Quick Note – ‘Equal Treatment’ and ‘Equal Opportunity’

‎’Equal Treatment’ is a lot more than ‘Equal Opportunity’ – It is an acceptance of the fact that social conditioning and prolonged periods of discrimination tend to make communities incapable of aspiration and productive behaviors and It means a willingness on part of the custodians of society( government etc) to invest in reasonable effort to support unlearning of learned behaviors .. If i punch someone and threaten them for centuries and then suddenly give them ‘equal opportunity’, that’s not going to benefit the society because equal opportunity to access food that is on a table 1 mile away means very little to a previously chained man who has never been fed. Liberty is useless without justice..

Emperor’s New Clothes…Your money is my money and my money is someone else’s…

Read this on NYT.. Great view of how the interconnected monetary games are coming to hit home!!

If Euro gets devalued,imports from EU zone will become cheaper for America and any imports from US will become more expensive.. America needs other currencies to move up or its exports may not be sustainably competitive and it will not be able to generate significant export volumes for its own recovery..The other option is for Americans to keep spending like crazy and keep importing until trade imbalances and high value of debt force exporters( China Included) to recalibrate their monetary systems into a higher valuation, but that will require a lot of government spending in the US just to push up sentiment – Republicans wont allow that( not at least until they’ve rattled Obama and got back into the White house) . Now if Americans allow all of America’s natural resources to be exploited at discounted price( much like the oil reserves elsewhere that they’ve exploited until now), keep currency artificially low by state-control of banks and convert those resources into mass-produced cheaper products for the rest of the world using cheap labor( from Mexico etc) ,well that’s another ‘China-Redux’ story with American endings ; Why does this sound like a miserable end-game to me ???? It is time to reconstitute Monetary and Financial economics and Fiscal policy within the framework of systemic social impact – When money goes from being a transacting measure of value to being a game that is played solely for what it’s worth, societies and people who generate wealth will become meaningless pawn in a destructive course.

Namma Metro.. The Seeds for a surviving megapolis???

The Bangalore Metro may not make profits from day one and it may be years before the typical bangalorean used to two wheelers will start liking the communal feeling of commuter trains.But I don’t care, not everything in life is viewed from economic perspective and the government’s role is broader than profit and loss.. I am saddened by how the ‘non-rich’ and ‘non-middle class’ are completely invisible to the nouveau and the new age Bangaloreans.I am hoping that the metro starts acting as that interface..When the guy travelling next to you at the end of the day is a sweat stained laborer whose daily earning is less than a 10th of what you probably make in an hour.We humans measure a product of convenience and time.A quick 10 minute ride in cramped spaces is often better than a 30 minute luxurious ride in a personal car. That comparative benefit will over a period of time lead to more people traveling on the Metro.. The Mumbai local trains are a rite of passage for every self-respecting Mumbai teenager, an introduction to cosmopolitan and economic diversity.. I am hoping that the Metro in 2025 will become such an experience for teenagers of that generation. Look at any megalopolis that has survived multiple economic booms and bust, you’ll find some form of public transit and speedy transportation that has always existed in that city, a river or a canal in the past and a railway system in the industrial age.

Note to the Netflix Team…

Netflix Team( including Mr.Hastings)

A big reason why I chose Netflix, was the ability to get movies in whichever format I wanted -DVD or Streaming- from a single website and account. I think you are designing your organization based on accounting rules and intrinsic view of how it should run,Not on the basis of what truly works for customers. You are taking a drastic step to resolve an incremental problem. The Netflix site has a miserable search capability and very poorly designed user-interface..But that can be fixed without shifting DVDs to a separate site. The shoddy website design often made it tougher to make a  ’1-Click’ choice between streaming or getting a DVD subscription. Then there were issues with not being able to enjoy those ‘ DVD special features’ on the streaming version. Irritants, but never something that could not have been fixed in the old structure. With this new structure, i’ll have to maintain multiple accounts, track payments, keep logging-in and out to shift from wanting to watch something in streaming mode and getting a DVD shipped. And i wont be able to track ratings or maintain a unified view of my likes and dislikes…

When you hiked the fee, i didnt budge; The price change was steep in terms of percentage change but i think the deal retained value for money..However, with this new change,I think I’ll kill my subscription entirely – i dont like the idea of any organisation trying to dictate my usage habits to simply meet its accounting needs and organisational hierarchy’s career interests. The entire series of events over the past three months makes me believe that Netflix leadership makes hasty decisions with little or no ‘Outside-In’ thinking or atleast some sampling of potential diverse customer feedback.  I am wondering if this is an indication of a fundamental weakness in your business model..Is there something in the fine-print on your P&L account and Balance sheet that needs more attention ?

I Work Therefore I Am? (via Cedricj’s Blog)

Good concise view with some valuable suggestions!

The other day one of the authors had a long conversation with a highly educated Mexican tour guide. We were on a seven-mile hike through a national forest near our home in Mexico. We were discussing the meaning of work in our respective cultures, and he remarked, “People in the USA live to work. Here in Mexico we work to live. Sometimes I think people north of the border have gone crazy about their work. Everyone seems so stressed out.” It made u … Read More

via Cedricj's Blog

My Wordle..

!! Wordle.net!!

Everybody Nobody Somebody Anybody.. & Projects..

This is a story of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

That is the story of projects – All and any of the types below

1. Projects without a vision
2. Projects with a vision that has not been developed into goals and outcomes
3. Projects with a vision but no resource/time commitments from stakeholders
4. Projects within a program where there are multiple projects laying stake over similar outcomes
5. Projects in large corporations run by leaders high on vision and low on execution skills
6. Projects in Matrix organizations that have a performance management system that creates divergent strategies
7. Projects that try to merge ‘High Maturity’ process implementations with ‘Low Maturity/Early Stage ‘ innovative changes.
8. Programs attempted under the banner of a ‘Project’( and thus limited in their visibility and resource capacity)
9. Programs initiated to ‘let’s us just put-together’ pet projects across departments that started at varied points of time in the past to fulfill each groups desire to ‘innovate’.

Add on to this… The comments space is all yours!!