The Chinese Spectacle

The Summer Olympics got off to a start with a breathtaking and spectacular opening ceremony choreographed by Chinese Director Zhang Yimou. Zhang is known for movies like Raise the Red Lantern, Story of Qiu Ju and the recent blockbuster Curse of the Golden Flower. The opening ceremony was full with deeply symbolic elements of the Chinese culture and history. It was a gigantic task to distill 5000 years of Chinese culture and present it in 50 minutes with such aplomb.

I was left wondering how the Olympic rings were created out of thin air?

After all the controversy that the Olympic torch attracted, I was curious on how the cauldron will be lit. Chinese gymnastics legend Li Ning was hoisted by steel cables from the floor to just below the stadium's rim, where he ran a lap around the crest of the Bird's Nest, then lit the Olympic cauldron.

This was remarkable enough, but fell short of astonishing sight in the Barcelona Olympics where Paralympic games archer Antonio Rebollo lit the Olympic flame by shooting an arrow over the cauldron. The fact that Antonio is blind elevated the spectacle to a whole new level, which is arduous to match.

Childhood Dreams

Have you really achieved your childhood dreams or are you among the vast majority of people who just swim through life and take it as it comes? Is fulfillment of dreams essential to give a meaning to life or do you have a nihilist approach to life?

Last week saw the passing away of Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. Randy gave his phenomenal ‘Last Lecture’ at CMU after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The lecture he gave-‘Really achieving Childhood Dreams’ combines humour, intelligence and inspiration. It is about overcoming obstacles, enabling dreams of others and seizing every moment. If you have not heard the lecture, do watch it on YouTube at http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&feature=related

‘We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand’ – Randy Pausch

Life's Paradoxes

Respect for the individual vs. Criticism
Being disciplined vs. Being innovative
Taking risks vs. Avoiding mistakes
Being an extrovert vs. Being an introvert
Knowing the details vs. Delegating responsibility
Fast decision process vs. Correct decisions
Centralized efficiencies vs. Decentralized responsiveness

Which side are you on?

The Glengarry Glen Ross Times

For salespersons, during a fiscal year end, the situations are straight out of the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, especially when the external environment is as volatile as it is currently. As the market goes cold and opportunities turn from a feast to a famine, the stakes are high and create a cauldron of anxiety, tension, and desperation. As the tagline of the movie goes " The hardest thing in life is sell "

The Long Tail

The internet has ushered in an era of unprecented choice, iTunes and Amazon offer nearly forty times as much as selection as a bricks and mortar superstore. As per the Pareto law, a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"). The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail, which was coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article.

Successful Internet businesses have leveraged the Long Tail as part of their businesses and examples include eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

In the social networking space, the Long Tail is being exploited by platforms such as Ning where more than 220,000 niche sites are hosted. Will the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites ?

Reverse Globalization

As oil prices soar higher, the higher cost of transportation is obliterating the East Asian wage advantage. Cheaper transportation has played its part in globalization as businesses could transport raw materials to newly created manufacturing plants in the developing world, and then once again to market in the industrial nations. Globalization is thus dependent on cheap energy and cheap transportation.

Media in the US, recently reported that DESA , a company that makes heaters to keep football players warm, is moving all its production back to Kentucky after years of having them made in China. While it once cost $3,000 to ship a container from a city like Shanghai to New York, it now costs $8,000, prompting some businesses to look closer for manufacturing needs.

What happens if energy rates rise so high that the cost of shipping raw materials and processed goods in a global market exceeds savings from cheap labor abroad? Will it stop the march of Globalization?

The magic of Guus Hiddink

He is affectionately called 'Aussie Guus', 'Tsar Hiddink' and 'The Goose', has been led off football fields after astounding victories to chants of 'Guus for President', Guus Hiddink also become the first-ever foreigner to be given honorary South Korean citizenship.

Guus Hiddink is known for Five championships wins, a European Cup and Champions' League
semi-final with PSV Eindhoven, leading South Korea to a 4th place finish in the 2002 FIFA World Cup, taking the Netherlands into the same position in the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France, leading Australia to the second round of the 2006 FIFA World Cup—their first appearance in the tournament for 32 years. And now, his team Russia comprehensively outplayed the amazing Dutch team in Basel to reach the Semi Finals of the Euro 2008. Hiddink's legend is assured with all these achievements.

Hiddink has made a habit of turning underdogs to dark horses, and for those who had overseen, a reminder was served in performance of the Russians. Could Russia go on to weave a fairytale finish that would not only lift the spirits of a whole nation, but also add yet another glittering star to the manager’s illustrious career?