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| The Charming CEO Continued |
| Tuesday, January 27, 2009 |
Continued from front page
2001: Gulfstream II jet sold for $4.9 million, thought to have been the most expensive item ever sold on the site.
June 2003: "Ghost in Jar" from Arkansas; winning bid: $50,922.
April 2004: Seattle man sells ex-wife's wedding dress after posting pictures of himself wearing it; winning bid: $ 3,850.
Other unusual auctions: lump of coal; piece of navel lint; a Lincoln Continental sedan once owned by President John F. Kennedy; boyhood home of former U.S. president Bill Clinton in Hope, Arkansas. Married a doctor instead While at Procter & Gamble, Whitman worked on the Noxzema skin care products team, but did not stay long at the company. She had married a Harvard medical student, Griffith Harsh IV, and because of his residency in neurosurgery, the couple had to relocate to San Francisco. There, Whitman found a job with Bain and Company, a global management consulting firm.
She also became a mother during the 1980s, and her next job was a child's dream: that of senior vice president for marketing consumer products for Disney. She helped launch the company's new theme stores outside the United States, but began looking for a job in New England when her husband was offered the post of chief of neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Fortunately, a shoe maker called Stride Rite in Lexington, Massachusetts, was looking for a new president.
During her time at Stride Rite, Whitman oversaw the revival of its vintage Keds sneaker line. Her next job was with Florists Transworld Delivery (FTD), a cooperative of florists, as president and chief executive officer, but she stayed only a year before going over to Hasbro, the toy maker. Not surprisingly, it was a decision that thrilled her young sons. Whitman ran Hasbro's preschool toys division, and successfully re-launched another vintage product, Mr. Potato Head. In the fall of 1997 Whitman was contacted by a headhunting firm, which conducts searches for executives and other key corporate personnel.
An online auction company was looking for a new leader to help launch it in earnest, but she had never heard of AuctionWeb, as eBay was still known. But Whitman agreed to fly to California for an interview. Before she left, she did some computer research on the company, when AuctionWeb was still a collection of classified ads. "I remember sitting at my computer saying, I can't believe I'm about to fly across the country to look at a black-and-white auction classified site," she recalled to Fishman. Took risk at new company EBay was still a relatively young company. It was started in 1995 in San Jose, California, by Omidyar, a computer programmer.
He created the site and its software as a way to help his girlfriend sell items from her collection of kitschy Pez dispensers. The buy-and-sell by auction concept, in which the highest bidder wins, took off, and Omidyar's site turned a profit six months after it was launched. Its premise was simple: seller posts an item for sale and accepts auction bids over a two-week time frame. The highest bidder wins, and the buyer and seller exchange address information for payment and shipping.
EBay charged a thirty-five-cent listing fee, and also took a small percentage of the sale transaction. One of eBay's most important features was a rating system by which buyers and sellers rated their transactions with one another. Negative comments—about buyers who had not paid or sellers who had not shipped—would make others wary about doing business with either. Omidyar was convinced that listening and responding to the site's user base was crucial to his company's success. The online rating system itself had been suggested by eBay aficionados, for example.
But he was having a difficult time expanding the company and maintaining his ethical outlook, and decided that a professional executive might do a better job in expanding eBay, as it had been renamed. Omidyar and the others in charge liked Whitman's customer service experience and brand management talents. She, in turn, liked eBay's sense of community spirit. Whitman talked to her family, and they agreed to move.
She started the job at eBay in February of 1998. The company had just nineteen employees at the time, and some were still using card tables as desks. Whitman delved in, taking a cubicle office like everyone else and even heading into fearsome high-tech territory. In June of 1999, with the company's site becoming more popular on a daily basis, its servers crashed for twenty-two hours. They had gone down before, but engineers had been able to find the problem quickly and fix it. This time was different.
Whitman showed up at 4 A.M. and, as she told Atoosa Rubenstein in a CosmoGirl! interview, "moved in with the engineers for three months and effectively ran the technology division. I didn't know very much about technology, and it was a bit like being in France—everyone is speaking French, and I don't!" An eBay "power seller" herself Whitman also oversaw eBay's initial public offering (IPO) of stock in September of 1998, and over the next five years helped eBay become one of the most unusual success stories in American business history.
