Saturday, July 17, 2021

HBR's 10 Must Reads - Management Ideas 2021 - Review

 

HBR’s 10 Must Reads - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review – 2021

(Amazon)

HBR’s 10 Must Reads - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review – 2021 is a good collection of short articles covering diverse topics. Of all, however, The Hard Truth about Innovative Cultures, by Gary P. Pisano, is the most important, and also the best written, piece. 

It may seem harsh to use the saying – ‘Monkey See, Monkey Do’, but success begets imitators. Decades ago, there was the ‘HP Way’, then came Google’s ‘20% Project’ and Amazon’s ‘extreme tolerance for failure’. If HP was the original garage startup that became one of the most successful companies of Silicon Valley (before suffering the inevitable decline, terminal in many cases, that every company goes through; Jim Collins' 2009 book, How the Mighty Fall, is a good read on the subject), Google and Amazon have grown to become trillion-dollar industry leaders. It is unsurprising that leaders at companies look to these successful companies for best practices to emulate. However, a superficial adoption of these practices without an understanding of what makes them successful in the first place is a recipe for failure. The article brings out the truths about five of the best practices of these innovative corporate cultures. 

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Indraprastha, by BB Lal - Review

Indraprastha: The Earliest Delhi Going Back to the Mahabharata Times

Author: B.B. Lal
Publisher: Aryan Books International


After Independence in 1947, the two most famous sites associated with the Indus Valley civilisation, Harappa and Mohenjodaro, became part of Pakistan. Indian archaeologists began a hectic campaign of excavations to discover more Harappan sites in India. One such excavation was at Lothal by S.R. Rao in 1954-55. In the coming years more than a thousand sites would be excavated, many along the route of the long dried-up Saraswati river. It is a matter of lament from archaeologists, including B.B. Lal that many of these sites have been subject to abject neglect and apathy and are in danger of being lost forever.

B.B. Lal, as a young archaeologist with the Archaeological Survey of India, wanted to examine whether places mentioned in the Mahabharata had an existence that went back to the times of the epic. It helped that the names of many of these places had remained unchanged from the times of the Mahabharata. The first excavations at Indraprastha were conducted in 1954-55, resumed after a gap of fifteen years, in 1969-70, and which continued till 1971-72. There was another round of excavations that was performed in 2014. A total of ten periods identified based on the excavations and the stratification were observed. These periods started with the Painted Gray Ware period, dated to the 10th century BCE; the Northern Black Polished Ware, dated to circa 600BCE; and all the way to the British period, dated to the 19th to mid-19th century CE.

Friday, March 5, 2021

yataḥ kr̥ṣṇas tato jayaḥ - Tales from the Mahabharata

In an earlier article, I looked at the thirteen occurrences of the words, यतो धर्मस्ततो जयः (where there is dharma, there is victory) in the Mahabharata, using the Critical Edition as my reference. These words are spoken by Arjuna, Dhritarashtra, Drona, Gandhari, Karna, Krishna, and Sanjaya.

These words are also the emblem of the Supreme Court of India. The first time these words are spoken in the epic is in the Udyoga Parva, by Dhritarashtra, and the last time by Bhishma, in the Anushasana Parva, just before he takes Krishna’s permission to depart for heaven.

I also pointed out, as best as I could find, only once are these words, an expansion of the earlier phrase, spoken in the Mahabharata, Bhishma – यतः कृष्णस्ततो धर्मो यतो धर्मस्ततो जयः (where there is Krishna, there is dharma; where there is dharma, there is victory), but a variation of these words can also be found in the text – यतो धर्मस्ततः कृष्णो यतः कृष्णस्ततो जयः (where there is dharma, Krishna is there; where there is Krishna, victory is there), also spoken by Bhishma.

So, that led me to another search, of another set of words – यतः कृष्णस्ततो जयः (where there is Krishna, there is victory). These words, in this order, are said six times in the Mahabharata (going by the Critical Edition) – thrice in the Bhishma Parva (all in the Bhagavada Gita Parva, though not in the actual Bhagavada Gita), and once each in the Adi (Viduragamana), Udyoga (Yana-Sandhi), and Shalya Parvas (Gada-Yuddha).

