and it did quite well.

Yesterday, I cut over to a new WP Theme. It is the official theme from WordPress itself called Twenty Ten. It is clean, elegant and works for me. I like stuff to be simple. Fancy features that get in the way, don’t last too long with me (although, I am a sucker for trying them out!).

I know how to make changes to the CSS and templates and have done so extensively to my older themes. But in general, you don’t want to go overboard there. Customizations to software take time and effort to make and maintain. Plus they make the website unstable. So far I have made just one CSS change to Twenty Ten. I hope I can keep it down low for a long time.

The header image, by the way, is of a sunrise at Mendocino, California. The photo credit is in the footer.

Plugins are what make WordPress extensible. I use several. And there are many more that I have used, but don’t anymore.

To control comment spam I use both Akismet and Bad Behavior. Even then, a lot of it gets through. Recently, I have started seeing comments that are clearly being written by a human being. I believe these services are being offered out of India. Comments with link backs are supposed to raise the Google rank of the websites they are promoting. I guess its a legitimate business. I just wish the comments made more sense. I just delete them.

I use plugins for Archives (Smart Archives), Google Analytics (Google Analyticator), Feedburner (Feedburner Feedsmith) and Sharing (Share This). Since most of my readers read my blog in an RSS Reader, I tinker around with Feedburner a bit too.

For Twitter, which I have started in earnest only recently, I found a pretty good plugin (or set of plugins) called Twitter Tools. Every blog post automatically goes out as a Tweet. Also, on a weekly basis, the week’s Tweets are posted to my blog. My Twitter handle btw is @basabp

For my Contact Form, I used the plugin Contact Form ][ for a while and it works fine. But I love Wufoo for forms of every kind. So my current Contact Me form is from Wufoo. It is not a plugin it needs to be embedded into the page.

I used Intense Debate for comments for a long time. I haven’t been happy with it. But the theme I was using till yesterday did not support nested comments. Yesterday, I retired Intense Debate after moving to my new theme. The social networking aspect of Intense Debate is bunkum. Nobody cares if your comments are aggregated across the blogosphere. Plus they seem to have lost on market share to Disqus anyway.

I used Gravatars for a while too, separately, and then because it was built into Intense Debate. But my readers are not the types to have gravatars. So instead of having empty boxes all over the comments section, I just discarded it.

Another thing that went away yesterday was the related posts that you saw at the end of every post. These related posts were generated automatically by a plugin called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. It worked well. But I don’t know if people noticed it or found the suggestions useful. At times, the suggestions degraded to where they were just visual noise. I might bring it back, but for right now its inactive.

I tend to write long essay-like blog posts, sometimes over multiple sittings. I could do that in WordPress – the Admin panel is pretty easy to use and auto saves. Actually, it is worth mentioning that the WordPress Admin is one of the best designed pieces of complex software that I have used. Thanks to Happy Cog.

Anyway, I got into the habit of writing up my blog posts in Evernote before I bring them over to WordPress. Evernote takes care of the auto save, and the archival to the cloud, in case something were to happen to my WordPress database.

I use images frequently, for which I use Skitch – free image manipulation software for the Mac.

Would love to hear from other bloggers out there who run their own blog.

The Yin and Yang of HR in Services Companies

I will start out saying something provocative, but true nonetheless. There are just two key elements in making a Services company successful – Leadership and the HR function. The company that does better on both these elements, wins. In the best companies HR will excel at hiring, training and motivating employees. The company leadership decides on strategy which determines how to deploy these employees to generate the best returns for shareholders. It also promotes, recruits and motivates the team that runs the company. Together, better Leadership and better HR, separate the winners from the rest.

Which is why the CEOs of services companies should pay a lot of attention to the HR function and the executive who runs HR for them. The job of running HR for a services company is tough, complex and requires an almost impossible combination of skills.

The scale at which Indian services companies operate, in some respects, has not been seen anywhere in the world. A few of them have more than 100,000 employees, which is huge but nowhere near the largest employers in the world like Walmart. But if you take recruitment numbers they start looking scary – on a 100,000 employee base if you grow by 20% and attrition is 15%, both very conservative numbers, you are still looking at hiring 35,000 employees this year. I can’t think of any centralized recruitment operation with that kind of hiring. Maybe some of the Chinese contract manufacturers like Foxconn. Companies like Walmart, with 2.1 million employees, might hire more people in a year but for them recruitment is very decentralized. It is an ongoing process that is handled at the store level because the recruitment is going to be from the nearby area only.

