Baby Sitting the Economy by Paul Krugman

I guess would-be and wannabe MBAs could learn some valuable lessons from 2008's Nobel Prize in Economics winner, Paul Krugman.

Go ahead, read the following article, I bet you wouldn't be awed if you haven't heard of economics

Baby-Sitting the Economy

More about him and his articles on his site at MIT
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/

to all MIT Sloan aspirants... bad news!! Krugman is moving to Princeton

Great Example of Customer Service !!

Have to check this out... a bit funny and awesome. This is a classic example of the adage - Customer is God



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Problem with Twitter

Disclaimer : This post reverberates only my opinions and doesn't refer to or mean anything offensive to Twitter or the people cited below.

I believe Twitter has been astoundingly successful, and it marked the coming of social networking x.0 (I frankly don't know what the version is, and I rather not mess with that).
It exactly does what it is says - What're you doing? 140 characters of your status - that's all is required to let your friends/family/fans/followers know.

It certainly has attracted a lot of biggies into the game (read : timOreilly, sethgodin, d2h guykawasaki etc.), and lets people keep themselves updated on what these guys are upto. But I guess, it didn't take care of a few things here. Take my case, I have very few friends(or in Twitterminology - followers) and I started following timoreilly on Twitter. As soons as I started following him, my page was exploded with posts from Tim that I lost the posts from my friends in the rubble. Imagine if I had subscribed to all the guys I have cited as examples. Phew !!

The updates from Tim very so frequent and so many that I didn't opt for the device setup. And embarrasingly, I removed the updates on my email that I got from Twitter, which is the sole purpose of registering on Twitter. Finally I had to unfollow Tim (No , I mean not even a bit of, offence meant to Tim. Period. He's a great guy, and has lots of things going on. I or anyone can't blame him for anything!!)


What I meant to say is, Twitter does gives you the privilege to follow influential people and get a piece of their ideas/style/philosophy without interfering their privacy and that's awesome. Probably that's why you don't see most of these guys on Facebook,Orkut, or other Social Apps where you get friend requests, wall posts, birthday reminders, photos, videos blah..blah..blah. But with so many posts coming from these guys, I feel the purpose of Twitter is losing somewhere.
I do want to follow these guys and at the same time, dont want to lose updates from my friends and I dont want a rush of updates. After all, who needs a Tweet every minute that's not personally important.
The only way that could be handled is to have the ability to group people you follow under categories like Friends, Colleagues, Influential people, Marketers etc. so that you can check what you need the most at the hour

Can something be done about this.
Twitter, are you listening ?

PS: I love the updates from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. Succinct, to-the-point and every tweet's worth reading

Thy name Seth

Last week, I was contemplating over the list of famous or not-so-famous(if you'd like to say so after I give the names) people I admire and coincidentally, I observer that there were three Seths in the list - Seth Godin, Seth Macfarlane and Seth Rogen.

Just an small intro about each of these guys, if you don't know

1.Seth Godin - marketing guru. Great guy, you have to read his blogs or his books. It's on my fav list if you want instant access. He simply shows what exactly "out-of-the-box" means. Not just talk, but in action

2. Seth Macfarlane - See it to believe it. If you ever watched the comedy "Family Guy", you should know him. He is the creator and writer for the show and the way he manages all three charcaters - Peter, Stewie and Bryan is amazing.

3. Seth Rogen - The lesser famous guy of the three, perhaps. But if you are a hollywood fanatic, you would know him. His acting/writing skills are awesome. Watch Knocked Up(in the leading role) or Superbad(he is the f***ing writer ,a supporting actor and the exec producer) or the latest Zack and Mirni make a porno to know what I'm saying.

Hats off , guys !!

Bottleneck CEOs

I was reading about some(successful and failed) start-ups when this phrase hit me. Bottleneck CEOs - CEOs who become the bottleneck and stifle the growth of a company when it has a greater scope to make a mark in the industry and go beyond. And this is especially true in the case of start-ups. There are companies whose growth is hampered because the founder-CEOs wouldn't , and couldn't, let someone else take the role and responsibility of a few critical areas in the company even when they themselves cannot do it. They want to do it themselves, even though they have to re-invent the wheel to learn the whole process.

