"Lala" Infosys

Infosys was , is , and will be a great company. Unarguably. But even great organisations suffer from malaise. Surprisingly, Infosys suffers from the malaise that you would not normally attribute to it - the Lala problem. Yes, I know, I am throwing mud at a great company, but you have to expect it if you lose 20% of your market value in one day.

Wait a minute. Isn't Infosys one of the most professional of companies ? A company that sets the standard for corporate governance. The company that raised the bar on ethical business. The company with the middle class values ? All true. But Infosys suffers from the same problem that family run companies have - the company is handed down from one  "family" man to another.

Only in Infosys' case, the "family" is not blood related, but the group of founders who set up Infosys. The peerless Narayana Murthy established it. The relentless Nandan Nilekani drove it to the status of a world leader. Kris Gopalakrishnan then took up the baton and reaped the boom years. And then , just like in a family,  the company was handed over from brother to brother, to Shibulal, the last of the founders. And as we all know, second and third generation families are never the same as the first generation.

In all this, quite a few senior managers stepped away, knowing they had reached the end of the road - not just that they could never lead the company, but that in the set way of things, they had done all that they could.

Infosys is not known in the market as a great company to work for. This, despite its undoubted brilliance, its strong values, its untarnished reputation and its incredibly strong balance sheet.  It simply does not attract the best quality talent that a leader in the industry should. And it loses talent far faster.

Calling it a "Lala company" is an insult to a great institution. But a staunch admirer of the company, and its founders that I am , I am usurping the right to be unfair.  A classic response of an organisation that is in the situation that Infosys is in now, would be to make an acquisition - especially since there is a mountain of cash burning a hole in its pocket. If its does that, it surely is then a Lala company. For that's what Lalas do.

Infosys will bounce back. It is suffering from the middle age blues - as all of us in our personal lives do too. It has reached middle age perhaps a little earlier than its peers - even in that it is a trail blazer. But its bounce will be faster if the founders leave. Lock their doors and go.

Its time for Infosys Gen 2 to emerge. One where there are no more "Lalas". 

An unfair post this one. For sure.  But you are only unfair to somebody you admire.

Who or what is a Doofus ?

I freely admit to not having a clue about what a "doofus" was, until today, if you will pardon the pun. For, apparently, a doofus is a guy who doesn't have a clue. My vocabulary has since improved by one, thanks to Carol Bartz, the ousted CEO of Yahoo  who called her Board which ousted her, a bunch of doofuses.

Everything about the Yahoo saga stinks. Carol Bartz was fired by her Chairman over the phone. It has brought into question again how firings are done. Not just firing a CEO, but firing any employee. Firing by phone or by email must surely rank as one of the worst blunders you can make in a company. Topped only by having a security guard present and showing the employee to the door. Employees deserve to be told in person that they are fired and also told the reason why they are fired. The reason may have nothing to do with their performance - we are making losses and have to cut costs and you got the short end of the straw, is perfectly acceptable if that is the honest truth. If the employee is surprised that he or she is being fired, then clearly the boss hasn't done his job. Firings are rarely required overnight. You can see it coming and its the boss's job to be open and forthright in communication with the employee. The Board of Yahoo displayed appalling behaviour in firing Carol Bartz over the phone.

Carol hasn't covered herself with glory either. In her now famous mail to employees, she wrote "I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board". She then proceeded to give an interview to Fortune where she has contributed to the increase in the vocabulary of bloggers like me. She also apparently said that " they  f---ed me over". She is going to collect a $10m severance pay but she may have put that in jeopardy because the severance agreement has the usual non disparagement clause (you don't throw garbage at the company, in lay man terms)

Then a pompous know it all (correction - rich pompous know it all) called Daniel Loeb who runs a hedge fund and has taken a stake in Yahoo writes a public letter asking for the Chairman of the Board to go and then naming a few directors who in his opinion have to go too. 

