Miscellanea

1. Economy

7. With 109 Chinese firms making
it to the Fortune Global 500-2017, where does India Stand?

While Walmart topped the Fortune
Global 500 list, China’s State Grid, oil giant Sinopec Corp and China National
Petroleum were ranked second, third and fourth. Seven Indian firms made it to
the list.

While India, as well as numerous
other nations, believe that the United States tops the list of the global
economic powers, not many realise the kind of impact China has been making. The
Fortune Global 500 list for the year 2017 was released on Thursday, July 20,
and 109 Chinese firms have made it to the list.

While US retail giant Walmart
topped the list, China’s State Grid, oil giant Sinopec Corp and China National
Petroleum were ranked second, third and fourth.

Among the 109 firms that have made
it to the list, 10 are debutants. These 10 names include e-commerce brand Alibaba,
internet giant Tencent, Anbang Insurance Group and real estate developer
Country Garden.

In
comparison, only seven Indian firms have made it to the Fortune Global 500 list
this year. India’s economic expansion is expected to have accelerated in the
April-June quarter and is likely to grow in the second quarter as well.

(Source: International Business
Times dated 21.07.2017)

8. India has a Leader Who Believes
in Disruption 

In his latest avatar as the
Chairman of US Chairman of US India Business Council, John Chambers is
convinced that India is at an inflection point. In a chat with ET’s TV
Mahalingam, Chambers, who is also Cisco’s executive chairman, spoke about his
reading of the Modi-Trump dynamics & how India has changed in the last three
years.

Excerpts:

What’s your reading of the
recent meeting between President Trump & PM Modi?

I turned positive on India three
years ago & I volunteered to be Chairman of US India Business Council
(USIBC). Even though I have been involved with India for 20 years with Cisco, I
think the inflection point in India is a record in terms of this opportunity.
The meeting between the two leaders could not have gone better.In the CEOs
session with him, the PM was incredibly effective in listening to each of the
20 business leaders in the room & coming back on key issues. On a scale of
1 to 10, how did the meetings go? It was 11.

This target of $500 billion of
two-way trade between the two countries that USIBC has set, how achievable is
that & what needs to be done?

I was the one to bet on China in
1995 when almost nobody else did. When I forecast a few years ago that France
would be a start-up nation due to digitisation, nobody believed me. Guess which
was the top startup nation in Europe last year? France.When it comes to India,
I think we have not seen anything yet. This is a win-win. If you look at going
from the current level of $115 billion to $500 billion -the amount of jobs this
will create is massive.If you look back at 2000, we were just at $20 billion.
Now these are doable goals based on the confidence of the Indian & American
business leaders.

(Source:
ET Q&A – The Economic Times dated 12.07.2017)

2.  Sports

9. IPL broadcast rights war: Can
Jio topple Facebook, Twitter for digital space?

18 big names from across the globe
bought tender documents last year. With most of them likely to enter the fray
again, the Invitation to tender is all set to be available from 21^st July
2017.

There was a jump of 454% in the
fee to retain Indian Premier League (IPL) title rights when Chinese mobile
manufacturing brand Vivo extended its deal for the next five years (2018-2022)
for whopping sum of  Rs. 2199 crore.

The Board of Control for Cricket
in India (BCCI) is expecting another such windfall as it is set to open the
Invitation to Tender (ITT) for IPL broadcast & media rights on 21 July
2017.

Sony Pictures Network India (SPN)
hold the television rights (2008-2017) while Star India has been in charge of
digital broadcast of the cash-rich 20-20 tournament for the last few seasons.

However, the competition for the
next term is going to be intense as quite a few big names including Discovery,
Facebook, Jio & Twitter are expected in the race.

(Source: International Business
Times dated 21.07.2017)

3. Industry

Why this is Indian IT
Industry’s Kodak Moment?