Saturday, February 13, 2021

The Curse of Bigness, by Tim Wu - Review


The Curse of Bigness: How Corporate Giants Came to Rule the World, by Ti Wu


Evidence of the power that tech behemoths have come to wield in the world was on display on 7 January 2021, when Google, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Snapchat, Discord, and others came together to ban the 45th US President, Donald Trump, from their platforms. It was reminiscent of Stalin’s Great Purge, with a promise of more to come. With even Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and German Chancellor Angel Merkel criticising the ban, back in stark focus are issues of intolerance, accountability, free speech, incitement, and monopoly power.

On 20 October 2020, the US Department of Justice sued internet search giant Google over what it claimed was an unlawfully maintained monopoly. A few weeks later, on 9 December, the Federal Trade Commission and 48 other states and districts sued social media behemoth Facebook, alleging that it had illegally maintained its social networking monopoly through anticompetitive conduct. How companies, especially tech companies, came to wield so much power and become the behemoths they are today is the subject of legal scholar Tim Wu’s short book, The Curse of Bigness.

Monopolies are not new; in fact, have been around for centuries, with the monarchy in England employing what was called the Crown monopoly as political patronage as well as to encourage innovation. The English Parliament banned monopolies in 1624 by enacting the “Statute of Monopolies”, which became the precursor to almost every anti-monopoly law, including the American Sherman Act and the EU’s competition laws. It, however, did not stop the King of England from granting a de-facto monopoly on the sale and export of tea in the British colonies to the British East India Company. This led to what is now known as the Boston Tea Party episode in December 1773, which led to harsh steps taken in retaliation by the British, and eventually sparked the American Revolution.

This anti-monopoly spirit ran deep in some of the founders of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Jefferson called for a declaration of rights to include a “freedom of commerce against monopolies”. Much of the zeal the American government showed in breaking up what it called “Trusts” of the Gilded Age can probably be attributed to the ideas of American jurist and later justice of the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis, who came to believe in the dangers of what he called “excessive bigness”. One of the triggers was J.P. Morgan’s attempts to combine more than three-hundred firms into a single entity—the New Haven Railroad, creating a monopoly of the Northeastern transportation infrastructure. Brandeis wrote that “Men are not free if dependent industrially on the arbitrary will of others”. Freedom, in his view, meant freedom not only in a political and individual self, but also freedom from industrial domination and exploitation.

Post World War II Europe was so scarred by the experiences of monopolies, particularly in Nazi Germany, that its anti-monopoly ideology was even stronger than in America and came to be known as Ordoliberalism. Ordoliberals, Wu writes, “wanted a state that was strong enough to break private power, but not so strong as to take over society. They wanted the state to guarantee certain economic securities, but to leave the provisioning of most goods to the market process.”
In 1945, American company Alcoa was broken up, and in the 1960s, anti-monopoly action by the regulators peaked, with the Justice Department going after banks, grocery stores, shoe manufacturers, and others, implementing what it saw as a “broad anti-concentration mandate” given to it by Congress to stop “creeping concentration”.

By 1969, IBM, with annual revenues of $7.2 billion, ranked as the fifth-largest company in America. Only General Motors, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, and General Electric were bigger. The same year, it was sued by the Justice Department with “monopoly maintenance”, and the case went to trial in 1975. The trial continued for another six years, and after what many called “a farce of mind-boggling proportions”, the case was dropped shortly after Ronald Reagan became President. The case, however, did result in two major changes. One, even before the case began, IBM made the decision to unbundle its software from its hardware offerings. This effectively birthed the modern software industry as we know it. The other, in 1981, was when IBM entered the personal computer market and chose to make it “open”—with a hard drive from Seagate, printer from Epson, processor from Intel, and the operating system from Microsoft.

Microsoft made the most of IBM’s decision and grew to become the world’s largest software company, pursuing a strategy of bundling applications with its Windows operating system to enter and dominate new markets. This strategy did not go down well with the regulators or competitors and it wound up facing the ire of the government when it was sued by the Justice Department in the 1990s. The case went to trial in 1998 and the government won in both the district court and in appeal, but just when it seemed a breakup of the company was inevitable, regulatory winds changed with the election of a new President in 2000.

