Fifteen Tech Companies That Will Define 2014

Impressive list. Do check it out.

The Boiling-Frog Trap

If a frog is placed in boiling water then it will jump out. However if it is placed in cold water which then the heat is slowly turned up it does not realize the danger and gets boiled…even to death. Similarly changes that happen gradually in the environment, industry or within the business, are not recognized by managements/owners until it becomes significant and show up threateningly. Conventional wisdom is that if something has worked for you well and delivered, just stick to it.

Building Blocks Of Market Beating Value Creation

How do companies counter and mange the forces which are so structured that they naturally have profit reducing tendencies? Profit here is the economic profit i.e. what is left over from the net operating profit after reducing the cost of capital. For it is this economic profit that truly creates value in businesses. What we are looking to analyze today is – what separates consistent value creators from those which are not able to?

Tech Mega Trends Affecting Businesses

Here is insightful simple presentation on ten very useful statistics for each of the five technology mega trends affecting most businesses – Mobile, Social, Cloud, Applications and Big Data.

Building Workplace Trust

One of the key qualities of a desirable workplace is ‘trust’. Its importance can be easily felt and seen in the way employees communicate, interact, feel, do tasks. Working under an environment where suspicion flows is not very easy and politics takes over easily.

Trust in your boss, your peers, your subordinates and vice versa i.e. their trust in you is not easy to build. While transparency and communication have been used by organization to build trust among employees at various levels, recent research has tried to unravel what the key drivers to building trust are.

Digital Ecosystems – How Is It Going To Play Out?

Digital Ecosystem? This resource explains the concept in a very easy to appreciate manner.

“A natural life ecosystem is defined as a biological community of interacting organisms plus their physical environment.

In the same way, a business ecosystem is “the network of buyers, suppliers and makers of related products or services” plus the socio-economic environment, including the institutional and regulatory framework.

A digital ecosystem is a self-organizing digital infrastructure aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organizations that supports the cooperation, the knowledge sharing, the development of open and adaptive technologies and evolutionary business models.

The digital ecosystem approach transposes the concepts to the digital world, reproducing the desirable mechanisms of natural ecosystems. As several interacting natural ecosystems exist, several digital ecosystems exists due to differentiation and the development of endemic product and services tailored to specific local needs.”

Let us get a even more better picture of what it means.

Nurturing Future Leadership Talent

This Forbes article set me thinking. It is called “Why leadership Training doesn’t Work”. It attributes most leadership training to:

“1) Herd a bunch of people into a big room. 2) Have somebody stand up in front and tell them what they ought to be doing and why, with a lot of “motivational” language .  3) Have a discussion or case study about the thing they’re supposed to be doing. 4) The end.”

This probably is true in many cases where ‘training for business leadership’ is considered a fairly straight forward way to develop future leaders.  Surely readers recognize that training alone is insufficient and can at best be a part of the whole process of leadership development.

So how should businesses go about it? Specially in the context of a global dynamic environment that is much more closely interconnected than ever before?

Macro Strategy Input – Global Portrait of Household Wealth

“Wealth is one of the pillars of the economic system – driving economic growth, the accumulation of capital, trends in consumption, asset prices, and specific industries such as healthcare and banking. Although the very top wealth holders attract a great deal of attention, there is a shortage of reliable data and research on the overall pattern of household wealth.” Credit Suisse has been trying to fill this gap through global survey. In their latest 2012 survey they point out:

12 Transfroming & Disruptive Future Technologies

There have been many technologies that have been bandied as those which will change the global landscape – socially and from a business standpoint. However when it comes to the crux many fail as not all factors that can truly influence the social fabric and business practices are built into it. Thus the need when studying such future technologies is to cut the buzz and realistically evaluate its potential to “to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange value pools.”

A recent study has identified 12 such technologies filtering the noise. What are these?

How High Is ‘Lobbying ROI’?

“The Webster’s dictionary defines “lobby” to mean “a group of persons who conduct a campaign to influence members of a legislature to vote according to the group’s special interest”. Going by the definition, lobbying is probably as old as democracy itself.

Conventional wisdom suggests that lobbying is the preferred means for exerting political influence in developed countries and corruption the preferred one in developing countries. However, lobbying and corruption are symbiotic in nature as both are ways of obtaining help from the public sector in exchange for favors.” (indialawjournal.com)

“In the United States, corporate lobbying is legalized. In India, it operates undercover and under different names. But both perform the same job – influencing public policy and crucial economic decisions – and in turn undermine democracy. Crucial decisions in agribusiness, fertilizer, seed, farm machinery, animal husbandry, dairy, energy, science and technology, and retail – areas that affect country’s food security – are also influenced by corporate lobbying. Millions of rupees have been spent over the past few years by some of the big multinational corporations to seek an entry into India. What may appear to be economic decisions taken by the government often turn out to be the result of intense lobbying by foreign companies.

It is much worse in America. According to Transparency International, an average of Rs 12.34-billion are spent by US corporations for lobbying activities every month. Such heavy investment brings them rich returns.”(deccanherald.com)

How high are these ROIs?