Once-great companies like Kodak,
Digital and Nokia with capable CEOs and vast resources come to an ignominious
end not because they do not see the tsunami coming — they die or fade into
irrelevance because they are unable to respond forcefully. Kodak invented the
digital camera as early as 1975. It had all the technology, resources, brand,
and distribution to prevail. Yet it failed.

A major reason why once-dominant
firms like Kodak fade away like old photos is culture. Culture trumps strategy.
A combination of complacence & overconfidence (“this cannot happen to
us”) prevented Kodak from adapting quickly. Its leadership was indecisive
and changed strategy many times. Despite having a venture capital arm, it took
years to make its first acquisition and never made any bets big enough to
create breakthroughs. Kodak offered the first service that allowed customers to
post and share pictures online but failed to follow through forcefully to
create what might have become Instagram or Snapchat. It diversified into
chemicals and pharmaceuticals but without much conviction; these businesses
fizzled and were sold off. Unlike Fuji, Kodak obsessed about its core developed
markets and did not seize the opportunity in emerging markets, especially a
rising China. Having failed to become a printing powerhouse, Kodak is now
trying to license its rich portfolio of patents.

There are a set of reasons that
make it difficult for even well managed companies to navigate industry
disruptions the way Fuji did or Microsoft has. High on the list is complacence,
even arrogance. When a company is sitting on lots of cash, fat margins & a
good market share, it is hard to create a sense of urgency in the organization
& among its shareholders.Today, India’s IT companies are struggling to
navigate a tectonic industry shift. Its leaders have seen the technological
& regulatory shifts coming for the last decade. They have recognized the
limits of wage arbitrage and understood the need to shift from renting IQ to
creating IP, and becoming more global. They see the giant new opportunities
afforded by the digital revolution. But as the story of Kodak shows, seeing is
not enough. Acting decisively and forcefully is crucial. More than ever,
India’s IT companies need the same caliber of courageous and entrepreneurial leadership
that created them in the first place.

‘The
snake that cannot shed its skin must die’ — Friedrich Nietzsche.

(Source: Extracts from an
Article by Shri Ravi Venkatesan, Co-chairman of Infosys in the Times of India
dated 02.07.2017)

4. Others

10. Skill, re-skill and re-skill again. How to keep up with
the future of work?

“Every
five years, your skills are about half as valuable as they were before”

The jobs market is well into the
21^st century. So why isn’t our education system?

Today’s jobs are vastly different
than they were a generation ago. All of us, from Gen Zers to Boomers, are
facing a working world that is more changeable and unpredictable than ever.

The days of working for 40 years
at one job and retiring with a good pension are gone. Now the average time in a
single job is 4.2 years, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. What’s
more, 35% of the skills that workers need — regardless of industry — will have
changed by 2020.

That rapid pace of change in jobs
and skills means there is a growing demand to update skills as well. According
to a new report on workforce re-skilling by the World Economic Forum, one in
four adults reported a mismatch between the skills they have and the skills
they need for their current job.

Skills for the wrong century

Here is the problem briefly: the
job opportunities that are available today are 21^st century jobs.
However, the way most people perform these jobs is still stuck in the previous
century. As is the way, our society is training and educating people.

In the 19th century, there was a
massive movement of the population from rural to urban centres. The primary and
secondary education system was created to train the workforce for the “new”
world of manual and clerical work in cities.

In the 20^th century,
work was dominated by factory jobs. The education system that was built in the
previous century was, with some modifications, still suited to training good
factory workers and their managers. Management focused on a series of tools to
optimize this kind of work: operational efficiency, something called Taylorism,
and eventually some management philosophies called Six Sigma. Management was
mostly done face to face, while health insurance, a social safety net, and
other benefits were bundled into inflexible labour contracts.

Today, in the 21^st
century, we are seeing the rise of new work models such as freelancing and
remote work. In the most advanced companies, teams are learning to be more
agile, to work with distributed and remote teams, and to scale up and down to
adapt to ever-changing conditions. This is the future of work.