It grew faster than Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, or Wal-Mart, and proved so successful for its sellers that many began quitting their day jobs in order to concentrate full-time on their online auctions. Heavy eBay pros were taking in $100,000 a year in sales, and some part-timers were helping to put their children through college with the extra income.
EBay was said to have boosted the fortunes of an immense number of small specialty stores like antique shops and t-shirt makers, simply by giving their Web-savvy owners a whole new nationwide customer base. Whitman instituted a policy at eBay that required its top executives to post items for auction regularly, so they would know firsthand what worked and what did not. She even sold the contents of her family's Telluride, Colorado, ski lodge. She also checked in regularly with the site's message boards to see what users were discussing. "The great thing about running this company," she told Brad Stone in Newsweek, "is that you know immediately what your customers think."
Under Whitman, eBay began holding annual member conferences for its top auctioneers. She is usually greeted like a rock star when she takes the stage, with the audience chanting her name. Honors have come from other sources, too: in 2002, Fortune magazine named her one of the three most powerful women in business. By then, eBay had over thirty million registered users, and took in $1.1 billion that year on a sales total that reached $15 billion in completed auctions. A year later that figure had risen to $24 billion in goods and services, and revenues had doubled to $2.17 billion.
At any given time on eBay, about twenty million items are up for sale. Ten million bids are submitted by users every twenty-four hours, with $900 worth of goods and services exchanging hands every second. Gave back to alma mater Whitman has an annual salary of $2.19 million, but thanks to her ownership of eBay stock she is thought to be the first female billionaire created in the Internet age. She has donated some of her fortune to Princeton University, where she sits on the school's board of trustees.
In early 2002 she and her husband donated $30 million to help the New Jersey school build a new residential college for undergraduates. Whitman College would be Princeton's sixth residential college, and would house about five hundred students.
The added space would increase enrollment at Princeton from 4,600 to 5,100 when its first classes begin entering in 2010. "I had a great time as a Princeton undergraduate," a report in Ascribe Higher Education News Service quoted Whitman as saying, about her reasons behind the gift. "The University inspired me to think in ways that have guided me throughout my life." Whitman works hard to balance her family life with a job she loves. She works out in the morning, and is usually able to drive her two sons to school. Vacations are often spent skiing or fly-fishing.
When she travels for business, she rarely flies on the company plane. Thanks to the numerous business magazine covers that have featured her, fellow fliers recognize her and tell her their eBay stories. "I have one of the best jobs in Corporate America," she enthused to Hof. "It's this unique blend of commerce and community. The community of users is endlessly interesting and endlessly surprising. That's what I love the most."
WYD Team |
posted by Win Your Dreams @ 7:03 PM
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| Today's Thought-The Godrej Story |
| Wednesday, January 21, 2009 |
 There’s more to Adi B Godrej, chairman, The Godrej Group, than business. Reema Sisodia finds out that the man has travelled to over 70 countries and is an adventure sports enthusiast.
His secretary for the past 33 years describes him as a man who respects punctuality, who is impeccably organised with a table that is never clustered, who is clear in thought, prompt in decision making — “someone who is constantly open to feedback”.
Plus, it must be added, Adi Godrej, doyen of the Godrej group, never stops learning. Consider this: Godrej has a pedigree which boasts of Pirojsha Godrej (the man who built the Godrej empire), Burjor Godrej (his father plus prime inspiration) and Naval Godrej (his business guru), but the man himself is finding new truths even from children, especially his grandsons.
Also, it was his two daughters who helped him recognise the importance of new-age fundamentals like team bonding and managing emotions. Says Godrej, “You can learn so much from the present generation and from your juniors. I must admit that it was my grandson who actually instilled the attribute of patience in me, which has helped me significantly to perform better at work. He has taught me things in management that no business school or management book can ever teach.”
