How the Swiss do it

If you have a weekend to spare and want to read a contrarion point of view on investing, The Zurich Axioms fits the bill

There are 12 major axioms and 16 minor ones in the book. Max Gunther purportedly distills these axioms from his observations from Swiss bankers - those magnificently rich people who have made it in a landlocked, mineral-poor, small country.

Frankly, there are only 3 or at most 4 insightful 'axioms'. The others seem to just make up the numbers. Max Gunther does try his best to debunk oft quoted advice from wealth management experts - Diversify, Invest for the long term, Don't sell too early, Technical analysis etc. He also trashes experts who are ubiquitous nowadays on TV and newspapers spewing advice on anything and everything by quoting trends, correlations and causality.

His writing style is conversational and this is admirable on a subject such as investing where P&L statements, Balance sheets and ratios are de rigueur.

If you've read Peter Lynch or you get your hands on Fundsupermart's quarterly magazine or have had a chance to read any other book on stocks or investing, this is a good 2nd book. Don't read it as your introduction into investing.

Unshackling India: Barriers - Part 3

In the last 2 posts in this series, I had talked about Illiteracy and Poor public health as two factors preventing our abundant human resources from being economically productive. But for even those who are able and ready, poor infrastructure either prevents or enervates their initiative.

A country's Infrastructure can be assessed broadly on 4 vectors. These vectors are either inputs for production or enablers of trade. The 4 is not an exhaustive list but is indicative of the strength of a country's infrastructure and is also instructive in where the malaise lies. The 4 are:

Power, Transport, Ports, Communication.

I'm not covering Sanitation here - not because it isn't important, but because it'll complicate the discussion. We'll come back to it in a later post when talking about solutions for Poor public health.

Let's look at Power. India's production of electricity is only 630 billion kwh. If you switch on a 100 watt electricity bulb for 10 hours, that's 1 kwh. Light it for 15 hours and you spend 1.5kwh - you get the math, right? For a country of 1.13 billion people, this means, we can afford only 558kwh per year per person!! That is 1.5kwh per day! Each person can basically light one electric bulb for 15 hours at this rate!

China produces 2500 billion kwh or 1900 kwh per person - each person not only gets a bulb, but a fan and some extra power to convert some iron into steel. The US produces 3980 billion kwh or 13,220 per person. While at some level, my 'Green' conscience tells me that's a bit too high with all its Greenhouse effects, a level between China and US should be our aim.

The list of pernicious effects of lack of power is too long to enumerate. Suffice to say that a nation cannot aim to convert it's abundant natural resources into usable products, if it lacks energy.

Next is Transport. Roads, Rails, Air and Waterways being primary modes of moving goods and people. In Roads and Rails, it's interesting to note that the issue is not of penetration but of quality and reliability.

India has 1.6 million km of metalled roads, 0.54 km per sq. km of land. That compares favorably with China (0.16) and US (0.45). Net, roads cover more land in India than in China or the US. The problem is in the definition. What passes off as metalled road in India would count as dirt track in a 1st world country. The fact that China has 34 thousand km and US has 75 thousand km of expressways and India has almost none reveals the real issue (yes, yes, we have the Mumbai-Pune expressway - but isn't it pathetic that we have a single stretch of 200km road to banner in 2.9million sq km country?). India's roads are simply not efficient or reliable enough to move goods and people at a speed that can be an enabler to economic growth.

On railways the story is similar. India has 21m of rail track per sq. km. China has 8 and US has 25m. So far, so good. But the average speed achieved on Indian tracks is 25km/h. If someone has data on China and US, please send it in, but it's safe to assume that it won't be below 25km/h.

A peek into airways and waterways is quite revealing. China has 13m of waterways per sq km. India has only 5 and the US has 4.5m. Waterways are the one of the most energy efficient manner of transportation and are a natural link from ports to the hinterland. We do not have a pan-Indian river system to ride on.

In airport density, the US is far ahead with 15000 airports - 1600 per 1000 sq km. India has 115 per 1000sqkm and China has 52 per 1000sqkm. Airports, historically have been better movers of people than goods so in a sense, it might not be the most important factor of transportation.

