Offshore: The Book is Out
My book on the offshore services industry, co-authored with Gaurav Rastogi, is now out in both print and Kindle versions. In India a print version of the book, published by Penguin, is available in major bookstores and online at Flipkart. In India the book is called Offshore: How India got back on the Global Business [...]
Robert Scoble ko gussa kyon aata hai
With due apologies to my non-Hindi speaking readers. A Bollywood film with a similar title just fit so nicely. It means “Why is Robert Scoble so angry?” And boy is he angry. A couple of days back, Robert Scoble, who hopefully needs no introduction to readers of this blog, posted a rant on the usability [...]
What Apple Means to Me
On Wednesday, as I trudged out of Oracle Open World after Larry Ellison’s keynote, I learnt that Steve Jobs had passed away. It threw a pall of gloom over me and most of the attendees. The world is poorer without Steve Jobs. On Thursday I was talking to my 15 year old son about the [...]
Password Strength and Security
xkcd has a cartoon that beautifully explains why strict password rules have brought us to a pass where it remains relatively easy for a computer to hack the password. But very difficult for people to remember them. My company, like most large corporates, has a password policy that forces the use of numbers, large caps, [...]
End of an Era at Infosys
Yesterday, N R Narayana Murthy retired from Infosys. In a touching farewell in Bangalore, friends and colleagues, present and past, bade him goodbye. There were breaking voices amongst the speakers and moist eyes in the audience. It was a great send-off for a great leader. To Indians, everywhere, Narayana Murthy, means something special. For those [...]
Can You Write a Full Sentence of More Than 140 Characters Anymore?
In the IT Services industry you have to be able to write code. And English. In fact, not being able to write code may be alright. But without English you just can’t function. And yet, it is surprising how little attention is paid to written communication skills. The BPO industry trained thousands of people in [...]
In Which Basab Gets UIDed
A couple of weeks back, I was in the Infosys Bhubaneswar offices. On Friday, which was my last day at work before my vacation, UID enrollment was going on on campus. SBI, one of the agencies entrusted to enroll people into Aadhar was going to be at Infosys for a week. I decided that I [...]
The Two State World View and BYOC
I rejoined Infosys on June 1 as Head of Global Sales. It’s been quite easy slipping back into the saddle on most fronts. The one that took a bit of adjusting to, was on my gear. Startups don’t have IT policies. For the past few years I have been using email in the cloud, [...]
How Not to Do a Newsletter
I get most of my reading done via twitter. I follow a bunch of smart people who essentially filter all that’s out there to what is truly worthy of reading. My feed reader is getting less and less airtime nowadays. But there are some bloggers who don’t tweet their posts so one has to go [...]
The Role of Management Consulting
The hearings on the Galleon insider trading case have begun. Two of the accused Anil Kumar (turned witness) and Rajat Gupta are former McKinsey consultants. So naturally, there is light being shone on McKinsey and management consulting. John Gapper in the FT The calculation every client makes is, in the words of Christopher McKenna, a [...]