The interior of the office reflects the man. The ambience is staid and white, sans any garishness, the decor simple yet modern symbolising the makeover of the group post-liberalisation. Godrej swears by change, technology and growth in the global economy. He says, “The challenge of the future is to use our brand image and success, while simultaneously creating a modern, efficient, young and consumer-centric organisation which can create a momentum of growth in the future.” But his motto - ‘sales is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality’ - remains unchanged.
Godrej believes that every organisation needs to  benchmark itself with global players. The company already receives 10 per cent of its revenue from operations outside India and aims to increase it to around 25 per cent over a 10-year period.
On people who have impressed him, he rates former United Kingdom prime minister Margaret Thatcher, GE CEO Jack Welch and industrialists JRD Tata and Dhirubhai Ambani. The writings of Welch have greatly appealed to Godrej. “I was lucky to meet the man and see the manner in which he managed GE. Apart from him, Margaret Thatcher awed me by the way she changed the face of Britain. On the Indian scene, JRD Tata was an institution in himself who I admired tremendously, while Dhirubhai Ambani, who was also my neighbour, left a lasting impression on me.”
To add another facet to a multi-faceted personality, Godrej is also a sports enthusiast, albeit with a difference. He avoids group sports like cricket or football and is mostly into adventure sports. Water sports, wind surfing, water skiing with the family, especially in the Mumbai shores, is for him a much-needed break. If not that, it would be bridge. Another all time high for him is paragliding.
Though “there is no place like home”, with operations spread over 50 countries worldwide and representative offices in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, etc travel naturally plays a major role in Godrej’s life. He travels most often to Europe, America and Far East. If time permits, he enjoys exploring surrounding regions and cities and intriguingly, likes to do it on foot.
“If I am on business and have a weekend free, I just walk around new destinations. It is something I enjoy doing. My passion for travel has taken me to around 70 odd countries. I have made friends in various nations, understood many new cultures and experimented with numerous cuisines.”
He prefers his vacations to be quality recreation. For instance, a recent trip to Tibet and Mansarovar with a group of friends. “I think of that trip as a memorable one. Walking around Mount Kailash, roughing it out in the mountainous terrain, was quite an experience,” he says.
But the biggest thrill is still in the office in Mumbai. “I look forward to the challenge of yet another Monday morning at work. I enjoy every day spent here,” says Godrej.
WYD Team |
| posted by Win Your Dreams @ 6:40 PM
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| Yahoo's new Captain |
| Monday, January 19, 2009 |
Her discipline was iron—and possibly excessive. To keep her family in Atherton, she commuted to the office, which required a long, traffic-clogged drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. To regain these lost hours each day, she spent the whole time behind her chauffeur reading and working, often stopping several times along the way to throw up out of carsickness. Her driver knew all the best places to pull over along Highway 101.
Secateurs at the ready
All of which exemplifies Ms Bartz’s general approach to “work-life balance”. To Ms Bartz the very notion is nonsense. You can “have it all”, as she does, but only by cutting life into compartments and then ruthlessly maintaining the boundaries. When her daughter, whom she had at 40, was a baby, Ms Bartz spent three days a week looking after her at home in Dallas, where she was living at the time. On Mondays she handed the baby to her nanny and flew to Silicon Valley for four days of work; then she flew home again at midnight on Thursdays.Unlike a lot of men in her position, Ms Bartz kept her power in perspective.
She had groomed a successor at Autodesk and became worried that he might leave if she stuck around too long. So she made way for him and became Autodesk’s chairman. “There is a real difference between managing and leading,” she once said. “Managing winds up being the allocation of resources against tasks. Leadership focuses on people. My definition of a leader is someone who helps people succeed.”
How, then, is she likely to make Yahoo! succeed? It is hard to imagine her trying to be geekier than the Young Turks at Google, Yahoo!’s larger and far more successful rival. Instead, she may approach Yahoo! as she does her life, or her garden in Atherton, stuffed at various times with everything from heirloom tomatoes to bearded irises. “If you don’t kill a lot of plants along the way, you don’t know how to garden,” she once said. In short, if there is one person tough and unsentimental enough to disassemble Yahoo!, sell parts of it to Microsoft and merge others with some media company, it is Carol Bartz.