So here is the picture on Transport. China has ridden on it's extensive waterways and expressways. The US has its rail and road network. India has none. It's roads are dilapidated, railways is unreliable & slow and waterways, non existent.

The 3rd Infrastructure factor is Ports. In a way, they are an extension of our transport system. Too few and too tardy. Our interaction with the outer world doesn't make for good copy. The 12 Indian ports have 233 berths with a throughput of 465 million tonnes of cargo. Shanghai, by itself, has a throughput of 537 million tonnes!

The average turnaround time at Indian ports is 4 days. This is an improvement over the 8 days we used to take in the 1990's. Singapore has a turnover time of, guess what.....12 hours!!!! Even other ports have a turnaround time of 1 day on an average.

What this means is that goods take 3-4 days to reach our sea ports from our factories and farms. They then sit idle for 4 days at our ports. 8 days of inventory carrying costs on a GDP of $922 billion is humungus!!

Last on the list is communications. For all the talk of a mobile phone revolution in India, we have just 150 million mobile phone users. China has 450, the US has 220 million translating to a teledensity of 34% and 73% respectively as compared to India's 13%. 'We have some distance to cover' might be the understatement of the year!

This makes for a grim prognosis. 1/3rd of our population is illiterate. Out of the remaining 700million, almost 1/3rd is out of work either due to disease or malnutrition. What the able and educated can produce is constrained by lack of power. What is produced either takes inordinately long to reach the market due to poor transport or loses half its value in the time it takes to get there. Markets are inefficient because of poor communication facilities.

These are the hard problems. The one's backed by numbers and data. There are a lot of soft problems too - terrorism, separatism, fanaticism, rich-poor divide, lack of civic sense, lack of service culture etc etc. Most of these are symptoms of an underlying gap between haves and have nots. And that gap is driven by the 3 underlying factors we've talked about - access to quality education, quality health and infrastructure.

I wanted to emphasize the primacy of these 3 underlying factors because in discussions with friends, I have discerned various starting and ending points on this topic. For some, the rich-poor divide is the biggest issue we need to solve. For others, it is the Muslims vs. Hindus divide. Some call it the urban - rural divide. Still others, say that separatism is the biggest threat to the country. I think these are profiling variables not discriminating ones. If you group all those who are illiterate and unhealthy, there will be a pre-ponderance of Muslims, of rural folks and of poor people. The have nots will be the ones asking for a separate state - the perception that being master of your destiny is the panacea to all their ills. But you can't do anything about someone being a Muslim, Rural or Poor apart from conversion, migration and donation - and I bet, those 3 would never solve the underlying problem.

Net, if we can tackle illiteracy, poor health and infrastructure in an equitable manner, I believe we will cover a fair distance in achieving our goal of becoming the #1 economic power in the world.

Over the next few posts, I'll try to explore solutions to these issues.

In closing, I wanted to bring up a soft point - the Lack of a clearly articulated Indian identity. It is a symptom, the causes of which can be seen scattered over illiteracy, curriculum, history and politics. I do not want to vitiate this forum by delving into it now but later, when talking of solutions, we cannot but help pay due import to this issue.

Good, thought provoking book but not gospel truth

Management leads by example - this is true not only for leaders but also for the discipline of Management Education. Case studies and examples are the best way to introduce and clarify concepts. Clayton Christensen uses cases from the Disk Drive industry and the Mechanical Excavator industry to answer the question he poses in the beginning - Why do great firms fail?

His answer - The Innovator's dilemma: The very capabilities that make firms great are the cause of its downfall when faced with disruptive innovation. He also peppers the book with interesting examples from other industries such as PCs, cars, retailing.

Another instructive section is his explanation of capabilities - the factors that affect what a firm can and cannot do. He breaks up capabilities into Resources, Processes and Values - something that managers at the helm can use at different stages of a firm's life cycle.

