Thursday, April 19, 2007

What drives a Boom…?

I was just thinking about what’s in a boom. What drives it? And what brings a downfall. And why I got this thought suddenly? Because for the first time in my life I today came across a company laying off people. So I thought I would better discuss and explore what keeps the giant wheel going round and round, up and down :)

Read this…

Sam Walton said,

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”

But drilling a little down everyone is a customer and each of us work in this viscous circle to keep the circle a perfect one ,ensuring the circle has no open ends! Not making sense??… I will explain it with a example.

In India we work in a services oriented fashion. Lets for the sake of it assume Iam a engineer working for a client Nokia. Now I work only to please my client and make him happy. I ensure I deliver my part of the product best.Nokia does his part of it ,integrates them and makes sure he sells his mobile to make his customer happy. And who is this customer? .The so called End Customer/Consumer? ..It happens to be me, you or someone else. And the money nokia earns it shares with me indirectly because I am paid indirectly by him.

Now there are two things. One, economies/companies grow only by sharing wealth and two, the consumer needs to spend, for the money to percolate. Only then the wealth flows and at some point flows back to us.

If you read the above paragraph again you will realise that these are the two things USA does excellently well.

And what is this viscous circle I am talking about should already be clear to you. It’s a binocular view of Demand – supply theory. Only if the supply is matched, and matched with the demand the product would sustain in the economy. If for some reason the demand becomes less the loop is broken. To be precise if the consumer is not in a position to afford the product or the product is not meeting consumer’s expectation then, the company/economy/product will become obsolete.

And now you know who drives the boom? Its you and me!!. :)

Having talked about spending/sharing wealth, to sustain the boom for our selfishness, :) in my next blog I will write about Saving!!!

Till then Happy reading…

Sunday, April 15, 2007

On-sight!!

Oh ya!!, the long pending onsite trip of mine finally happened and I think the excitement of being in the new culture and seeing a developed economy kept me occupied for the first two weeks. But finally, I sat down to write, trying to do some justice to the blog I started.

This onsite had more been a path to understand the intricate advantages and disadvantages of being in a new culture like Canada or USA, so far. As the cliché goes So far So good!!. Canada is no different from USA Iam told. So i would tend to generalise as i keep writing.

For the last two weeks, I have been sighting far many things which I am still not able to digest. I came with impressions that my visit to Canada wouldn’t take me to big surprises and all my analysis about moving out of India would stand vindicated. Since I have two sisters in US and my parents have visited USA 3 times I know pretty much well about these countries. But after i have been here, so many opine’s of mine have been proved just a myth!!!

Over the past two weeks I had done some unique things which I might have not and never experienced in India. These are the obvious nice things about Canada and USA.Let me list them down…

Number One, I interacted with people from all geographies of the world. Canadian,American,Chinese,Japanese,Syrian,African,European,Russian and of course Indians.

And one uniform observation from all of them is their deep sense of timing while they converse. They mix up their fluency of English with both wit and substance and keep us thinking throughout their talk. Yes, at times they do talk non-sense but they do it in such a way that you will get out of thinking about the emptiness of their talk sooner.

Number Two , Another striking thing I have noticed is the discipline people follow in anything and everything. One of the toughest part for me is to follow the protocol while walking. It’s opposite to India both in the roads and for pedestrians. And if you walk on the left of the corridor while going south to north they look at you with disgust. And its people who are most respected on roads,then cyclist,then motorists and then follow all heavy vehicles. Directly opposite to India :).

Number three, is the variety of immigrants who have come here and settled but still respect and follow the protocols set by local Canadian government. When I was in Toronto I was told that Toronto has the largest immigrant population in the world. More than 60% of Toronto people are not Canadians!! What I immediately tend to admire is the way they have all adjusted to the system and become a part of it. Why I quote Toronto is because Toronto constitutes more than 40% of Canada’s GDP!!. In India Indians from Karnataka don’t like Indians from TamilNadu. But here people from all over the world just stay without inhibitions. They do have some differences of opinions but they keep it away from influencing others.

Number four, which is the most strking thing for me is, there is not much importance given to politics and Religion here. People don’t discuss day to day politics as seriously as they do in India. They respect and trust their leaders. Religion is of not much significance here. Many of them are not even particular to go to church and also not interested to take their children to churches. And I don’t have to say anything about India here :) .

Number five, I will end with this :) . Life as if it is day to day, is so easy here. The system has been automated to a large extent and there are hardly any failures in them. I am talking right from the morning when a municipal garbage system cleans up the city using their machines, or the microwave oven’s that heat food instantly, or the doors that lock automatically and track intruders through cameras, or the Wifi internet that’s hooked up everywhere. And once you start to office there are these GPS enabled buses which are tracked and also they are climate controlled. You go to office and find all find of devices right from the machine that gives you snacks and drinks by dropping dollars, or the cup washer that cleans up your cups. You come back from work and drop in your clothes in a washing machine that cleans then up in minutes and then you switch on your TV which works on a triple play through the cable modem!!!. As I said life is very very easy and convenient here…

Hang on… Are you wondering that this guy has turned Canadian? I am not. This week’s article as I aspired would just be to share my so called excitation. I still have my critic dormant inside. I will come out with all those worse parts of being here next week..

Till then, stay tuned and Happy reading!!!