Just Power: Rethinking Leadership Energy

Think about Power. The mind of the ambitious harbors dreams about wielding control, while the rest think of the famous quote by Lord Acton, the British historian (1834-1902), who said, “…absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Although it is easy to dismiss power as a necessary evil in the worldly scheme of things, it masks our ambiguous relationship, wanting to wallow in the luxury of freedom it allows, without succumbing to the guilt of having abdicated responsibility. 


Travel notes from a garbage village

Few weeks ago, I visited Devachi Uruli, a small village in the outskirts of Pune. The moment you enter Devachi Uruli, the stinker of garbage greets you to its barren lands. There is nothing beautiful in the village except the exotic advertisements along the roads, featuring Asian models seducing the city-dwellers to live the life of their dreams (nightmares?) inside houses, lifted from the pages of Architectural digest, at the garbage village.

Interview with Mr. Deepak Gupta, VP Sales, Apalya Technologies

Apalya Technologies is India's leading white-label content aggregation, provisioning and distribution platform in the Mobile Video Delivery space. Apalya's mobile video delivery platform seamlessly streams video content to consumers, integrating Mobile Operators, Content owners and Mobile advertisers, creating new revenue streams across the New Media value chain.

Excerpts from the email interview with Mr. Deepak Gupta, Vice-President, Sales Apalya Technologies.

Q. Last year, Indian Premier League(IPL) helped you to cross the 3 million subscriber base, what’s your strategy this year for the World Cup ?

Interview with Keith Curran,Chief Executive, Steadings Group

The volcanic explosion of social networks in the recent years has led to an archipelago of social networks where all of us are sharing our lives straddling across islands with diverse social graphs. Michael Arrington poignantly pointed this out in Tech Crunch recently when he wrote that
The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way….Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services, and help us separate the noise and spam from the real signal. I don’t know who’s going to do it  
Who knows? Keith Curran might be that someone who could help us find a way out of this mess. 

Tuesdays with a farmer - Instinct Vs Analysis - Part III


Farmer: The common school of thought we are all familiar with says that analysis is better than instinct. There is no evidence however to support this. Most of the businesses are done not out of instinct, but out of analysis. Therefore analysis is the only thing business know and can do well.


You can see this in any field. Those who are engineers would realize that some are born engineers and there are some who struggled and struggled and finally got through engineering. Despite their efforts, they didn't get what others had got. There are only few only who actually got  it.



Tuesdays with a farmer - Instinct Vs Analysis - Part II

Farmer: When we are talking about instinct, we are talking about something which cannot be analyzed. So if we are talking about balance between instinct and analysis, its ridiculous. 

Nature is a great strategist. When we need good strategy in this new era, then in some ways we can change the model of nature and apply to business. We should be able to. Strategy is the key for business. And may be nature is a good point to start with. Now we know that the main spring of nature is instinct. So really, a class in strategy should be a class in instinct. 

Surviving your serengeti - Book Review

Self-help books are of a strange kind. As I dusted my childhood book-racks looking for them inside my cranial nerves, I found several books which made me squirm with disbelief. Oh God! Did I read this?A strange sense of dispossession engulfed me as I looked at the covers of my trove of american self-help books, sumptuous fast food items stuffed with super sexy ideas, industrially processed with 99.9% fat and 0.1 % nutrition to achieve what it takes to live my big fat american dream.

Symbiotic memories- What does it mean to say good bye?

On March 10, 2011, I will be officially stepping out of my B-School! What a jolly go ride it has been!!  Wrote this for my batch's year book! Wrote in terms of We. Would be writing later in terms of I some time later.

Tuesdays with a farmer - Instinct Vs Analysis - Part I




Student: When we look at Instinct and analysis, don't you think the best way, it seems to me, to approach it through a perfect balance of both instinct and analysis?


Farmer: This is a perfect example of an analytical answer. Add these two dichotomies and it will make you look smarter. What does balance mean?

Mobile Content Summit 2011 - Highlights - Part II


The post lunch session began with the opening remarks by Deepak Halan, Group Business Director, IMRB. He pointed at the excessive fragmentation of the telecom market with far too many content providers. He also contrasted the Indian telecom scenario in the international context where telecom operators dominate the revenues, unlike other countries, such as China, where content providers dominate the major chunk of the revenues.  

Mobile Content Summit 2011 - Highlights - Part I



Virtue Insight’s Mobile Content Summit 2011 was abuzz with excitement as twitterati began to swarm the event with a flurry of tweets since morning, enlivening the atmosphere much before speakers graced the stage. Tweets from the organizers and event partners started pouring in the huge screen near the podium, facilitated by the Conference App by Hazel Media, Mobility partners of the event.