The trial did, however, reveal the strong-arm tactics of the company and the ruthlessness of Bill Gates, its co-founder. The after-effects of the trial were to “distract” the company from competing effectively in the booming internet age, with lawyers looking over the executives’ shoulders. This paved the way for companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others to thrive, grow, and grow.
During the George Bush and Obama years, there would be virtually no major anti-trust action by the government. These regulatory shifts in anti-monopoly action over the last four decades can mostly be traced to what Wu calls the victory of “neoliberalism” in American academia. This philosophy argued that the one and only measure of consumer welfare was prices. Lower prices meant that consumers could not be seen as harmed, and therefore, companies could not be penalised for concentrating too much market share and power as long as prices did not go up. Neoliberals were also “opposed to almost all forms of state intervention in the economy”. Aaron Director, “the father of the neo-conservative Chicago School of antitrust,” believed that breaking up larger companies protected weaker companies and reduced efficiency by stopping these larger companies from lowering prices. This thought percolated to the regulators, with the European regulator, in 1997, suggesting the “lowered prices” and “consumer welfare” were its goals.

What have been the consequences of this thinking? The market for glasses and sunglasses, which looks a hotbed of competition with companies such as Armani, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, DKNY, and dozens of others available to choose from. Except it isn’t. All these brands are owned, or exclusively licensed, by just one company—Luxottica. Consumers pay over $200 for a pair of glasses that cost no more than $20 to manufacture. Prescription glasses retail for $400, but cost under $20. Or the beer market, where two companies—InBev and Heineken—own nearly “every single major brewer in the world”. In the technology industry, it allowed Facebook to buy out fast-rising competitor Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, and WhatsApp for $16 billion in 2014. It allowed Google to acquire 270 companies, including competitors like Waze, YouTube, and AdMob. The change in attitudes even in Silicon Valley was captured best by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who wrote, “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits”.

Perhaps the most alarming lesson one may draw from the book is how the growth of cartels and monopolies may foreshadow a coming of totalitarianism. In many ways, the last couple of years showed how tech platforms that now control all social media apps have begun to increasingly exercise censorship on content that they determine to be ideologically contrary to their own beliefs.
Wu writes that “extreme concentration of German industry before the war was an aid to Hitler’s rise to power…” This is lesson we simply cannot afford to ignore. Indeed, German companies like United Steel, Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben and others were major beneficiaries as well as contributors to the Nazi military build-up of the 1930s. IG Farben was perhaps the only company to run its own concentration camp as well as operate a rubber plant in the Auschwitz campus. In case the name IG Farben does not ring a bell, the company was broken up into its original six constituent companies, including BASF, Agfa, Hoechst, and Bayer.

While it is too short to do justice to a subject as complex as antitrust enforcement, Tim Wu’s book nonetheless serves as an accessible primer to some of the thinking that has guided authorities in the US and Europe, and what challenges these authorities face in their enforcement battles against companies that have become larger and more powerful than ever before.

This review first appeared in The Sunday Guardian on the 16th of January, 2021.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal.
© 2021, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Friday, February 5, 2021

Where thee is Dharma, there is Victory - Tales from the Mahabharata

The emblem of the Supreme Court of India is “yato dharmas tato jayaḥ”, which is translated as “where there is dharma, there is victory”. These words are taken from the Mahabharata. When asked to identify the person who speaks these words, most people would answer that it was Gandhari who responded thus when her son Duryodhana came to her before the Kurukshetra war to get her blessings for victory. Gandhari did not bless her son with victory; she instead told him that victory would be where there was dharma. While Gandhari did say these words, they are uttered not once, but thirteen times in the Mahabharata, if we take the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata as our reference. 

Some other factoids that should interest people, as they did me. These words are uttered once each by Arjuna, Dhritarashtra, Sanjaya, Drona, Karna, Gandhari, and Krishna. Bhishma and Vyasa say these words thrice each, unsurprisingly. They are spoken once each to Vidura and Karna, twice each to Dhritarashtra, Duryodhana, Gandhari, and Yudhishthira, and thrice to Krishna.

Finally, these words occur once each in the Drona, Shalya, and Anushasan Parvas, twice in the Stri Parva, thrice in the Udyoga Parva, and five times in the Bhishma Parva.


Let’s dig into the thirteen occurrences, in the order they appear in the Mahabharata.
Image credit:detechter (via IndicToday)