It's in the solution to the dilemma that I feel Prof. Christensen does not do enough. This is actually symptomatic of a general trend I see in popular management books where solutions are presented as a straightforward inverse of the issue. If current capabilities inhibit success in disruptive innovation, create a separate organization with new capabilities. If small opportunities do not fulfill the growth needs of a large company, embed the innovation in a small organization. If it's hard to estimate market size, plan to fail.

Reality is not that simple. Failure at great firms in the face of disruptive innovation is either because they did not 'see it coming' or executed incorrectly. His thesis presents solutions for the 2nd cause, not for the 1st.

In essence this problem from the perspective of the incumbent is that of balancing current business with future growth. Stated this way, it's not an either-or. A successful firm needs to do both - deliver current business and plan for future growth. Some of the future growth will come from sustaining innovation (for which the current organization is appropriate) but an unknown part can come from disruptive innovation. A separate, self-sustaining group, preferable under the CEO's watch is better positioned.

Prof. Christensen also does not cover the issue from the perspective of an entrant - the book would have been more complete if he had. For an entrant, the challenge is to find a consumer segment that wants his innovation. I feel that instead of stating and re-iterating the innovator's dilemma (which after a point starts to grate), he could have spent some effort in laying out a conceptual framework to help an entrant. Here, I find the concept of Points of Difference and Points of Parity from other management schools to be useful.

And even if you don't have a disruptive innovation but want to enter a market, there are important pointers in the book - though they are not laid out as such. Find a market where the existing products are over-designed for some people. Create an innovation that achieves Point of Parity for current important attributes and Point of Difference on a new attribute. Windows compatible software that is not as evolved as Microsoft Office, meets the basic word processing, computation and presentation needs of a significant part of the population but is significantly cheaper is a case in point. And to subvert the bundling problem, it can be downloaded.

The power of the book for a practising manager is that it asks an important question. And through its examples provides a fertile ground for you to introspect and ruminate over your experiences. The real value of the book resides in these connections that your introspection reveals.

Chak De India - commentary

1. I thought of writing a commentary after chancing upon a reference on wikipedia. It said that the film opened to lukewarm response in India and UK and some critics have trashed the movie as being slow.

I loved the movie. I absolutely did. And it's hard to explain why; I always struggle to explain emotions. Contrary to opinions that persistently asking 'why' leads you to the root cause, I believe emotions can't be explained. One, because the very method employed to elicit an explanation causes an error - Claimed data is claimed. It undergoes rational processing that renders the response incorrect. Second, why explain something that is supposed to be felt. Try explaining a fragrance - they do that when explaining perfumes and it makes for a very poor alternative to some good ol' sniffing.

Anyways, coming back to the movie........

Chak De India uses hockey as the sub text to bring into relief 3 issues that afflict India sport - 1) Individualism, 2) Regionalism and 3) Using sports as a means to an end. More importantly, it offers a poignant commentary on the fickleness of Indian public where public adulation is driven by the most recent performance. Lastly, it directs one's eye to the disproportionate focus of India sport to that genteel pastime - cricket, at the expense of all else.

The movie is commendable for its bravery and instructive in its business acumen. Using 11 unknown faces, no leading heroine, no exhibition of flesh and no song-dance sequence is brave. Ensuring there was Shahrukh's face to pull crowds in, was smart.....else this might have ended being a late bloomer or a DVD wonder.

See the movie if you haven't. It'll 'stick' with you.................

ps: Tomorrow, I'll pick up the threads of the 'Unshackling India' series. Apologies for the longish hiatus.

The End of Poverty - Review

Who is it for?

Anyone interested in developmental economics. Anyone interested in poverty. Anyone interested in getting a helicopter view of what has happened in the economies of Bolivia, Poland, Russia, China, India and Africa.

Who is it not for?

Footsoldiers, innovators or entrepreneurs looking for execution ideas that'll make a clear, verifiable and real difference in the lives of the poor. Wide-eyed arm chair philosophers looking for a magic bullet, an insightful idea that will make good conversation over coffee/beer.

What is it?

