All posts by Mukund Mohan

My discipline will beat your intellect
Other

San Francisco vowing to levy fines of up to $1,000 on those unwilling to separate their Kung Pao chicken leftovers from their newspapers.

The Board of Supervisors passed new recycling and mandatory composting
rules on Tuesday in a 9-to-2 vote.

The city already diverts 72 percent
of the 2.1 million tons of waste its residents produce each year away
from landfills and into recycling and composting programs.

The new
ordinance will help the city toward its goal of sending zero waste to
landfills by 2020, said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city’s
Department of the Environment.

Other

Venture Capital returns are just not that attractive

8 percent returns for venture capital over the last 10 years,

compared
with −27 percent for the S&P 500 and

−28 percent for the Nasdaq,

the
Russell 2000, an index of small-cap stocks that returned 18 percent
over the same period.

only about 0.2 percent of the estimated 600,000 new businesses created
in the United States each year are financed by venture capital and
about 16 percent of the fastest-growing companies are, he found.

Another problem he cited was that information technology has matured to
the point that new innovations will not be hugely profitable and it
costs a fraction of what it used to to start an I.T. company.

Other

Leadership TIVO style

Leaders may know exactly what they want to see happening.

They send out messages down the management line. Employees ought to
understand. But between the top table and the shop-floor something goes
wrong. Leadership teams can be scarily ignorant of how badly their
wishes have been distorted, and how much unhappiness there is among
those on the receiving end.

There are four things in particular that managers need to provide if
they want to avoid this false anxiety syndrome:

predictability
(over-communicate);
understanding (keep it “Sesame Street
simple”, advises Procter & Gamble’s AG Lafley);
control (break down
big challenges into manageable ones); and
compassion (show that you
care).

Other

Blaming the Baby Boomer for the recession and the new “jobs” for teenagers

Newsweek finds yet another person to blame for this recession – Baby Boomers. See graph below of US population by age.

“The Baby Boom lasted from 1946 to 1964, and
some 78 million American children were born during that time. As this
cohort ages, its sheer size overshadows the rest of society.”

The worrying trend:
What happened in Japan in the 1990s was
a demographic shift into retirement, where a large portion of the
population went from a lifestyle of earning, saving and spending to a
lifestyle of not earning, living off assets and spending less. This
resulted in less demand for investments like stocks, less demand for
housing, and less demand for material ‘things’ — and the prices of all
these fell.

In one of the comments a user says “Let’s see, both my husband and I started working for cash before we
were even in junior high (he had a paper route, I babysat). Funny, I
don’t see any kids working in stores now, or many doing paper routes
either.”

The thing is there is no more of the paper route job. And the “working in stores” job is being done by adults out of college since there are no more jobs for them.

I dont think kids these days are slackers, or obsessed with navel gazing on twitter. They just dont have the opportunities that existed, since those jobs are gone.

Other

Large realty players in India looking to raise funds

QIP plans of the large real estate companies in India.

HDIL (about Rs 3,000 crore through QIP and Rs 850 crore through
promoter warrants), Parsvnath and Akruty (Rs 2,500 crore each),
Anantraj (Rs 2,000 crore), Sobha Developers (Rs 1,500 crore),
Puravankara (Rs 750 crore) and Orbit Corp (Rs 500 crore through QIP and
an unidentified amount through promoter warrants).