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| posted by Win Your Dreams @ 7:21 PM
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| Meet America's most powerful young CEOs |
| Sunday, January 18, 2009 |
 Jerry Yang is no longer among those intrepid youngsters who are CEOs of very big companies, though he was long the most famous and powerful of them. It wasn't a birthday that took him out of the mix, either. Yang, 39, was just shunted aside at Yahoo! for the more venerable Carol Bartz, 60, formerly of Autodesk. Who does that leave? Some 21 CEOs who are under 40 now run companies worth at least $500 million, our research shows.
Francisco D'Souza, 39, heads what is now the largest public company run by a 40-or-under CEO, though his $5.7 billion Cognizant Technology Solutions is dwarfed by the $16.9 billion Yahoo!. D'Souza has been an officer at Cognizant for 11 years now, chief executive since 2007, and chief operating officer since 2003, when he was a mere 33.
In pictures:
Amphenol's R Adam Norwitt and CNX's Nicolas J DeIuliis run the second and third largest public companies on the list. Norwitt is one of 10 who run tech-oriented companies. That sector, always associated with youthful genius and entrepreneurship, has far and away the largest representation. Energy and health care each have just three companies on the list.
Joshua G James, 34, of Omniture, is the youngest of all these CEOs. His business is worth $750 million. James was one of Omniture's founders, and in his last reported year of pay, he made more than $2 million. Not bad for a guy born after all the troops came home from Vietnam.
In pictures:
DynCorp International's William L Ballhaus and WellCare's Heath G Schiesser will both hit 41 soon and retire from the realm of these daring youths. Will anyone replace them, or will there be increasingly fewer young CEOs at large corporations as we move farther away from the tech boom? That has been the trend so far.
The most experienced and seasoned old CEOs have to make hard-nosed decisions and endure intense scrutiny during tough times. Young CEOs may find themselves under an even brighter spotlight, thanks to their supposed inexperience. But at least they have plenty of time ahead of them to correct any errors -- and possibly move on to even bigger things.
Also see:
CTY:Rediff |
| posted by Win Your Dreams @ 3:32 AM
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| The HCL Story-Continued |
| Friday, January 16, 2009 |
Continued from the front page...
 Nadar explains, "We knew many people in IIT and Indian Institute of Science. We formed an advisory panel and asked them, can you help us navigate this whole thing and they were very enthusiastic about this and they of course shaken up a little bit when they saw that we started advertising in Bombay -- selling education as a commercial project." From calculators to IT education, the first five years of HCL was a combination of growth and expansion riddled with uncertainty but the company was now gearing up to set a much bigger target for itself and an announcement from the government would help it takeoff to those soaring heights.
In 1984, the Indian government announced a new policy that would change the fortunes of the entire computer industry. The government opened up the computer market and permitted import of technology. With new guidelines and regulations in place, HCL grabbed the opportunity to launch its own personal computer.
The demand for personal computers was slowly but surely mounting in the Indian market. Most banks were shifting to the UNIX platform. A few companies approached HCL for personal computers, so, the founders flew all over the world to bring back PCs they could take apart, study and reproduce and indigenously upgrade. Their first innovative personal computer was ready in three weeks' times and soon they launched their first range of computers, and they called it the Busybee.
Chowdhry says, "In a lot of ways, it opened up the market because one thing was that, you no longer had to develop basic stuff in India - like operating systems but on the other hand it opened new opportunities like banking because as per government policy, all banking computers must be UNIX based. So, feverishly we set out creating a UNIX based computer and we bought the UNIX source code and created that product out of nothing."
In two years, HCL became one of the largest IT companies in India. The founders now went to different corners of the country to set up sales and marketing offices and it now needed the brightest minds to take it to the next level of competition. Campus recruitment in management and technical institutes began in full swing and HCL grabbed some of the best talent by offering pay packages that outscored some of the best companies of the time -- Rs 2,000 per month to start with.
The adrenaline rush of the first half of the 1980s and the rapid expansion strategy soon caught up with HCL. A turning point came in 1989, when HCL on the basis of a report by McKinsey and Company decided to venture into the American computer hardware market. HCL America was born but the project fell flat on its face. HCL had failed to follow a very crucial step necessary to enter the US market. A big disappointment was on its way.