Yet education has not kept pace.
We still send our children through a fixed set of primary and secondary
education steps, only now a college degree has been added on as a virtual
prerequisite for the best jobs. The model does not actually prepare anyone well
for a flexible world, in which skills are typically outdated by the time you
finish a four-year degree.Further, on-the-job training is not enough to close
the gap. The World Economic Forum report found that 63% of workers in the US
say they have participated in job-related training in the past 12 months. Yet
employers are reporting the highest talent shortages since 2007.

What individuals can do

Given this situation, people in
the workforce should proactively steer their own ongoing skills development. In
other words, recognize that you need ongoing training, and realize that you
hold the responsibility for your own education. Do that and you can improve
your marketability for years to come?

The first step is to ask yourself:
Are my skills still in demand? What is the outlook for these skills? In
addition, what skills could I work on today that would increase my income
potential in the coming years?

Do this exercise every few years?
If the half-life of a job skill is about five years (meaning that every five
years, that skill is about half as valuable as it was before), you want to get
ahead of that decline in value. Assess your own skills every two or three years,
and get started learning new skills sooner rather than later.

For example, if you are a truck
driver, you can see that autonomous vehicles are a likely threat to your
employment — maybe not this year or next year, but certainly within 5 or 10
years. Do not wait until self-driving trucks are a common sight on the highways
to start building skills for your next job. Start doing it this year, so you
will be ready when the time comes.

Do not feel like you have to
retrain yourself completely, all at once. First, as pointed out by the New York
Times this week, many of the skills needed to do fading jobs are applicable to
growing jobs. For skills, you do need to acquire, consider step changes. In
computer science, we are trained to break down large problems into smaller
chunks that can be more easily solved, one at a time. You are not going to turn
yourself from a coal miner into a data miner overnight. Nevertheless, you can
acquire basic skills leading in the direction you want to go.

As your career progresses, make
decisions about which work to take based on how much you will learn. Prioritize
jobs where you will learn valuable new skills.

(Source: World Economic Forum
dated 31.07.2017)

11. Indian Scientist wins Marconi Lifetime prize

Thomas Kailath, who grew up in
Pune and is now an emeritus professor at Stanford, has been conferred the
lifetime achievement award by the US-based Marconi Society. This is only the
sixth time the lifetime award has been given by the prestigious society in its
43-year history.

Kailath has been recognized for
his contributions to information and system science over six decades, as well
as his sustained mentoring and development of new generations of scientists.
Among his many significant contributions is a classic textbook in linear
systems that changed the way that subject was taught.

Kailath and his doctoral student
Arogyaswami Paulraj, currently emeritus professor in the electrical engineering
department at Stanford University, are joint holders of the original US patent
for MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) technology which underpins the
technology that drives every Wi-Fi, 4G, and 5G network today and helps to make
them more efficient. 

The scientist was born in 1935 in
Pune, to a Malayalam speaking family, according to Wikipedia. He studied at St.
Vincent’s High School, Pune, and received his engineering degree from the
Government College of Engineering, University of Pune, in 1956. He received his
Master’s degree in 1959 and his doctoral degree in 1961, both from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was the first Indian student to
receive a doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT, says Wikipedia.

The Marconi prize has been
instituted by the Marconi Society, which was established in 1974 by the
daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel laureate who invented radio. Previous
winners of Indian origin have been educationist and former UGC chairman Yash
Pal in 1980 and Stanford University emeritus professor and wireless antennae
pioneer Arogyaswami Paulraj in 2014. In June, the Marconi Society announced
that Arun Netravali, the engineer- scientist who grew up in Mumbai and
pioneered work on video compression standards, is the awardee for this year.
Kailath and Netravali will be awarded their respective prizes in October.

(Source: The Times of India
dated 15.08.2017)

12. Leadership Quotes

–   Jeff Bezos –

     “When It’s Tough, Will You
Give Up, Or Will You Be Relentless?”

–   Donald Trump
–

     “Think Big and Make It
Happen”

–   Larry Page –