Excellent. With such worthy managers, Board and investors, what chance do the employees of Yahoo have. I am a regular user of Yahoo and its quite good at some of the things it does. But what a mess. Which sensible guy will now be willing to be the CEO. Probably only a guy who has some familiarity with doofusism !

Happy Birthday Big Blue

On June 16th, IBM turned 100. Yes, 100 years old. That is a colossal achievement by any standards. As with living beings, so with corporations - the primary motive, and a great achievement,  is survival. Time to bring out the cake and sing Happy Birthday.

The company started life in 1911 as Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, formed by a merger of three small companies. A decade or so later it changed its name to a more catchy International Business Machines, the name by which it is still known. And over the decades it has weathered many a storm, made many a significant achievement and today, even at a ripe old age, is strong, robust and dancing. That is has done so in the field of information technology, where the pace of change is far more rapid than in other sectors, adds a special gloss to the achievement.

Look at the inventions it has to its credit. The punch clock to record time, the electric tabulating machine, the ATM, the floppy disk, the hard disk, the magnetic stripe card, the barcode system, the relational database, the DRAM .......... Its employees have won five Nobel Prizes. It helped put man on the moon.

It has had towering business leaders. None bigger than Thomas J Watson Sr, who was President of the company for 40 years ,  between 1914 and 1956. A legend, it was he who created IBM. And in the 1990s, when it was tottering and seemed about to fall, it turned to a biscuit king - Lou Gerstner to transform it into a services company.

It was one of the earliest companies to adopt HR practices, that we would consider common place today but were positively revolutionary for those times. Group insurance in 1934, paid leave in 1937, a training centre in 1933. 18 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the US, it recruited its first black salesman.

Its had troubled times too. Early on, it didn't move away from punched cards and almost died. Another near death experience was when it lost the battle for the PC operating system to Microsoft. In the 90s , until Lou Gerstner pulled it into services, it was stuck on being a hardware company. But each time, it survived and came bouncing back. That's the stuff of champions.

Today its back to its heyday. Its a colossus and in robust health. Its one of the largest companies in the world. And one of the most admired. Happy Birthday old girl. You deserve a toast and cheer, even from your competitors.

The Apple of my eye

Today's post is a guest post I made in Preeti's blog. Preeti is a famous blogger, writer of two books, artist and a very nice and warm person. She was very kind to invite me to write a piece in her blog and who can resist the ask of a pretty and intelligent lady !

The post is here.

Are you human ?

If you would like to comment on some blogs (not mine), or do various other things on the internet, you are required to prove that you are a human being. How do you do that ? By looking at a mangled word and typing the text into a box. Since humans are better at pattern recognition than machines, it is then presumed that you are a human. Though judging by the number of times I get it wrong, I must be at least half machine.

Apparently this sort of stuff is called CAPTCHA – Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). Trust somebody to come up with an abbreviation like that. As a digression, you may want to read an old rant of mine against meaningless jargon like this here.

Now this set me thinking on various other strange stuff we have to prove in daily life.

• I am always amazed at the need for a birth certificate to prove that you have been born.

• Ditto death certificate to prove that you are dead.

• One of the companies I know requires pensioners to reaffirm every year that they are alive, by producing an “alive certificate” (in prescribed format, no less) to continue drawing their pension.

• How many times have I needed to sign on documents that I am “of sound mind”. Now that’s an entirely debatable assertion.

• I am aware that in our good old country, a farmer can get a write off of a buffalo loan by proving that his buffalo had died. Acceptable proof was the production of a buffalo tail. Needless to say a thriving market existed in reused buffalo tails and the service of rendering your alive and well buffalo tailless.

• Certain countries (there being one really notorious one which I shall not name), require a formal marriage certificate attested by a multitude of government agencies to accept that your spouse is your spouse. Now in countries where a marriage certificate was not the norm, this is a really tough matter. The simpler way is to remarry (complete with sons, daughters, grandchildren present), to the accompaniment of much mirth, to get that prized certificate.

