samar

If you have a dream, you will find a way to make it real. We all have heard one iteration or another. But yet, having a goal which you literally for is far from easy or deliberate.

It’s a mix of passion, circumstances and mindset. They all have to be aligned towards a single aim and only then can you be the lightheaded and experimenting entrepreneur that I have for so long wanted to be. And my dream is poultry to surprise of many. Poultry might sound modest but I have had no intentions of modesty ever. My aim is to grow our family business to a conglomerate controlling every aspect of poultry industry in the country and eventually the world. Now this might sound a little arrogant, maybe.

So, the next question is do I have a plan? Actually, I don’t believe in plans, they never work. So what I rather have is a direction I start moving in and a set of guiding principles.

I will start expanding my existing poultry both horizontally and vertically to achieve more efficiencies and rest I will figure along the way.

My guiding principles, as of now

1. Honesty gives you strength to do anything.
2. Concentrate on people, profits will come.
3. Never give second chances.

So people, let’s build an empire.

PS: I am looking for investors.

I recently read that PETA is opposing growing genetically modified foods in India. So it is time someone said something about what PETA wants and what are it’s implications. PETA certainly knows marketing and so I just propose that I talk logically and keep my clothes on.
The GM food debate: GM food is nothing new. Almost everything we eat is genetically modified, only methods have become faster and more precise. Earlier crossbreeding used to do what gene manipulation does today. Have you seen a Chinese Crested dog? It is not GM, just plain old crossbred product.
So why do people want GM food anyways, isn’t crossbred food good enough already?
Simply put, because earth cannot possibly sustain us all.
Yields in Punjab and other bread baskets of the world are decreasing due to water over exploitation and soil degradation.
Rust is returning (perhaps one of the few single biggest leaps in mankind’s history was development of rust resistant wheat species). It’s not a coincidence that Green Revolution in India came with these rust resistant breeds and the land of famines became self sufficient in food. It was essentially what genetic modification is all about today.
Population is growing at a faster pace than crossbreeding approach to crop improvement can handle.
What does PETA say? PETA says GM can go wrong, plants might not be that disease resistant. Sure it can but so can crossbreeding. It’s just faster. Sure it’s risky, but the alternative is billions of people starving. What is all the research in genetics for if there were no risks? Faced with a problem, do we go ahead and solve it or wait till the problem becomes a catastrophe?
What I don’t understand is why giving a standard process a fancy name (companies have to make money also) should be an issue at all. Of course miss Pamela Anderson can eat all the “organic, natural and pure” food she wants but I am talking about the billions in Asia and Africa here.

Choice can be a real problem sometimes, so I am realizing. I used an iPhone for an year, switched to the Nexus One since its release (literally first day order) and recently got another iPhone 3GS for my father. After a day of use he gave up on the whole touch thing and so I have the iPhone now.
Which brings me to the point of the post, I want a iDroid which can only happen if Google and Apple make love. iPhone has all these foolish restrictions and lack of functionalities that I love in Android (Contacts are perfectly synced across accounts, notifications and file management in Android are far better.
On the other hand, Apple is just the best at doing interface and the App store is far better in case of Apple (at least in India, there are no paid apps in android app store).
I miss something in both the phones. I am really hoping iPhone to get better at these things as I am not sure Google can really catch up with Apple in interface design. Secondly, google seems to be going the windows way in smart-phones, more market share but a less integrated and coherent experience.

Who are you??

Today I saw my first business crisis. I went to work as usual and almost routinely one of our supervisors said that generator was not working and we needed the electrician to get the feed prepared for the next day. I had been thinking of spending a day understanding the whole feed distribution process at our farm so I decided to see what was up.
All the supervisors said that they had not been getting the quantity of feed they required for past few days. As it turned out the whole situation was like this. We need 30 tonnes of feed daily to feed approximately 300,000 birds. What was happening was that they were making the required feed daily with as little as 15 tonnes in stock. Because of the rains this speed had reduced gradually in last 7 days. As a result all the stock depleted in last seven days. Yesterday there was no electricity for whole day and generator gave up and this worsened the situation. There was no feed for the evening with feed mill halted.
A crisis is rarely because of a single cause but rather it only brings forth systemic failure in implementing rules. In this case here were the rules violated.
There should have been a stock of processed feed for 24 hours, there was none because of reduced production for last seven days.
There were two generators that should have been checked every three days, both failed as they had not been operated in some time.
Information flow disruption was the main cause. Almost everyone complained to his superior and considered his responsibility completed. The head supervisor did not say anything as he was afraid and thought he could handle the situation on his own. If someone had asked why wasn’t this being rectified and notified me, this could have been averted.
Lastly, I think very few people realize the intensity of the situation even in a crisis. At 5 pm in the evening none of our supervisors were really worried with only 50% of required feed available to be fed before night. Let alone anyone thinking about the next morning’s feed.
So I mobilized everyone and told everyone to not halt production in feed mill till next morning, we finished production at 4 in the morning with an hour to spare for already starving birds to be fed and we have a one month stock of feed ingredients. Now that a huge loss was averted I need to learn form this event and make sure such a situation never occurs again.