A planner's experience-laden fiscal plan on how much is needed to eradicate poverty and how to fund that investment. Peppered with anecdotes and events that affected economic transformations in countries we are interested in. Topped with exhortations and appeals to our moral, intellectual and human side. With a fair sprinkling of bashing of US war & tax policy.

What is it not?

An action plan to eradicate poverty. A repository of execution ideas that can be implemented by individuals, entrepreneurs or private enterprise.

Is it any good? Yes

Does it lay out the problem, spell out the investment needed to solve it and give ideas on how to finance it? Yes.

Does it delve into what to do with that investment? A little bit.

Does it give you a good understanding of development economics? Yes.

Does it make for an interesting read, was it educative? Yes, most certainly

Is this book the magic bullet that will eradicate poverty? Maybe not.

Does it talk about how to execute? No.
Does it go down to the trenches, dirty your hands and talk of real people. No.

Overall, a good read. I might add to this review after I've read the 'White Man's Burden'.

Unshackling India: Barriers - Part 2

The last post covered Education and the lack of quality (skill and stance) and reach as a barrier to achieving India's goal of becoming #1 GDP country in the world. In this post, I'll explore Health as the 2nd big barrier.


Health is both a cause and effect of extreme poverty. And it's a very complex problem. Let me state the magnitude of the problem first.


25% of Indians do not have access to basic healthcare. Sometimes percentages numb our senses since they hide the people they represent. What this 25% means is that around 270 million Indians, when they fall ill, do nothing but wait. They wait for divine intervention or human fortitude or quacks or ultimately for...... death. These are people in remote villages, slums or shantytowns next to big construction projects - you can see them living each day on borrowed time.


With infant mortality of 34.6 per 1000 live births, 1 million infants die every year - laying waste 9 months of pre-natal investment. This is no small number. It means half of New Zealand dies as infants in India every year!!


For every 1000 adults of working age, 4 die of infectious diseases such as TB, Diarrhoea, AIDS and Malaria. That is 4.5 million preventable deaths a year!! More than the population of Singapore! Another 2 million die of nutrition related diseases. It's ironic that Singapore is trying to get up to a population of 6.5 million by 2010 to sustain its economic growth and we lose the same number every year to deaths that are preventable via sanitation, immunization and nutrition.


India has 25% of the world's population of blind people. Isn't that blinding infuriating?? 1/4th of world's blind people are in India!! - a direct result of Vit A deficiency and poor cataract treatment outreach.


With such vast swathes of people rendered economically ineffective, its not hard to see why India has not been able to harness its abundant human resources - a lot of them are just not fit to work!

What are the causes of this abysmal state of healthcare in India?

First is Poverty. Poor people just do not have the economic surplus to invest in nutrition, prevention and treatment.

Second is Budgetary failure. Indian Govt. has a) not allocated enough to fulfill its promise of universal healthcare and b) whatever is allocated doesn't reach the needy due to corruption and inefficiencies.

Third, is Lack of infrastructure. This happens on two fronts - 1) Lack of roads and refrigeration impedes reach of medication and vaccines, 2) Lack of sanitation compounds spread of infections.

Fourth is Lack of education. This again, works on two fronts - 1) The affected don't know and therefore don't take simple actions that can prevent a lot of infectious and nutritional diseases and 2) there are not enough doctors and health workers for our population.

Interestingly, most of the above are interlinked. And that's not surprising. Over the past 407 years (1600 - 2007) while the Western World went through its political, industrial and technological revolutions, India's GDP was stagnant for the first 340 years and grew at a meagre 3% for the next 30. Only in 1970 did we break into a more respectable 5-6% growth rate behind the Green revolution and from 1991, started galloping at 7%.

The first 370 years of the last 4 centuries made the pernicious factors of illiteracy, poor health and poor infrastructure intertwine into a massive ballast that keeps pulling the Indian ship down.