• I am often required to prove that my daughter is my daughter. Her calling me papa is apparently not enough. Thankfully, I got her birth certificate which says so; so it must be so !

• I have just signed a visa application to visit a certain country, where I have been required to aver that I am not a terrorist.

But back to CAPTCHA. Apparently an outsourcing industry has sprung up to serve spammers. Machines have outsourced the job of beating CAPTCHAs to human beings in developing countries. I believe the going rate is $3 per 1000 CAPTCHAs broken. You can, but only, marvel at the business acumen in the outsourcing industry. Make a business of proving to a machine that you are a human. Now that’s something …

Is Microsoft ready for the next surge?

A guest post from my dear blogger friend Adesh. Adesh writes an excellent blog and is a passionate advocate of customer service. Seeing my blog dry up because I'm traveling and not online, he very kindly offered this guest post - a gesture that has truly touched me. Adesh - I really owe you one. Here is his post.

There was a statement few days’ back which I got my attention today. Prominent person who has done extremely well in his field made it. However, the statement showed that they are trying to change things and trying to make sure his organization do not lose race to others in this cutthroat competitive world.

Statement came from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

“It is a competitive business; it’s always been. There’s nothing really new about that. You can list our past competitors and those made for a lot of good news articles that Microsoft was on its last legs. We would not want to deny anyone the opportunity of denying those articles. Again and again and again.”

This statement does bring some kind of air of arrogance with it but at the same time makes it clear that Microsoft knows it cannot takes things lightly as competition is catching up with them fast.

Microsoft is struggling as its competitors are trying to change the rules of game and Microsoft has to play this new game according to rules established by its competitors.

Apple came out with blockbuster products like iPod and iPhone, which in turn also made people lapping up their Macs. Microsoft tried to counter them by launching Zune but it turned out to be a dud. Now Microsoft is trying hard to counter the attack posed by resurgent Apple. They are coming up with advertisements, which show that Apple laptops are costly than PC. But will this work; we have to wait to know the results.

Apple is not the only one who is threatening the dominance of Microsoft. Their other nemesis is Google. This Internet giant is putting its money on Internet based applications and challenging Microsoft’s business model, which is to have software and applications installed on PC. Only time will tell how robust Google’s new business model is but it surely has caught Microsoft off guard as it has agreed to give its Microsoft Office product free online.

With Yahoo! Search in Microsoft’s pocket, intentions of Microsoft are clear that it is ready for long haul. Good thing is that Bill Gates is not taking competition easy. Hopefully we will continue to see more innovation from company, which gave us Operating system and Office suite.

IT Industry - Stop begging for favours

One of the provisions of the Indian budget presented a couple of days back is to extend the income tax holiday to IT companies This is an annual ritual. The STPI scheme under which this tax holiday is enjoyed was supposed to expire sometime ago. Every year the industry clamours for its continuance. And the government accedes.

The Indian IT industry does not pay the full income tax in India. This is a completely wonky situation. They operate in many countries in the world, most notably in the US. The tax laws are such that they pay taxes in every country they operate in. The only country in the world where they don’t pay is India.

Businessmen have no shame when they clamour for sops from the government. Moral and ethical rationale have no place in this argument, it appears. The same businessmen bemoan the fact that the fiscal deficit is huge. Why will it not be huge when everybody wants tax sops.

Corporate income tax is the largest source of revenue for the government. And one of the most profitable of industries in India does not pay income tax. Now why do we moan about no tax on agricultural income. Why do we shout on the unsustainable fertilizer subsidy. There is no greater moral vacuum than the IT industry getting tax exemptions. The usual arguments are presented – its an export industry, it creates employment, it needs “support” against foreign competition, blah blah blah. I am not even going to dignify this with demonstrating the utter illogic of these as justification for sops.

The government should bite the bullet and treat the IT industry just like any other industry. And the industry should hang its head in shame for continuing to clamour for tax exemptions.