Purely objectively to me, India Bandh was:
1. A minor inconvenience.
2. A great puzzle.
Lets get to the puzzle part. How do you get the biggest democracy to a halt for a full day! Almost everyone (almost, as you will see) everyone I knew of disapproved of the bandh, it hurt the participants the most ( they were the ones losing business) and finally the government and administration (hopefully) didn’t want it happening. So what made it tick?
Lets try to follow a hypothetical command chain of the functioning of the Bandh.
The opposition party supremos decide to have a Bandh -> Regional offices and allies informed of the dates -> Regional leaders organize people to jam roads and close down shops (since most people will open them as usual in the morning) -> The D day arrives and the lowest level people in the pyramid are told to have a free hand.
This last step is where the power of the mechanism lies. There are a lot of unsatisfied/disgruntled people who have spent most of their life being ignored by major portion of the society. This is their day of power. They can tell people to close shops as they have a cause (this is the where the agenda comes, inflation in this case) and also because there are a lot of them.
I met one such person who used to work as a driver for s a few years back. I was in the market when he was geting some shops closed. So I sked him why was this bandh? He said because of rising prices. I asked him why he was getting the shops closed, aren’t they also worried about rising prices? His reply was its a good chance to get things even with a few people. Here is the “unsatisfied/disgruntled youth” that makes Indian politicians so strong. Go to a protest in Switzerland, and it feels like a picnic.
Another thing that this bandh demonstrates very well is that, while it takes an army of babus to get a huge complicated machine of a country running, it takes far less to stop it from that. Just like a small splinter can jam a huge series of gears and can bring a complex machine to a halt.

I always intuitively knew this, now I am sure. If you like modern art (you don’t have to claim to understand it) and have been to New York, you will probably know that MOMA has free entry on Friday evenings. I might have missed it but because of the huge collection of Carteir Bresson’s work on display I had to know about it.
I reached about half an hour before the starting time of the free entry. The queue already completed one whole circle of the block and one would expect that there wont be enough tickets or something like that. So I asked one of the organizers if the queue stayed like that only. He said that the queue was there for only the first hour and then the entrance was usually clear. His view of why so many people were standing in the queue was that people want to justify getting the otherwise $20 entry ticket for free. I think people just like standing in the queues secretly. it gives them a reason to do nothing.

A few months back I was sitting through some MBA courses, though they don’t teach any magic formula but they did teach me two really important things:

1. There is no real reason to pay for an MBA, just choose any school and sit through. If you can be confident enough people will eventually think you are a student. You will get an additional lesson(of “Jugaad”) before everyone else starts their education.
2. MBA does make you more aware of the processes you routinely go through during entrepreneurship or management. But that doesn’t mean its required, on the contrary, it seems to make something intuitive look like bookish and boring.

I am today writing about what I learnt about first steps of Entrepreneurship in one such course at UMD’s b-school.
1. Assess yourself, list your strengths and weaknesses.
I am passionate about technology and marketing, and also good at making people understand complex technology like a simplified black-box.
I am easily bored with mundane repetitive work.

2. Have a look around yourself, find out resources that you have at your disposal.
I am on a poultry farm in a small town. So one might think such a place is not suitable for technology ventures, but I would like to change this notion. So I have a room with a seating capacity of about 10 people and I can get a decent( by Indian Standards) internet connection. Rest there is my time and all the creativity in the world. Lets see what I can make out of it.

I will keep you updated.

Stay rssed!

Yesterday, while coming out of the Easy Day, a Bharti- Walmart join venture, here in our good small Sangrur, two kids asked me if there was a ticket for going in?
I told them any one could go in and it was just another shop. Amazed at how such a “hi-fi” shop could be free to enter and yet sold at cheaper than market rates, they asked the guard the same question. The guard knowing that they didn’t really want to buy anything told them to run away. At this I took both of them inside showed them that it really was just another shop.
They reminded me of my amazement at entering a Walmart superstore even though I had seen Indian super markets in Mumbai and Delhi. For one whole week I spent more than an hour everyday walking past every shelf in every aisle till I remembered what was where. To me Walmart was more of a circus than a place to come rushing and stock up for as much time as you possibly could. Those two kids had discovered their own urban circus.

It has been a few days since I have been observing things at our poultry farm and I am identifying areas I need to improve. Perhaps the one that needs urgent attenton is record keeping. Everyone maintains a register in their own way and there is almost no way of knowing something fast and in a coherent way. But this is a gradual process and must be given time to be adopted.
The more immediate and interesting issue, that is the subject of this post, is that of rats, yes rats.
My estimate for financial cost of a rat is Rs 100 or about $2 an year. Now our veterinary consultant estimates the number of rats at our farm to be 50k! So the financial cost is a staggering Rs 5000000 an year, roughly the cost of a top luxury sedan in India.
So, what am I going to do about it, the most obvious was to make it a monthly exercise to keep rodenticide laced peanut butter baits. Peanut butter it seems is a stuff rats just love. Second was to get people interested in getting rid of rats. They do complain about them sometimes but no one is motivated enough to get a trap and do something about them. So I announced that for every rat they get one rupee. We have killed about 1000 rats in the first day and to my astonishment the most effective way of killing rats is good old group hunting exercise. One person scares some rats out of their hideouts and four or five people kill them with anything from brooms to slippers.
To them it’s 1000 rupees of extra income and to me it’s 100000 rupees of saved grains. Now that’s synergy.