In my 1st post, I mentioned that in addition to Education and Health, the 3rd barrier is that we have not created conditions that allow our human capital to contribute. This primarily alludes to lack of Infrastructure but extends into 2 other vectors - 1) Governance and 2) Inefficiencies (corruption, intermediaries)

In my next post, I would explore this 3rd barrier in some detail

Unshackling India: Barriers - Part 1

The fundamental barrier to becoming the World's Largest economy is the quality of our human resources. India has poor human capital - both in terms of literacy and health. If you're sick and/or unskilled, your economic value is low and your ability to improve your stock is impaired.

A secondary barrier is that we have not created conditions for our human capital to realize their potential (read: infrastructure)

What makes the issue complicated is the inter-twining of these barriers over the years, thereby blurring the lines between cause and effect. This vicious cycle needs some explaining.

India has a population of 1.1 billion. But 39% of population is illiterate. This in itself significantly curtails the economic value of our human capital. Here's a simple way of increasing our GDP by 60% - achieve 100% literacy! This will need twin efforts in 1) increasing school enrollment of Point of School Entry kids and 2) reducing drop out rates. The other 61% literate are not really off scrutiny. There are 2 issues that beset those defined literate - one hard & poignant, the other soft & regrettable.

Lets take the hard issue first. This issue is of skill (or the lack of it in our current education system). A recent survey by Pratham and another one by Secretary, Govt. of Maharashtra revealed that out of those termed literate as per the 3 R's, only 23%, yes 23%!!! students were able to read/write a simple sentence or do a simple sum. Others just recalled their name as you would recall a logo or wrote their name as you would draw a caricature - there was no understanding aiding their memory. This finding is scandalous not only for its content but for the fact that it's not better publicised!! The issue is shifted from primary to secondary & from secondary to higher secondary levels due to teachers' vested interest in performance parameters & executed via a combination of teacher-aided cheating and manipulation of answer sheets in exams. Why, you would ask, are students not getting it? Why after spending 13 years in school, they are not able to gain understanding of language and arithmetic? The answer doesn't lie in the student's lack of ability but in 1) teacher absenteeism that besets Govt. schools in India and 2) lack of teacher training in engaging students. Later, we'll discuss causes of these behaviors and possible solutions.

The second issue among the 61% is soft. Its one of stance. Our current education does a poor job of imbibing values in our kids. Over the years this has come full circle where today's parents and teachers are themselves devoid of 1) civility 2) nationalism, 3) honesty and 4) dignity of labor. Our current education system also does a poor job of spurring creativity and multi-dimensional development in our children. Rote learning, extreme focus on year-end examinations and very low student-teacher ratio in assembly line classrooms inspires conformism and inhibits creativity. No wonder India is the world's back office and not its lab. Again, we will analyze causes for this and possible solutions in future posts.

Thus, lack of quality education - both its stunted reach and emaciated serving (skill & stance) - are barriers that need to be removed.

In the next post, we'll explore the state of healthcare and its negative impact on Human resources in detail.

In the meantime, would welcome any thoughts or perspectives on Education

Unshackling India : The Goal

Any discussion on how to unshackle India should start with a disclaimer and a request.


The disclaimer : These are my opinions and they are biased.

The request is a corollary to the disclaimer : Please be indulgent and patient in equal measure.


Lets start with what's our goal - since problems and solutions are best talked in relation to a goal. Different people lay different goals for India.
-Improving living standards of our countrymen
-Removing poverty.
-Achieving complete literacy for Indians.
-Making India a superpower.
-Ridding India of corruption.
-Creating social harmony in India.
-Sundry others.......


To my mind, all these are either means to an end or a problem stated as a goal. They are either vague or too narrow. I want to set a concrete and broad enough goal for India. My goal is for India to become the World's Largest economy in terms of GDP (absolute $s). All other goals in my mind lead up to this goal. Stating the goal in economic terms also takes it beyond social, religious and regional overtones that run the risk of derailing our discussion.


Now, what's the barrier to achieving this goal, what are the causes of these barriers and what are some possible solutions?


Over the next few days, I want to explore these areas and would love to hear your thoughts. Does anyone have a goal that is more inspiring and concrete than this?