For example, these founder(s) CEOs wouldn't let a professional(say, an MBA) take care of the finances or a new area of business or a new product. We can't completely argue against it as the founder(s) have a greater sense of ownership and responisiblity towards the company than any employee. But, if ones wishes for the good of the company, one has to let go. If he is the person who took the path less-travelled, then he has to do that again and again.

Take the example of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin let Eric Schmidt be the CEO and take the company ahead - this has been argued that Eric really doesn't have a say but is just the spokesperson. Now whatever be the case, Eric Schmidt has been entrusted to run the company while Page&Brin are taking care of the technology to take Google ahead, and the triumvirate has been astoudingly successful.

Why can't all founder(s) let go of a few things when it is absolutely required to?
Agreed that you are the owner, but you wouldn't know how high it can fly until you let go. Don't just be a founder, be a leader too.

End of Investment Banking ??!!

Bankers,Economists and Financiers, pardon me for my lack of knowledge of finance if I said something weird !!

With the last two giants in IB, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, foraying into retail banking and said that investment banking is no longer viable for them, I started to wonder what might happen to the scores of Investment Bankers, wannabe-IBs - all who spent a good time of their life with the sole aim of becoming one. What's going to happen to all the top tier schools (even worse for the middle-tier bschools) that were/are known as "IB Strong schools". What's going to happen to all those 2nd year MBA students(a few who I know) with offers from the bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the sold-out Merrill Lynch and even worse, with the collapse rate of a bank/day(including the bailed out AIG, Fannie Freddie and the cheaply sold out WaMu) what's going to happen to all the Wall Street aspirants and the most dreaded thing, what's going to happen to Wall Street ITSELF !!

Are we going to see the US become a 90's Japan(with the whole financial market crumbling down) or even worse, are we going to see Great Depression II !!! So much for subprime mortgage ?? I know that recovery measures are underway in Main Street with the plan to use $700 billion for controlling the market but is that going to help? I am not going to delve into this matter, as I dont know the outcome nor the subtleties involved.

I think , if this is the status in the US , what's happening in the controlled environments of EU. I dont read a lot of this stuff, but I guess there are serious repurcussions in the EU too. We'll have to wait and see how the mystery unfolds.

But , Every cloud has a silver lining . These are indeed turbulent times but at the same time interesting too. The whole of finance industry will no doubt undergo a complete transformation. Ten years from now, banking will never be the same again, veterans wont be able to recognize the state of the industry and future generations might not know what it was like in the 00's.

I hope, there's some learning from these disasters. People studied the Great Depression and came up with laws and policies, they studied Japan's financial markets and came up with models, Five years down the line, I think professors, financial planners and experts are going to come up with models ,formulations and analyses of what went wrong now and teach the same to wannabe-(what would they be called??).

Oops I did it again!!

First of all , I'd like to thank the very first visitors to my blog. You guys made my day, as I nver thought someone would visit my blog which hasnt got anything worthwhile and I need to apologize to those very few visitors to my blog for my absence.
I've been going through a storm raging in my head regarding my bschool application, and as the topic of this blog suggests, I , once again, have decided on not applying this time. This is my second time when I have shortlisted my schools, talked to alumni, spoke to my recommenders, started off with the goals/why mba essays and then decided on not applying.

Well , atleast this time, I guess there is a strong reason to support my decision as I was made to think about my application by a bschool alumni and my decision was backed up by a few other current bschool students too , so I dont regret doing so.
And my dear readers, the very few precious people who voluntarily or involuntarily, have visited my blog, I will explain my reason in its fully glory within a few weeks as the reason is not fully ready yet.

I'd just like to wish the very best to all the current bschool applicants with whom I couldnt share my application follies and joys. But may be as a junior to you in bschool, I could take your advice in the following years :)