Friend Umesh Ramakrishnan’s new book is out on November 13 – No Elevator to the Top. If it is anything like spending an hour with Umesh it will be thoughtful and full of useful stuff.
A blog on the book is here.
The book on Amazon is available here.
The Future of a Finance Job
Even among economists and finance gurus, there is disagreement about the financial rescue package that the US Congress approved last week. A very well argued viewpoint, which does not agree with the Treasury’s plan, is here. But the one thing everyone agrees upon is that Wall Street is going to change forever.
While legislators and companies look at what this means for the economy and for their businesses, most people, particularly students who are looking at a career in Finance, wonder about what this means for them. What follows in this post applies more to developed markets like the US and Western Europe. In developing markets like India, the same trends will manifest but I expect that the effect of the underlying economic growth on the financial sector can more than compensate for it.
Economist’s Global Elections for US President
The Economist has a global vote running on the US Presidency. Its design matches the US electoral college system. Each country has a number of electoral votes that are roughly proportional to the population of the country. The candidate who wins the country takes all the electoral votes of that country. The electoral votes are not split in proportion of the individual votes.
The vote of course makes no difference to the actual election, if only to bring focus to what the rest of the world thinks about the candidates who are contesting to be the “ruler of the free world”.
The very early results indicate a strong support for Barrack Obama. The screenshot attached was taken at about 9:15PM Pacific. [You can click on the image to see its details.] At 8 PM when I cast my own vote, John McCain had no electoral votes. Since then El Salvador seems to be leaning towards McCain. Most countries I checked – India, Britain, Germany, USA – had Obama polling over 80% of the votes. Even Israel was over 70%.
These are very early results. The poll was announced in the print edition of this week’s economist. With just the weekend gone, I suspect that the results still represent the voting of the core economist reader. This will change as each party’s supporters will be sent to the economist site to register their vote.
You need to create a user id for economist.com which is free, but don’t have to be a subscriber of the print edition.
Bailouts and the Fog of Finance
“Bailout” was a bad word in the US to begin with. The current financial crisis and the US government’s $700 B plan to revive the market for troubled mortgage based assets have made it toxic.
What does “bailout” mean to Joe Citizen? It means that a company made mistakes and as it suffers financially, is perhaps close to bankruptcy, the federal government rides to its rescue using taxpayer’s money (“my tax dollars”) to rescue the company. To any logical person that seems unfair.
But Joe Citizen is not all logical about this. There is a lot of emotion and mental imagery involved with the current set of bailouts.
Zoho and the Bottom of the Software Pyramid
Last week Sridhar Vembu the CEO of Adventnet, makers of the Zoho suite of software, was featured on the Economist’s Face Value. This may seem like a big deal for the CEO of $60 M company (The Indian CEO featured before Sridhar was TCS’s Ramadorai). But you have to hand it to the Economist. For a magazine that covers politics, economics and business, it has the pulse of the software industry. What Zoho is attempting to do can be game-changing for business software.
Getting Roadside Directions in India
In Mumbai again. Yesterday I went to visit a friend of mine in the evening. He had moved to a new place in Khar close to Khar Gymkhana. His directions were somewhat sketchy so we had to stop a few times to get directions. It got me thinking about how different asking for and giving directions was in India.
Online Petition
Infosys’s Mohan Babu’s 4 month old baby tragically died on a flight into India, just minutes before landing. The grieving parents are seeking answers from the airlines (Jet Airways) and the airport authorities. Link to the online petition can be found here.
Stopping Climate Change Needs Short Term Targets
Al Gore’s speech yesterday was noteworthy. America, he said, faces three big problems – the economy, national security and climate change – all three of them have the same solution – replace fossil fuels. He said that the US must set a 10 year target of producing 100% of its electricity requirements from renewable and carbon-free sources.
The Nature of Switching – Implications
In my last post I described a framework to understand how individuals make switching decisions. Using this framework, let’s examine its implications for marketers of technology.
At the most basic level the framework says that to maximize the chances of switching you should maximize Switching Benefits, minimize Switching Costs and make Research and Trial really easy.
Maximize Switching Benefits
If there isn’t a compelling feature or two in your product that will get a large percentage of your target user base to check out your product, it won’t work. When you introduce a product, it is more important to focus on the Switching Benefits than on lowering the Sacrifice. If the Switching Benefits aren’t there, you won’t get enough people into Research & Trial. If the Switching Benefits are there but the Sacrifice is somewhat high, at least you’ll get the trials and perhaps some early adopters to switch. You might also get some parallel runs, where users use both products for a while. But most importantly, you will get feedback.
The Nature of Switching
Last week I switched from Windows to Mac. I have used a Windows computer all my working life and the switch was something I agonized over for more than six months. I wanted the performance, stability and design coolth of the Mac, but I worried that the switch would require me to learn a totally new OS. It would cause me frustration, loss of productivity and just plain wouldn’t work for somethings like demoing our Excel product which is not supported on the Mac. What eventually tipped me over was that a couple of weeks back Microsoft pushed an update down and Windows kept insisting that I restart the machine. I decided to restart 15 minutes before a demo to a prospect to avoid the reminders from interrupting the demo. Twenty minutes and a couple of memory reference errors later, it still hadn’t booted up. I had to reschedule the demo.
But this post isn’t really about Windows vs Mac.
6 am pacific 