Even outside recruitment, other processes like appraisals, are now operating at a scale that is achieved by only a handful of global companies. A company like Infosys at 120,000 employees will have practically every employee go through a single, centralized appraisal process and system. A global company like GE with over 300,000 employees will likely have a multitude of appraisal systems that differ by business, country and class of worker.

With this kind of scale, HR bosses have to run very tight processes for everything from recruitment to appraisals to separations and everything between. These processes have to be efficient, effective and must run on applications which allow it to scale without breaking down. A candidate or an employee is a “widget” that flows through a “supply chain” and an “employee life cycle”. How do you standardize around a set of processes and build supporting systems that allow higher throughput (100,000 employees growing at 20% a year) and reduced cycle times (start and finish appraisals, promotions and increments within 3 months)? HR Heads who possess “systems thinking” will come out ahead on this front.

On the other hand, HR teams must continue to play the traditional HR role – be the via media between management and employees. Be there to protect, represent and sometimes just listen to employees. An employee is an emotional being who can produce fantastic work if he is motivated. And who can drag down the morale of everyone around him if he is demotivated. Salaries matter when deciding whether to stay or leave a company. But other things matter too. Investment in training and growth. Quality of work. A pleasant, non-hostile work environment. A boss who knows what it means to be a boss. Bonds of friendship and trust. Only an empathetic HR function can work towards creating this environment for their employees.

Successful HR heads must have both empathy and systems thinking. It’s a tough ask. But as the recent quarter is showing us, the industry is still in a high growth phase. Which means that the HR function has never been more important that it is today.

Currency Wars and India

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in an interview to FT has said that he is “worried about the global situation” over rebalancing the global economy.

At the heart of the matter is what can be called currency warfare. Money is cheap in the western world. It seeks better returns. Better returns are in emerging growing markets like India and China. These countries are seeing huge capital inflows which put pressure on the currency.

China manages its currency. It is more or less pegged to the dollar and moves in a narrow range. This creates balance sheet issues for China – they need to keep sucking up dollars from the market, and buying US Treasuries with them, that offer low returns. But at least they protect their export competitiveness.

India on the other hand uses a much lighter touch on the rupee. Since September, the rupee has appreciated from 47 to nearly 44 rupees to the dollar. That has a tremendous impact on the profits and competitiveness of exporters like the Services industry.

Essentially, India is getting squeezed between an undervalued Renminbi and cheap money in the west.

I have never understood why informed opinion in the US defends the Chinese on this issue. Its not so much defending them as much as deflecting the criticism by saying “The Renminbi is not the problem. The US should look at itself to see what ails it – why are its students falling behind on Science and Math scores, what can it do to make its workers upskill etc. etc.” Which is hogwash. Yes, the US needs to look at these fundamental matters, but that’s not an argument for why the Renminbi should be undervalued.

None of this makes sense until you realize how much stuff big business in America manufactures or buys from China. Why would they want their dollar cost of imports to rise? US jobs be damned.

Some people argue that even if the Chinese loosened their grip on the Renminbi, and it rose say 10% overnight, it’s not as if jobs would whoosh back to the US. The difference in labor costs and the all-in cost of manufacturing is just too high.

So the undervalued Renminbi makes no difference to jobs in the US. But it does make a big difference to India. And other low cost manufacturing countries in Asia like Vietnam and Bangladesh. A fairly priced RMB could make India a very competitive destination for manufacturing.

Next month’s G-20 summit will see a lot of hot air, but almost certainly, no solution to this global quandary. The China-US game has reached a stalemate. India unfortunately is paying the price.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-10-10

  • CWG TV coverage is the long-tail of sports. Unpopular, weird and totally unknown sports – all in one place. 2 hrs of wt lifting anyone? #
  • Airport announcements in Hindi must be written by Sanskrit scholars who don't care if they are understood by junta. "Vilamb"?! #
  • A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending | Taibi on Tea Party http://bit.ly/9QQgeD #
  • Indian CAs advising clients against "going to the US for delivery of children" | fallout of changing US tax regime http://bit.ly/ccwm7G #
  • The service you order from Airtel is recognized by the amount. So Rs. 98 is 1mth gprs for Delhi. Clever, but a UX nightmare methinks. #
  • Accenture to buy Ariba's BPO – Platform BPO, low competition, Ariba strong partner – good deal! http://reut.rs/a9VjV6 #