Piramal says, "For every entrepreneur, the US will always remain the dream market. It's the biggest market in the world and Shiv Nadar obviously was drawn to it but he really didn't know what he was getting into. The computers he made didn't get environmental clearances. In fact, HCL probably turned into his biggest mistake but HCL and Shiv himself, he is a very strong person, he understood he was making a mistake, he saw that Infosys and Wipro are doing really well in software and he was not too proud to change gears and finally HCL did enter the software market."
It didn't take too long for HCL to brush off the disappointment in the US. Its first failure in the US was set aside in 1991 and HCL entered into a partnership with HP (Hewlett-Packard) to form HCL HP Limited. It opened new avenues for HCL and gave opportunities to firm up its revenues.
In three years, another new possibility came knocking at its door and in 1994, HCL looked beyond PCs and tied up with Nokia cellphones and Ericsson switches for distribution.
Chowdhry explains, 'In 1991, when India didn't have enough foreign exchange. We were in the hardware business and we didn't have enough funds. That's the time when a clear thought entered our minds - that we should globalize and in the very early days, we actually created a joint venture with Hewlett-Packard.
In 1997, HCL was already a multi-dimensional company spun off HCL Technologies Limited to mark their entry into the global software space. It made up its mind to focus on software development, which was twenty years behind its entrepreneurial journey, Shiv Nadar was now ready to take on global competition with all his might.
From 70s to 90s, the HCL story was one of steady rise but in the face of its rapid expansion and continuous flow of achievements, Shiv Nadar didn't anticipate that he would be in for a rude shock and that it would come from someone very close.
In 1998, Arjun Malhotra, Shiv Nadar's comrade and friend decided to leave the company to start his own TechSpan, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. He was also one of the largest shareholders in HCL Infosystems at that time. For Shiv Nadar, it was time to think afresh.
The revenues were shrinking from the hardware sector and Nadar now decided to redesign HCL. The company once again needed funds to grow and this time around, Nadar decided to look at the capital market. An initial public offer (IPO) was made on the Indian Stock Exchange in 1999, which was a stupendous success.
President, HCL Technologies, Vineet Nayar says, "The shareholders supported us and then I think we started with Rs 580 an IPO and went up to Rs 2,800 or something like that. So, it was a dream run, I think the shareholders bought the argument we were making, they liked the articulation of the strategy, they liked the management team and they liked the vision we were painting and they supported the stock full time and that was a turning point for HCL."
Shiv Nadar now put aside his dream of becoming a global hardware major and venture into software with an open mind and a clean slate. Technology was opening up vistas of opportunities in the software sector and HCL now wanted to build new businesses. Global business became a priority, so, now they started a BPO in Ireland in 2001. His partner in this ambitious venture was British Telecom.
The years that followed saw HCL in an expansion mode. In 2005 alone, HCL signed a software development agreement with Boeing for its 787 dreamliner programme. Next came a venture with NEC, Japan.
It even brought out the joint ventures Deutsche Bank and British Telecom's Apollo Contact Center. In the same year, HCL Infosystems launched it sub Rs 10,000 personal computer and joined hands with AMD and Microsoft to bridge the digital divide.
The successes of 2005 spilled over into 2006 and the company now produced over 75,000 machines in a single month, with more parallel joint ventures growing on its list. But in spite of this overwhelming success, Shiv Nadar would not rest. There was a nagging sense of dissatisfaction and perhaps not having exploited its full potential that still drove Nadar and the company to achieve much more.
Thirty years after starting his company, Shiv Nadar really does not have much to complain about. Hindustan Computers Ltd today is an empire worth $3.5 billion with staff strength of 34,000.
But then dissatisfaction has been the quintessential factor that has made Shiv Nadar the visionary that he was and continues to be. Dissatisfaction once drove him to quit his job at DCM and it is that same quality even today, that is driving him to achieve much more when he can quite easily rest on his laurels.
WYD Team |
| posted by Win Your Dreams @ 6:16 AM
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